› added 11 years ago

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TIL that the artificial sweetener Sucralose (Splenda) was discovered when a researcher misheard a command to “Test this chemical” as “taste this chemical”.

E1oKW TIL that George Harrison created a film production company to fund Monty Python's Life of Brian at a cost of £3 million, because he "wanted to see the movie"—later being described by Terry Jones as "the world's most expensive cinema ticket".
5YmQP TIL the copyright for Peter Pan is incredibly complicated. Which includes competing laws from the U.K. and the EU; where the U.K. says a children’s hospital owns the rights for forever and the EU saying it’s already public domain.
PYOMV TIL that in 1945, a US Army Air Force B-25 bomber crashed into the Empire State Building. The crash severed an elevator's cables, causing it to plummet 75 stories. The elevator operator Betty Lou Oliver survived the elevator fall, and holds the record for the longest elevator fall survived.
4Xxj6 TIL Astronomer Thomas Harriot observed the Sun directly through a telescope and left nearly 200 drawings of sunspots from the period 1610–1612. To protect his eyes, he took advantage of mist and fog to dim the Sun's brightness
m6Ly TIL California’s largest body of water, the Salton Sea, was created by an engineering mistake. Irrigation canals were dug from the Colorado river to the Salton sink. When the river flooded a dyke was breached and the entire Colorado river poured into the sink making the sea.