Chris
I’ve always been a sucker for random facts that make me sound smarter than I actually am. You know the type. Those little nuggets of info you casually drop at a dinner party, like, “Oh yeah, did you know sea otters hold hands when they sleep?” Suddenly, you’re the most interesting person at the table, even though all you did was scroll Reddit for a few minutes beforehand.
That’s the magic of the “Today I Learned” subreddit. It’s a treasure trove of oddly specific facts, obscure history, and weird-but-true trivia that somehow makes you feel like you just got a degree in “Useless Yet Fascinating Knowledge.” And the best part? They fact-check their stuff, so it’s not just internet fluff.
So, whether you’re trying to impress your friends, win a bar bet, or just feed your brain something fun, these facts are ready for their moment in casual conversation glory.
1. TIL More than 30 million viewers in Britain tuned in to watch the BBC “Royal Family” documentary in 1969, such that during the intermission, the flushing of toilets all over London caused a water shortage.
2. TIL until the mid-1990s the Italian-American mafia controlled trash collection in New York City, fixing prices by extorting or murdering competitors or requiring them to join the price-fixing cartel. After an undercover operation convicted the leaders, trash collection costs dropped by $600 million.
3. TIL 2010 Vancouver luge gold medallist Felix Loch had his medal melted into 2 discs and gave one to the parents of a deceased competitor who died in a practice run on the day of the opening ceremony.
4. TIL a female reporter attempted to recreate the famous novel “Around The World In 80 Days”. Not only did she complete it with eight days to spare, she made a detour to interview Jules Verne, the original author.
5. TIL Leonard Nimoy refused to join Star Trek the Animated Series without George Takai and Nichelle Nichols claiming they were proof of ethic diversity in the 23rd century.
6. TIL that in the 1950s, a psychiatrist had three paranoid schizophrenic patients who each believed they were Jesus Christ. He put them in a room together to see if their beliefs would change after confronting each other. They did not, in fact, change their beliefs but each individually came to the conclusion that the other two men were insane. They made a movie about it, called Three Christs.
7. TIL when Charles Darwin was sent some flowers from a friend he noticed one flower was extremely long and bet some moth with really long mouth parts exists to pollinate it. A few years later that moth was discovered.
8. TIL Black Panthers are not a real species. They are jaguars and leopards who have “Melanism”, which causes them to have black skin. It’s the opposite effect of having albinism.
9. TIL of The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre of 1902. The French wanted rats exterminated from the sewer system. They set a bounty for each dead rat tail. Thousands of tails were submitted per day but the rat problem only grew worse. They found the hunters were breeding, not hunting, rats for their tails.
10. TIL about the liking gap, which is that people you meet like you more than you think. Psychologists found that “people systematically underestimated how much their conversation partners liked them and enjoyed their company.”
11. TIL Hisako Koyama, a female Japanese astronomer who hand drew sunspots every day for more than 40 years. Her detailed sketches aid researchers in studying solar cycles and the sun’s magnetic fields.
12. TIL that Willie O’Ree, the first black man to play in the NHL, was blind in one eye. It was caused by a ricocheting puck that hit him in the face when he was 18 and he kept it a secret for his entire 21-year career.
13. TIL Thankful Villages (also known as Blessed Villages) are those few villages in Britain to which suffered no casualties in the First World War. These villages had lost no men in the war because all those who left to serve came home again when war ended.
14. TIL that Tarzan actor and Olympic swimmer Johnny Weismuller and his brother were swimming in Lake Michigan when they saw a boat capsize. They pulled at least 14 people from the water, and 11 of those people survived.
15. TIL Thought destroyed by Nazis, a priceless mosaic owned by Roman emperor Caligula ended up as a coffee table for 50 years in a NYC apartment.
16. TIL that the work of Charles Drew, a pioneer in preserving blood, led to large-scale blood bank use, U.S. blood donations to Britons in WWII, and the use of bloodmobiles. He resigned as chief of the first American Red Cross blood bank over a policy that separated the blood of black and white people.
17. TIL in the 1980s, the last 29 Guam kingfishers were captured in an effort to save the species from total extinction caused by non-native brown tree snakes. Through the dedicated effort of zoos, there are now 140 around the world with the aim of reintroducing them back to the wild one day.
18. TIL that to save the Hawaiian culture and people from disappearing, Kalākaua, the last king of the Hawaiian kingdom, went on a world tour in 1881, and travelled to Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and the United States, and he became the first reigning monarch to circumnavigate the globe.
19. TIL Martin Luther King Jr was a huge fan of Star Trek. He loved that it showed a future with people of all colors working together in harmony. He bumped into Uhura, Nichelle Nichols, at a convention. She said she was quitting. She ended up staying after MLK urged her to, saying she was a role model.
20. TIL an FBI whistleblower reported multiple problems in forensic cases. After years of the FBI seeking to ruin him, his claims were investigated and a report showed that forensic hair analysis was flawed or inaccurate over 90% of the time.
21. TIL a grown cat can jump between 5-8 times it’s height. That would be the equivalent of human ability to jump from the ground up to 3rd or 4th floor!
22. TIL that Poppy flowers became associated with the military after a Canadian poet was inspired by a field of poppies near a mass grave in Belgium following World War 1. The poppies grew there after the bombing and trench warfare churned up the soil, exposing dormant poppy seeds to the sunlight.
23. TIL: In 2020, Colombians shipped 130 grams of cocaine to Italy, inside individually hollowed out coffee beans. They were caught when a customs official noticed the “sender” shared the same name as a mafia boss in John Wick.
24. TIL The Big Ben’s unique tone is because the bell had cracked in 1859, barely two months after its inauguration. The bell is since oriented in such a way the hammer doesn’t strike the ‘crack’.
25. TIL the US-Canada border is the longest international border in the world, and that Alaska’s portion alone is about 38%.
26. TIL President Harding literally saved the U. S. Constitution which was deteriorating improperly stored at the State Dept. He had it preserved in a glass case.
27. TIL that dolphins will come together to form mega-pods which can consist of over 10,000 dolphins.
28. TIL that unlike most animals, goats have excellent object permanence and are able to remember where objects are hidden without being able to see or smell them.
29. TIL Brendan Fraser is the first American-born actor to be inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame.
30. TIL that Mississippi did not make child-selling illegal until 2009, after a woman tried to sell her granddaughter for $2,000 and a car and it was discovered that there was no law to punish her under.
31. TIL that Paul McCartney is the only artist to reach the top of the UK charts as a solo artist, duo, trio, quartet, quintet and musical ensemble.
32. TIL Emerson Romero was a silent film actor who was deaf. When movies with sound were invented, deaf actors got less roles and the intertitle text was removed. This led him to make an early form of movie captioning in 1947 so that movies would still be accessible to deaf people.
33. TIL when Great British Bake Off hosts Mel and Sue would see a contestant crying out of frustration or disappointment, they would use their coats to block the person from cameras, or start swearing a lot, so the footage was unusable.
34. TIL that since Brazil could not afford to send a team to the 1932 Olympics, they sent the athletes on a ship full of coffee. The athletes sold the coffee along the way to fund their journey.
35. TIL that 1604, King James I wrote ‘A Counterblaste to Tobacco’, in which he described smoking as a ‘custome lothesome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs.
36. TIL that Ethiopia has a unique calendar which is 7-8 years behind the rest of the world. The current year in Ethiopia is 2014.
37. TIL Finland used a lot of resources and logistics during WW II to bring the fallen to their home parishes for a proper funeral, instead of using mass graves in the battlefield.
38. TIL Jeff Cohen who played Chunk, the chubby kid in the Goonies went on to study law and entertainment law later co-founding the Cohen & Gardner firm in Beverly Hills. Earlier he asked Goonies director R.Donner for a recommendation for his college application Donner and his wife offered to pay for it.
39. TIL that breast milk can adapt to a babies’ illness and produce more milk with illness-specific antibodies.
40. TIL in 2009 Burger King ran the “Whopper sacrifice” campaign, which gave a free whopper to anyone who deleted 10 friends on Facebook. Facebook suspended the program because Burger King was alerting people letting them know they’d been dropped for a sandwich.
