› added 10 years ago

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TIL that Steve Irwin told his cameramen to keep rolling in case of an alligator attack, so that his last words would be “crikey” as he is going down the belly of the alligator.

oBJ8K TIL John D. Rockerfeller once had an apprenticeship making $16 per month & his dream as a kid was to make $100,000. His personal fortune ended up being $1.4 billion by 1937 which makes him the wealthiest person in recent history.
KYN7B TIL about the Duquesne spy ring, the largest espionage case in US history that ended in convictions, where 33 members of a nazi german espionage network were sentenced to a total of over 300 years in prison. They were lead by a man who had advised Theodore Roosevelt on big-game hunting.
9YPj7 TIL when the Northridge Earthquake caused a massive power outage in L.A. in 1994, panicked residents called 911 to express alarm about a strange ethereal light overhead; they were seeing the Milky Way Galaxy for the first time.
vP8dD TIL the final line of Willy Wonka was originally written as Grandpa Joe yelling, 'Yippee!' The director hated it so much, he phoned up the screenwriter who was vacationing at a remote cabin in the woods and forced him to come up with a better line right on the spot as they were filming the ending.
OoOae TIL that a USSR physicist published his equations for solving reflected electromagnetic waves from surfaces, as the Soviet authorities considered them insignificant for military purposes. His work was found by Lockheed in the 1970s, leading to a breakthrough in developing their stealth plane F-117.