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TIL that in 1963, the British army tested how long a WWI Vickers Machine Gun could fire. It fired 5 Million Rounds, Firing Continously for Seven Days, an Average of 500 Rounds Per Minute for 10 000 Minutes.

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OoJA6 TIL in 1960, an Australian father won nearly $3 million (adjusted AU$) in the lottery, with his picture getting plastered all over the news. Shortly after, his 8-year-old son was kidnapped for ransom and eventually murdered. This changed anonymity laws for lottery winners in Australia forever.
x6pEb TIL in 1952, Navy LT Jimmy Carter led a team of nuclear scientists in disassembling a Canadian nuclear reactor undergoing meltdown. Carter, alongside others, personally lowered himself into the reactor to disassemble it by hand, exposing himself to one thousand times the level of safe radiation.
d0xK TIL Frank Hayes was a jockey who, in 1923, suffered a fatal heart attack in the midst of a race at Belmont Park in New York. His horse finished and won the race with his lifeless body still atop, making him the first, and thus far, only, jockey to win a race after death
newQo TIL that Great Britain once had a Cones Hotline for people to report rogue traffic cones. The Cones Hotline was launched in 1992 for citizens to report traffic cones on the road for no obvious reason. The policy was mocked for both being comically pointless and for being a waste of government money.
m1L5E TIL in the 1906 book 'John Dough and the Cherub' the titular Cherub was a child of indeterminate gender; the editors created a contest to guess the gender and second place argued girl as "if it had been a boy he would have eaten the ginger-bread man at once whether it agreed with him or not"