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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Napoleon Bonaparte thought torture should be abolished because the information obtained from it is worthless.
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In 1999, a fisherman found a love letter in a bottle from a soldier in WWI. He returned said letter to the now deceased widows 86 year old daughter.
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Pineapples were such a status symbol in 18th century England that you could rent one for the evening to take to a party.
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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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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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