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TIL that, owing to a surge in production at the end of the 19th century, oysters became cheaper than meat, poultry, and fish, making them a popular dish on working class tables in the United States and Europe. This period of mass production is known as the Golden Age of Oysters.

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b94LZ TIL During the Second World War, the Japanese army poisoned more than 1,000 water wells in Chinese villages to study cholera and typhus outbreaks. Japanese planes dropped plague-infested fleas over Chinese cities or distributed them by means of saboteurs in rice fields and along roads.
dDVVE TIL that American chocolate tastes like puke to most Europeans, due to the inclusion of butyric acid to preserve the milk. In Europe, the cows live much closer to the chocolate factories
OG766 TIL In 1964 Nikes were being made on a waffle press in a van, while Converse was producing almost 100% of all basketball shoes for the NBA and NCAA. By 2003, Converse was bankrupt and Nike purchased what remained of the company for $138 million.
grZG7 TIL the studio behind the movie Se7en proposed a sequel called "Ei8ht" where a suddenly psychic Morgan Freeman chases an also psychic serial killer. The idea was dropped after director David Fincher replied, "I would be less interested in that than I would in having cigarettes put out in my eyes."
9Y7bM TIL Buster Keaton's film The Navigator (1924) was filmed on the USAT Buford. The ship had previously been used for the First Red Scare, as the "Soviet Ark" to deport 249 "undesirables" from the United States to revolutionary Russia, among them the noted anarchist Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman.