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TIL that in the 1910s, an encyclopedia company gave away tracts of land in Huntington Beach, California, with every $126 encyclopedia set purchased. Today, the median home price in the area is close to a million dollars.

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9PdD TIL after the success of The Hobbit, Tolkien wanted to publish a book on the history of Middle Earth, The Silmarillion, it was through a misunderstanding that the publisher rejected the draft without reading it, leading Tolkien to write another story about hobbits, which began The Lord of the Rings.
oRRy7 TIL ferrets are illegal to own in California.
4kVY5 TIL A study in the UK found that the number of CEOs of top companies with red hair was four times higher than the percentage of persons with red hair in the general population.
Np7P TIL: Thomas Jefferson invented his “wheel cypher” in the 1790s and a deceptively innovative little device it is. In fact, this machine was so far ahead of its time, it was still in active use in the US military 150 years later at the beginning of WW2.
gMk7X TIL the biblical tale of Moses was likely inspired by the Mesopotamian legend of Sargon of Akkad, which predates Exodus by over a millennia and also features a baby abandoned on a river who is raised in a palace and grows up to overthrow a king