› added 8 years ago

109

TIL that Paris, France, was the first western capital to have a black mayor (1879)

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mxMLE TIL considered today the worlds largest living organism is a grove of 47,000 Aspen which are basically clones of each other. Together they would weigh around 6,600 tons (5,987 metric tons). The General Sherman sequoia itself weighs just a few hundred tons less, a testament to the size of a sequoia.
OoKBY TIL that St Patrick, as well as being Patron St of Ireland, is also Patron St of Nigeria! And their Guinness is almost twice as potent.
0GvA TIL AOL still brings in $600 million a year from dial up Internet subscriptions.
XKlX TIL in 1998, Sony inadvertently released a camcorder that could see through clothes. When aimed at people wearing dark clothing, the night-vision feature created an x-ray effect, meaning what ever was beneath became visible. Sony had to recall over 700,000 units after they discovered the issue.
0vJL TIL When Paris fell to the Nazis on June 14, 1940, French resistance fighters cut the elevator cables to the Eiffel Tower. This meant that if Hitler wanted to hoist a swastika flag, a soldier would have to climb the roughly 1710 stairs to the summit platform.