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TIL of Henry “Box” Brown. A slave who escaped the slave state by mailing himself in a 3 foot X 2 foot X 8 inches deep box from Virginia to Philadelphia. The journey took 27 hours and he had a little water and some biscuits as food. Brown became a prolific Anti Slavery speaker

yLvl TIL: The Barbary slave trade lasted for nearly 3 centuries. During that time, up to 1.25 million white Europeans were enslaved by African slavers.
Yaax TIL that two amazon booksellers using automatic algorithms to set their prices once each accidentally based their pricing on the other. The automatic programs created an upward spiral of competing prices that eventually topped $3 million for a textbook.
kJWQE TiL that while primary endosymbiosis, which originated the plastids and the mitochondria, happened only once, secondary endosymbiosis happened several types, giving rise to many different, unrelated groups of algae that got their plastids by engulfing other eukaryotes that had engulfed bacteria!
Ny1P TIL that a group of artists built a secret 750 square foot studio apartment in a parking lot of a Providence, RI mall which wasn’t discovered until 4 years later.
kJQd4 TIL about a ~1,920 year-old letter written by a Roman cavalry decurion named Masculous to prefect Flavius Cerialis, inquiring about the instructions for his men for the following day, including a polite request for more beer to be sent to the fort (they had already consumed their entire stock).