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TIL In 1945, a B-25 bomber pilot crashed into the Empire State Building’s elevator shaft, snapping the cable. By the time the carriage reached the bottom, a thousand feet of cable had piled up beneath it acting like a spring, which allowed the lone occupant in the car to escape injured but alive.

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grlM7 TIL that when Hewlett-Packard (HP) began selling computers in 1966, it wanted to do so without using the HP name. HP turned the corporate logo upside down to look like "DY", and called the new computer business "DYMEC".
Y79Yv TIL "I've Never Met a Nice South African" was a 1986 anti-apartheid song where the songs narrator states that despite the numerous unlikely things they've seen they've never met a nice South African. The chorus has South Africans describing themselves as "arrogant bastards who hate black people"
won4o TIL that the oldest known photo of a U.S. president is of John Quincy Adams. The photo was taken in 1843.
neX8G TIL that a 1916 zoning law in NYC allows skyscrapers to go as high as they want as long as they cut back in on themselves. The “setback law” allows for sunlight and air to pass through to smaller buildings and street level. These tiered skyscrapers helped to give rise to the Art Deco style.
16W98 TIL that Hollywood's first Chinese-American film star Anna May Wong had to support herself by becoming an Australian vaudeville chanteuse, a British theatrical luminary and a B-film pulp diva because of the shortage of roles for Asian actors and Hollywood tending to cast white actors in those roles