Today I Learned Facts | We fact-check your TILs so you don't have to

The debate over whether an Irish merchant named gasoline by altering trademarks

Disputed Crime Money & Trade Language11 days ago

Historians dispute whether the word gasoline originated from a Dublin shopkeeper pirating a lamp oil brand. In the 1860s, Samuel Boyd swapped the initial letter of John Cassell's patented oil Cazeline to sell counterfeit Gazeline, prompting an 1865 trademark lawsuit. While the Oxford English Dictionary links gasoline to this scam, linguists show it also evolved independently as a standard scientific coinage. More

When the Mona Lisa vanished from the Louvre in 1911, French detectives were so baffled that their top suspect was none other than a young Pablo Picasso.

Disputed Art Crime Modern History20 days ago

Pablo Picasso was interrogated for the 1911 Mona Lisa theft, but not because French investigators were randomly grasping for leads. A mutual acquaintance had repeatedly looted ancient Iberian stone sculptures straight out of the Louvre and sold them to Picasso for pocket money. When the painting disappeared, the paper trail of Parisian art fencing led a magistrate straight to Picasso's apartment. More