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39 Bits Of History That People Are Shocked To Learn Happened Simultaneously
Time and progress, as we know it, work in mysterious ways. While most of us enjoy technological achievements in celluloid form à la "Barbenheimer," one of the oldest indigenous tribes in the world, the Yanomami, are fighting for their survival in the Amazon.
But this is just a mere example of the different timelines that happen at the same time, yet in different parts of the world. As u/Cuish, who asked the AskReddit community "What other things oddly existed at the same time?", noted, the last execution by guillotine in France occurred in 1977, the same year that George Lucas' Star Wars forever altered the course of sci-fi movies. Scroll down below and explore these intriguing random facts for yourself.
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#1
Orville Wright of the Wright brothers lived long enough to see Chuck Yaeger break the sound barrier and travel on an airliner that had a wingspan equal to the distance he covered in his first flight (37m)
There are many different explanations for the perception of time, including Einstein's wildly popular "Time is relative", one of the pillars of modern physics, theory which claims that the rate at which time passes depends on your frame of reference.
However, when we observe the occurrence of various significant historical events seemingly close to one another, it can be mind-boggling, considering the odds of such proximity. Can you believe that Harvard didn't have calculus classes when they just opened their doors? Unbelievable!
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#2
Oxford University celebrated its 200th graduating class by the time the Aztec Empire started in Central America.
The phenomenon of perceiving significant historical events clustered closely together, then, can trigger a cognitive dissonance that makes our minds reel. These events, though separated by vast stretches of time in reality, seem to converge in our minds, blurring the temporal boundaries. You know, reading about the events that happened in the span of 2,000 years whilst you've only been on Earth for only a few of Microsoft's Windows generations can be pretty mind-blowing.
#3
My favourite that I've seen: When Harvard opened, they didn't have calculus classes because *calculus hadn't been invented yet.*
#5
I always found it strange that Victorian England and the Wild West happened at the same time.
#6
Dmitri Shostakovich (major Russian composer who became huge in the 1920s) attended a performance of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Jesus Christ Superstar” in London, 1975. He actually loved it and watched it again the next day, claiming he wished he could’ve written something for a rock band.
#7
I watched the first moon landing with a woman who’d been in Paris for Lindbergh’s first transcontinental flight landing. Edit: wow this blew up! And my first award!! Trippy, thanks—and I owe it all to Mrs. B.
#9
The last execution by guillotine occurred on September 10th, 1977. The Atari 2600, the first successful home video game console, released the very next day. In a sense, the boundary separating the "era of guillotines" and the "era of video games" is less than 24 hours. It's basically a fine line with no overlap.
#11
Women in Switzerland got right to vote in 1971 when India was already having a woman prime minister !
#17
Something that oddly did NOT exist at the same time: Tyrannosaurus Rex is closer in time to humans than to a Stegosaurus.
#21
Bro, South African Apartheid ended the year that Jurassic Park came out. We were eating popcorn drooling over dinosaur puppets, while they were still fighting to use the same toilet as white people. Pitiful it took so long. Of course, hindsight tells us Apartheid started and ended with $$$ in mind. It was economic disparity that finally pushed for the end of said segregation...As it goes with much of the civil rights successes throughout the 20th century 😑
#22
2 empires, The Roman Empire and The Ottoman Empire, spanned the entire gap from Jesus to Babe Ruth.
#26
The last surviving witness to the Lincoln assassination appeared on the TV game show *I've Got a Secret* several weeks before his death in 1954.
#31
You were alive at the same time as the last living Civil War widow. She only died three years ago.
#33
Anne Frank, Martin Luther King Jr., and Barbara Walters [were born in 1929.](https://twitter.com/WhatTheFFacts/status/446672526572519425), Barbra Walter died in December 2022.
#35
There are definitely Japanese people alive right now who have interacted with actual samurai. (Japan started modernizing and abolishing the samurai in the 1860s, so a samurai born in the 1840s that lived to be 100 would overlap with the lifespan of someone who is 80+ years old)
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