TIL that the world's oldest hotel, Japan's Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, is no longer family‑owned after more than 1,300 years of continuous operation by the same lineage. In 2017 the 52‑generation family
TIL Agatha Christie's play, The Mousetrap, has been running almost continuously in the West End since 1952. This has prevented any film adaptation from being made, and has even kept the short story it
TIL Michael Jordan donated his entire first-year salary after coming out of retirement to play for the Washington Wizards to support 9/11 relief efforts
TIL about Okawa Elementary School, a school in Ishinomaki City, Japan which was destroyed during the 2011 tsunami, leading to the deaths of 74 of its 108 students and 10 of the 11 teachers. The school
TIL an ASML machine used to make advanced chips costs about $150M, is bus-sized, has 100,000 parts and 2 km of cable, and needs 40 shipping containers, 20 trucks and 3 Boeing 747s to deliver. It creat
TIL the former director of Tekken, Katsuhiro Harada, missed out on a barbecue with fans to celebrate the addition of Leroy Smith. Due to misunderstanding the intention of fans, Harada thought the cook
TIL the Vietnam Veterans Memorial includes more than just those killed in action. The Wall also lists service members who died in Vietnam from accidents, illness, drowning, murder, animal attacks, sna
TIL, that among the reasons Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark to explore the Louisiana Purchase, is he thought Mastodons still existed and they were likely to encounter them.
TIL In order to support the 3D graphics required by the SNES 1993 Star Fox videogame, a custom RISC coprocessor was soldered into every game cartridge. The SNES' native CPU was too slow to render poly
TIL that there is a real fruit called the Black Republican Cherry. The name originated as a slur against abolitionist supporters and Republicans like Abraham Lincoln. The Black Republican cherry is a
TIL the 1985 discovery of the Titanic happened during a secret US Navy mission to find a sunken nuclear sub from the 60s. Commanding officer Robert Ballard had 12 days left over to hunt for the Titani
TIL that the personal physician to King George V purposefully hastened the King's death in part so the announcement would appear in the morning papers as opposed to the "less appropriate" evening pape
TIL a drinks vendor in Germany cheated $47,000 from a bottle recycling machine by putting a single bottle into it 177,451 times. He built a wooden tunnel and magnetic sensor to pull the bottle back ou
