FRANK'S FACTS

🏛 History Facts

Frank keeps a globe on his desk for one reason: to remind himself that history didn't happen in a tidy line. It happened everywhere at once, overlapping in ways that would get rejected from a novel for being too far-fetched. Woolly mammoths and pyramids? Same era. Oxford dons and the Aztec Empire? The dons got a three-century head start.

Every fact on this shelf has been checked against the record books, dusted off, and filed. Pull up a chair — the timeline is about to misbehave.

Timeline Scramblers

• FACT #300 Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire. Teaching existed at Oxford as early as 1096, while the Aztec Empire was founded in 1428 — more than three centuries later.
• FACT #301 Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the construction of the Great Pyramid. The pyramid was already about 2,500 years old when she was born; the Moon landing came just under 2,000 years after her death.
• FACT #302 Woolly mammoths were still alive while the pyramids of Giza were being built. A small population survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic until roughly 4,000 years ago — centuries after the Great Pyramid was finished.
• FACT #303 Nintendo was founded in 1889 — the same year the Eiffel Tower opened. The company spent its first decades making Japanese hanafuda playing cards.
• FACT #304 Harvard was founded in 1636, decades before Isaac Newton published any of his work on calculus. Students were enrolled before the math existed.
• FACT #305 The Ottoman Empire was still standing when the Wright brothers flew. The first powered flight was in 1903; the empire lasted until 1922.
• FACT #306 Martin Luther King Jr., Anne Frank, and Barbara Walters were all born in the same year: 1929.
• FACT #307 President John Tyler was born in 1790 — and one of his grandsons was still living in the 2020s. Two generations, two hundred and thirty-odd years. (Late fatherhood ran impressively in the family.)
• FACT #308 Betty White was older than sliced bread. She was born in January 1922; commercially sliced bread first went on sale in 1928.
• FACT #309 France was still executing people by guillotine when the first Star Wars film premiered. Both happened in 1977.
• FACT #310 The last public guillotine execution in France took place in 1939 — the same year The Wizard of Oz hit theaters.

The Ancient World

• FACT #311 The Great Pyramid of Giza was the tallest human-made structure on Earth for roughly 3,800 years, until England's Lincoln Cathedral finally overtook it around 1311.
• FACT #312 King Tutankhamun was buried with a dagger forged from meteoric iron. A 2016 analysis of the blade's metal showed it came from a fallen meteorite — space steel, centuries before iron smelting was common in Egypt.
• FACT #313 The world's oldest known customer complaint is about 3,700 years old: a clay tablet from the city of Ur, in which a customer named Nanni blasts a merchant called Ea-nasir for delivering shoddy copper. It's on display at the British Museum.
• FACT #314 Young Julius Caesar was kidnapped by pirates — and, according to Plutarch, was insulted by the modest ransom they demanded, so he told them to raise it. After his release, he hunted them down.
• FACT #315 Roman laundries cleaned wool clothing in human urine, prized for its ammonia. Emperor Vespasian even taxed the urine trade, giving us the saying "money doesn't smell."
• FACT #316 According to the Greek historian Herodotus, ancient Egyptian households mourned the death of the family cat by shaving off their eyebrows.
• FACT #317 The first known vending machine was invented in the 1st century AD. Hero of Alexandria described a coin-operated device that dispensed holy water in temples.
• FACT #318 Cleopatra was not ethnically Egyptian — she was Greek, a descendant of Ptolemy, one of Alexander the Great's Macedonian generals.
• FACT #319 Roman writers describe staged naval battles — called naumachiae — fought in flooded arenas and basins for public entertainment, complete with real ships and real combatants.
• FACT #320 The University of Bologna, founded in 1088, is widely regarded as the oldest university in continuous operation on Earth. It was teaching law before the Magna Carta's grandparents were born.

Kings, Wars & Curiosities

• FACT #321 The shortest war on record was the Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896. It lasted about 40 minutes, start to surrender.
• FACT #322 The Hundred Years' War lasted 116 years, from 1337 to 1453. Nobody ever went back to fix the name.
• FACT #323 There is no archaeological evidence that Vikings wore horned helmets in battle. The image largely comes from 19th-century costume designs for Wagner's operas.
• FACT #324 Napoleon was not unusually short. He stood around 5 feet 6 to 5 feet 7 inches — about average for a Frenchman of his era. The "tiny tyrant" image owes much to British cartoonists and a mix-up between French and English inches.
• FACT #325 High heels were originally men's wear. Persian cavalrymen wore heels to lock their feet into stirrups, and 17th-century European aristocrats — including Louis XIV — adopted them as status symbols.
• FACT #326 When an 11th-century Byzantine princess used a golden fork at her wedding feast in Venice, local churchmen were scandalized — one wrote that her later death was heaven's judgment on such decadence.
• FACT #327 The Leaning Tower of Pisa was already leaning before it was finished. Construction began in 1173, and the soft ground had the tower tilting by the time the upper floors went up.
• FACT #328 A Japanese temple-building firm, Kongō Gumi, founded in 578 AD, operated as an independent company for more than 1,400 years — through the entire history of samurai, shoguns, and steam engines.

Everyday History

• FACT #329 The London Underground opened in January 1863 — while the American Civil War was still being fought. Commuters rode beneath London behind steam locomotives.
• FACT #330 In 1752, Britain and its colonies skipped 11 days. To adopt the Gregorian calendar, Wednesday, September 2 was followed directly by Thursday, September 14.
• FACT #331 Russia's "October Revolution" of 1917 happened in November — by the modern calendar. Russia was still using the old Julian calendar, which ran 13 days behind.
• FACT #332 Before alarm clocks were affordable, British factory workers hired "knocker-uppers" — people paid to walk the streets at dawn tapping on bedroom windows with long poles.
• FACT #333 The legendary Pony Express only ran for about 18 months, from April 1860 to October 1861. The transcontinental telegraph put it out of business almost overnight.
• FACT #334 The Statue of Liberty spent its early years as a working lighthouse, officially operated as one from 1886 to 1902.
• FACT #335 In 1919, a giant storage tank burst in Boston and released a wave of molasses that tore through the streets, killing 21 people. Locals reported smelling molasses in the neighborhood for decades.
• FACT #336 One of the first people ever cited for speeding was Walter Arnold of Kent, England, in 1896 — doing about 8 mph in a 2 mph zone. He was chased down by a policeman on a bicycle.
• FACT #337 The U.S. Secret Service was founded in 1865 to fight counterfeit money, not to guard presidents. Presidential protection wasn't added to the job until after President McKinley's assassination in 1901.
• FACT #338 Abraham Lincoln's son Robert Todd Lincoln was at or near the scene of three presidential assassinations: his father's in 1865, Garfield's in 1881, and McKinley's in 1901.

Inventions & Firsts

• FACT #339 The fax machine is older than the Oregon Trail's heyday. Alexander Bain patented an early fax device in 1843 — the same year the first great wagon train rolled west.
• FACT #340 The microwave oven came from radar research. In 1945, engineer Percy Spencer was working on a magnetron when — as the famous story goes — a chocolate bar melted in his pocket, and he started experimenting with popcorn next.
• FACT #341 Bubble Wrap was invented in 1957 as textured wallpaper. When that flopped, its creators discovered it was magnificent at protecting packages instead.
• FACT #342 Play-Doh began life as a wallpaper cleaner. When coal heating declined and walls got cleaner, the putty was rebranded in the 1950s as a children's toy.
• FACT #343 The Slinky was invented by accident in 1943, when naval engineer Richard James knocked a torsion spring off a shelf and watched it "walk" down instead of falling.
• FACT #344 The world's first webcam pointed at a coffee pot. Computer scientists at Cambridge rigged a camera in 1991 so they could check the pot without walking down the hall — and it ran until 2001.
• FACT #345 When Sylvan Goldman invented the shopping cart in 1937, shoppers ignored it — so he reportedly hired models to push carts around his stores until the idea caught on.
• FACT #346 The Eiffel Tower was built as a temporary exhibit with a 20-year permit. It survived largely because it proved so useful as a giant radio antenna.
• FACT #347 From 1912 to 1948, the Olympics awarded medals for painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, and music. You could be an Olympic medalist in poetry.
• FACT #348 Tug of war was a genuine Olympic sport from 1900 to 1920. Great Britain remains the all-time medal leader, presumably forever.

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That's 49 slices of the past, checked and filed. Still hungry? Wander over to Food Facts for honey that outlives empires, puzzle over Number Facts, or head back to the Library Front Desk »