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5

TIL Rosa Parks received social justice training at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee prior to her civil disobedience arrest in Alabama. Dr Martin Luther King Jr also trained there.

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4Xoow TIL that Elijah Bond, the inventor of the Oujia board, also trademarked a talking board called the Nirvana talking board, which featured the word "Nirvana" inside a swastika. He sold it in his own company, called The Swastika Novelty Company (thankfully well before WWII).
1aXyd TIL Galileo used a crude refracting telescope. His initial version only magnified 8x but was soon refined to 20x magnification. The main problem with his telescopes was their very narrow field of view, typically about half the width of the Moon
j6M1a TIL an alchemist from the Tang dynasty was searching for an immortality potion and ended up discovering gun powder, which would do the opposite of the sought after potion.
54dP TIL It’s rumored that Mathew Perry made a bet with Bruce Willis that if The Whole Nine Yards (a movie in which both co-starred) opened at No 1 at the box office, Willis would have do a guest-appearance in Friends for free. Willis lost, and guest-starred in Friends.
W5PX TIL that when the USS West Virgina was finally raised after being sunk during the bombing of Pearl Harbor, deceased men were found in an airtight storeroom. On the calendar, 16 days were crossed off in red pencil.