/f/todayilearned
TIL: The massive, multinational tableware company Oneida started in 1848 as a sex cult that invented the term "free love" and featured, among other things, middle-aged women acting as sexual mentors to adolescent boys and a focus on men withholding their orgasm during intercourse (coitus reservatus)
en.wikipedia.orgSubmitted by smrad8 t3_10t59vc
TIL In the 1970s East Germany had a coffee shortage so they made Vietnam into a supplier. East Germany invested the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into Vietnam in exchange for half of Vietnam's coffee harvests for 20 years. By the first harvest in 1990 East Germany was already dissolved.
en.wikipedia.orgSubmitted by jamescookenotthatone t3_10rnoe5
Submitted by Sidius303 t3_10ponr2
TIL In 2010, Mitchell Heisman shot himself in Harvard Yard in front of tourists, leaving behind a 1,905 page suicide note explaining in detail “Why life is truly meaningless”. The note is a work of five years with a 20 page bibliography and 200 references to Nietzsche.
hindustantimes.comSubmitted by Pensateur t3_10m609o
Submitted by Copper_plopper t3_10lo1j6
TIL of Gilles Garnier, a french recluse living in a forest in France. Due to his lifestyle he had trouble finding food so he began hunting children and eating them raw, like an animal. People initialy thought the attacks were done by a werewolf, so he was convicted of lycanthropy and witchcraft
en.wikipedia.orgSubmitted by Ainsley-Sorsby t3_10jmpst
TIL when Dan Shechtman discovered quasiperiodic crystals, he was widely ridiculed. Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling said of the discovery, "There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists." Shechtman would later win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery.
en.wikipedia.orgSubmitted by WouldbeWanderer t3_10iu116
Submitted by 410ham t3_10h9dgv
Submitted by hillo538 t3_10bhdih
TIL: To "protect the truth," a woman recorded hundreds of thousands of hours of TV news between 1977 and 2012. Her archives grew to about 71,000 VHS and Betamax tapes stacked in her home and apartments she rented to store them. Upon her death, the Internet Archive agreed to digitize the volumes.
en.wikipedia.orgSubmitted by theotherbogart t3_10be7k1