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TIL The clarinet hit its peak in jazz during the Swing Era of the 30s and 40s but was replaced by the saxophone after the rise of bebop. Artists of the 40s and 50s considered the clarinet passé and unfashionable in jazz

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R7eR4 TIL that before women became the mainstay telephone operators were teenage boys. The change came about when the lads being pesky teenagers pulled too many pranks, got drunk on the job and swore down the phone
mx0RP TIL US Army dentist Ben L. Salomon was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for providing a rear-guard action during the Battle of Saipan. His body was found laying on his machine gun with 98 Japanese soldiers in front of him and 76 bullet wounds (and almost as many bayonet wounds) in him.
OoKQa TIL About a paper which models the expected "time-to-failure" of potential conspiracies. E.g. if the moon landing was a hoax, the conspiracy would have had to involve 411k people, and thus the model posits that the conspiracy would have been exposed within about 4 years
5YjQ9 TIL that sentences with the sole purpose of annoying the reader exist and are called "garden path sentences". They make you go back and read the sentence again, an example is: "The old man the boat"
lojeN TIL the oldest continuously ongoing company in the world is a construction company in Japan specializing in Buddhist temples. Established in 578 CE, it is as old as the time when Buddhism was introduced into Japan in 538 CE. In 2007, after 1,429 years in business, it ran out of money.