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TIL Salvador Dali was a cheapskate who liked to appear generous to his friends by inviting them to fancy restaurants. When it was time to pay the bill, he would write out a check then doodle a sketch on the reverse, knowing that the restauranteur would never cash a check bearing one of his sketches

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D1DGv TIL Penicillin is an accidental discovery. Fleming returned from a two-week vacation to find that a mold had developed on an accidentally contaminated staphylococcus culture plate. Upon examination of the mold, he noticed that the culture prevented the growth of staphylococci.
L4lP TIL The sound of Darth Vader mask’s respirator function is trademarked in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office under Trademark #77419252 and is officially described in the documentation as “The sound of rhythmic mechanical human breathing created by breathing through a scuba tank regulator.”
KNDB TIL Häagen-Dazs is actually jibberish that was meant to sound Danish and the company even sued a competitor for daring to use foreign sounding jibberish as their brand name too
oBlwW TIL the nokia 3210 was the first phone to sell 100 million units. It spotted the first mass market internal antenna, there games, and had a standby time of up to 11 days
wDJ8 TIL British PM Gordon Brown hand-wrote a letter of condolence to a mother whose son had died in Afghanistan where he misspelled the deceased’s surname. The Sun published a vitriolic article criticising his lack of care but misspelled the same name and was forced to publish an apology of its own