› added 4 years ago

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TIL that while young Robert E. Lee worked surveying the boundary between Ohio and Michigan, he jokingly referred in a letter to a snake he killed in a lighthouse as the lighthouse's keeper. Lee's biographer Douglas Southall Freeman misinterpreted this as an admission that Lee killed a human keeper.

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PX4w TIL: the clear fluid that fills blisters is blood plasma
vPPNx TIL about the movie "Saved from the Titanic," released just 31 days after the disaster. It starred an actress who'd been aboard the ship and wore the clothes she'd worn the night it sank. Reportedly traumatized by reliving the tragedy, she quit acting soon after. The film was lost in a 1914 fire.
X0D9j TIL Squirrels can survive a fall from any height, at least hypothetically They’re small, they’re fluffy and they’re really good at not getting hurt when falling off of tall objects Squirrels.
Wk5vN TIL when Fiat introduced the 850 to the US market, they downsized the engine to just below 50 cubic inches in order to make it small enough to be exempt from emission standards, which only applied to 50 ci and larger engines.
LQd6v TIL Rodger Young, despite being deaf and nearly blind (due to a head injury) and the shortest soldier in his company, won the Medal of Honor for singlehandedly destroying a Japanese machine gun nest (at the cost of his life) in WWII