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TIL in Henry Fords' childhood farming was manual. He wanted to "lift the burden of farming from flesh and blood and place it on steel and motors." Ford was the only automotive firm to sell cars, trucks and tractors simultaneously from 1917 to 1928.

59J8 TIL that Michigan has a bottle deposit of 10 cents, instead of the usual 5 cents. Their recycle rate is 97%, compared to 70% of states with bottle deposits, compared to 33% for states without any deposit laws.
b95x0 TIL that there were only three people in the United States were qualified to pack the parachutes for the Apollo 15 mission in 1971. Their skills were deemed so vital that they couldn't ride in the same car together as an accident would cripple the space programme.
VMDVZ TIL of Alice Bradley Sheldon, an author who wrote under different names to hide her gender and identity. Best known as James Tiptree Jr. and Raccoona Sheldon, she was not very successful getting published under the psuedonym Raccoona until her other alter, Tiptree, wrote to publishers to intervene.
NXxGQ TIL of the Bengal Water Machine, a water capture mechanism resulting from the pumping of shallow subsurface water by millions of individual small landholders.
XEVrQ TIL of August Natterer, who, on April Fool's Day 1907, had a pivotal hallucination of the Doomsday, during which "10,000 images flashed by in half an hour". He spent the rest of his life in a mental institution, where he became a prolific painter, attempting to capture his hallucination.