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TIL Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, landed next to an unsuspecting farmer, and told him “I am a friend, comrades, a friend!”

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xVygw TIL Charles Babbage lost 2 games of chess to the Mechanical Turk, an automaton with a chess player hidden inside that fooled people that a machine could play chess. He knew it was a hoax but it inspired his work on the Difference Engine and then the Analytical Engine, the world's first computer.
Q0E9 TIL that over 30% of AOL’s total revenue still comes from dial-up subscribers
p64G TIL one person has made 47,000 edits to Wikipedia to correct a single grammatical error: the misuse of the phrase “comprised of”
994B TIL of the New York City Police Riot of 1857, a battle between the recently dissolved Municipal Police and the newly formed Metropolitan Police. Municipals fought Metropolitans attempting to arrest the corrupt Mayor Wood. The situation later required the intervention of the New York State Militia.
wLXL7 TIL Let it Snow doesn’t say one word about Christmas in its entire song. It was written in the summer by Sammy Cahn, after he was tired of the summer heat.