TIL the PDF file format was invented by Adobe more than 30 years ago (in 1993) [Source]

TIL of Chevalière d'Éon. Assigned Male at Birth, d'Éon was legally recognized as a Woman at age 50 by King Louis XIV in 1777 [Source]

TIL Friday the 13th (1980) was panned by critics upon release. Gene Siskel was a vocal critic of the film, going so far as to publicly spoil the ending in an attempt to convince audiences not to see it and encourage detractors to write to actress Betsy Palmer and express their contempt for the film. [Source]

TIL the “Great Oil Sniffer Hoax” fooled French state oil company Elf Aquitaine in the 1970s into spending over $150 million on planes that supposedly detected underground oil from the air, before the technology was exposed as a fraud. [Source]

TIL When Benedict Arnold's home town learned he had betrayed the revolution and burned their neighboring New London harbor, they got so mad they dug up his father's grave and threw his bones in the river. [Source]

TIL the White Beaches, a stretch of sandy coastline located in Tuscany. The unusual color of the sand is the result of years of processing and discharge of calcium carbonate by a chemical plant located about a kilometer from the coast. Due to that, they are among the most polluted beaches in Italy [Source]

TIL Capt. Charles McVay committed suicide in 1968 after being wrongly blamed for the USS Indianapolis disaster. For over 20 years, he received letters from grieving families calling him a murderer, he was cleared of all charges posthumously in 2001. [Source]

TIL 13 residents of St. Paul's River in Quebec, which only has a population of about 150, bought lottery tickets (along with one other person from a nearby village) collectively for nearly 20 years before they won a $50 million jackpot. Each person in the group of 14 received a $3.5 million share. [Source]

TIl that industrialist Andrew Carnegie spent $56.2 million to build 2509 libraries across the world. Known as Carnegie Libraries, cities had to follow a strict maintenance commitment to obtain funding. Today, there are an estimated 900 Carnegie Libraries operating in the United States. [Source]

TIL that in Full Metal Jacket (1987), director Stanley Kubrick let R. Lee Ermey improvise much of his dialogue, and sometimes only required 3 takes per scene. This was highly unusual for the meticulous director, who almost never allowed improvisation and typically took 40 takes or more per scene [Source]

TIL the real-life inspiration for Mowgli was Dina Sanichar, a feral boy found living in a wolf den in 1867. Unlike the fictional character, Sanichar never learned to speak, preferred raw meat, and remained severely impaired for the 20 years he lived among humans. [Source]

TIL some moth species do not have mouths or digestive systems, instead they have a finite energy reserve from the food they ate before metamorphasis that lasts 5-10 days, just long enough to find a mate and reproduce. [Source]

TIL in 2008 a NY man discovered a 7-inch knife had been baked into the bread of his foot-long sandwich from Subway. He realized something was amiss after tasting the bizarre flavor of the melted knife handle infused into the bread. Although he sued Subway for $1 million, he walked away with $20,000. [Source]

TIL that Schweppes is the world's oldest soda and it preceded Coca-Cola by a 100 years [Source]

TIL Agoraphobia is not the fear of the outdoors but rather the fear of a place or situation that would be difficult to escape from. It can range from traveling alone to an unfamiliar place but also crowded and enclosed spaces like the subway. [Source]

TIL there are over 33,000 Japanese companies with histories of 100 years or more. These long-standing firms are known as 'shinise'. They are governed by a management philosophy that prioritizes long-term continuity and generational succession over short-term profits. [Source]

TIL about the Gansu ultra marathon disaster where twenty-one professional runners died from hypothermia. [Source]

TIL that the pink color in Himalayan Pink Salt is mostly rust. [Source]

TIL of "Project 100,000." in 1966, Sec. Def. Robert McNamara lowered enlistment standards to accept people with an IQ of 80 (borderline intellectually disabled) to boost military ranks. Fictional characters Leonard Lawrence (Full Metal Jacket) and Forest Gump were based on these recruits [Source]

TIL an effective formula that predicts the probability of mortality due to burns. The Baux score includes body area affected + age of patient + 17. [Source]

TIL that Antarctica is technically the largest desert on Earth, receiving less annual precipitation than the Sahara Desert [Source]