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TIL During the Black Death, incoming ships were forced to wait for 40 days to prevent possible infection. The Italian word for 40, "quaranta", is where we get the word "quarantine".

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YBZW TIL Fred Smith received a C on his Yale business school paper which essentially outlined the business plan for what later became FedEx.
vPbEx TIL that audiences were so convinced that the film "The Battle of Algiers" was newsreel that the American distributors put a notice that "not one foot" of newsreel was used
ne1xB TIL In 1863, scientists started to doubt that the Sun is actually burning coal and proposed that the heat of the Sun has been kept up by meteoric bodies falling into it. "If the sun were composed of coal, it would last at the present rate only 5,000 years"
NYme TIL that in 1993, an Indian airplane was hijacked at forced to land in Amritsar. Indian army Commandos then conducted an operation which killed 3 hijackers within 12 seconds, without any civilian casualties
8anaX TIL that climbing the second highest mountain on each continent is considered to be harder than climbing the highest one.