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TIL During the American Civil War the town of Winchester Virginia changed hands over a dozen times between the Union and Confederates due to it’s strategic location in the Shenandoah Valley. A British observer called Winchester the "shuttlecock of the Confederacy."

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PYoNO TIL About Einstein's "Year of Miracles". In one year he published 3 papers that changed modern physics. The first about the particle theory of light (won him his Nobel Prize), the second led to people accepting the existence of atoms, and the third introduced special relativity (E=mc^2). He was 26.
xVAD7 TIL that the largest volcanic eruption of the 20th Century was Novarupta, in Alaska in 1912. The eruption lasted for 60 hours and created the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes. Due to its remoteness, the eruption did not kill anyone.
X0eoX TIL that in 1989, scientists at IBM succeeded in arranging 35 individual xenon atoms on a substrate of chilled crystal of nickel to spell out the initials "IBM". It was the first time atoms had been precisely positioned on a flat surface.
grPo8 TIL: about the massacre of Kalavryta, where occupying German soldiers massacred an entire village for the death of 78 prisoners of war that had been captured by Greek guerrillas. Only 13 men survived, and one lone Austrian soldier saved the most of the women from being burned alive. 693 people died.
rNL4y TIL Alessandro Morechi (11 November 1858 – 21 April 1922) was the last castrato singer and the only Italian castrato singer of the classical bel canto tradition who made solo recordings in the late 19th century.