› added 9 years ago

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TIL Coca-Cola was originally sweetened with wine. Before the wine was switched out for sugar, it was known as “Pemberton’s French Wine Coca”. It was a 1886 prohibition law enacted in Atlanta that caused its inventor, Dr. John S. Pemberton, to rewrite the formula.

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x6XJ1 TIL In Romance and other European languages, Hellas is named "Greece" after the Grecians, a Hellenic tribe which colonized southern Italy and interacted with the Romans, who used their name to refer to all Helenes.
l71KK TIL that in 1609, explorer Henry Hudson and his crew became the first Englishmen to visit Manhattan Island. The day? September 11.
699jQ TIL the gyroscopic monorail was invented in Ireland and despite being championed by Churchill, didn’t catch on.
ne5mG TIL many bird species engage in "anting", where they actively rub ants onto themselves to excrete their body's chemicals. As to why, hypotheses include using the chemicals to ward off pests, preparing them to eat, for grooming their feathers, and for stimulating themselves.
b6L4 TIL that Martin Luther wrote a 65,000 word antisemitic treatise called “On the Jews and Their Lies,” which states that Jews are “full of the devil’s feces…which they wallow in like swine,” and that their synagogue is “an incorrigible whore and an evil slut.”