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TIL almost 100 years before railroads, England’s Bridgewater Canal made it so one horse could pull 30 tons of coal, dropping the fuel price in half. It was so successful that it created a 1770’s “canal mania” starting the Industrial Revolution.

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klrg TIL that the Louvre museum in Paris generated $2.5 billion dollars in sales last year.
OoQNY TIL that The Lion King, heavily marketed by Disney as their "first Disney original" was straight up plagiarized from Osamu Tezuka's Kimba the White Lion (1960)
e08r6 TIL that both South Korea and the Maldives once used the tune of Scottish song "Auld Lang Syne" for their anthems. South Korea inherited it from Scottish missionaries. The poet behind the Maldives' anthem, for his part, chose the music after hearing it chiming out of an uncle's novelty clock
JYd4j TIL of Aleksa Zdravkovic, a Serbian soldier who carried the same loaf of bread baked by his mother for 8 years through the Balkan Wars and WWI as a good luck charm until he returned home to Pirot. It remains preserved in a museum to this day.
6Ekp7 TIL in 1871 most of the 400 members of the shipwrecked HMS Megaera had to spend up to 3 months on the volcanic Saint Paul Island