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TIL that 3% of all movies in the 1960s featureed quicksand

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DQ10D TIL in 1714 the British government offered £20K (~£2m today) to solve the longitude problem - which had cost thousands of lives due to a lack of ship positioning. John Harrison, a carpenter, took 40 years to make the perfect clock - his final version only lost 39.2 seconds over a voyage 47 days.
1a5yX TIL of Charles Lightoller, the most senior officer to survive the Titanic, who forced men to leave the lifeboats at gunpoint so only women and children could board. He was then pinned underwater for some time, until a blast of hot air from the ventilator blew him to the surface.
6Elm8 TIL each year about 100 US firefighters are convicted of arson. The issue is so prevalent that the South Carolina Forestry Commission and the FBI Behavior Analysis Unit both created profiles of an arsonist firefighter.
yQydV TIL that the movie "Death Wish III" was changed to "Death Wish 3" because the Cannon Group conducted a survey and found that nearly half of the U.S. population could not read Roman numerals
QNNXp TIL that after a major flood of the Turia river, the Spanish city of Valencia diverted the river and turned the former river bed into a massive city-wide park.