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TIL Until 1616 coffee was essentially a monopoly run by Yemen. Merchants were forbidden to sell live coffee plants or seeds. That changed when Pieter van der Broecke, a Dutch merchant, stole coffee seeds and brought them back to Holland. 40 years later coffee had traveled as far as Sri Lanka.

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E1YyX TIL in 1945, a man survived the atomic blast in Hiroshima, dragged himself to an air raid shelter, spent the night there, and caught the morning train to arrive at his job – in Nagasaki – where he survived yet another nuclear blast
8eDL TIL Steven Hawking believes humans will be extinct in 100 years of we do not colonize space.
KOP04 TIL That Paul Stanley of the band Kiss was unable to hear on the right side due to a birth defect. As a kid he found it difficult to determine the direction of a sound, and he could not understand speech in a noisy environment. He was taunted by other children for his deformed ear.
5aOk TIL that slavery didn’t end after the Civil War. Until 1945, a system of neoslavery existed whereby African Americans could be arrested for not having jobs, then sold to companies like U.S. Steel through a “convict lease” system to do forced labor.
16Z77 TIL that in 1982, to protest Border Patrol inspections that were harming tourism, the city of Key West, FL declared independence. The mayor named himself Prime Minister of the Conch Republic, declared war on the US, surrendered one minute later, then applied for one billion dollars in foreign aid.