› added 12 years ago

100

TIL - In 1797 George Washington opened a whiskey distillery three miles from his Virginia estate, and in 1799 it produced 11,000 gallons of whiskey and made Washington the largest American whiskey producer in the 18th century.

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Wk6d4 TIL that the bullet that killed the longest confirmed sniper kill in history (3,540 m) flew for 10 second and and was flying for so long that the sniper had to take in the curvature of the Earth into account.
gMNjL TIL the Netherlands loaned 2,5 million dollars to John Adams, who was the ambassador to NL back in 1782. This was done in order to stabilize the US after their war of independence finished. In today's value that would be a loan of roughly 150 billion dollars.
mxkY TIL: Two thousand rats were bred for the production of Indiana Jones and the last Crusade (they had to be bred specially as ordinary rats would have been riddled with disease).
XEl4P TIL Bill Gates had an arrangement with Melinda that he and his ex-girlfriend, Ann Winblad, could keep one vacation tradition alive. Every spring, as they have for more than a decade, Gates spends a long weekend with Winblad at her beach cottage.
kJPoW TIL that trains have sandboxes which dispense sand immediately in front of the drive wheels to give the locomotive traction on steep or slippery rails.