› added 3 years ago

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TIL that Roman Emperor Nero during gladiatorial fights looked at the arena through a concave emerald to eliminate the glare of the sun and his nearsightedness. Those may have been the first sunglasses in history.

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jNEKn TIL: J. R. R. Tolkien used the name "Bag End" as a calque of "cul-de-sac", to poke fun at the British use of French terms.
PYg5Z TIL the myth that birds can't eat rice is so popular that it killed the wedding tradition
rRZk0 TIL Astronomers from Johns Hopkins University, studying spectral analysis of over 200,000 galaxies, initially determined the average color of the universe to be a greenish white. Later study corrected this to a slight beige. A vote followed by press coverage christened the final color "Cosmic Latte"
VBlO4 TIL that the first face seen on a television screen was that of "Stooky Bill"—a chalk-white ventriloquist's dummy used by Scottish inventor John Logie Baird for his experiments to transmit a televised image. A dummy was used because the lights of this first TV studio were too hot for humans to bear.
l7EPG TIL that prior to their famous duel, Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr served on the same defense team during a sensational murder trial that was dubbed the "Trial of the Century."