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TIL that Mary Anderson invented the first operational windshield wiper but never profited from the invention as her patent expired before it became widely used in the auto industry

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4XpxJ TIL of the horseshoe theory, in which the far right and the far left in fact closely resemble one another (tendency to support authoritarian governments, etc), such that the political continuum resembles a horseshoe rather than a linear line.
5YnBp TIL that many WW1 soldiers on the Western front spontaneously declared truces for Christmas 1914. On both sides, they left their trenches to bury their dead, hold church services, and trade cigars and other small goods in no man’s land.
A15d TIL Most of the money George Clooney makes off his Nespresso commercials, he spends on a satellite that surveils over the border of North and South Sudan to keep an eye on criminal and dictator Omar al-Bashir to track his vicious army in an attempt to warn civilians before attacks occur
b6ogZ TIL that the first writing system evolved from accounting practices in ancient Mesopotamia. Over a thousand years later, Chinese writing independently developed from divination practices in ancient China.
woOKY TIL of "Historia Piscium," a book about fishes published in 1686 by the Royal Society. The book sold so poorly that the Society reneged on funding Isaac Newton's "Principia". Clerk Edmund Halley funded Principia himself; the Society later paid him with unsold copies of Historia