TIL about the "Polar Bear Expedition" of 1918-19. 5,000 Americans deployed to Archangelsk in northern Russia to check the Germans, but ended up fighting the Red Army
TIL Beethoven kept his hearing loss a secret. He once wrote (but never sent) a letter to his brother confessing it and explained that people mistakenly thought he was antisocial: he longed for human c
TIL J. D. Drew is the only player in MLB history to be part of two instances of back-to-back-to-back-to-back home runs. First time with the LA Dodgers in 2006 and the second time in 2007 with the Bost
TIL that motivation does not cause action; action causes motivation. The brain cannot produce dopamine for a task until you physically begin doing it, requiring a physical or kinetic trigger to activa
TIL In 2006, Dustin Diamond, who played Screech on Saved by the Bell, directed and released his own sex tape called Screeched – Saved by the Smell. He later claimed that he didn't appear in the sex ta
TIL that George Weah went from being one of the world’s best footballers, winning the Ballon d’Or in 1995, to entering politics and eventually becoming President of Liberia in 2018.
TIL the first submarine attack in history (1776) was a one-man, hand-cranked wooden sub called the Turtle, whose pilot was supposed to screw a gunpowder mine onto a British warship's hull from underne
TIL about Hollywood Henderson, who played with the Dallas Cowboys in the 1970s including a Super Bowl win. He would later hit rock bottom and go bankrupt from cocaine addiction. But then would end up
TIL in 2024, the School of Management and Business at the Vietnam National University in Hanoi announced that female students had to be at least 1.58 m tall and male students at least 1.65 m to be con
TIL In 1931 the U. S. Congress established the talking-book program, intended to help blind adults who couldn’t read print. It created spoken texts on phonograph recordings that in the 1930s could pla
TIL that several crew members onboard the Challenger space shuttle survived the initial breakup. It is theorized that some were conscious until they hit the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.
TIL many historians consider the decline of Rome starting with the 378 AD battle of Adrianople. After the Goths were defeated by the Huns they fled into Roman territory were horribly abused by Rome. T
TIL of the Mount of Temptation, the mountain that Jesus was supposedly shown the whole world by Satan to tempt him after fasting for 40 days, is also called Mount Quarantine (from the latin "quarranta
TIL that the use of incubators to save premature babies was popularized by a Coney Island sideshow that exhibited preemies in incubators for decades before maternity wards adopted the technology. The
TIL tetraethyllead (TEL) - main component used to make gasoline "leaded" - was selected out of thousands compounds tested mainly for being the cheapest - just 1 part TEL in 1300 parts gasoline was fou
TIL about sea silk, a rare golden fabric made from filaments secreted by pen shells. It's been around for millennia, and is still made at small scale by a few people in Sardinia.
TIL Thomas Edison’s 1876 electric pen made tiny perforations in paper to create reusable stencils for copying documents. In 1891, Samuel O’Reilly adapted the technology into the first officially paten
TIL The 1833 Factory Act limited the hours children could work in factories, for children aged 9 to 13, they could work a maximum of 48 hours a week and 8 hours a day.
TIL the 1998 film adaptation of Scott Smith's novel "A Simple Plan" went through five different directors, including Mike Nichols (with Nicholas Cage attached), Ben Stiller, and John Boorman (who cast
TIL that Winamp's slogan "It really whips the llama's ass!" comes from the Wesley Willis song "Whip the Llama's Ass". Willis was a schizophrenic musician and artist who released over 48 albums in his
