› added 6 years ago

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TIL In 1903, the New York Times declared that "flying machines" were essentially a waste of time—only a week before the Wright brothers successfully flew their airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

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Yx5r TIL that Irrawaddy dolphins have developed a mutual relationship with local fisherman by chasing fish into their nets in exchange for some leftover fish. This relationship has become so embedded that when a fisherman’s “own” dolphin helped a rival, he followed up with lawsuits.
EgGXw TIL that VLF, used to communicate with submarines, creates a bubble around the Earth that protects us from Solar Flares and Coronal Mass Ejections
j6npn TIL of the 1963 Children's Crusade in the US, when more than 1,000 students marched in the fight for Civil Rights. Most of them were teenagers, but some were as young as six years old, at least 600 were taken into custody.
rRr4W TIL of the Montparnasse derailment in Paris. A train entered the station too fast, crashed through a wall, and fell 33 feet before landing on its nose and killing a woman standing below. A guard was fined 25 francs as he'd been preoccupied with paperwork and failed to apply the emergency handbrake.
OoyN6 TIL The ampersand (&) was the 27th letter of the alphabet as a ligature of the letters 'e' and 't' to form the Latin word 'et' meaning 'and'. So the alphabet would go X,Y,Z and And. So to distinguish it from the rest, children started to say 'and per say and' which later evolved into 'ampersand'.