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TIL Bowditch's American Practical Navigator, an encyclopedia of navigation, has been in print since 1802. It is so popular that it's colloquially referred to after it's original author "Bowditch". In 1867 the US government bought the copyright and has published 52 editions of it since then.

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YpK8A TIL Charles Joseph Minard was French Civil engineer and pioneer of info-graphics. Minard is famous for his flow graphs, one notably showing the trade of French wine. Information designer Edward Tufte said his map of the French invasion of Russia, "may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn"
M7eLa TIL Harvard sentences are 720 sample sentences, in sets of 10, which are phonetically balanced and used for testing phone and voice-to-text systems.
y9ZX TIL the guitar Marty McFly rocks in 1955 in Back to the Future wasn’t created until 1958
YKbB TIL The singing voices of Homer, Apu, Barney, and Skinner in The Simpsons episode “Homer’s Barbershop Quartet” were provided by Disneyland’s The Dapper Dans
m9Qo TIL of Laika, the first dog in space. Her journey was actually a journey into hell. The insulation came off the craft and the dog spent five hours in extreme stress and 100+ heat before succumbing and dying.