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TIL in 1856 an American clipper was approaching Cape Horn when its captain collapsed, leaving his 19-year-old wife to navigate through one of the world's deadliest sea passages. She commanded for 56 days, faced down a mutiny, and navigated the clipper ship into San Francisco

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VMLbQ TIL that in the movie Noah's Ark, filmed in 1928, the flood scene at the movie's climax was created by actually dumping 600,000 gallons of water onto the set. Three extras drowned and many suffered broken bones. This led to the introduction of safety regulations for movie stunts in 1929.
d8o4r TIL by using a man in the middle, two brothers hacked the French optical telegraph system to gain advance information on the stock market. When they got caught two years later, they walked away as free men because in 1836 there were no laws against hacking
8e6Kb TIL that in 2012 a 15 year old girl in Pakistan was the target of an assassination attempt because of her Pro-Womens Education activism. In 2014 she would win a Nobel Peace Prize, making her the youngest ever Nobel laureate at 17.
w40o TIL in 1847 Robert Liston amputated a mans leg in under 2.5 minutes, operaterating so quickly he amputated the fingers of his assistant as well. Both later died from gangrene, and a spectator reportedly dropped dead from fright, making it the only known operation with a 300% mortality rate.
VMpBm TIL of Joseph Paul Jernigan, a murderer who agreed to donate his body to science prior to his execution in 1993. Jernigan’s body was encased, frozen, and cut into 1,851 slices. Images of those cuts are now used by medical students and radiologists as a human anatomy correlate for CT and MRI images.