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TIL That a robotic chess machine called ‘The Turk’ toured the world in the 1700s, easily defeating prominent statesmen such as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. A human chess master was long suspected to have been hidden inside, but wasn’t exposed for 84 years.

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pNEG TIL the reason Morton salt has the little girl with the umbrella as their logo is because Morton discovered that adding magnesium carbonate to table salt made it pour more freely and not clump up, even in humid or rainy weather. Hence their slogan, “When it rains, it pours. ”
L0Mp TIL To create the battles for Lord of the Rings, Weta used a program called MASSIVE & was able to create thousands of CG soldiers, give them artificial intelligence, talents, and skills, then just let them fight. The AI worked so well that some of the soldiers assessed the battle and fled.
69mOm TIL that alpine frogs take part in a three to four day annual orgy; some males even embrace their partners in autumn and cling to them all winter until this super productive spring event.
epkkE TIL that a little girl stopped growing at the age of 2. The doctors termed her condition as Syndrome X. She died at the age of 20, with the body of a 2 year old and the mentality of a 9 to 12 month old.
Z8J0G TIL that Einstein actually had good grades in school, with the highest scores in his A-levels for algebra, geometry, descriptive geometry, history and physics. His reputation for being bad at school comes from his dislike of school authority, leading to clashes with teachers.