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TIL that in the 1920's newly hired engineers at General Electric would be told, as a joke, to develop a frosted lightbulb. The experienced engineers believed this to be impossible. In 1925, newly hired Marvin Pipkin got the assignment not realizing it was a joke and succeeded.

4kAO6 TIL Song titles can't be copyrighted. You can legally title a song "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Stairway to Heaven", "Smells Like Teen Spirit" or any other already used song title.
mxEBv TIL Dupont, a chemical company, knowingly dumped an incredibly toxic chemical, called C8, into the Ohio River. The chemical eventually made it's way to aquifers downstream and gave thousands of people different kinds of cancers, and many kids birth defects.
bL94 TIL An episode of South Park had to add a disclaimer, “this is what Scientologists actually believe”, after depicting an alien(Xenu) that Scientologists believe in so that people didn’t think it was satire
PY9Lw TIL when Stephen Hawking met with the Pope in the Vatican, the Pope knelt down when he had trouble understand Hawking. This prompted one scientist in the room to say that "things certainly have changed since Galileo."
468N TIL that the words in the song “do re me fa sol la si’ came from an old language that comprised of only 7 syllables. "Words could be sung, or played and since the language could also be translated into the seven colors of the rainbow, sentences could be woven into a textile as a stream of colors.”