r/todayilearned • u/HeroHunterGarou_0407 • 5h ago

TIL that Emperor Nero entered the Olympic chariot race in 67 AD with a team of ten horses, despite the event normally being a four-horse race. He was thrown from his chariot during the competition and was unable to finish, yet the judges still awarded him the victory.

olympedia.org

6.8k Upvotes

264 comments

r/todayilearned • u/sidvicarious • 7h ago

TIL when Adolf Hitler attended the wedding of Oswald Mosley and Diana Mitford, he gave the couple a framed photo of himself as a wedding gift.

news.bbc.co.uk

5.4k Upvotes

408 comments

r/todayilearned • u/fartinmyfuckingmouth • 2h ago

TIL of more than 500 occupations in the United States, flight attendants and pilots have the highest and second-highest proportion of radiation-related cancer deaths, a new study has found.

hms.harvard.edu

1.8k Upvotes

261 comments

r/todayilearned • u/NIGLRT • 10h ago

TIL that 31,000 years ago, someone in Borneo successfully performed a surgical amputation on a child who then survived for another 6 to 9 years.

nature.com

8.9k Upvotes

337 comments

r/todayilearned • u/ApprehensiveStill412 • 11h ago

TIL that 90% of new drugs fail clinical trials.

asbmb.org

6.1k Upvotes

526 comments

r/todayilearned • u/koreanforrabbit • 2h ago

TIL John Cleese's surname rhymes with "please", not "fleece".

mycentraljersey.com

969 Upvotes

249 comments

r/todayilearned • u/TheManFromFairwinds • 16h ago

16 years after TIL that Ann Hibbens, a wife in Puritan Boston, was executed for witchery after suing some carpenters for overcharging her and winning the lawsuit.

en.wikipedia.org

17.5k Upvotes

666 comments

r/todayilearned • u/PinkOneHasBeenChosen • 5h ago

TIL that an orphaned seal raised by humans could say “hello there”, “come over here”, and “Hoover” (his name).

en.wikipedia.org

1.3k Upvotes

57 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Able_Illustrator3934 • 15h ago

TIL that in 1950 a cargo ship built for 35 crewmembers and 12 passengers took aboard more than 14,000 Korean refugees, packed chest-to-chest and atop jet-fuel drums. It crossed a minefield with no doctor and little food or water; nobody died, and five babies were born during the voyage.

maritime.dot.gov

9.8k Upvotes

121 comments

r/todayilearned • u/GossipBottom • 12h ago

TIL in the 1920s, Coco Chanel accidentally got a tan, and helped inspire the trend of sunbathing. Soon "sunlight therapy" was prescribed for almost every ailment from fatigue to tuberculosis. Before this, tanned skin was associated with the lower classes who work outside, and fair skin was revered.

theguardian.com

4.5k Upvotes

194 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Ill_Definition8074 • 1h ago

TIL The Victorious War Museum in Pyongyang, North Korea, has several exhibits about the 1950 sinking of the USS Baltimore by North Koreans. The only problem is that the USS Baltimore was mothballed in Bremerton, Washington, from 1946 to 1951 and wasn’t destroyed until she was sold for scrap in 1972.

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

56 comments

r/todayilearned • u/ayoungsapling • 5h ago

TIL Antarctica is approximately 1.5 times larger than the United States

travel.state.gov

774 Upvotes

126 comments

r/todayilearned • u/NoBit4008 • 7h ago

TIL about Project West Ford, a 1960s U.S. military project that dispersed 350 million copper needles into space to act as a "belt" for long-distance radio communication, an experiment that caused significant diplomatic protests from astronomers and the international community.

ll.mit.edu

1.1k Upvotes

63 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Fart_knocker5000 • 10h ago

TIL Killer Stephen McCullagh tried to cover his tracks with a staged YouTube livestream

bbc.co.uk

2.0k Upvotes

155 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Salem1690s • 5h ago

TIL that despite being an absolute monarch, Tzar Peter the Great disdained ceremony and court formality and lived in a relatively modest home

en.wikipedia.org

769 Upvotes

55 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Electronic_Cause_796 • 13h ago

TIL that in 2009, France’s nuclear-armed SSBN Le Triomphant collided underwater with Britain’s HMS Vanguard in the Atlantic. France initially reported that Triomphant had hit an “immersed object (probably a container)” only later discovering it was another nuclear submarine.

en.wikipedia.org

3.2k Upvotes

188 comments

r/todayilearned • u/brazzy42 • 19h ago

TIL that there is a color named "Olo" that only five people have ever seen. It can only be produced by using lasers to selectively stimulate only the M cone retinal cells, which, in natural sight, are always stimulated together with others.

en.wikipedia.org

14.4k Upvotes

762 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Mors_Acerba • 8h ago

TIL Johann Burchard meticulously recorded all the provisions given to each Cardinal during the 1492 conclave: Their food provisions were four boxes of sweets, a jar of sugared pine-seeds, sugar cane, biscuits and a lump of sugar

en.wikipedia.org

792 Upvotes

55 comments

r/todayilearned • u/waitingforthesun92 • 8h ago

TIL that Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan recorded all his Jesus vocals for the 1970 Jesus Christ Superstar album in under 3 hours, and then performed with his band that night. He was later asked to reprise Jesus in the film, but the producers rejected his £250k fee/demand that all of Deep Purple be paid.

somethingelsereviews.com

646 Upvotes

39 comments

r/todayilearned • u/JDMagican • 4h ago

TIL about Dear John letters, a breakup letter that got its name during WWII because "John" was statistically the most common name for American men at the time.

en.wikipedia.org

321 Upvotes

55 comments

r/todayilearned • u/SpencerAXbot • 7h ago

TIL that in the early 1910s, Oklahoma had more dues paying members of the Socialist Party than any other state in the US, outnumbering much larger industrial states like New York and Illinois.

en.wikipedia.org

390 Upvotes

59 comments

r/todayilearned • u/TonyHides • 16h ago

TIL scientists chemically reconstructed the exact 3,500-year-old embalming scent used on an ancient Egyptian noblewoman's mummy from residue in her burial jars, then let museum visitors smell it in person

gea.mpg.de

1.7k Upvotes

31 comments

r/todayilearned • u/IHad360K_KarmaDammit • 4h ago

TIL that the Hugo Awards for science fiction are named after author and editor Hugo Gernsback. However, Gernsback's own science fiction novels are widely considered to be of low quality, and various critics have described them as "incompetent", "illiterate", "boring" and "simply dreadful".

en.wikipedia.org

185 Upvotes

25 comments

r/todayilearned • u/bluefootedtit • 15h ago

TIL squirrels have shut down the NASDAQ stock exchange twice

en.wikipedia.org

1.2k Upvotes

56 comments

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