› added 11 years ago

103

TIL The man who wrote what is considered the first significant self help book in 1859, Samuel Smiles, is the great-great-grandfather of Bear Grylls.

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neJJY TIL Iceland has a Horse Naming Commission that oversees horse names across the country to ensure that no horse gets a foreign, vulgar, or inappropriate name.
E1V1P TIL that there’s a research station on Antarctica that can me moved as the ice shelf it’s on gets closer to the sea and it looks like something you’d see in a sci-fi movie.
549Q TIL that Coca Cola had tried to sell bottled water at a premium price which happened to be tap water taken from the mains
m1LYE TIL of Black Joe's Tavern, a bar opened in 1795 by a freed slave and his wife in Marblehead, Massachusetts. It was described as a "racially integrated drinking place for hard drinking fisherman.
Br7BL TIL the term Gerrymandering was coined when, in 1812, Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry created a partisan district that looked like a salamander