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TIL John Hawkins was the first Englishman to profit off of the triangle trade of enslaved Africans to the Americas. Harkins' journeys also brought the sweet potato and tobacco to England.

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Bg4dr TIL that ants take rest for around 8 Minutes in 12-hour period. In a 24-hour period, two such rest periods occur, however, only one of them bears any resemblance to what we would call sleep.
x5wk TIL that in 1993 Pepsi ran a contest in the Philippines in which it promised 1 million pesos, roughly $40,000, to the person who found the number 349 inside his bottle cap. Pepsi went on to mistakenly print 800,000 winning caps, leading to outrage and death threats to Pepsi executives.
ADGwo TIL that Karl Pilkington's brother was kicked out of the army for driving a tank down the high street to get a packet of fags.
PYYae TIL that "Mum" in the saying "Mum's the word" is a Middle English word, meaning "Silence"; derived from the "mummer" who does pantomime and just acts without saying anything
JPm4 TIL Nathaniel Bedford Forrest, the civil war general involved in the early Ku Klux Klan, had a total of 29 horses shot out from under him during the war. He himself was shot four times, and he defeated over 30 Union soldiers in hand-to-hand combat.