The handbook issued to US soldiers in Britain during WW2 included the line "The British don't know how to make a good cup of coffee. You don't know how to make a good cup of tea. It's an even swap."
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London's Pall Mall became the first street lit by gaslight in 1807!
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Leonardo da Vinci could write with one hand and draw with the other at the same time.
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Clocks made before 1660 had only one hand - an hour hand.
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In the 1830s, a Greek prime minister tried to spread the potato in Greece but people weren't interested so he put armed guards in front of shipments of potatoes so people would think they were important. People then started stealing these potatoes so much that the crop spread to all of Greece.
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The site where the Parthenon was built had to be cleared of hundreds of dinosaur bones (then called giants' bones) before construction could begin.
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Romans used a plant called Silphium as contraception. They had so much sex that they drove it into extinction.
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