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TIL the BBC’s Ceefax officially launched on 23 September 1974, making it the world’s first teletext service. It began as an experiment to provide subtitles for the hearing impaired but expanded to include news, weather, and sports.

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JoYl TIL that “Texas” is slang for ‘crazy’ in Norway
gmkb TIL 165 years ago today, Abraham Lincoln became the first and only president to register a patent; the invention, which was never produced, was an idea for lifting boats over obstructions if they got stuck.
wrX8 TIL when the Beatles wrote the song “With a Little Help from My Friends”, the first line ended with ‘What would you think if I sang out of tune? Would You Throw Ripe Tomatoes at Me?’, but Ringo changed it so that fans would not throw tomatoes at him should he perform it live.
5VVQp TIL about the Faraday School Kidnapping that occurred in 1972 in Victoria, Australia, where two men kidnapped a teacher her six students for a ransom of $1,000,000. The kidnapping inspired the HBO movie, "Fortress", which portrayed the kidnappers as gun-wielding maniacs wearing Halloween masks.
neb9o TIL Frederick Douglass was the most photographed American in the 19th-Century