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TIL The Ottomans sent £1000 pounds to the Irish as aid during the potato famine. The sultan attempted to send more, but the British told him not to so as to not donate more than Queen Victoria.

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g8vb TIL that because Abraham Lincoln grew a beard (at the request of an 11 year old), Milton Bradley’s business of selling lithographs of the clean-shaven presidential nominee failed. Soon after, Bradley developed the boardgame, Life.
4kbR5 TIL that California Community Colleges is the largest university system in the United States with 1.8 million students. But this is still less than one third of the largest in the world - Indira Gandhi National Open University in India, with 7.1 million.
amYZ TIL that any domino can knock over another object up to 1.5x its size due to gravitational potential energy. In 29 dominoes, the last domino would be as tall as the Empire State Building, irrespective of first domino is so tiny (5 millimeters tall and only 1 millimeter thick).
Rmdl TIL: South Korea has a ‘Cinderella Law’ that forbids children under the age of 16 to play online video games from 12:00 A.M. to 6:00 A.M. to prevent them from excessive 'Internet addiction’
P47E TIL Nikola Tesla was born during a fierce lightning storm. According to family legend, midway through the birth, the midwife wrung her hands and declared the lightning a bad omen. This child will be a child of darkness, she said, to which his mother replied: “No. He will be a child of light.”