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TIL Elizabeth Eckford of the little rock 9 was alone on the day of that iconic photo because her family had no telephone!

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R7K9l TIL that the legendary 1981 film "Das Boot" was shot as if it were a silent film, with all of the dialogue and sound added later, because the cameras and their newly developed gyroscopic stabilizers, used for the submarine interiors, drowned out the dialogue and diegetic sound.
XEGyD TIL the Gerber Mark II combat knife originally had a 5 degree offset between the blade and the grip, one of the reasons being to ride in the sheath more comfortably - many were returned because of a 'bent blade'.
WkXVL TIL that to avoid being conscripted by the Roman Army, some men would cut off their thumbs so that they couldn’t wield a sword. By the end of the fourth century, conscription avoidance was so widespread that Emperor Theodosius passed a law that forced the thumb-less to serve.
gr1ZW TIL while writing the 1971 song "Ain't No Sunshine", Bill Withers had originally intended to write more lyrics instead of repeating the phrase "I know" 26 times, but then followed the advice of the other musicians to leave it that way. Withers said: "When they said to leave it like that, I left it."
KOZe4 TIL: During the Siege of Leningrad, when hundreds of thousands starved, the authorities distinguished between two legal categories of cannibalism, those who murdered someone in order to eat them, and those who ate of a corpse that was already dead.