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TIL Robin Williams protested 'It's my voice! You can't stop me.' against Disney when they tried to prevent him from voice acting in Ferngully: The Last Rainforest

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GYaXQ TIL of Tilly Bébé, a circus performer famous for her taming of large predators. She was small and dressed like a doll while performing with hyenas, lions and even groups of 40 polar bears. Silent footage of her life with the animals helped pioneer a new "exotic-erotic-escapist" genre of film.
RMOj TIL that Benjamin Franklin had an illegitimate son, who had an illegitimate son, who had an illegitimate son.
e0ye6 TIL Marshall Mabey was a $1 a day NYC tunnel worker called "Sandmen". On Feb 19 he was working under the East River where the tunnel was pressurized to prevent cave ins. A crack in the ceiling vented Mabey up through the mud, the East River and 25 feet into the air. He lived and was uninjured.
0d87R TIL of the Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing "automaton" from the 1700s actually operated by a cleverly hidden human. It toured the palaces of Europe, even playing against Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon, who attempted to cheat multiple times, prompting the Turk to swipe all the pieces off the board.
mxJWM TIL that when Alfred Hitchcock was five his father sent him to the police with a note, the policeman looked at the note and locked him in jail for few minutes. This experience left him with lifelong fear of policemen and he wouldn't even drive a car in case he got a parking ticket.