TIL that the canal system was largely forgotten about in the UK, until the publication of the book Narrow Boat in 1944. The book which details a canal journey on the eve of WW2, stirred an enthusiam t
TIL Tommy Prince was an Indigenous Canadian WW2 hero who was so quiet, he could sneak behind enemy lines, enter Nazi barracks, slit their throats, then steal their shoes before returning back to camp.
TIL in 2013 the 91-year-old Guardian crossword setter Araucaria told his readers he was dying through one of his own puzzles. The note above it read "Araucaria has 18 down of the 19, which is being tr
TIL a man with no heirs left more than €10 million to a Normandy village of 1,800 people that he's not thought to have ever visited. The only connection anyone could find was that it shared his surnam
TIL that in 1967, a 14-year-old Chinese girl was hit by a stray bullet, she mistook it for a pebble. For 48 years, she survived with the 2.5 cm bullet lodged in her nose until chronic headaches led to
TIL Frank Zappa's father worked at a chemical warfare facility that stored mustard gas. Because of its proximity to their home, the family kept gas masks in case of an accident. This profoundly influe
TIL that early anaerobic life accidentally caused Earth's first mass extinction. By evolving to use photosynthesis, they produced oxygen as a byproduct, which was toxic to the anaerobic organisms and
TIL that Cheryl Wheeler-Dixon, the stuntwoman who was severely injured during the filming of Back to the Future Part 2, was killed in a shootout alongside her husband when she and her husband went to
TIL Post-it Notes exist because Art Fry, a man in a church choir, wanted bookmarks that wouldn't fall out of his songbook. He used a "failed" glue that 3M colleague Spencer Silver invented in 1968, wh
TIL that the original run of X-Men comics failed to produce the sales numbers Marvel wanted, and so were essentially cancelled in 1970, with the comic only publishing reprints between then and the rel
TIL that the Spanish name for the Falklands, Islas Malvinas was derived from the French name Îles Malouines when the French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville departed from Saint-Malo in Brittany
TIL that Korea was using movable metal type to print books more than 70 years before Gutenberg's printing press—and the oldest surviving metal-type book was printed in Korea in 1377.
TIL that gasoline in Brazil must have a minimum 32% of ethanol blend from sugarcane. By comparison, gasoline in the US typically only has 10% ethanol. The increase from 30 to 32% in the ethanol blend
TIL Abraham Lincoln was once challenged to a duel. Given the choice of weapons, the 6’4” Lincoln chose enormous cavalry broadswords, then demonstrated his advantage by chopping down a tree branch abov
TIL Robert Rodriguez had to work to convince studio backers to let him make the family in Spy Kids Hispanic. Backers said the movie would attract a limited audience and asked, "Why don't you just make
TIL spider fighting is widespread in Florida prisons. Three prisoners fought over the theft one such spider, resulting in a life-threatening skull injury for one inmate.
TIL about the Right-Tail or Burnt Popcorn Illusion: Where rare outcomes make the average much higher than the typical result. If 60 popcorn kernels each have a 1/30 chance to pop per second, 52 likely
TIL that an estimated 41% of women in the UK consume alcohol at some point during pregnancy, compared with 15% in the US. Despite this, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder is thought to be substantially u
TIL In 2020, to curb obesity, Mexico enacted a law requiring warning labels on the front of food packages that contain "excess" sugar, calories, sodium, or saturated fat by Official Mexican Standards.
TIL Thomas Edison created a test for prospective employees that was so difficult his own son, an MIT graduate, failed it. When the questions were published, Albert Einstein failed it too.
TIL that between the 11th and 19th centuries, Japanese Buddhist monks practiced Sokushinbutsu, a ritual in which they mummified themselves over the course of a thousand days. They believed that succes
TIL before he wrote Don Quixote, Cervantes was captured by corsairs on his way home from Naples and spent nearly five years enslaved in Algiers. He made four separate escape attempts before a charity
TIL China's Grand Canal and its branches total about 3,000 km of waterways, with the first works dating to the 6th century BC. By the 13th century it formed an inland network of over 2,000 km of man-m
TIL that early Wahhabis banned modern technology as forbidden Innovations. When Ibn Saud later allowed such technology, the hardline Ikhwan rebelled; their defeat at Sabilla (1929) contributed in the
TIL Adolphe Saalfeld, a perfumer aboard the Titanic, left 65 vials of fragrance samples behind when he escaped in a lifeboat. Salvagers recovered 62 of them from the wreck in 2000, still sealed after
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
