› added 5 years ago

164

TIL about the Jumping Frenchmen of Maine, a cluster of lumberjacks who exhibited strange exaggerated startle responses and were highly suggestible

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X0ppP TIL the Mechanical Turk was a chess playing machine from 1770 that seemed to be able to compete against a human chess player like artificial intelligence. Except that it simply hid another human player within itself.
9wO4D TIL The 38th book in the Oz (Wizard of Oz) book series, written in 1949, entered the public domain in 1977, but the 39th Oz book, written in 1951, won't enter the public domain until 2047.
v04D TIL that the last movie rented from Blockbuster before it closed its doors nationwide was ironically: This is the End.
ANa6x TIL that Fantasmagorie (French word for phantasmagoria) was the first animated cartoon film in history produced by French cartoonist Emile Cohl in 1908.
ne1Dr TIL that almost 1 of every 4 beds sold in the late Eighties was a Waterbed. Then the industry dried up in the Nineties.