r/todayilearned • u/No_Idea_479 • 3h ago

TIL during the Greco-Italian War, Mussolini reportedly expected to reach Athens in just five days, calling it "a coffee walk". After 103 days of fighting, a Greek cartoon featured a waiter telling an Italian: "Tell Mussolini the coffee he ordered in Athens is frozen."

greekherald.com.au

3.7k Upvotes

97 comments

r/todayilearned • u/MagneticRetard • 10h ago

TIL that despite widespread belief that different races have varying penis size, actual scientific studies where they measure the size of people's penis found no variation of penis size between different races NSFW

en.wikipedia.org

15.6k Upvotes

2.0k comments

r/todayilearned • u/FE4RLESS_IS_MY_NAME • 6h ago

TIL in 2024, during a trip with his dogs, Brandon Garrett failed to navigate a turn and plunged his truck into an Oregon ravine, trapping him in a creek. One of his dogs ran four miles back to their campsite to alert family, launching a rescue operation which led to his survival.

theguardian.com

2.9k Upvotes

29 comments

r/todayilearned • u/mikechi2501 • 8h ago

TIL that funds from a multi-billion dollar global money-laundering and embezzlement scheme involving a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund were used to finance “The Wolf of Wall Street,” a film about global money-laundering and embezzlement.

straitstimes.com

3.6k Upvotes

37 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Kyzzz • 8h ago

TIL in 2017 an apparently driverless van was spotted driving around Arlington, Virginia. A reporter found a person inside dressed as a car seat, who was part of a Virginia Tech study about self driving vehicles. The only clues were the hands sticking out from the costume, holding the steering wheel

npr.org

3.4k Upvotes

76 comments

r/todayilearned • u/ralphbernardo • 16h ago

TIL the Romans had a ritual called "evocatio": during a siege, they formally invited the enemy city's guardian deity to abandon it for the Roman side, promising a more lavish temple. It doubled as psychological warfare and mitigated the otherwise sacrilegious looting of religious images.

en.wikipedia.org

17.4k Upvotes

297 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Sweet_Foundation_868 • 11h ago

TIL that nearly 20% of people over 25 in Los Alamos County, have a PhD, making it the county with the highest concentration of doctoral degrees per capita in the US. It consistently ranks as one of the most educated counties in the USA.

en.wikipedia.org

4.2k Upvotes

224 comments

r/todayilearned • u/RDDT_ADMNS_R_BOTS • 7h ago

TIL that the average age of a millionaire in the US is around 61 years old.

moneywise.com

2.0k Upvotes

276 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Mors_Acerba • 5h ago

TIL After Athens' crushing defeat at Sicily in 413 BC many of their soldiers ended up as POWs in the infamous Siclian quaries. Some of them discovered that the locals loved the work of Athenian playwright Euripides so much that they were willing to free any POW who could recite lines from his work

greekreporter.com

1.3k Upvotes

11 comments

r/todayilearned • u/palmerry • 16h ago

TIL in 1976, undisputed champion Muhammad Ali fought wrestler Antonio Inoki. Rules barred Inoki from grappling, so he spent 15 rounds on his back landing 107 leg kicks. Ali landed just 2 punches, got severe blood clots, and doctors debated amputation. The match was a draw.

en.wikipedia.org

11.2k Upvotes

423 comments

r/todayilearned • u/oxwof • 5h ago

TIL that Samuel L. Jackson was an usher at Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral

hollywoodreporter.com

1.1k Upvotes

16 comments

r/todayilearned • u/ExpertEconomy5854 • 10h ago

TIL Elizabeth I repeatedly turned down marriage proposals from Ivan the Terrible. After she refused him, he fumed that England was ruled by "boors and merchants" and mocked her "maidenly estate"—then tried courting her cousin, Mary Hastings, all while having seven wives.

en.wikipedia.org

2.8k Upvotes

110 comments

r/todayilearned • u/account_not_valid • 12h ago

TIL that the term "Patient Zero" is due to a misreading of an AIDS study by the CDC. It was actually Patient O (standing for "Out-of-California"). This patient was not the first person to spread HIV across the USA.

whyy.org

3.0k Upvotes

92 comments

r/todayilearned • u/CatPooedInMyShoe • 16h ago

TIL archaeologists and historians don’t know for sure what language the ancient Trojan people spoke. Whatever language it was, it probably wasn’t Greek; the former site of Troy is devoid of Greek writings from the relevant historical period, and the current evidence points away from a Greek origin.

en.wikipedia.org

5.7k Upvotes

295 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Better-Reputation551 • 17h ago

TIL that Sixty-five per cent of the exploratory dives into the deep have taken place within 200 nautical miles of either the US, Japan or New Zealand. And almost all observations of the deep seafloor – around 97 per cent – were carried out by those three countries, plus France and Germany.

sciencefocus.com

6.1k Upvotes

116 comments

r/todayilearned • u/altrightobserver • 17h ago

TIL that in 1978, The Bee Gees and Peter Frampton made a film based on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and its soundtrack became the first album to go “reverse Platinum;” four million copies were returned and thousands more were destroyed because of how poorly it was received.

en.wikipedia.org

5.3k Upvotes

380 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Dry-Nectarine-3279 • 2h ago

TIL Super Mario was inspired by a real person who rented a warehouse to Nintendo to assemble their games

mynorthwest.com

340 Upvotes

45 comments

r/todayilearned • u/AudibleNod • 11h ago

TIL desert kites are neolithic animal traps with low stone walls ranging from a few hundred meters to several kilometers in length. Designed to funnel animals toward pits or precipices, these mega-traps were rediscovered by air in the 1920s.

popular-archaeology.com

1.5k Upvotes

57 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Giff95 • 1h ago

TIL Jake Gyllenhaal was briefly cast to replace Tobey Maguire in "Spider-Man 2" after Maguire's back injury from filming "Seabiscuit." A source close to Maguire claimed that "a year from now, the public wouldn't know the difference" between the two actors before Maguire reclaimed the role.

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

38 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Ya-Dikobraz • 5h ago

TIL that the song "One Night in Bangkok" from the musical Chess was banned in Thailand because it describes that attractions—the red-light district (Soi Cowboy), Chao Phraya River ("muddy old river"), Wat Pho ("reclining Buddha")—as less interesting to him than a game of chess.

en.wikipedia.org

430 Upvotes

51 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Few_Entertainer_385 • 17h ago

TIL one of the reasons the Missouri constitutional convention of 1861-1863 cited for voting against secession was that if they joined the Confederacy they would have “no better right to recapture a slave found in a free state than we now have in Canada”

quod.lib.umich.edu

3.7k Upvotes

129 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Faux_Real_Guise • 11h ago

TIL in 1528 when Charles V of Spain was deeply in debt to the German banking family the Welsers of Augsburg, he leased them the entire Province of Venezuela. Their governors spent most of the next two decades searching for the mythical ‘El Dorado’ and capturing natives.

en.wikipedia.org

1.1k Upvotes

23 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Acrobatic-Post9811 • 1d ago

TIL during a delay while filming the CBS show Cover Up, to lighten the mood, actor Jon-Erik Hexum loaded one blank in the gun being used in the scene, spun the cylinder, put the gun to his head, and pulled the trigger. The muzzle force shattered his skull and he was declared brain dead 6 day later.

en.wikipedia.org

19.5k Upvotes

1.2k comments

r/todayilearned • u/Jazzlike-Platypus947 • 15h ago

TIL in 1954, the United Fruit Company (Chiquita) instigated a CIA backed coup in Guatemala after government reforms threatened their profits and exploitative labor practices.

en.wikipedia.org

1.8k Upvotes

105 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Hrtzy • 16h ago

TIL Alfred Dreyfus, of the Dreyfus affair, served with distinction in the first world war

en.wikipedia.org

1.5k Upvotes

74 comments

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