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139

TIL In London from 1682 one could buy fire insurance: you attached a metal plate to their building ensuring that if there were a fire their insurance company would fight to extinguish it. If the building wasn’t insured the fire wasn’t put out unless it threatened to spread to an insured building.

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VBYW4 TIL the iconic opening lyrics of Stevie Nicks' 'Edge of Seventeen' were lifted almost verbatim from a menu in a Phoenix restaurant
97AX TIL Roald Dahl lost his daughter to measles and wrote a letter urging people to vaccinate their children to stop them from dying.
xVOVD TIL Winston Churchill described Graham Sutherland's gift of a portrait of Churchill as filthy and malignant, and said it made him look like a down-and-out drunk who has been picked out of the gutter. Lady Spencer-Churchill broke it into pieces and had them incinerated.
XEGOX TIL in 1933 there was a proposed Amendment to the US Constitution that would put a Limit of $1 million on personal wealth. In the wake of the Great Depression many Americans developed more socialist values and believed personal wealth should be limited to avoid such an issue from happening again.
Y7D6Z TIL I learned that the surveillance technology in the 1998 movie "Enemy of the State", which shows the NSA hunting Will Smith using live satellite feeds, didn't exist until a government research engineer saw the movie and kicked started the development of Wide Area Motion Imagery (WAMI).