› added 9 years ago

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TIL President John F. Kennedy was a huge James Bond fan. He viewed an early print of ‘From Russia with Love’ at the White House on Nov 21st, 1963. It was the last film he ever saw, he was killed the next day in Dallas.

4XeG6 TIL that “Idaho” was not a Native American word as originally thought but rather a made-up word. “To his horror, he found that he had been the victim of a practical joke. [He]learned, to his surprise, that the name did not mean, "gem of the mountains"...In fact, it did not mean anything at all.”
QJMlp TIL of the “Coffin Torpedo”—a small shotgun secured inside the lid of a coffin to “prevent the unauthorized resurrection of the dead.” The shotgun fired lead balls at whoever pried the lid open and were used as an experimental deterrent to the rising tide of body snatchers in the late 1800s.
M7bOB TIL that to protect trade secrets, the glassmakers guild in thirteenth-century Venice would imprison a glassmaker’s family if the glassmaker left the city, and if he still didn’t return they’d send an assassin to kill him.
K15a TIL that in the early 1800s the British spent many hundred of thousands of pounds bribing countries to stop the slave trade
rRpmM TIL Doubling the ventilation rate from the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Engineers minimum cost less than $40 per person per year and improved the performance of workers by 8%, equivalent to a $6500 increase in employee productivity each year.