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TIL that during a Communist Party conference in 1937, following a speech by Stalin, the audience began to clap and carried on for 11 minutes, with no-one daring to be the first to stop. The first person to stop was a paper factory director who was arrested that night and sent to prison for 10 years.

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nRgP TIL In 2012, British supermarket Sainsbury’s discovered that reducing the size of a toilet paper tube from 123mm to 112mm would allow more rolls in each truck, taking 500 trucks off the road and reducing carbon emissions by 140 tonnes.
wkxM TIL in 2008 a California nuclear plant was taken offline due to “a rapid influx of jellyfish”
GA7LN TIL that barnacles were a major problem to old ships and that the 18th-century British Navy gained a great advantage by covering their ships' hulls with copper to stop the barnacles from growing.
VMrr0 TIL Elizabethan era upper-class Englishmen were restricted to spending no more than 100 pounds per year on clothing.
epyLD TIL that Nabokov saw each letter as a color. It's called grapheme-color synesthesia