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TIL A fictitious soft drink was created to prove the effectiveness of advertising on buses. So many people started demanding it that the drink actually starting being made by restaurants and soft drink companies

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AN6pd TIL: The "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" was declassified in 2008 and it contains advice on how spies can sabotage the enemy by just being maliciously incompetent. Advice include praising inefficient coworkers, cry and sob frequently at work, asking inane questions in meetings, and spreading gossip.
78lYZ TIL Michel Fourmont, an antiquarian and French priest, enjoyed destroying antiquities and remnants of ancient Greek cities, including Sparta. Sent by Louis XV to find manuscripts, he turned to marble inscriptions which he defaced after copying them.
vaNB TIL that famous paintings that expressed the horrific emotion of war by painter and printmaker Francisco Goya were defaced by the modern artists the Chapman brothers who painted over the visible victims’ heads with those of clowns’ and puppies’ heads causing outrage in the art world.
x6AxD TIL about Leonard Sly. Born poor in a small town outside of Portsmouth Ohio. He stole chickens to keep from starving. As a youth, a judge ordered him to leave the county. He drifted and ended up in California as a movie stuntman.
8aBxK TIL about Clarence Dally, perhaps the first person to die of man-made radiation in 1904. He was an assistant to Thomas Edison on a new x-ray machine. He had to have both of his hands amputated but eventually died from cancer. Edison refused to work with x-rays ever again.