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TIL that C. S. Lewis (author of The Chronicles of Narnia series) was an adamant atheist, until attending Oxford, when his closest friend, J. R. R. Tolkien (author of the Lord of the Rings trilogy) convinced him to convert to Christianity.

gr7wA TIL Benjamin Franklin was fond of dating older women, (in)famously writing 8 reasons why they were better than their younger counterparts. Among them, he stated that they naturally provided birth control, were discrete, and could not be distinguished from younger women from the girdle downwards.
nWv4r TIL In 1967, Paul McCartney forgot his passport when travelling to France to shoot a music video. He told the agents, ‘You know who I am so why do you need to see a photograph of me in a passport?’ And was let through.
BrYYe TIL that Grizzly Adams, the man upon whose life they based the tv and movie series, had his career ended when he received severe back and spine injuries from a Bengal tiger he was attempting to train for his employers. He went on to be a cobbler.
1aAJ4 TIL "That Charles Darwin upon discovering parasitic wasps actually questioned why a benevolent loving God would create a creatures designed to feed off of a caterpillar's body from the inside."
KOD0w TIL The first settler to successfully grow commercial Tobacco was John Rolfe in Jamestown, in Virginia in 1609. In 1614, the first shipment was sent to England. In 1638, 3,000,000 pounds was being sent annually. By the 1680s, Jamestown was producing over 25,000,000 pounds for export to Europe.