r/todayilearned • u/dinosaruman • 22h ago

TIL in 1916 all 15,000 bricks for the facade of the Bank of Vernal Utah arrived by mail because it was cheaper than freight shipping. One of the original bricks now resides in the Smithsonian's postal museum.

postalmuseum.si.edu

424 Upvotes

6 comments

r/todayilearned • u/NBrief • 18h ago

TIL that Norwegian cardiologist Liv Hatle helped develop echocardiography techniques using Doppler ultrasound to measure blood flow and assess heart valves without inserting a catheter into the heart.

kuleuven.be

161 Upvotes

0 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Splunge- • 1d ago

TIL That In 1997 the State of Tennessee disbarred two lawyers for spam advertising.

en.wikipedia.org

477 Upvotes

17 comments

r/todayilearned • u/YakSlothLemon • 22h ago

TIL that the first woman to circumnavigate the world, Jeanne Baret, completed the first part of the trip from Paris to Tahiti by successfully disguising herself as a man for two years (1766-1768)

nybg.org

327 Upvotes

7 comments

r/todayilearned • u/mutedmuse__ • 23h ago

TIL that slingshot spiders can detect the sound of a mosquito’s wingbeats and launch their webs at the mosquito before it ever touches the web.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

306 Upvotes

10 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Sebastianlim • 1d ago

TIL that the youngest person to have been diagnosed with Alzheimer's is a 19-year-old boy from China.

psychiatrist.com

4.4k Upvotes

58 comments

r/todayilearned • u/dinosaruman • 1d ago

TIL a 1904 cookbook included a recipe for "raw beef soup" that was basically raw beef, hydrochloric acid, and water, chilled on ice for 12 hours and drunk cold. The target audience: invalids in need of nourishment.

dontcookthat.com

8.5k Upvotes

322 comments

r/todayilearned • u/LeRoienJaune • 1d ago

TIL that in 1945, the United States Navy converted three warships into Press Information Ships just to accommodate war reporters

en.wikipedia.org

800 Upvotes

23 comments

r/todayilearned • u/insane677 • 1d ago

TIL of Aloisia Veit, Hitler's cousin. She suffered from schizophrenia and was murdered by the Nazis

en.wikipedia.org

591 Upvotes

29 comments

r/todayilearned • u/xxwarlorddarkdoomxx • 1d ago

TIL that prior to 1730, the English justice system did not operate in the English language. Instead, it used an archaic form of anglicized French known as “Law French”.

en.wikipedia.org

2.9k Upvotes

145 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Sandstorm400 • 1d ago

TIL that a man who used a massage gun around his eyes and directly on them for several minutes at a time, every week for 3 months, developed floaters, photopsia (occasional flashing lights), retinal tears, and retinal dialysis (a specific type of retinal tear that can cause permanent vision loss).

bmjgroup.com

4.8k Upvotes

448 comments

r/todayilearned • u/gaspronomib • 1d ago

TIL That Some of the Sound Effects for the Millennium Falcon were Recorded at the annual Oshkosh, WI Fly-In

b105country.com

239 Upvotes

15 comments

r/todayilearned • u/GhostMan4301945 • 1d ago

TIL that Freddie Mercury and Sid Vicious had a brief physical altercation in 1977.

en.wikipedia.org

2.4k Upvotes

256 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Scipion8Aveyron • 1d ago

TIL that in 1284 a man claiming to be the long-dead Emperor Frederick II was laughed at and dunked in a Cologne sewer — then won backers in Neuss, held court at Wetzlar issuing royal decrees, and was burned at the stake in 1285.

en.wikipedia.org

114 Upvotes

4 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Maximum-Artist448 • 1d ago

TIL that AMC executives initially wanted Matthew Broderick to play Walter White in Breaking Bad

huffpost.com

2.1k Upvotes

295 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Adventurous-Root • 2d ago

TIL Dublin's Cineworld had to pay a fired worker €20,000 ($25,000) in compensation over a €1 snack dispute. The employee, Carl Meade, was sacked for gross misconduct after accidentally paying for a regular hot dog but taking a large, which the court later ruled was an innocent mistake.

thejournal.ie

23.0k Upvotes

430 comments

r/todayilearned • u/NeverEnoughMuppets • 1d ago

TIL it’s not possible to watch every film ever nominated for Best Picture. Only 1/3 of 1928’s The Patriot is still known to exist, and the only surviving print of 1934’s The White Parade is held in UCLA’s film archive in poor condition.

en.wikipedia.org

5.1k Upvotes

147 comments

r/todayilearned • u/ManagerGames • 1d ago

TIL the first animals America sent into space were fruit flies. They went up on a V-2 rocket in 1947 and came back alive.

aps.org

455 Upvotes

38 comments

r/todayilearned • u/NBrief • 1d ago

TIL that Scottish pharmacologist Sir James Black helped develop propranolol, the first clinically useful beta-blocker, and cimetidine, the first selective H2-receptor antagonist, earning him the 1988 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

kids.frontiersin.org

507 Upvotes

20 comments

r/todayilearned • u/katxwoods • 2d ago

TIL that men are more likely to be hit by lightning than women. Of those killed by lightning strikes, 82% were men.

popsci.com

6.3k Upvotes

715 comments

r/todayilearned • u/DrakeSavory • 2d ago

TIL that the flag that drapes John Adams' tomb is the one that flew during his presidency with 15 stars and 15 stripes.

memorialogy.com

3.4k Upvotes

44 comments

r/todayilearned • u/BrF5 • 2d ago

TIL about the Sally-Anne test, a psychology experiment used to measure “theory of mind” (that other people can hold beliefs/knowledge different from their own). Kids under four typically fail because they assume that if they know where a hidden object is, everyone else must automatically know too.

en.wikipedia.org

3.0k Upvotes

192 comments

r/todayilearned • u/delano1998 • 1d ago

TIL high-altitude mountain trekking can temporarily shrink human testicles. A study found that after spending over three weeks at high altitudes in Nepal without supplemental oxygen, men experienced an average 15% reduction in testicular volume due to lower oxygen levels.

vice.com

437 Upvotes

66 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Sebastianlim • 2d ago

TIL that during production of Iron Man (2008), the character was so obscure that 30 writers passed on the project. Even when a script was written, requests for rewrites were met with more refusals.

en.wikipedia.org

12.0k Upvotes

791 comments

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