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TIL that Henry Ford probably never said "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses" - but his tone-deafness to customers' needs in the 1920s, when GM was producing numerous models to Ford's single Model T, caused Ford's market share to drop from 70% to 15% in 6 years

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1aJEV TIL of Ablaut Reduplication - a subtle rule of linguistics which dictates why "King Kong" sounds more right than "Kong King", "Hip hop" sounds more correct than "Hop hip". Similarly "tick tock", "zig zag", "chit chat" etc.
xAl5 TIL that General Motors and other companies would buy street cars and trains and scrap them to decrease public transportation competition
NPZ8 TIL that orcas killed during harvesting for marine parks were stuffed with rocks and sunk to prevent their discovery
pxdQ TIL: There’s a subway ticket machine in Moscow that accepts 30 squats as payment. Installed ahead of the 2014 Sochi Olympics to “bring sports to the people”.
NloM TIL daytime fireworks are made up of colored smoke so they can be seen during the day.