21.
TIL that the Milky Way got its name because the Greek goddess Hera pulled a breastfeeding Hercules off of her boob and milk sprayed across the galaxy.
22.
TIL Kenny G was one of the original investors in Starbucks and has made more money investing than from his music career.
23.
TIL The man who took the first up close photo of a snowflake, Wilson A. Bentley in 1885, also started the concept “No two snowflakes are alike”. In his lifetime, he took over 5k photos of snowflakes.
24.
TIL, that in 1838 a 14 year old boy nicknamed “The boy Jones” broke into Buckingham Palace and stole Queen Victoria’s underwear
25.
TIL the Rat Pack were a group of entertainers who were friends in the 1950’s. When one performed in Vegas, others would often come without an official booking and perform at the first one’s show. Hotel marquees would read “Dean Martin, Maybe Frank (Sinatra), Maybe Sammy (Davis, Jr.)”
26.
TIL that Hiram Maxim, the inventor of the automatic machine gun, spent so much time test-firing his guns that he became completely deaf. His son Hiram Percy Maxim eventually invented the silencer, but too late to save his father’s hearing.
27.
TIL McDonalds lost the ‘Big Mac’ naming rights in england after trying to sue an irish company called Supermac (that predated McDonalds) , allowing Burger King to troll them by calling their burgers things such as ‘like a big mac, but actually big’
28.
TIL During WW II the US Army was aware that mail to soldiers was critical for morale, but overwhelmed with the volume and space it took to ship. So the resuscitated a British/Eastman Kodak method where every letter was photographed, and the film was shipped, then printed. It was called V Mail.
29.
TIL Mary Shelley published her novel “Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus” at 19 years old, its themes of birth and death reflecting the deaths of both her first infant child and sister within a short timeframe, followed by pregnancy with another child who she carried throughout the book’s writing.
30.
TIL that Oskar Schindler abandoned his wife after going bankrupt and returned to Germany, leaving her in Argentina. They never saw each other again in the 20 years before his death, though they remained married. The final scene of Schindler’s List was her first time ever seeing his grave.
