› added 4 years ago

109

TIL that after WWII, a small electronics shop was built in a bomb-damaged department store in Tokyo. The company, Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation, had only $530 and 8 employees. The company invented Japan's first tape recorder and, in 1958, changed its name to Sony.

Read more museumofmagneticsoundrecording.org

via reddit.com

Y7D0G TIL - The longest word in any language is the chemical name for the protein Titin, also known as connectin, which has 189,819 letters? The word takes over three hours to pronounce in its entirety, and it would take more than 2,000 pages to write it out by hand.
9Yod6 TIL drawings of battles between knights and snails appear in the margins of many texts from the 13th and 14th centuries. There is no known explanation for the meaning behind this recurring depiction.
kO5De TIL the US military uses dolphins to find and identify underwater mines because they are better at it than humans.
nX9b TIL some shots of the parade scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off were secretly filmed during an actual parade. The production’s float was inserted into the parade “unbeknownst to anybody, all the people on the reviewing stand. Nobody knew what it was, including the governor”
EgxOW TIL that the list of big banks in 1988 is dominated by Japanese institutions, which captured the first 10 spots and 17 of the top 25.