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TIL Stephen Hawking's wife Jane offered free room-and-board at their home to students who would help care for her husband. Stephen needed fulltime help with dressing, bathing, and did not want help from anyone other than Jane

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6XLZ TIL A 20 year-old woman was kept as a (sex-)slave in a box for 23 hours a day between 1977 and 1984; at one point she was permitted to even visit her family, yet still returned to her captors.
oENA TIL the world population living in extreme poverty went from 94% of the world population in 1820, down to 9.6% of the world population in 2015.
40Oa TIL that during the negotiations for the Treaty of Paris to end the American Revolutionary War, the French delegate told the English diplomat that the USA “would form the greatest empire in the world.” The English diplomat shot back, “Yes sir, and they will all speak English; every one of ‘em.”
PYnrg TIL that the first thing that was ever bought and sold over the internet was weed. In 1971 or 1972, Stanford students using Arpanet accounts at Stanford's AI Laboratory engaged in a commercial transaction with their counterparts at MIT, and thus the first act of e-commerce was a pot deal.
R57Dj TIL in 1881 Listerine mouthwash distributor agreed to pay royalties to it's inventor and still pays his family, for some 141 years for now