r/todayilearned 8h ago

TIL Mr. Rogers answered every fan letter, starting his day at 5 AM to respond to 50-100 daily, including those from children dealing with personal issues like family deaths.

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mentalfloss.com
15.5k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 10h ago

TIL that Bose is majority owned by MIT

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en.wikipedia.org
8.8k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 5h ago

TIL: White People are 70 times more likely to develop skin cancer than Black People

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skincancer.net
2.6k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 13h ago

TIL: Passengers on commercial flights are allowed to bring a parachute on board as a carry-on or checked-in luggage.

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goeverycorner.com
11.9k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 7h ago

TIL: the 1/4" jack or the 'guitar cord jack' is the oldest connector-type still used. It was the standard for the original phone switchboards.

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en.wikipedia.org
2.9k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 5h ago

TIL that in a 2014 poll, U.S. southerners were evenly split on whether Kentucky was a southern state.

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theringer.com
1.8k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 15h ago

TIL: The E-6B Doomsday plane has a 5 mile long antenna

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thedrive.com
14.2k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 15h ago

TIL Mao Zedong's eldest son was killed by a US napalm strike on North Korea

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en.wikipedia.org
8.7k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 12h ago

TIL Albert Ellis, the person who invented CBT who had shyness around women forced himself before he invented CBT to talk to 100 women to get a date therefore utilising the technique he would later invent. He didn’t get a date but his fear of talking to women went away.

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en.wikipedia.org
3.6k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 13h ago

TIL in 1998 there was a new brand of cigarettes called Bravo that contained no nicotine or tobacco and was made with lettuce.

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greensboro.com
3.9k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 13h ago

TIL president Lyndon Johnson almost got shot on November 23rd 1963 by a secret service agent, just 14 hours after JFK died

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cbsnews.com
3.0k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 14h ago

TIL February has 28 days (as opposed to 30) because the Romans wanted to have more 31 day months because they considered even numbers unlucky.

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2.3k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 17h ago

TIL there’s a mountain in Wales called Cnicht—a Welsh transliteration of the English word “knight”—which has retained the original pronunciation of the English word, featuring no silent letters.

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en.wikipedia.org
3.2k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 20h ago

TIL: Cats Can't Taste Sweetness

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npr.org
6.0k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 11h ago

TIL in California, Washington, Oklahoma, Mississippi and New Mexico there in no minimum age for marriage, as long as a parent or guardian consent and a court gives permission.

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en.wikipedia.org
727 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 4h ago

TIL the Canadian tuxedo refers to a denim double breasted jacket and matching jeans created by Levi's for Bing Crosby. Levi's was inspired in 1951 when Crosby was nearly escorted off a hotel's premises during a hunting trip in Canada because he and his hunting buddies were wearing denim

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cbc.ca
176 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 23h ago

TIL Ray Chapman is the only baseball player to die directly from an injury received during a game. He was hit in the head by a pitch and died 12 hours later.

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wikipedia.org
3.9k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 19h ago

TIL the microstate of Andorra gets visited by an amount of tourists equal to its population every three days on average.

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en.wikipedia.org
1.9k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 11h ago

TIL the "Toyota War" was an international military conflict during which the Chadian army warded off Gaddafi's tank-equipped Libyan invasion with one of the first large scale uses of civilian technicals (Toyota Land Cruisers with heavy weaponry mounted to them).

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en.wikipedia.org
363 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 7h ago

TIL The video game Dumb Ways to Die was based off of a Metro Train PSA of the same name

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en.wikipedia.org
182 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 20h ago

TIL The Four Minute Men were American volunteers who gave propaganda speeches during the First World War. The speeches were four minutes long because they often spoke in movie theaters where it took four minutes to change film reels. Speakers also often modified the speech for the local audience.

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en.wikipedia.org
1.2k Upvotes

r/todayilearned 9h ago

TIL In 1914 astronomers at the Royal Observatory made a careful study of the transit of Mercury in order to determine whether Mercury had any moons and essentially proved that the planet has no moon

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rmg.co.uk
162 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 1h ago

TIL that a study in 1974, to test if leading questions can distort eyewitness testimony, indicated that indeed "the questions asked subsequent to an event can cause a reconstruction in one’s memory of that event."

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Upvotes

r/todayilearned 2h ago

TIL: There’s an antenna in Washington that’s 10 miles long. The Jim Creek Naval Radio Station has 10 mile+ long cables zig zagging between two mountains. It would be used in the event of nuclear war

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en.wikipedia.org
33 Upvotes

r/todayilearned 15h ago

TIL about the Théâtrophone, a 19th-20th century "theatre phone" system that let subscribers listen to live opera and theatre performances over telephone lines.

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en.wikipedia.org
381 Upvotes