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TIL the United States almost adopted the Metric System in 1794. Frenchman Joseph Dombey was en route to America to present the prototypes of a Meter and a Kilogram to the US Congress but his ship got hit by a storm and he got stranded in the Carribean where he died in a British prison.

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MEaV TIL Dwight D. Eisenhower said “The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants…It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals…We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”
x605w TIL in the US there was an "oyster craze" of the late 1800s and early 1900s. Due to advances in oyster farm technology, between 1880 and 1910, as many as 160 million pounds of oysters were harvested a year, and in 1909 the price per pound fell to less than half of beef.
R7o01 TIL after Boeing pressured the US Government to impose a 300% tariff on imports of Bombardier CSeries planes, Bombardier sold a 50.01% stake in the plane to Boeing's main competitor, Airbus, for 1 Canadian dollar.
X0EgR TIL about "mundane science fiction," a sci-fi literary movement driven by creating plausible extensions of existing science and technology; situating stories on Earth or within the Solar System, thereby lacking the use of interstellar or intergalactic travel; and not considering contact with aliens.
LQAnP TIL about Catherine King and Wayne Adams, who built a floating compound on the west coast of Vancouver Island from salvaged materials and lived on it for more than 30 years.