/f/todayilearned
TIL Western music traveled to China in the 80s through these cracked cassette tapes. Once discarded as trash, and shipped to China's black market from abroad, they were purposefully destroyed by labels to prevent resales. And these tapes influenced a generation of musicians in China.
radii.coSubmitted by fangz_fabricated t3_zkmyh1
TIL Teddy Roosevelt's 2nd son Kermit Roosevelt joined his father's Amazon expedition and had a river named after him, resigned from US Army in 1917 to join the British Forces to fight in WWI. To join the first fight in Finland/Norway, he took help of Churchill to secure a commission in British Army.
en.wikipedia.orgSubmitted by Satvahana t3_zo98qb
TIL Diophantus of Alexandria, a mathematician from the 3rd century, came up with many mathematical equations that took a long time to solve. The last one, Fermat's Last Theorem, was first stated in 1637 and was proved in 1995 by British mathematician Andrew Wiles.
en.wikipedia.orgSubmitted by dustofoblivion123 t3_z3cfdp
TIL Robert W. Service sent his poems to his father to be printed and given as gifts to friends. Service received back an offer of royalties for publication, the printers had loved the poems, The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses was an immediate success and Service quit his bank job the next year.
en.wikipedia.orgSubmitted by jamescookenotthatone t3_z7rs6k
TIL that France and Spain "went to war" over a few stop signs in the 1970s and 1980s when France built two new roads that crossed a Spanish road and installed new stop signs which Spanish citizens continually removed over and over again for years. This became known as the "War of the Stop Signs".
en.wikipedia.orgSubmitted by AxelNotRose t3_ydmfzt
TIL One of the only pieces of Hitler's dream reconstruction of Berlin as Germania is an enormous concrete cylinder in the Tiergarten neighborhood. It's called the Schwerbelastungskörper which translates as "heavy load-bearing body." It was to test the load-bearing capability of the ground.
en.wikipedia.orgSubmitted by muttmutt2112 t3_ycngn3
TIL about the Forty Elephants or Forty Thieves, an all women crime syndicate in London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that specialized in shoplifting and pretending to be maids and robbing the wealthy families who hired them.
en.wikipedia.orgSubmitted by Professor_Hillbilly t3_124yp1v
Submitted by Zrgaloin t3_11h30tj
TIL: On January 5, 2002, Charles J. Bishop stole a Cessna 172 light aircraft and crashed it into the side of the bank of America tower. His mother filed a lawsuit against Roche Laboratories claiming that Accutane had side effects such as depression and suicidal actions.
en.wikipedia.orgSubmitted by deadflowers1 t3_11w9rpr
TIL that just a few days after surviving the sinking of the Titanic, actress Dorothy Gibson starred in a silent motion picture short about the disaster called "Saved from the Titanic". Gibson even wore the same clothes she wore the night of the sinking to add to the films authenticity.
en.wikipedia.orgSubmitted by PresLyndonBJohnson36 t3_1266gzf
Submitted by ethereal3xp t3_10sk85f