Somehow, thinking back about history lessons brings back nothing but a feeling of insurmountable boredom. Yup, the history lessons we’ve had at school brought no joy with all the dates of historical events and horribly bland teaching. Thankfully, later on, the internet was invented (kidding, we’re not that old here!), and we found out how exciting and jaw-dropping our history truly is! And, to share this discovery with you, we’ve compiled a list full of the coolest and the most incredible historical facts. Yup, some of these cool facts are definitely unbelievable, but you’ll see that for yourself.
So, this list will take you down the road of the unexplained as some of these weird historical facts seem to be related more to aliens than to humans. However, if kooky isn’t really your cup of tea, this list also boasts a myriad of fun historical facts. You know, something that wasn’t oh so funny when it actually happened, but now, in retrospect, it looks purely hysterical. In fact, these pieces of interesting history might shed a whole new light on humanity for you! Not necessarily its good part, but exciting nonetheless.
Now, the main question here is this - are you ready to dig deeper with these interesting historical facts? If so, then scroll on down below and check them out! Be sure to give the most unbelievable facts your vote and share this article with all the history buffs you know.
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Marie Curie, the famous nobel prize-winning physicist’s notebook still can not be handled safely as it is still radioactive.
The word 'quarantine' comes from 'quarantena', meaning “forty days” in 14th century Venetian. The Venetians imposed a 40-day isolation of ships and people arriving in their lagoon during the Black Death.
Since 1945, all British tanks have been equipped with tea-making equipment and facilities.
I dream of making a good cup of tea, it always tastes sort of bitter even if I brew it for a short period of time. My mouth always feels fuzzy after I drink it.
It largely depends on the quality of the tea. Also, do you mean black tea? For green tea you'd have to let the water cool down.
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Cleopatra was not Egyptian.
The ptolemies were not good at original baby names. All the men were called ptolemy. The women got a choice of Cleopatra or Arsinoe
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Charlie Chaplin enrolled in a Charlie Chaplin lookalike competition and he came 20th in rank.
Columbus didn't actually 'discover' America. The Vikings' had early expeditions to North America around the year 1000 A.D.
So, what I'm hearing is, next time I'm asked by a teacher "who discovered America?" I'm saying "not Columbus you lying b****es".
The Germans and British soldiers paused the war for a day during Christmas Day 1914. They sang, drank and celebrated together.
They also held a football match which the Germans probably won on penalties.
this should read a very few German and British soldiers. it certainly wasn't that many in the scale of an army.
Doctors used heroin to treat cough.
Do you suffer from woman's troubles? Heroin. Are you experiencing bouts of dropsy? Heroin. Is quinsy getting you down? Try heroin.
Load More Replies...Still today actually. Well kind of. I once had a very severe cough and was prescribed codeine.
Codeine, a common caught suppressor is a derived from the poppy, which is where heroine comes from
The pyramids of Giza were built when pre-historic woolly mammoths were still walking the earth.
Vincent van Gogh painted his masterpiece "The Starry Night" in 1889, the same year that Nintendo formed as a corporation.
The Olympics used to award medals for art.
I think the problem is that art is too subjective. It's easy to tell which runner is the fastest, but deciding which picture is the best isn't so clear cut.
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Thomas Edison didn't invent the light bulb.
A lot of history's disasters were caused by sleep deprivation.
One of the most successful pirates in history is a woman - Ching Shih.
I would measure my success by the size of my booty. I'll be here all week.
Quantum sarcasm: both of straight answer and a silly one at the same time
Load More Replies...She is represented in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. At the gathering of the pirate lords in Shipwreck Cove, Mistress Ching
There is more time separating Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex than Tyrannosaurus Rex and us.
Pope Gregory IX declared war on the cat population.
This lead to the black plague! Pope Gregory believed that cats carried Satan’s spirit around and, therefore, were not to be trusted. This led to the superstition that Black cats are unlucky. In fact, during the years 1233 – 1234, there was mass extermination of cats by those loyal to the Church and the Pope. Some historians believe that people killed so many cats to cause a wave of the Plague; this then led to believe that Satan caused the Plague due to being furious that so many of his cats were killed. Looking back at history, we can understand that the rats flourished because so many cats were killed. But, little did they know it; it was the fleas on the rats which carried the Plague.
In the battle of Pelusium, the Persians knew that Egyptians worshipped cats and were forbidden to kill them. So the Persians used them as shields.
Don't worry, they didn't actually use real live cats, they just painted cats on the sheilds
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
Don’t worry, the Egyptians didn’t think it was worth it to hit the cat pictures on the shields. So instead their army was slaughtered and a few cities were pillaged
Load More Replies...In Renaissance France, a woman could take her husband to court if he was impotent.
The 1985 discovery of the Titanic stemmed from a secret United States Navy investigation of two wrecked nuclear submarines.
In WW1 an estimated 37 million people lost their lives and in the last year of WW1 the Spanish flu broke out. The flu took an estimated 50 million lives worldwide.
And they are still not sure of the total number. Excellent book by John Barry "The Great Influenza."
I encountered this book a year before Covid. I was prepared.
Load More Replies...Wrongly named 'Spanish' Flu actually came from America. The Spanish, who during WW1 had no news censorship (whereas the rest of Europe and the US did) and broke the story to the World ; as a consequence it was wrongly dubbed 'Spanish' Flu.
46 BC was 445 days long and is the longest year in human history. Nicknamed the annus confusionis, or “year of confusion”, this year had two extra leap months inserted by Julius Caesar.
Roman elections were at a fixed time I'm but the chief priest who was elected got to decide on any leap days weeks or months so they sometime altered when the election was by adding time to the calendar
During the Victorian period, it was normal to photograph relatives after they died.
Isn't that wild? It also was really expensive. Watch "Ask a Mortician" on YouTube. She has an episode about it.
a pose a picture with grandma and grandpa #hanging with the dead fam
Anyway, it was easier, because they didn't move during the exposure, which, in those times, was reeeeally long!
Albert Einstein could’ve been the president of Israel.
Israel has prime ministers, not presidents. They also have presidents but he wasn't offered that.He denied the offer, he was offered it because he was jewish. Instead of him, David ben gorion was the first prime minister of Israel.
Space travel was first proposed in the 1600s.
A Japanese soldier never realized WWII was over until 1974.
It's actually true I remember reading about it years ago, Hiroo Onoda, he hid out in the Phillipines with 3 others after the war ended for the rest of the World. It took his former captain/commander to find him and relieve him of his duty to make him desist arms
Load More Replies...I heard about him he was on a small island and hey didn't stop fighting until his old senior officer ordered him to stop
Buddhist monks used to mummify themselves alive.
They changed the system after some monks reported difficulty in mummifying themselves when they were dead.
Very few actually achieved it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokushinbutsu
Mauritania is the world’s last country to abolish slavery, and the country didn’t make slavery a crime until 2007.
A 17-Year-Old high school student designed the current U. S. flag.
The Leaning Tower of Pisa was never upright.
Mussolini tried to fix it by pouring concrete into the foundations, which made it worse.
In 18th Century England, pineapples were a status symbol.
They actually didn't eat them. They were displayed until they rotted
Of course they were, idiot. Have you ever tried growing a Pineapple in a cold, wet, bleak environment ?
Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896 is generally considered to be the shortest war in history, lasting for a grand total of 38 minutes.
the british went bombed the palace with only one casualy for them and 500 for the zanzibar . the palace was immediatly destroyed and a white flahg was raised above what was left of the palace
Nordlingen is a German town built inside a 14 million-year-old meteorite crater.
Before alarm clocks, knocker-uppers was a profession where they had to go and wake up by knocking on the doors of the townsman houses.
Always wondered how the knocker-uppers knew when to wake up. Did they have other knocker-uppers? Who might also have knocker-uppers? Maybe those knocker-uppers were people who went to bed late and they woke up the next set of knocker-uppers so they could be awake to wake the later knocker-uppers and so on?
John F. Kennedy, Anthony Burgess, Aldous Huxley, and C.S. Lewis all died on the same day.
100 imposters claimed to be Marie Antoinette’s dead son.
Captain Morgan was a real person.
Richard Nixon was an extremely talented musician. He played five instruments in total: piano, saxophone, clarinet, accordion, and violin.
During the Great Depression, people made clothes out of food sacks.
Quite a lot of other times and places people did this. Apparently it was still a thing in Yorkshire in the 40s and 50s.
In her later years, Queen Elizabeth I’s teeth were black and decayed from too much sugar.
The world’s oldest film is only 2 seconds long.
And it's of a horse galloping, they used that film to tell if the horse has all 4 legs in the air at one point in the gallop(they do)
In 1834, ketchup was sold as a cure for indigestion by an Ohio physician named John Cook.
The first toy advertised on TV is Mr. Potato Head.
The first one GB hard drive was made in 1980 and had a price of forty thousand USD.
To give you an idea for reference, in 1994, the computer I used mostly, had a 400 MB hard drive. So, even in 1994, 1 GB was a lot, but certainly not impossible. So, $40K 24 years earlier, sure. In 1980 though, tapes were more commonly used for large data storage. There was a time of divergence though when the UK was mostly tape and the US was disk, due to Sony making disk drives and being big in the US. For example, there is a lot of 8 bit software that was written to normal audio cassettes. You can put them in a tape player and it's similar to modem sounds. also, in 1994, a cdrom had about 650-800 MBs of storage, which was twice as big as the hard drive on that PC. Can you imagine only a few years later what CD burning brought to the table when the prices started finally coming down. -My best friend's response. He's a computer geek. He can build them, write programs, etc.
One of the reasons Hollywood moved from New York to Los Angeles is to escape Thomas Edison’s patents.
It used to be Hollywood land. Look it up. I've seen the old sign on documentary s and Carroll Burnett. She talks about it in her biography
The shipbuilders Harland and Wolff insist that the Titanic was never advertised as an unsinkable ship.
In the Salem witch trials, the accused witches weren’t actually burned at the stake. The majority were jailed, and some were hanged.
Giles Cory refused to enter a plea to the charge of witchcraft so that his children would get his money and not the church, as would have happened when he was found guilty of witchcraft. His last words were, "more weight". He may have been crushed to death, but he died an innocent man.
Load More Replies...Former U.S. President Bill Clinton lost the nuclear launch codes.
Winston Churchill smoked 8 to 10 cigars a day.
The British Royal Air Force accidentally sunk a ship full of holocaust victims in 1945.
There are questions as to whether or not it WAS an accident. The people were on their way to what was then called Palestine and GB was more concerned with Arab attacks than they were in saving people.
So why would they sink a ship of Holocaust survivors?
Load More Replies...Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Jr. were both born in 1929.
So.. they're roughly the same age? Something doesn't add up for me here timeline-wise
No, Anne Frank died in Bergen Belsen concentration camp in 1945 aged 17 (no date of death is recorded), Dr King was born 5 months earlier and was murdered in April 1968 aged 39.
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Gandhi wrote Hitler a letter imploring him to rethink the war.
England’s king George I was actually German.
What an amazing "fact" ffs, given all of European royalty marrying each other, most of our Kings and Queens could be considered foriegn.
Given that almost every Dynasty of English monarchs were foreign at least to start with this isn't surprising. So far we've had Danish, French Viking(Norman), Angevin/Aquitainian, Welsh, Scottish, Dutch and German.
He was also the grandson (maybe great-grandson)of Anne of Denmark, who was the Queen of king James I/VI of Scotland and England
Turkeys were once worshipped like gods.
The former head of Cuban intelligence, Fabian Escalante, told a British documentary team the CIA had tried to kill Fidel Castro more than 600 times, over a period of about 40 years.
The Soviet Union and the United States were supposed to go to the Moon together during the Cold War.
Egyptians used slabs of stones as pillows.
Genghis Khan created one of the first international postal systems.
Tablecloths were originally designed to be used as one big, communal napkin.
Women were once banned from smoking in public.
The number of things women have been banned from doing suggests that over the course of History there were a lot of them and they were quite popular.
The U.S. government poisoned alcohol during prohibition.
That's the hardware store kind. They didn't want people getting drunk off it, thus, denatured alcohol.
Abraham Lincoln is in the Wrestling Hall of Fame.
He was a skilled amateur wrestler. The hall of fame is in Ames, Iowa so not the pro wrestling one.
Load More Replies...The automobile was first invented and perfected in Germany and France in the late 1800s.
Arguably the first automobile was invented in Cornwall at the beginning of the 19th century by Richard Trevithick. It was steam powered slow and clunky and there's a reason why later pioneers are remembered and and he isn't.
The Great Molasses Flood killed 21 people and injured 150 others in Boston.
Historians became a professional occupation in the late 19th century.
Technically one of the duties of bards was to preserve history through oral storytelling.
The world’s oldest parliament is from Iceland and is called Althing.
The Althing is a Viking tradition of public meeting and worship that dates back MUCH further than that...
The shortest term for a U.S. president was only 2 months.
Good - now can you persuade the current lot to stop being ghastly to the Palestinians who, after all have been in your part of the World for a bloody sight longer than you have ?
Load More Replies...Since the end of WWI, over 1,000 people have died from leftover unexploded bombs.
Left over from WW1? There were some other wars with left overs after, including a lot of landmines all over the globe. This needs clarification.
Living in Flanders... There's a special military team still operational here to go and pick up the bombs accidentally dug up by farmers. WWI ammo. All of it. They're called dovo, and they have work every day.
Load More Replies...Julius Caesar was stabbed 23 times.
Mary actually had a little lamb.
True, but it met a grisly end. Mary had a little lamb, She tied it to a pylon. 10,000 volts shot up it's a**e and turned it's wool to nylon. True story.
Mary had a little lamb, It didn't have a Willie. Mary made a big mistake, In calling this lamb Billy.
Load More Replies...Mary had a little lamb, she also had a bear, I've often seen her little lamb, but never seen her bare!
Lyndon B. Johnson gave interviews from the bathroom.
July 4th isn't the real Independence Day.
Depends in the country. And it is the day the USA celebrates independence.
I think it was implied for the United States. . . like they weren't talking abt every country. . . .
Load More Replies...In 1913 Stalin, Hitler, Trotsky, and Tito all lived in Vienna for a couple of months.
When the USS Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine on 30 July 1945 survivors were left in the water for four days, during which time around 600 men died of exposure, dehydration, and shark attacks. Estimates of the number who died from shark attacks range from a few dozen to almost 150.
They were returning from delivering the A bombs to Tinian Island, a very secret mission. Part of the reason for the delay in rescue is that secrecy. Interesting story.
Napoleon took an estimated 150,000 horses with his army as he rode into Russia in 1812, only an estimated 1,600 came back.
Walt Disney didn't draw Mickey Mouse.
In WWI French made a fake Paris to try and fool German bomber pilots.
The Dutch declared a war against the Royalists but no battles happened. It went on for 335 years.
The earliest known lottery was during the Chinese Han Dynasty between 205 – 187 BC.
In 1710, Native American leaders traveled to Britain to visit the Queen.
Native American leaders thought white men were men of honor. Broken treaties after broken treaties prove almost fatal. Annihilation was their goal. The quest for ownership of everything is the ultimate goal.
Marie Antoinette never said "Let them eat cake."
Andrew Jackson had a vulgar parrot.
There are so many vulgar things about Andrew Jackson why not just have one more
The Kentucky meat shower is still unexplained.
The Kentucky meat shower was an incident occurring on March 3, 1876, when what appeared to be chunks of red meat fell from the sky near Olympia Springs in Bath County, Kentucky. The most popular explanation is that a group of vultures regurgitated their meals after being startled into taking flight. The exact type of meat was never identified.
its exactly what it sounds liek meat falling from the sky
Load More Replies...Between 1900 and 1920, Tug of War was a legitimate event at the Summer Olympics.
Fox Tossing was once a popular sport.
Pope Pius II’s 'The Tale of Two Lovers', an erotic novel, was the 15th century’s most popular book.
As is most of the established church regardless of the bent ....
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Paul Revere never actually shouted, "The British are coming!"
sooo. . What happened. See, yall just be saying "this didn't happen like this :/" then never explain its kinda sus
He just warned that the British were on the way. They're just saying he didn't just ride through towns screaming the British are coming, because the loyalists would have told the British minuetemen were organizing
Load More Replies...The riders would've said, "The regulars are coming!", as the colonists in New England were all British subjects. Regulars refers to the men of the regular English army, not the local militia men.
He actually went to certain houses to tell the people important about it
Thanksgiving, as most Americans have been taught is not exactly accurate. In truth, native people did not willingly hand off their country to the invaders.
"We cannot break bread with you. You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now, my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations. Your people will wear cardigans and drink highballs. "We will sell our bracelets by the roadside. You will play golf and enjoy hot hors d'oeuves. My people will have pain and degradation. Your people will have stick shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken, they have said, 'do not trust the pilgrims, especially Sarah Miller.' "And it is for all these reasons that I have decided to scalp you, and burn your village to the ground."
I was taught in school that Thanksgiving was celebrated to remember a time when the white settlers were provided food by the local tribes during a period of near-famine as they were coming into the cold season. Whether or not that's true is debatable, but I was never taught that it was celebrated for them 'giving' us any land.
The Aegean Sea owes its name to a man who jumped in it and died.
The supposed Iron Maiden torture device never actually existed.
No it existed alright - along with lots of a fake mediaeval stuff the Victorians made
The earliest known bronze gun, that employed gunpowder, was from the early Yuan dynasty and dates back to 1332.
The Circus Maximum in Rome is still the largest capacity sports arena ever built.
Using forks used to be seen as sacrilegious.
Johnny Appleseed was real.
His real name was John Chapman. He introduced apple trees to several parts of the United States as well as Ontario
Load More Replies...Humanity received the first extraterrestrial signal in 1977.
Not at all true. This "fact" refers to the famous Wow signal, for which we have not got an explanation for. We have been receiving extra-terrestrial signals since the dawn of time, given background radiation and signals from stars. If, by extra-terrestrial you mean alien intelligence then no, we are not aware of any extra-terrestrial aliens.
another thing i will like to add was once there was time when everytime during lunch a signal will appear that would appear it was from space turns out it was the microwave
Load More Replies...The proof that intelligent extraterrestrial life exists, lies in the fact that they never contacted earth
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Founding Fathers and the 2nd and 3rd Presidents of the United States respectively, died within hours of each other on July 4.
John adams last words, not knowing Jefferson had died earlier in the day, was to tell Jefferson that he was the greatest friend he (Adams) had ever had
George Washington opened a whiskey distillery after his presidency.
Best President Ever! Clinton was later kicked out of it for repeatedly wandering off the tour.
The 1929 Wall Street crash did not cause a rash of suicides.
The oldest Bible is over thousands of years old.
Helicopter hieroglyphs were once found in an Egyptian petroglyph.
No. Hieroglyphs in the shape of what we would recognise as a helicopter has been found in a petroglyph. The hieroglyph is NOT a helicopter.
Yeah new hieroglyphs were written over old ones
Load More Replies...There is a downvoting troll prowling again, I have seen my comments as well as the comments of Scaggsy and others. I have upvoted any I have seen down voted.
Another lazy list of "facts" The third one I have seen in the space of a week? Ambiguous, without context or details, and some facts just plain wrong. It is not Bored Panda, it is Lazy Panda.
True but if it inspires you to research the "fact" and possibly learn something, even trivial, that's worth something, no?
Load More Replies...People saying this is worthless but in reality knowledge is power and even trivial facts( they did get some wrong) are good yo know
There is a downvoting troll prowling again, I have seen my comments as well as the comments of Scaggsy and others. I have upvoted any I have seen down voted.
Another lazy list of "facts" The third one I have seen in the space of a week? Ambiguous, without context or details, and some facts just plain wrong. It is not Bored Panda, it is Lazy Panda.
True but if it inspires you to research the "fact" and possibly learn something, even trivial, that's worth something, no?
Load More Replies...People saying this is worthless but in reality knowledge is power and even trivial facts( they did get some wrong) are good yo know
