Category Archives: Today Fact

Who Actually Invented the Light Bulb?

Who invented the telephone? How about the airplane? The lightbulb? If you paid attention in high school history class, you’ll probably know the standard answers: Alexander Graham Bell, The Wright Brothers, and Thomas Edison. But if you’ve been watching our channels long enough, you’ll also know that when it comes to the big inventions that… Read More »

Do Spaceship Escape Pods Actually Exist in Real Life?

In the 1969 science fiction film Marooned, a trio of astronauts manning an experimental space station attempt to return to earth, only for their spacecraft’s main engine to fail. Without sufficient fuel either to initiate reentry or return to the space station, the astronauts find themselves – well, marooned – in orbit, doomed to slowly… Read More »

History’s Literal Deadliest Fart

While dropping your drawers and flashing your no doubt abnormally attractive derriere at those you wish to express your contempt for may seem a relatively harmless act, it turns out at one point in history combining said act with expelling the gaseous contents of one’s colon once resulted in the deaths of at least 10,000… Read More »

Who Invented the Jet Engine?

On the morning of August 27, 1939, a small aircraft was towed onto the runway at Marienehe airfield in Mecklenberg, northern Germany. To the handful of observers gathered at the edge of the field, the craft must have looked like something out of science fiction, with its gleaming barrel-shaped fuselage, gaping nose intake, and stubby… Read More »

Alexander Graham Bell’s Forgotten Greatest Invention

Artists often come to resent their greatest hits, and while inventor Alexander Graham Bell didn’t hate his most famous creation, the telephone, it was far from his only priority and passion. An inveterate tinkerer, throughout his long life Bell pursued hundreds of projects across dozens of fields, inventing early versions of the metal detector and… Read More »

What’s the Safest Seat on an Airplane?

Ah hurtling through the air in a device made of several million parts in a portion of the Earth where the temperature generally sits at -40 degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit and there isn’t enough oxygen or atmospheric pressure to keep you alive. All the while a rather complex combination of a controlled explosion and rapidly… Read More »