› added 4 years ago

80

TIL of Zippy Chippy, a racehorse that, despite having many famous racehorses in his pedigree, failed to win all of the 100 races he competed in and ended up banned from all tracks except Northampton Fair.

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VMLJ8 TIL that Mister Rogers once used an egg timer and simply let it run for sixty seconds on a television broadcast—in order to demonstrate how long a minute is. Unlike most TV made for kids, "Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood" was deliberately slow and contemplative.
OG4Oe Til of Thomas Brassey, who, by the time of his death in 1870, was responsible for the laying of ¹/²⁰ of all the railways in the world.
won91 TIL BBC developed a written form for West African Pidgin. Pidgin has 75 million speakers in West Africa but did not have a standard written form prior to this. E.g. ,"Wen be Eid al-Fitr and how dem dey decide di date?"
9w0Or TIL of Savitri Devi, a french born greek-italian hindu and ardent nazi who tried to combine hinduism and nazism and proclaimed Hitler to be an avatar of Vishnu. She was also an animals rights activist who believed that people who don't respect animals and nature "should be executed"
5QJP TIL that Citizen once made a series of watches powered only by the temperature difference between the wearers skin and the ambient air.