Instead of McDonald's tearing down a ~200-year-old Georgian mansion, citizens of a small NY town forced them to renovate it instead, resulting in a uniquely historic franchise location.
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The word 'mile' is derived from the Latin word for 1,000 - the number of paces it took the average Roman!
6
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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It's still possible to see the division between East and West Germany due to different light bulbs.
5
Iceland has been so culturally isolated through history since the Vikings, that compared to other Scandinavian counties, people who speak Icelandic can still read the old Norsk sagas.
4
In 1770, the British Parliament passed a law condemning lipstick, stating that “women found guilty of seducing men into matrimony by a cosmetic means could be tried for witchcraft.”
4
Sifrhippus was a species of horse about the size of an average duck and roamed North America 56 million years ago.
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