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
TIL that the Hula grass skirt is a fairly recent addition. It arrived from the Gilbert islands sometime in the late 1800s and isn't originally Hawaiian.
TIL in 2013 a Columbian man with HIV was admitted to the hospital with an aggressive malignant cancer that was not human and from a small tape worm. He died 72 hours later.
TIL that in Spider-Man: The Animated Series, Spider-Man was not allowed to punch anyone. Producer John Semper Jr. claimed that it was his idea, as he didn't want to teach children to "solve problems t
TIL that in 2004, Reason Magazine sent out their June magazine issue with personalized covers to each one of their 40,000 subscribers. The personalized cover was a satellite image photo of their house
TIL from 1994 to 2002, there was a strange art installation in Portland, Oregon called the "24 Hour Church of Elvis" containing assorted 70s pop culture memorabilia. The "church" would perform real, l
TIL among all active US physicians, only 0.75% of them, or 1 for every 133, are plastic surgeons. There are only 7,719 plastic surgeons among 1,032,365 active US physicians.
TIL there are over a half billion tea drinkers in China who consume an average of 3.5 pounds of tea per year, and the value of "all the tea in China" passed one trillion yuan in 2023
TIL Grad student David Radies was doing random sampling for a lichen diversity study in British Columbia when he saw logging tape tied around a red cedar at least two thousand years old. He discovered
TIL that in 2023, a Montana ski patrol reported that a mountain goat started a 1,000' avalanche, road the avalanche all the way down, and walked away without apparent injury.
