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TIL of WW2 US Army Captain Moffatt Burriss who, along with two other me in a Jeep, accidentally stumbled upon a 15,000 strong German Panzer Corps outside of Berlin toward the end of the war. He approached the enemy commander alone and tricked him into surrendering his army and being taken captive.

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l79Q1 TIL A Crossair flight crashed in Switzerland causing 24 deaths due to pilot error. The same pilot previously overflew a destination in Switzerland to Italy and only realized it when a passenger could see road signs in Italian.
YBlr TIL The Act of Habeas Corpus 1679 was only just passed . When the votes were counted, there were not enough Lords in favour, so it was decided that one of the Lords, because he happened to be fat, was worth ten votes. It started as a joke, but remains on the statute books to this day.
P18pe TIL that reinforced concrete became popular after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The subsequent fire destroyed much of the city, but those built with reinforced concrete made it "through the ordeal unscathed, where buildings of brick and stone in their immediate vicinity were entirely wrecked."
0Ewj TIL the first solar cell developed had less than 1% conversion efficiency, and was denounced as a fraud by the USA for “generating power without consuming matter, violating the laws of physics.”
M7Db0 TIL back when margarine was illegal in several states, New Hampshire tried to mandate that sellers dye the butter alternative pink. However, the Supreme Court ruled that "pink is not the color of oleomargarine in its natural state."