› added 8 months ago

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TIL: That Alfréd Hajós was a Hungarian swimmer who won two gold medals in swimming at the 1896 Athens Olympics. He went on to compete in the 1924 Paris Olympics 28 years later winning a silver medal for architecture, making him one of only two Olympians ever to have won medals in both sport and art.

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X0DY8 TIL Before the invention of radar during World War II, incoming enemy warplanes were detected by listening with the aid of "sound locators" that looked more like musical instruments than tools of war.
a8Jr9 TIL that the Amber Alert isn't named after the color, but after Amber Hagerman, a nine-year-old Texan girl who was kidnapped right off the streets and later found dead with her throat slit four days later. Her murder is still unsolved.
W7ge4 TIL that the tallest tree ever measured wasn’t actually a redwood. It was an Australian mountain ash. Which was recorded at a height of over 130 meters!
LQkDd TIL despite being completely landlocked, the U.S. state of Nebraska offers the title of Nebraska Admiral as its highest honorary civic title. Originally the full title was "Admiral in the Great Navy of the State of Nebraska". The honorary certificate even describes it in a tongue-and-cheek fashion.
rRWn4 TIL that life in Puritan New England was so hard that children who were abducted by Native Americans often refused to come back