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TIL, a parchment manuscript was erased by a 13th-century monk to write a Christian liturgical text. The erased manuscript was originally written by Archimedes and contained some of the fundamentals of modern calculus, which wouldn’t be developed for almost another 2,000 years.

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DANJ TIL: In 1946, the United States offered to buy Greenland from Denmark for $100,000,000 but Denmark did not agree to sell.
7rY5x TIL Twenty babies born in Britain since the Second World War have been named Adolf
78JmZ TIL that the Bennerley Viaduct was built as a solution to railway rivalry and difficult terrain, and it still stands because its innovation wrought iron lattice construction was too difficult and expensive to demolish and now it's a Grade II* listed building (i.e. protected)
Vag4 TIL Vatican once invited Stephen Hawking to a conference where he had an audience with the Pope. Pope John Paul had trouble understanding Hawking and knelt down beside his wheelchair to hear him better, prompting one scientist to comment that “things certainly have changed since Galileo.”
J1rbv TIL Jefferson Davis attempted to patent a steam-operated propeller invented by his slave, Ben Montgomery. Davis was denied because he was not the "true inventor." As President of the Confederacy, Davis signed a law that permitted the owner to apply to patent the invention of a slave.