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TIL using fountain pens in a school in Edinburgh improved academic performance and self esteem

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via reddit.com

4k0xg TIL that the youngest person ever elected to the U.S. Congress was William Charles Cole Claiborne, who served at just 22 years old. Despite the constitutional requirement that representatives be at least 25 years old, his election was allowed due to his exceptional qualifications and popularity.
drEZ TIL in 1955, Hugh Hefner agreed to publish in Playboy a short story about straight men being persecuted in a world where homosexuality was the norm. In response to the criticism, Hefner replied, “If it was wrong to persecute heterosexuals in a homosexual society then the reverse was wrong, too.”
gMOrD TIL of Laura Bridgman, the first deaf-blind American child to gain a significant education in the English language, fifty years before the more famous Helen Keller. Boston, Massachusetts, c. 1845.
9Y8Mp TIL actors who play James Bond "give away their rights to wear a tuxedo in any other film" and that this was circumvented by Pierce Brosnan in The Thomas Crown Affair by wearing an unbuttoned shirt and a white bow-tie which wasn't tied around his neck.
5V5RR TIL If you plant an apple seed, the tree that develops from it will not produce the same apples as the one you planted. This is due to the fact that apples are cross pollinators, which means they require pollen from other types of apples to grow.