Leonardo Da Vinci made a robotic lion in 1515 that would walk, sway, open its mouth and move its tail - it even had a compartment that opened to present flowers.
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Astronomer Percival Lowell believed that he was the first person to observe canals on Venus, but because of a faulty adjustment of the eyepiece on his telescope, he was in fact looking at the blood vessels in his own eye.
4
The University of Oxford (teaching since 1096) predates the Aztec empire (1428 - 1521).
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A Kodak engineer constructed the first digital camera in 1975. They didn't want to go digital. They went bankrupt in 2012.
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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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Unsinkable Sam (nickname of a German ship's cat) who served on 3 warships, one German, two British, all sank in action. The cat survived each sinking, floating away on wooden planks to rescue.
19
It has been calculated that every 2 minutes, we take more pictures than all of humanity in the 19th century.
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