It has been calculated that every 2 minutes, we take more pictures than all of humanity in the 19th century.
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In 1846, a 14 year old French peasant girl named Angelique Cottin was found to possess extraordinary electrical power. With a gentle touch she could knock over heavy pieces of furniture and even shock people near her.
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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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There is a 600 year old 240 paged book called the Voynich Manuscript, that’s written language is still completely unknown today.
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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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Pierre Jaquet-Droz, a watchmaker, 240 years ago invented a robot that could write, and the parts could be interchanged to say whatever you want.
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The ‘@’ sign is centuries old, and was used in Europe to denote a unit of weight (the “arroba”) equivalent to 25 lbs.
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