59 facts, each with a source

History facts

History facts have a way of rearranging your timeline. Cleopatra lived closer to the Moon landing than to the building of the pyramids, mammoths were alive while the Great Pyramid went up, and the shortest war on record lasted 38 minutes. These are the ones that make you check the date twice, each with its source attached.

Ancient Rome

Roman concrete repairs itself.
Romans rinsed their mouths with urine.

Ancient Egypt

Cleopatra is closer to the Moon landing than the pyramids.
A vending machine was selling holy water 2,000 years ago.
Mammoths were alive while the Great Pyramid went up.
The Rosetta Stone is a piece of tax paperwork.
Egyptians shaved their eyebrows when a cat died.
The Great Pyramid held the height record for 3,800 years.
The first recorded strike in history happened around 1157 BC, when the craftsmen building royal tombs in Egypt downed tools because their grain rations were late.
The Great Pyramid was once cased in polished white limestone.

Medieval

Two cities fought a war over a stolen bucket.
Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire.
A whole town danced itself half to death in 1518.
In 897 a pope had his predecessor's corpse dug up, dressed in vestments and put on trial.
Vikings never wore horned helmets.
Mansa Musa spent so much gold on his way through Cairo in 1324 that the metal's local value stayed depressed for years afterwards.
Harald Hardrada, the Norwegian king who invaded England in 1066, had spent his twenties as a mercenary bodyguard to the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople.

WW1

Whale oil also yielded glycerine, and glycerine makes explosives.
The Zimmermann Telegram, which helped push America into the First World War, reached Germany's ambassador partly over a US diplomatic cable Washington had lent Berlin for peace talks.
After a munitions ship exploded in Halifax harbour in 1917, Boston sent doctors and supplies overnight.

WW2

A bear was enlisted as a soldier and given a rank.
Japan launched around 9,000 bomb-carrying paper balloons across the Pacific in the Second World War.
Mitsubishi built Japan's Zero fighters at a plant with no suitable road to the airfield.

US History

Boston shipped ice to India for a living.
Harvard is older than calculus.
The Pony Express only existed for 18 months.
Camels once carried supplies across the American West.
A storage tank burst in Boston in 1919 and sent a wave of molasses through the North End at around 55 km/h.
In 1806 a Boston merchant filled a ship with ice cut from a pond and sailed it to the Caribbean.
Doctors used to appear in cigarette adverts.
As the nearby whales vanished, voyages stretched to four and five years.
For its first sixteen years the Statue of Liberty was run as a working lighthouse.

Asian History

One in every 200 men alive may descend from a single warlord.
Nintendo existed at the same time as the Ottoman Empire.
During Japan's two centuries of near-total isolation, Dutch traders confined to one artificial island were required to hand over an annual written report on world events.

Forgotten People

A conman sold the Eiffel Tower for scrap.
One man decided not to believe his screen, and the world carried on.
The last person born in the 1800s died in 2017.
The Oxford geologist William Buckland tried to eat his way through the animal kingdom, and reportedly ate a preserved heart said to be Louis XIV's.
Women painting glow-in-the-dark watch dials were told to point their brushes with their lips.

Tech History

Railway companies imposed standard time before any government did.
In 1707 a British fleet ran onto the Isles of Scilly and as many as two thousand men drowned.
Portable, precise time then created a new problem on land.
Coal tar had until then been a nuisance left over from making gas for streetlights.
Parliament put up a fortune for a solution.
The ice trade was then killed by the machine that replaced it.

More history facts

The shortest war in history lasted 38 minutes.
A volcano cancelled summer and invented Frankenstein.
Australia went to war with emus and lost.
The guillotine was still in use when Star Wars hit cinemas.
Eleven days once vanished from the calendar overnight.
Two officials were thrown from a castle window and walked away.
A summer of stench built London's sewers.
Betty White was older than sliced bread.
Russia's team arrived twelve days late for the 1908 London Olympics.
Napoleon was a perfectly normal height.
Sweden switched from driving on the left to the right overnight in 1967.
The Eiffel Tower gets taller in summer.
The warship Vasa sank about 1,300 metres into her maiden voyage in 1628.