› added 11 years ago

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TIL of Hans Island, a tiny uninhabited Arctic island claimed by both Canada & Denmark. Traditionally, Canadian expeditions leave behind a bottle of whiskey for the Danes, while Danish sailors leave Aquavit.

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gB6W TIL Fred Waldo “The Great Impostor” pretended to be a surgeon in a Navy ship during the Korean War. When 16 severely wounded soldiers showed up, he speed-read the various surgeries he needed to perform, including major chest surgery. All soldiers survived.
0d8Lj TIL René Lacoste won 7 Grand Slam tennis titles, won a bronze medal at the 1924 Olympics, founded the Lacoste clothing company, and invented the first tubular steel racket at a time when wood rackets were the norm.
M7eG7 TIL it took an Iowa man named Otto Frederick Rohwedder some 16 years to perfect and sell the first bread-slicing machine. A prototype made in 1912 was destroyed in a fire, and he didn't sell his first slicing machine until 1928. Within 5 years, 80% of bread sold in the U.S. was pre-sliced.
7rgZx TIL that several months before Russell Crowe won the Oscar for Gladiator, the FBI warned him that the al-Qaeda were planning to kidnap him as part of a “cultural destabilization plot”. For nearly two years, the FBI guarded Crowe in public and refused to give him any details about the threat.
p8nwA TIL you are likely descended from royalty, but that doesn’t make you special. Everyone of European descent alive today can claim ancestry from medieval kings and queens based on statistical analysis of their ancestry