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TIL up until the 70s, movies were only copyrighted for 56 years. This means all movies released in 1966 (and prior) would be in the public domain by now. Instead, it was expanded to 95 years and one must now wait until 2062.

wow8W TIL that for the unveiling of their new handheld console in 1989, Nintendo wanted to do for Video Games what Sony had done for music. And since their target demographics were on the younger side, it took only a small stretch of logic to turn “Walk Man” into “Game Boy”.
PYx6Z TIL magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin went to French controlled Algeria in 1856 to show the power of French magic. He lifted a metal box in front of a crowd, then had a warrior that he had made "as weak as a woman" try. Turning on electromagnets in the ground, he made the metal box unliftable.
QJLVE TIL that there were over 158,962,555,217,826,360,000 combinations to the Enigma Machine, regarding the codes it could use for messages. Yet, Alan Turing's Bombe machine, through just trial and error, was able to decode messages sent by Germans in 20 minutes.
BD6b TIL that washing your hands with regular soap and water removes bacteria mechanically and is as effective as antibacterial soap.
J1Zkk TIL when South Korean students take their college eligibility test every November, day-to-day operations are halted or delayed on test day. Shops are shut, banks close, even the stock market opens late. Most construction work halts, planes are grounded and military training ceases.