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TIL from the 1920's to the 1950's cigarette companies routinely paid doctors to endorse and prescribe their brand of cigarettes to patients, falsely claiming them as a "healthy" alternative to other brands. This was done to cover up increasing evidence of the harm done by smoking.

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VMga4 All of the World's yeast probably originated in China.
X0vk8 TIL the reason you can’t go up in the Statue of Liberty’s torch is because of shrapnel from an explosion caused by Germans in 1916 to sabotage munitions for the Allied powers.
xRRw TIL the 1992 Olympics US basketball team (the “Dream Team”) has been called “the most dominant squad ever assembled in any sport”. Magic Johnson said “I look to my right, there’s Michael Jordan … I look to my left, there’s Charles Barkley or Larry Bird … I didn’t know who to throw the ball to!”
epgpg TIL The first reference to files in the context of computing was in 1940 when a computer function was stored in a “file of punched cards”. The idea of a file system that managed virtual "files" on a storage device was introduced in 1961 by the Burroughs MCP and the MIT Compatible Time-Sharing System
j6K5M TIL that in 1917, when the US Army tested what later became known as the M1917 Browning Machine Gun, it was able to fire non-stop for 48 minutes and 12 seconds (over 21,000 rounds) without a malfunction. It went into service in late WWI, and is still used by some irregular forces today.