› added 4 years ago

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TIL of Baron von Steuben. A Prussian Military Officer who served as Major General of the Continental Army during the American Revolution. Von Steuben wrote the Army's Drill Manual, and is credited for turning the Continental Army into a formidable force.

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E7GV TIL that MIT students found out that by buying $600,000 worth of lottery tickets from Massachusetts’ Cash WinAll lottery they could get a 10-15% return on investment. In 5 years they managed to game $8 million out of the lottery through this method.
v1DdL TIL: 10 years ago, a lot of people believed Lady Gaga had a penis.
EgGax TIL when John Steinbeck published The Grapes Of Wrath in 1939, a farm worker with two leaders of California Associated Farmers publicly burned a copy of the book because he did not like what he heard about it, even though he had not read it. After reading it years later, he said he “had no regrets.”
pYYY8 TIL that in the Kingdom of Hungary in 1946, inflation was so high that prices doubled every 15 hours. Something that cost 379 Hungarian pengős in Sep 1945, ended up costing 1 trillion trillion pengős by Jul 1946.
6EjWZ TIL that, although people consider prostitution to be the "oldest profession", human beings have been practicing dentistry since around 7000BCE. This makes the oldest surviving records of dentistry far older than that of prostitution.