› added 10 years ago

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TIL that Cracker Jack, Cream of Wheat, Juicy Fruit, Quaker Oats, Shredded Wheat, Pabst Blue Ribbon, elongated coins, spray paint, Phosphorescent lamps, and a zipper precursor were all introduced at the Columbian Expo in Chicago in 1893

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V0Z8 TIL that upon his second defeat to Alexander the Great, King Darius III of Persia offered Alexander 30,000 talents (780 tons of silver, worth around £500,000,000 today) as part of an unconditional surrender. Alexander refused and proceeded to conquer Persia and rule all the way up to the Himalayas.
xVOmb TIL, UHAUL's founder Leonard Shoen was born on Leap Day, February 29th, and the year he was born on, 1916 is a leap year!
AD50x TIL that there were originally 8 of the foundational Stoic Discourses of Epictetus. Only the first 4 survive today.
gM4M8 TIL that functioning ‘mechanical gears’ were seen in nature for the first time. Previously believed to be only man-made, a natural example of a functioning gear mechanism has been discovered in a common insect - showing that evolution developed interlocking cogs long before we did.
4aZ6 TIL that Scientologists tried to hijack the Hugo Awards in 1987, filling the World Science Fiction Convention with cultists in order to promote L. Ron Hubbard’s science fiction novel