› added 7 years ago

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TIL Harvard's first black faculty member was a dentist. Dr. George Franklin Grant joined the Dept of mechanical dentistry in 1871. Also an inventor, he patented the wooden golf tee. Previously, golfers carried around buckets of sand, placing their balls on little piles as they went.

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mA1Y TIL George Crum invented the potato chips after a customer complaint that his french fries were too thick and soft. In order to teach him a lesson, he cut the potatoes as thin as possible, deep fried them to a crisp and salted them. The customers loved them and the potato chips were invented.
wGp6 TIL that chemical technician Karen Silkwood, who after exposing numerous safety and ethics violations by the Kerr-McGee energy company, died in a mysterious car accident on her way to meet with a New York Times journalist.
4X98a TIL champion shearer Ian Elkins answered a call put out by RSPCA Australia when a heavily overgrown merino sheep was spotted by a bushwalker. Merino sheep, bred to grow wool, may get infections/flystrike if not shorn; about 80 pounds of fleece was shorn from "Chris" the sheep, a world record.
LkbLP TIL : If it weren’t for Pierre Berton, far fewer Canadians would know the legend of Sam Steele, Canada’s most famous Mountie and probably the world’s most cartoonishly Canadian person. From 1898 to 1899, Steele was commissioner for the Yukon, as thousands of men and women from around the world
R7y9a TIL that during the 1965 Algerian coup d'état that overthrew Ahmed Ben Bella, army units who were moving through the streets of Algiers didn't raise alarm because they were mistaken for extras for the film "The Battle of Algiers", which was being filmed in the capital at the time.