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TIL that in 1958, Burma-Shave offered a "free trip to Mars" for sending in 900 empty jars. A grocery store manager, Arliss French, took it literally and collected all 900. To save face, Burma-Shave sent him, fully dressed as an astronaut, to Moers, Germany (of which they felt was pronounced Mars).

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0Dx5 TIL of John Deydras, a clerk who claimed to be the real King Edward II, but swapped as babies. He attempted to claim a palace and challenged Edward to single combat. At his trial, he confessed to making it up and blamed his cat, which had been possessed by the devil. Both he and the cat were hanged.
78JLx TIL brazil declared war on germany in WW1
neRKY TIL the surname "Esposito" and its variants comes from children who were abandoned ("exposed") in Italy (before the XVII century, when the law forbade it). Every person with that surname today descends from an exposed child that kept the surname the orphanage once gave them.
m1wbY TIL the father of rocket science was a self-educated grade school math teacher
oky7 TIL Stephen Hawking’s father was a medical researcher and encouraged his son to get into medicine. But Stephen turned down biology as it didn’t seem to explain things at a fundamental level. He got into mathematics which seemed highly impractical to his father.