› added 4 years ago

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TIL the first submarine attack on a ship occurred in 1864, when the CSS Hunley sank the sloop-of-war USS Housatonic using a spar torpedo, a primitive form of torpedo that was, in essence, a bomb on the end of a stick encased in a motor boat.

p8gPZ TIL in 1965 when Gatorade was invented at the University of Florida, the football coach wouldn't let researchers experiment on the varsity team and only allowed testing on freshman (who couldn't play varsity by NCAA rule). And those players described it as tasting like urine or toilet bowl cleaner.
4krno TIL that Paul Thomas Anderson filmed a late night informercial with Tom Cruise as Frank T.J Mackey from Magnolia promoting his "Seduce and Destroy System" from Magnolia (1999). Anderson bought time on late night TV to play it on and a lot of late night viewers called convinced it was a real product.
D1P6D TIL of Ina Koenig, a German kindergarten teacher who jumped down a 75-foot mine shaft when one of her 3-year-old students accidentally fell down it. It was filled with cold water. For more than 2 hours, she kept the child’s head above the deluge, saving his life, until helped arrived.
6jyY TIL in England, after 2 thieves broke into a mans home and made off with his laptop, they inspected the device, found serious child abuse material and went to the cops regardless. The paedophile got 3 yrs in jail. The judge gave robbers a 12 month community service orders in light of their good deed
1a9K4 TIL that some people in rural Eastern Europe historically opted not to identify with a particular nationality and instead self-identified as “tutejsy”, meaning “from here”.