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TIL modern Westerners tend to have a lifelong attraction to fire because they don’t learn to start, maintain, and master fire during childhood. However, in cultures where fire is used as a tool from a young age, interest in it wanes around age 7.

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PYBQV TIL due to Chinese espionage and infiltration in Nazi Germany in WWII, the Chinese under Chiang Kai-shek's government were able to warn Stalin that Germany was planning to attack the Soviet Union in the spring of 1941, several months before the commencement of Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941.
OoRBR TIL in 1949, 15 ‘smokejumpers’ were parachuted in to deal with the Mann Gulch wildfire, but they soon had to run for their lives. Only 3 survived, one of whom did so by lighting his own escape fire, to give him a charred patch to enter, so that the main fire went right around him
e0PXD TIL that natural gas, propane, etc don't really have a smell of their own. A chemical called methanethiol is added as a safety measure because it is detectable by the human nose at incredibly small concentrations. It is also partially responsible for the smell of bad breath and flatulence.
M7Qem TIL I learned how Champollion cracked the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. The reason why he succeeded -23 years after the Rosetta Stone discovery- is that he spoke Coptic, and it meant that the sounds written in hieroglyphs made sense to him.
16Mr4 TIL in the 1950s, future stuntman Evel Knievel drove earth movers in a Montana copper mine. He was fired for making the vehicle do a wheelie and accidentally crashing it into a power line, cutting power to the city.