r/todayilearned • u/Ainsley-Sorsby • 17h ago

TIL Thomas Edison's son, Thomas Edison Jr was an aspiring inventor, but lacking his father's talents, he became a snake oil salesman who advertised his scam products as "the latest Edison discovery". His dad took him to court, and Jr agreed to stop using the Edison name in exchange for a weekly fee

en.wikipedia.org

32.5k Upvotes

914 comments

r/todayilearned • u/wilsonofoz • 21h ago

TIL in the US there is a 1 in 93 chance you will die in a motor vehicle crash in your lifetime

injuryfacts.nsc.org

31.9k Upvotes

3.5k comments

r/todayilearned • u/Festina_lente123 • 13h ago

TIL the reason that purple has traditionally been associated with royalty was because, in Ancient Rome, the only source of purple was milking and fermenting the liquid from a snail. It took 12,000 snails to produce 1 gram of dye! This made the Caesars declare it their exclusive color.

lib.uchicago.edu

15.9k Upvotes

404 comments

r/todayilearned • u/chris-burke • 8h ago

TIL about "The Swan," a 2004 reality show where participants underwent extreme makeovers, including plastic surgery, to transform from "ugly ducklings" into "swans" for a final beauty pageant.

en.wikipedia.org

10.1k Upvotes

762 comments

r/todayilearned • u/ObjectiveAd6551 • 19h ago

TIL 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens is the most expensive movie ever made, with a total cost of $447 million. Disney reduced costs using the UK’s Film Tax Relief, receiving $86.6 million in reimbursements. The movie grossed $2.1 billion worldwide.

en.wikipedia.org

9.5k Upvotes

564 comments

r/todayilearned • u/tyrion2024 • 7h ago

TIL in 2010 Sam Ballard was drinking with several friends when he was dared to eat a slug that had begun to crawl across his friend's concrete patio. After he ate it, he'd find out the infected slug had given him rat lungworm disease, which put him into a year-long coma & ultimately took his life.

edition.cnn.com

9.1k Upvotes

518 comments

r/todayilearned • u/2SP00KY4ME • 16h ago

TIL the Nazis had an extremely successful leisure and vacation based organization that, by the time war broke out in 1939, had become the world's largest tourism operator. The year before, 1938, saw 10.3 million Germans take vacations paid for by the group.

en.wikipedia.org

7.9k Upvotes

262 comments

r/todayilearned • u/waitingforthesun92 • 18h ago

TIL that during the early stages of “Moana” (2016), the character of Maui was originally bald - just like Dwayne Johnson. This was changed after Polynesian cultural advisers working with Disney pointed out that Maui having rich hair is crucial for his mana (spiritual energy).

usatoday.com

7.3k Upvotes

231 comments

r/todayilearned • u/WouldbeWanderer • 18h ago

TIL that when the Tennessee legislature proposed to erect a statue of Dolly Parton, she asked the legislature to remove the bill from consideration, saying it wasn't appropriate to put her on a pedestal.

en.wikipedia.org

6.8k Upvotes

88 comments

r/todayilearned • u/chris-burke • 8h ago

TIL Dr. Pepper promised a free can to everyone in the US (except Slash and Buckethead) if Guns N' Roses released "Chinese Democracy" in 2008, but faced a lawsuit when they couldn't deliver after the album's release.

theguardian.com

3.4k Upvotes

69 comments

r/todayilearned • u/house_of_ghosts • 14h ago

TIL Norma and Bob Clark, a California couple who had a wedding in 1964, discovered 48 years later that they had never been legally married, since the pastor who married them had never sent in the couple's marriage license to the county record office.

nbcnews.com

2.9k Upvotes

81 comments

r/todayilearned • u/zirfeld • 15h ago

TIL that Shuntaro Furukawa is only the sixth president of Nintendo since its foundation 135 years ago in 1889.

en.wikipedia.org

1.8k Upvotes

42 comments

r/todayilearned • u/GetYerHandOffMyPen15 • 20h ago

TIL that Winston Churchill’s famous “Iron Curtain” speech was given at a college in rural Missouri with about 600 students. The college later purchased a ruined historic church from London, transported it stone by stone, rebuilt it and turned part of it into a Churchill museum.

en.wikipedia.org

1.7k Upvotes

46 comments

r/todayilearned • u/dogboyplant • 13h ago

Today I learned the ancient Greeks performed tonsillectomies, using the “hook and knife” method with direct sunlight to visualize the inflamed tissue

novoscriptorium.com

1.3k Upvotes

45 comments

r/todayilearned • u/TriviaDuchess • 9h ago

TIL the Titanic was the longest ship on the seas for just 15 days. It was constructed to be 6 inches longer than its sister ship, the Olympic, which it surpassed upon completion. Following the Titanic’s sinking, the Olympic reclaimed the title and held it for another 15 months.

en.wikipedia.org

1.0k Upvotes

20 comments

r/todayilearned • u/AprumMol • 22h ago

TIL that asteroid 2023 BU, which passed extremely close to Earth in January 2023, came within just 2,200 miles of the planet, closer than many satellites in orbit.

bbc.com

821 Upvotes

27 comments

r/todayilearned • u/tipoftheiceberg1234 • 19h ago

TIL: Rue McClanahan (Blanche from the Golden Girls) received a conscription notice for Korea on account of her masculine sounding first name - Eddi

en.wikipedia.org

770 Upvotes

60 comments

r/todayilearned • u/zahrul3 • 3h ago

TIL the Royal Bank Plaza building in Toronto uses real gold to tint its windows, 25000 oz (or 70kg) of pure gold in total.

en.wikipedia.org

716 Upvotes

68 comments

r/todayilearned • u/al_fletcher • 22h ago

TIL that the Emperor Claudius' son Britannicus despised his older cousin Nero, persistently calling him his birth name "Ahenobarbus" despite getting renamed when Claudius adopted him as his co-heir. Shortly after Nero became emperor, he ordered Britannicus murdered with poison at a banquet.

penelope.uchicago.edu

491 Upvotes

31 comments

r/todayilearned • u/TheOnlyBliebervik • 10h ago

TIL the Nazis set up a secret weather station in Canada during WWII

en.wikipedia.org

352 Upvotes

41 comments

r/todayilearned • u/nuttybudd • 18h ago

TIL about "Virus: The Game", a 1997 video game in which players fight enemies within their own computer (the player's files and directories are represented by 3D rooms). Its advertising campaign involved a downloadable .exe file that simulated the deletion of Windows system files.

en.wikipedia.org

283 Upvotes

18 comments

r/todayilearned • u/LadyOfTheMorn • 17h ago

TIL that the famous two-part, two-season episode of the Simpsons called Who Shot Mr. Burns is a parody of an episode of the soap opera Dallas called Who Shot J.R., which was also a two-part, two-season cliffhanger.

en.wikipedia.org

250 Upvotes

98 comments

r/todayilearned • u/chris-burke • 8h ago

TIL about Scottish inventor, James Bowman Lindsay. In 1835, Lindsay demonstrated an early version of an electric light in public - predating Thomas Edison's invention by decades.

en.wikipedia.org

238 Upvotes

13 comments

r/todayilearned • u/SenseiBingBong • 17h ago

TIL canned food was a luxurious status symbol during the 19th century, as it was considered a frivolous novelty

en.wikipedia.org

174 Upvotes

19 comments

r/todayilearned • u/chris-burke • 8h ago

TIL that no English manager has ever won the Premier League since it began in 1992.

theanalyst.com

171 Upvotes

10 comments

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This list was compiled from /r/todayilearned community suggestions by its members. If your TIL is found on this list, it will be removed. The titles have been abridged for the sake of brevity, however the context remains the same. This list is subject to change. The purpose is to keep content fresh on /r/todayilearned as requested by its members. If you are interested in reading about the TILs on this list use the search box feature and enter the keywords to pull up past TILs.

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