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TIL The first bridge to span the Mississippi River was built in 1855 near Minneapolis. The Father Louis Hennepin Suspension Bridge charged a toll. Price for pigs and sheep was 2 cents, humans paid 3 cents, horses cost 15 cents and carriages cost 25 cents.

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AN9l7 TIL Joaquin Phoenix's older brother, River Phoenix, was set to play Arthur Rimbaud in Total Eclipse (1995), Jim Carroll in The Basketball Diaries (1995) & Jack Dawson in Titanic (1997). After his death in 1993, all these roles ultimately went to Leonardo DiCaprio.
l7BB1 TIL luxury British lingerie company Rigby & Peller lost its royal warrant of appointment after June Keaton, the company's owner and former bra-fitter to the Queen, referenced her trips to Buckingham Palace in her autobiography "Storm in a D-Cup".
N75lP TIL that Shiro Ishii, a Japanese general who oversaw Unit 731 and thousands of horrific war crimes during WWII, was given immunity in exchange for human experimentation data. He also may have gone on to do bio-weapons research at Fort Detrick located in Frederick, Maryland.
QJD9e TIL the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC was opened by a signal relayed through the Viking I Mars Lander to a remote pair of scissors to cut the ribbon.
jNM0n TIL When USSR premier Nikita Khrushchev visited IBM's Silicon Valley research facility in 1959 he showed indifference to computing technology, but he was so impressed by their buffet style cafeteria that he instructed factories across the Soviet Union to implement the self service dining concept.