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TIL the American food corporation General Mills had an engineering division that built surveillance balloons that spied on Eastern Bloc countries, and built a deep-sea submersible that surveyed the Titanic wreck and helped recover a hydrogen bomb from the Mediterranean Ocean.

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8a9BP TIL Dennis Farina was the only cast member of Law & Order who was actually a Cop. He served in the Burglary division of the Chicago Police Department from 1967 - 1985.
yQdRe TIL for over a decade, NASA used 11 deaf people with damaged vestibular systems (making them immune to motion sickness) to explore how extreme forces might affect astronauts. One test had four men spend 12 straight days in a 20-foot-wide room rotating at 10 revolutions per minute.
X0wmk TIL that the Nanga Parbat is the only mountain taller than 8000 meters, whose maiden summit was done solo. The climber, Hermann Buhl, did so by taking methamphetamine and reaching the summit after a 19 hour long climb from his camp.
7rWnX TIL George Washington mandated the creation of the Contingency Fund for Foreign Intercourse, a secret program comprising 12% of the U.S. government's budget which funded clandestine intelligence gathering missions in Europe, including spies and political subversion.
j6o7R TIL about the Alipore Central Jail, a prison in Kolkata, India where political prisoners were kept under British rule. It is no longer operational as a jail. The jail site has been now developed into an independence museum in memory of the martyrs who were imprisoned and executed here.