› added 11 years ago

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TIL Robert Taylor, inventor of soap-in-a-pump-bottle (Softsoap), knew larger competitors like Colgate would try to copy his product. In order to ensure they couldn’t copy him, he bought every small bottle hand-pump (100 million bottles) in the US. This resulted in a year of the market to himself

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VMXKG TIL that George Washington had his own personal recipe for egg nog that he would serve to guests, which included one pint brandy, 1/2 pint rye whiskey, 1/2 pint Jamaica rum, and 1/4 pint sherry wine
6EYAW TIL Fireflies are the most efficient lights in the world. 100% of energy is emitted as light. Fireflies: larvae & eggs glow, talk to each other with light, imitate each other, then eat other fireflies, are on almost every continent, taste bad, are medically and scientifically useful, adults live<1mo
jgpQ TIL that reindeer are unable to walk and pee at the same time, so they have to take a bathroom break roughly every 6 miles. The distance between stops is so regular that in Finnish, this distance is known as “poronkusema” or “reindeer’s piss” and was a description of distances in the countryside.
N6xQ TIL that the words ‘idiot,’ 'imbecile,’ and 'moron’ were originally medical categories for intellectual disability
VMGEp TIL of Six Californias, a proposed initiative in 2016 to split California into six separate states: Jefferson, North California, Silicon Valley, Central California, West California, and South California. The initiative failed to meet the required signatures to make the ballot.