› added 9 years ago

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TIL A man who survived 5 concentration camps convinced Hasbro to start producing Transformers, also holds over 100 other patents, the best-known of which gave him the exclusive right in the United States to detect and display hole cards in poker games.

VBOBZ TIL: That Alfréd Hajós was a Hungarian swimmer who won two gold medals in swimming at the 1896 Athens Olympics. He went on to compete in the 1924 Paris Olympics 28 years later winning a silver medal for architecture, making him one of only two Olympians ever to have won medals in both sport and art.
Z8d0Q TIL Christopher Nolan waited to make Dunkirk until he had earned the trust of a major studio to let him make it as a pure British film, but with an American budget. He said, "Hollywood studios are interested in films about Americans, and there were no Americans involved."
KOm1G TIL about Henry Savery, a convict and Australia's first novelist. He was to be executed on April 22nd, 1825 in his native England for credit fraud amounting to £30K ( £2.3 million pounds today) Through influential friends this was commuted to transportation, only a day before his execution was due.
nWyP7 TIL that the rarest event ever recorded was the radioactive decay of xenon-124 (an isotope of the element xenon used in flash lamps and ion thrusters in spacecraft), which was detected by a dark matter detector
LkQjV TIL NYC Mayor Fiorello La Guardia banned pinball in the 1940s as gambling that emptied the "pockets of schoolchildren in the form of nickels and dimes given them as lunch money". All pinball machines were rounded up and smashed dramatically by the mayor, before being dumped into city rivers.