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TIL. The marathon distance of 26.2 miles is not the distance between Marathon and Athens, but was established by the Queen of England for the 1908 Olympics.

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vPp4L TIL that in 1958, Burma-Shave offered a "free trip to Mars" for sending in 900 empty jars. A grocery store manager, Arliss French, took it literally and collected all 900. To save face, Burma-Shave sent him, fully dressed as an astronaut, to Moers, Germany (of which they felt was pronounced Mars).
4jwJ TIL Gauss personal diaries indicate that he had made several important math discoveries years/decades before his contemporaries published them. Math Historian Temple Bell said that if Gauss had published all of his discoveries in a timely manner, he would have advanced mathematics by 50 years.
16WV8 TIL Lego was flirting with bankruptcy, and the release of Bionicle, which accounted for 100% of their profits in 2003, saved them from going under.
0d05y TIL of the 'Azolla event', a situation in which a species of floating fern covered the Arctic Ocean ~49 million years ago; scientists suspect the fern grew so aggressively that it removed enough CO2 from the atmosphere to initiate a global ice age
0wgPj TIL that in 1944, the British hatched a plan to assassinate Hitler – Operation Foxley. Many, including Churchill approved of the plan. It never went through though because Hitler was an awful military strategist, and there was fear that whoever replaced him would be more adept at winning the war.