TIL that Thomas Paine's bones were dug up in 1819 and taken to England by radical journalist William Cobbett, who intended to give Paine a heroic reburial in his native country. It never happened. Cob
TIL that Aleister Crowley, who helped pioneer attempts on K2 and Kanchenjunga, was also an English occultist who called himself “The Beast 666,” founded his own religion, studied yoga in India, allege
TIL that the original Godzilla suit was so hot and heavy that technicians would regularly pour out cups of sweat between takes, and suit actor Haruo Nakajima lost 20 pounds of weight over the course o
TIL that in Sweden, a man heard roaring coming from his neighbor's garden and discovered a moose stuck in an apple tree, apparently drunk after gorging on fermented apples. Firefighters had to saw off
TIL King Philip II of Spain (1527–1598) ruled Spain, Portugal, Naples and Sicily, controlled the Netherlands and was King of England and Ireland through his marriage to Mary I. His empire also include
TIL 40,000 people showed up to a place in the middle of nowhere in Texas in 1896 to watch two trains intentionally run into each other. “The Crash at Crush,” brought in more people than inhabited Texa
TIL that in 1896, a Swedish explorer named Salomon August Andrée attempted to reach the North Pole by hydrogen balloon. The expedition disappeared into the Arctic and was only discovered 33 years late
TIL Voltaire wrote a sci-fi novella where a giant alien from a planet orbiting Sirius befriends a giant alien from Saturn after being banished from his home planet. They visit Earth and assume it's li
TIL that in 1878, a 96-pound machinist flew a hand-cranked hydrogen airship, then repaired its propeller with a pocketknife while dangling 3,000 feet in the air.
TIL that Japan's first astronaut, Toyohiro Akiyama, hated his time in space because he suffered from severe space sickness and chain-smoked four packs a day on Earth. His fellow cosmonauts later repor
TIL that shares of the company IG Farben, officially put into liquidation in 1952 and in insolvency in 2003, were exchanged on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange until 2012
TIL The lottery winner of the Taylor Swift Eras VIP tickets concert in Vancouver was a music fan who donated four seats in his VIP suite to the Make-A-Wish-Foundation. He bought a scratch and win tick
TIL that 39 days before D-Day, a top-secret full-scale rehearsal for the Utah Beach landings was conducted in England called Exercise Tiger. It was attacked by German E-boats, killing 749 American ser
TIL that Kuwait’s unofficial stock market grew so large it trailed only the US and Japan — and when it crashed in 1982, nearly every bank in the country became insolvent, plunging Kuwait into recessio
TIL French impostor Frédéric Bourdin convinced a Texas family he was their missing 13 year old son. Bourdin bleached his hair, got a matching tattoo and concocted a story he was human trafficked. Desp
