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TIL about Titanic's original second officer who was replaced just before the maiden voyage. He took with him the key to the locker containing the crow's nest binoculars, resulting in the lookouts working with mere eyesight on the night of the sinking

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Wd5X TIL George Miller, director of the Mad Max films, was a medical doctor who began taking film classes in his down time. Much of the physical violence in the movies was informed by what he learned treating car-crash victims.
nerv7 TIL of an Island in Massachusetts colloquially named 'Busta Rhymes Island'. So named, because a resident said it has" ..rope-swinging, blueberries, and . . . stuff Busta would enjoy."
lo5ON TIL in the 1970's, the head of a Vegas union ordered the bombings of several nonunion establishments. When he refused to pay his bombers for their work, the union boss was abducted and his body was later found in the desert outside of Las Vegas.
woGn7 TIL The first song to use guitar distortion was Rocket 88 by Ike Turner's Kings of Rhythm in 1951. Their amplifier had been damaged and they tried to fix it by stuffing it with newspaper, which gave it a distorted sound. The band were pleased with the sound and decided to keep it on the song.
dDpP8 TIL of Drapetomania, a proposed mental illness that, in 1851, American physician Samuel A. Cartwright hypothesized as the cause of enslaved Africans fleeing captivity. The concept has since been debunked as pseudoscience and shown to be part of the edifice of scientific racism.