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TIL the rocket in Jules Verne’s 1865 story From the Earth to the Moon launched from Florida and landed in the Pacific Ocean because of Verne’s calculations. In 1969, Apollo 11 took off from Florida and landed in the Pacific Ocean.

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DZ5V TIL that Astronomer Charles Messier was obsessed with finding comets. He only cataloged other “Messier Objects” in order to help him avoid wasting time when comet hunting.
oBxxY TIL Guards at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier take an average of six hours to prepare their uniform. They are also required to memorize 35 pages of information about Arlington National Cemetery and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, including the locations of 300 graves and who is buried in each one.
LkWbv TIL The Taliban used dynamite to destroy two 4th century statues of Buddha. They saw it as idolatry. The destruction revealed a previously unknown network of caves with wall paintings from the 5th to 9th centuries and another giant statue of Buddha.
oBWjL TIL Way back in 1994 a camera was trained upon a lonely fishtank within the as yet unknown company Netscape. It transmitted live images of the fishtank to the emerging new landscape known as the World Wide Web. It was the second live camera on the web and is the oldest camera site still in existence
ookr TIL Mr Roger’s car was once stolen but the thief returned it when he realized whose car he had stolen.