› added 4 years ago

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TIL that Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' wasn't originally intended to be presented as a work of fiction. His editor rejected the manuscript believing it would cause widespread panic, given that Jack the ripper was active in London at the time. The version we read starts on page 102 of the original script.

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a8V8N TIL due to copyright expiration, The Wizards of Oz (1939) will be free to post anywhere without repercussions starting in 2035.
awa09 TIL The Lord of the Rings films originally would have been released by Disney via Miramax but they chose not to fund it due to costs. They let New Line Cinema have it on the condition they pay $10M in "turnaround" costs. The LOTR trilogy will later on gross over $2.9B at the global box office.
16wZX TIL=Plastic has become such a central component of modern life, it has found its way into our Earth's crust itself, becoming a geological marker. But there's an upside: The plastic is so obvious in the Earth's crust, it gives an exact timetable for when that layer of ground became solid Earth.
YpODG TIL of Heinz Drossel, a German soldier who married the first Jew he rescued in WWII; a woman he stopped from committing suicide. Risking execution, he sheltered her in his apartment before giving her money to find a safer place to stay. Heinz went on to rescue more Jews.
5YJkQ TIL Stephen Hawking was still working on "Brief Answers to the Big Questions" with questions like "Is there a God?" when he died. To fill the gaps, the publishers used Hawking’s “enormous personal archive” and completed the book with his academic colleagues, his family, and personal estate