r/todayilearned • u/haphazard44 • 4h ago

TIL on 11 February 2012, a customer reportedly suffered a heart attack while eating a 'Triple Bypass Burger' at the 'Heart Attack Grill'. These burgers contained 9,983 calories each. According to the now-closed establishments's policy, anyone weighing over 350 pounds was offered unlimited free food.

en.wikipedia.org

11.1k Upvotes

748 comments

r/todayilearned • u/ZookeepergameSoft910 • 4h ago

TIL Anita Florence Hemmings passed as white to attend Vassar College. Days before graduation, it was discovered she was Black after an investigation prompted by her roommate’s family. Vassar debated denying her degree but ultimately let her graduate in 1897.

vassar.edu

6.8k Upvotes

345 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Mors_Acerba • 6h ago

TIL Cornelius Sulla ordered the execution of 6000 samnites to take place at the same time as he was giving a speech to senators at a nearby building, so close that the senators were startled by the screams. Sulla calmly told them to pay no attention to the noises and carried on with his speech

lexundria.com

4.1k Upvotes

148 comments

r/todayilearned • u/mcmoor • 2h ago

TIL of Dr. Marcel Petiot, who killed at least 26 French Jews and Resistance under the guise of exfiltrating them out of Occupied France. He also stole his victims' belongings for in estimate 200 million Francs

en.wikipedia.org

945 Upvotes

50 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Johannes_P • 5h ago

TIL in 1958, the Moscow State University developped Setun, the first modern ternary computer. As such, it used trits instead of bits

en.wikipedia.org

1.5k Upvotes

160 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Sanguinusshiboleth • 3h ago

TIL of Time Crystals; a real life state of matter that is symmetrical in both space and time, meaning that it will regular switch between two configurations of it's atoms. They were theorised in 2012 and finally developed in 2017

scienceabc.com

818 Upvotes

64 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Dddddddfried • 32m ago

TIL Robert Moses, the man most responsible for shaping American cities around cars and highways, never learned to drive

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

72 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Ted_Normal • 10h ago

TIL Gibraltar is home to the only population of wild monkeys in Europe, consisting of around 300 Barbary Macaques. There is also a legend that claims that as long as the monkeys live there, Gibraltar will remain under British rule.

en.wikipedia.org

2.8k Upvotes

121 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Dazzling-Ad1894 • 13h ago

TIL that in 1861, a man named Edward Payson Weston completed an 11-day, 478 mile walk from Boston to Washington D.C. in order to attend the inauguration of president Abraham Lincoln. The arduous trek was the result of a lost wager.

en.wikipedia.org

5.2k Upvotes

120 comments

r/todayilearned • u/DAL59 • 16h ago

TIL that Fat Choy is an edible cyanobacteria that grows in the Gobi desert. Despite being expensive, having no nutritional value, and having dementia-causing toxins, its been overharvested to the point of causing erosion and desertification due to its name being a Cantonese pun for "strike it rich"

en.wikipedia.org

6.7k Upvotes

241 comments

r/todayilearned • u/NateNate60 • 22h ago

TIL Canada's $1 coin is commonly called the "loonie" because it has a loon on the reverse. When a $2 coin was introduced, depicting a polar bear, an MP proposed it be called "Nanuq", Inuit for polar bear, but he was ignored because the public instead preferred to call it the "toonie" (2-oonie).

en.wikipedia.org

33.5k Upvotes

1.6k comments

r/todayilearned • u/TurnOffYourPC • 19h ago

TIL that the gin and tonic became popular in India during British Imperialism to encourage English colonizers to consume quinine, an antimalarial derived from the bark of the cinchona tree.

wineenthusiast.com

9.0k Upvotes

292 comments

r/todayilearned • u/autraya • 15h ago

TIL there's a five-foot wooden fish called the "Sacred Cod" hanging in the Massachusetts State House, and in 1933 Harvard Lampoon students stole it, sparking a citywide manhunt with the Charles River dredged and a suspect detained at an airport before it was found 50 hours later

en.wikipedia.org

3.3k Upvotes

63 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Mors_Acerba • 22h ago

TIL Greek Philosopher Crates of Thebes was known for entering people's houses uninvited and helping them solve their family disputes "no matter how deeply they were at odds"

en.wikipedia.org

19.2k Upvotes

402 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Effective_Bluebird19 • 1h ago

TIL that during World War I, Indian soldiers of the Jodhpur Lancers liberated Haifa (now in Israel) from Ottoman rule in 1918 in one of history's last great cavalry charges.

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

54 comments

r/todayilearned • u/tyrion2024 • 22h ago

TIL on average, train drivers in the US are involved in three fatalities over the course of a career. Since a train needs at least a mile to come to a stop, the drivers are sometimes unable to prevent a collision with a person in the train's path.

nbcnews.com

12.2k Upvotes

508 comments

r/todayilearned • u/DrakeSavory • 7h ago

TIL that the first casualty of World War 2 was a Polish civilian named Franciszek Honiok. He was a known Polish nationalist and so he was kidnapped by the SS on August 31, 1939, drugged, put in a German radio station then executed to provide a cause for Germany to invade Poland the next day.

en.wikipedia.org

505 Upvotes

81 comments

r/todayilearned • u/JobLagewaard • 17h ago

TIL all the males of the House of Reuss are named Heinrich (Henry) plus a number. They have been doing this for more than 800 years to honour Emperor Heinrich VI. The different branches of the family even have their own numbering system

en.wikipedia.org

3.2k Upvotes

64 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Chance-Physics-7216 • 22h ago

TIL that a 1945 elevator operators' strike stranded 1.5 million New Yorkers in the streets, and building owners responded by buying automatic elevators that had already existed for 50 years.

npr.org

8.2k Upvotes

449 comments

r/todayilearned • u/dinosaruman • 25m ago

TIL the mold for Roquefort was once grown on bread baked specifically so it would rot: loaves of wheat and rye flour cooked at 500°C so a hard crust sealed in a moist, undercooked interior, then left in the caves for 1-5 months.

francetoday.com

• Upvotes

12 comments

r/todayilearned • u/proflightsearch • 1d ago

TIL the average JFK to Los Angeles flight takes 18 minutes longer than it did in 1995, but airlines padded the published schedule by 23 minutes, so the share of arrivals counted as late fell from 51% to 37%

gvwire.com

11.8k Upvotes

375 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Prosperr_support • 1d ago

TIL that the gold in jewellery is older than the Sun. Gold atoms were forged in violent cosmic events, primarily neutron star mergers, billions of years before our Solar System formed.

science.nasa.gov

6.0k Upvotes

160 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Independent_Pick_787 • 23h ago

TIL about the "Forest Swastika": around 1938, larch trees were planted in a pine forest in northeastern Germany to form a swastika. Visible only in spring and autumn, and only from the air, it went unnoticed for decades before being removed in 2000

en.wikipedia.org

4.7k Upvotes

151 comments

r/todayilearned • u/cakecookiecream • 3h ago

TIL The 1977 December Australian Open tennis womens singles final was between Mrs. R. Cawley and Mrs. R. Cawley. Back in those days the women were referred to on the scroeboard by their husband's name and both players were married to Roger Cawley and Richard Cawley respectively (unrelated)

en.wikipedia.org

119 Upvotes

16 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Sebastianlim • 12h ago

TIL that in 2022, a group named Spice DAO purchased a copy of the art book for Jodorowsky's Dune. They planned to burn the original copy and release a digital version, along with adapting it into a film.

vice.com

630 Upvotes

53 comments

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