› added 3 years ago

98

TIL that commercial fax service was in operation 11 years before the invention of the telephone

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JYN6Q Today I learned the St. Francis dam disaster was one of the most catastrophic civil engineering failures in American history.
6Oam TIL that Adolf Hitlers father beat him severely every day. When his father found out that he was planning to run away, he beat him so hard that he went into a coma for days - his family unsure if he was going to live
R7RNQ TIL the largest theft ever investigated by Quebec police was the "Great Maple Syrup Heist" in which 3,000 tonnes of maple syrup, worth $18.7 million, was extracted from 9,571 barrels and replaced with water.
5V7R9 TIL that in 2012 at the Emir of Kuwait International Grand Shooting Grand Prix, the winner was from Kazakhstan, and they played the parody national anthem from Borat by mistake, which mentions the potassium exports and the second-cleanest prostitutes in the area.
lo4bA TIL of Henry Lucas, who in 1663 founded a professorship of mathematics at Cambridge University. The "Lucasian Professor of Mathematics" has become hugely prestigious, with holders including Isaac Newton, Charles Babbage, Paul Dirac and Stephen Hawking.