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TIL Of Titanic Thompson, a prolific hustler and golfer of the early 20th century. One of Thompson's tricks was to play righthanded, win, and offer to play double or nothing lefthanded, he was naturally lefthanded. In his time a professional golfer could earn 30,000$ a year, he earned that in a week.

VM08Q TIL in 1809 Theodore Hook made a bet that he could make any house in London the most talked-about address in a week. He sent out 1000s of letters in the name of Mrs Tottenham of 54 Berners Street, requesting deliveries, visitors, and assistance. A large part of London was brought to a standstill.
8Mr4 TIL the Russian gov’t drilled a ~15km (49,000 ft) borehole into the Earth’s surface but couldn’t continue due to temperatures in excess of 180 °C (356 °F)
ANXeo TIL After Vancouver hosted 2010 Olympics, its Olympics Village became a ghost town, to the extent that a sales campaign discounted remaining units by up to 50% in 2011. The developer fell short on its loan payments because of poor sales
neEe7 TIL 11,000 women were breaking Nazi codes in America during WWII. Among them was Elizebeth Friedman who cracked at least 3 Enigma machines and dozens of different radio circuits to decipher more than 4,000 Nazi messages saving millions of lives. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI took credit for it.
vrPr TIL the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird was so fast that the standard evasive action in case a surface-to-air missile launch was detected was simply to accelerate and outfly the missile