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TIL Charles Redheffer was an American inventor who claimed to have invented a perpetual motion machine, He was later exposed when an engineer found a hidden cord that led to an upper floor. Upstairs he found an old man who was turning a hand-crank with one hand and eating bread with the other

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wLPA1 TIL the origin of the phrase “steal my thunder” is an 18th century playwright who created a machine that recreated thunder noises for a cancelled play. When he attended a later play in the same theatre and heard it used, he cried "Damn them! They will not let my play run, but they steal my thunder."
oBXrL TIL that a few years a couple in Bosnia discovered that they were cheating on each other, with each other. They had been chatting with one another on an online chat-room, without realizing that they were in fact speaking to their spouse.
w6LE TIL 90,000 Kentuckians fought for the Union, while 35,000 fought for the Confederate States. But Kentucky has 72 Confederate monuments and only two Union ones
lglB TIL When Adolf Hitler decided to commit suicide, he fed some cyanide to his dog to make sure it worked. His private nurse later said that the people in the bunker were more distraught by the death of his dog than that of his wife, Eva Braun.
6EVal TIL that the text in ReCAPTCHA security codes looks so strange because they're actually helping to digitize books and other text. The company has designed their system so that humans enter the words optical character recognition software can't recognize. Their old slogan was "Stop spam, read books."