r/todayilearned • u/Johannes_P • 23h ago

TIL that shares of the company IG Farben, officially put into liquidation in 1952 and in insolvency in 2003, were exchanged on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange until 2012

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

48 comments

r/todayilearned • u/ubcstaffer123 • 1d ago

TIL Grad student David Radies was doing random sampling for a lichen diversity study in British Columbia when he saw logging tape tied around a red cedar at least two thousand years old. He discovered an ancient forest that was about to be logged, which was then saved as Ancient Forest park

thetyee.ca

• Upvotes

205 comments

r/todayilearned • u/estarararax • 1d ago

TIL among all active US physicians, only 0.75% of them, or 1 for every 133, are plastic surgeons. There are only 7,719 plastic surgeons among 1,032,365 active US physicians.

beckersphysicianleadership.com

• Upvotes

321 comments

r/todayilearned • u/DataGuru314 • 1d ago

TIL that despite being the mascot of the Klondike Bar, polar bears do not actually inhabit the Klondike region of the Yukon.

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

88 comments

r/todayilearned • u/XyleneCobalt • 1d ago

TIL that after the disastrous Battle of Midway, Japanese Naval high command not only kept the true result hidden from the public, but also from the Army and most of the Navy. Only Emperor Hirohito and the highest Navy command staff were accurately informed of the carrier and personnel losses.

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

639 comments

r/todayilearned • u/NateNate60 • 1d ago

TIL from 1994 to 2002, there was a strange art installation in Portland, Oregon called the "24 Hour Church of Elvis" containing assorted 70s pop culture memorabilia. The "church" would perform real, legal marriages for $25, as well as "cheap, not legal" marriages for $5.

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

51 comments

r/todayilearned • u/artsforall • 20h ago

TIL that standardized international time zones were not set until 1884.

webexhibits.org

• Upvotes

37 comments

r/todayilearned • u/CatPooedInMyShoe • 20h ago

TIL Eugene Satterwhite Blease, who was chief justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court in the early 1930s, shot and killed his brother-in-law in 1905 after accusing the victim of an affair with his wife. Blease was acquitted of murder on self defense grounds.

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

10 comments

r/todayilearned • u/jacknunn • 1d ago

TIL Changi Airport covers roughly 1.75% of Singapore's total land area, spanning about 13 square kilometers

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

48 comments

r/todayilearned • u/sage6paths • 1d ago

TIL the Jury on the OJ Simpson trial were sequestered for 265 days. Additionally, it involved involved extreme isolation and constant supervision.

bbsattorneys.com

• Upvotes

1.0k comments

r/todayilearned • u/no1_vern • 1d ago

TIL that the Hula grass skirt is a fairly recent addition. It arrived from the Gilbert islands sometime in the late 1800s and isn't originally Hawaiian.

painawaikiki.com

• Upvotes

75 comments

r/todayilearned • u/UpperphonnyII • 1d ago

TIL that last year the last remaining Shaker community gained its 3rd member. The Shakers was a Christian sect founded in the late 18th century with a peak membership of upward to 4,000. One of their main practices is celibacy, which made new memberships difficult.

npr.org

• Upvotes

218 comments

r/todayilearned • u/hopefulmonstr • 1d ago

TIL that in 2023, a Montana ski patrol reported that a mountain goat started a 1,000' avalanche, road the avalanche all the way down, and walked away without apparent injury.

theinertia.com

• Upvotes

113 comments

r/todayilearned • u/starkeffect • 1d ago

TIL there are over a half billion tea drinkers in China who consume an average of 3.5 pounds of tea per year, and the value of "all the tea in China" passed one trillion yuan in 2023

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

• Upvotes

113 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Depressed_Cat_00 • 1d ago

TIL 2001: A Space Odyssey used a $750,000 rotating spacecraft set that was 38 feet across and spun at up to 3 mph. The camera rotated 360° with the set, making actors appear to walk up the walls and across the ceiling, and the cameras had to be specially modified to work upside down.

theasc.com

• Upvotes

65 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Ill_Definition8074 • 1d ago

TIL The 2019 World War 2 drama The Painted Bird is the first film to feature the Interslavic language. The director's reasoning is that he didn't want to associate the film's characters with any specific Slavic nation.

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

15 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Aleksandr_Ulyev • 1d ago

TIL that Henry Ford used to hire disabled people for the factory work since 1914, long before any mainstream social concerns on the matter arrived. That included blind, deaf, limbless and low intelligence people. The labor was so grained that working required simple monotonous repetitive actions

gardenofpraise.com

• Upvotes

693 comments

r/todayilearned • u/orientalornamental • 1d ago

TIL trumpets in Bach’s time had no valves - players changed notes purely with their lips and breath, using the instrument’s natural harmonic series.

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

90 comments

r/todayilearned • u/carboncopy95437 • 1d ago

TIL in 1762, Russia’s Catherine the Great invited 1000’s of German farmers to settle near Russia’s Volga River. For generations, the “Volga Germans” kept their language, religion and customs, but later faced persecution. By the early 1900s, many had emigrated to the U.S. especially the Great Plains.

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

29 comments

r/todayilearned • u/obalovatyk • 1d ago

TIL In 1985 Audi installed a prototype Porsche PDK transmission in the S1 and achieved 0-60mph in 2.6s on gravel.

jalopnik.com

• Upvotes

69 comments

r/todayilearned • u/quinnroo • 1d ago

TIL that Efunroye Tinubu, a powerful female merchant in 19th-century Nigeria, was a slave trader who secretly continued trading enslaved people with Brazilian and Portuguese merchants even after Lagos signed an 1852 treaty abolishing the Atlantic slave trade.

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

152 comments

r/todayilearned • u/carboncopy95437 • 1d ago

TIL that during the medieval period, much of North Africa, including parts of present-day Tunisia, Algeria and Libya, was known as Ifriqiya, a name derived from the Latin Africa. For a brief time there was a Kingdom of Africa in the 12th century.

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

34 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Electronic_Cause_796 • 1d ago

TIL Austrian climber Hermann Buhl made the first solo ascent of an 8,000-meter peak. In 1953, he climbed Nanga Parbat (8,125 m) alone, using Pervitin (methamphetamine). His summit push took 17 hours, followed by a solo descent through the night, with the ordeal lasting 41 hours.

thefridaytimes.com

• Upvotes

64 comments

r/todayilearned • u/Cpt_Covfefe • 1d ago

TIL that new world parrots immigrated to South America from Antarctica over 50 million years ago

en.wikipedia.org

• Upvotes

49 comments

r/todayilearned • u/signaldecoderr • 2d ago

TIL a frog collected by the Smithsonian in 1963 sat unidentified in a museum collection for over 60 years before scientists recognized it as a new species.

smithsonianmag.com

• Upvotes

16 comments

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As of May 2026

This list was compiled from /r/todayilearned community suggestions by its members. If your TIL is found on this list, it will be removed. The titles have been abridged for the sake of brevity, however the context remains the same. This list is subject to change. The purpose is to keep content fresh on /r/todayilearned as requested by its members. If you are interested in reading about the TILs on this list use the search box feature and enter the keywords to pull up past TILs.

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