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TIL the Statue of Liberty was originally designed in the 1860s for Egypt. Named 'Progress Carrying the Light to Asia', French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi modelled the statue after an Egyptian woman dressed in a veil. Due to costs, the idea was rejected, and a lighthouse was erected instead.

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eVDn TIL: Iceland is so small that virtually everyone is related but big enough so that you don’t know how you’re related
xQoB TIL it is common for spiders to eat their own web daily to reuse the silk proteins.
4nYg TIL to be ‘on cloud nine’ originated from the 1896 International Cloud Atlas to which the tallest cloud structure - the cumulonimbus - was No.9
9Yy5r TIL Emperor Nero had become so fond of a gladiator called Spiculus, that when he was overthrown in 68 AD, he wanted to die a swift death at the hands of him. But his aides could not get hold of Spiculus in time and Nero took his own life
KYdR TIL Benjamin Franklin intentionally faked the death of rival publisher, Titan Leeds. (Franklin maintained that the still-alive Leeds was an impostor.)