Rio de Janeiro was once capital of Portugal, making it the only European capital outside of Europe.
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In 1949, an official boxing match between a bear and a man was held. The bear won.
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In 2011, a couple bought a box of textbooks for $10. Inside, they found a 25-cent bill signed by the president of the Republic of Texas, Sam Houston, and subsequently sold it for $63,250.
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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.
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In real life, Pocahontas was 11 years old when she met John Smith - he was 28.
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Chunosuke Matsuyama, a Japanese Seaman, sent a message in a bottle in 1784 that his ship had wrecked. It washed up in 1935 in the village where he was born.
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20 years ago, there were only 130 websites, Google wasn't around, and you had to pay for an email account through an ISP.
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