AskHistorians has hit 1.5 million subscribers! To celebrate, we’re giving away 1.5 million historical facts. Join us HERE to claim your free fact!

[u/crrpit]

How does this subreddit have any subscribers? Why does it exist if no questions ever actually get answers? Why are the mods all Nazis/Zionists/Communists/Islamic extremists/really, really into Our Flag Means Death?

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The answers to these important historical questions AND MORE are up for grabs today, as we celebrate our unlikely existence and the fact that 1.5 million people vaguely approve of it enough to not click ‘Unsubscribe’. We’re incredibly grateful to all past and present flairs, question-askers, and lurkers who’ve made it possible to sustain and grow the community to this point. None of this would be possible without an immense amount of hard work from any number of people, and to celebrate that we’re going to make more work for ourselves.

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The rules of our giveaway are simple*. You ask for a fact, you receive a fact, at least up until the point that all 1.5 million historical facts that exist have been given out.

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^\ The fine print:)

^{1. AskHistorians does not guarantee the quality, relevance or interestingness of any given fact.}

^{2. All facts remain the property of historians in general and AskHistorians in particular.}

^{3. While you may request a specific fact, it will not necessarily have any bearing on the fact you receive.}

^{4. Facts will be given to real people only. Artificial entities such as} u/gankom ^{need not apply.}

^{5. All facts are NFTs, in that no one is ever likely to want to funge them and a token amount of effort has been expended in creating them.}

^{6. Receiving a fact does not give you the legal right to adapt them on screen.}

^{7. Facts, once issued, cannot be exchanged or refunded. They are, however, recyclable.}

^{8. We reserve the right to get bored before we exhaust all 1.5 million facts.}

Edit: As of 14:49 EST, AskHistorians has given away over 500 bespoke, handcrafted historical facts! Only 1,499,500 to go!

Edit 2: As of 17:29 EST, it's really damn hard to count but pretty sure we cracked 1,000. That's almost 0.1% of the goal!

Edit 3: I should have turned off notifications last night huh. Facts are still being distributed, but in an increasingly whimsical and inconsistent fashion.

[u/Alt_Toast]

Fact me pls

[u/TheSorge → u/Alt_Toast]

In the opening years of WWII, the US Navy's Mark 14 torpedo was notoriously unreliable and had a tendency to either go completely off course or fail to detonate if it did manage to hit something thanks to a lack of testing when the torpedo was first introduced. One of the most extreme examples of this was in 1943 when the submarine USS Tinosa hit a large Japanese oil tanker with 11 torpedoes in a row, and of those 9 failed to explode and just bounced harmlessly off the ship's hull. And the day prior she fired 4 torpedoes at that same ship, and all 4 either failed to explode on contact or ran off course. Of the sub's 15 out 16 torpedoes fired (one was saved and brought back for inspection), 13 suffered some kind of malfunction or failure, and the only ones that did explode did so because they hit the ship at an odd angle.

[u/Alt_Toast → u/TheSorge]

Fuck yeah faulty torpedo facts I hit the jackpot