› added 7 years ago

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TIL when John Williams first played Steven Spielberg the theme song for 'Jaws,' the director laughed and thought it was a joke. He then asked Williams if he could try something a little more swashbuckling, but luckily the composer was able to convince him otherwise.

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1bKW TIL Alfred Heineken proposed the creation of rectangular Heineken beer bottles, so that people in poor places could use the empty bottles as bricks to build structures. The company rejected the designs for a number of reasons, saying that the first prototype looked “too effeminate.”
D99P TIL the most radioactive place on earth isn’t Chernobyl or Fukushima, but a lake in the southern Urals that was once home the the Soviet’s nuclear waste storage area. You could receive a lethal dose of radiation in 30 minutes just standing on the shore of the lake.
4XRNN TIL Universal Studios, United Artists, and Disney rejected to get involved with "Star Wars" due to budget concerns or believing it wouldn't succeed due to being too strange. Only 20th Century Fox agreed because they wanted to form relations with George Lucas after his success of "American Graffiti".
d841j TIL that Laika is not the first animal to travel into space. The title actually goes to a bunch of fruit flies aboard a V2 rocket launched in 1947. They were later recovered alive.
54Zk TIL that US ski jumper Anders Haugen finished 4th at the 1924 Olympics, when 50 years later a Norwegian historian discovered a scoring error was made and Haugen should have gotten the bronze medal, which was handed to him in Norway in 1974 by the daughter of the original bronze medal winner