When you think of the fax machine, you might picture the 1980s, but it was actually invented much earlier. In 1843, Alexander Bain patented the first electric printing telegraph. Around the same time, Charles Dickens was publishing “A Christmas Carol.” Interestingly, both of these are older than modern Italy, which unified in 1861.
Welcome to a fascinating exploration of time! Today, we’ll dive into some surprising facts that will change how you perceive history. From prehistoric creatures living closer to our time than you might think, to the guillotine’s surprisingly long history, there’s a lot to discover.
Salvador Dali’s famous painting “The Persistence of Memory” and Willem de Kooning’s “Women” series are iconic in art history. While they seem like figures from the distant past, Dali only passed away in 1989, the same year the movie “Weekend at Bernie’s” was released. De Kooning lived until 1997.
Many associate Nintendo with the 1980s video game boom, but the company was actually founded in 1889 by Fusajiro Yamauchi in Kyoto. Originally, it sold Japanese playing cards called hanafuda. This means Nintendo is as old as the Eiffel Tower, which debuted at the World’s Fair in the same year.
The Ottoman Empire, established around 1299, reached its peak under Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16th century. While it’s often linked with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the empire lasted much longer. It was still around when Walt Disney released his first cartoons in 1920, finally dissolving in 1922.
Though often associated with the French Revolution, the guillotine was used in France until 1977, the same year “Star Wars” premiered. It remained the official method of execution until the death penalty was abolished in 1981.
Greenland sharks are some of the longest-living animals, with one estimated to be up to 512 years old. This means it could have been alive before the United States was founded. Bowhead whales also have impressive lifespans, with one living up to 211 years.
While woolly mammoths are often thought of as ancient creatures, some survived until around 3,700 years ago. This means they were still around centuries after the Pyramids of Giza were built between 2550 and 2490 BCE.
Cleopatra, Egypt’s famous queen, was born around 69 BCE, making her closer in time to us than to the construction of the pyramids. To her, the pyramids were as ancient as Socrates is to us today.
Dinosaurs didn’t all live at the same time. The Stegosaurus existed during the Jurassic Period, while the T-Rex appeared millions of years later in the Cretaceous Period. Carl Sagan’s cosmic calendar helps us understand this vast timeline, with humans appearing only in the last moments of December 31st.
Helen Viola Jackson, the last known widow of a Civil War veteran, passed away in 2020. She married her husband, a Civil War veteran, in 1936 when she was 17 and he was 93, highlighting how recent the Civil War feels in historical terms.
Sliced bread was first sold in 1928, while Betty White was born in 1922. Canned beer became available in 1935, two years after Dianne Feinstein was born. Pluto the planet and Pluto the dog both appeared in 1930, though the dog was named later.
As we look back, it’s fascinating to realize that 1982 was 40 years ago. If you were born in 1972, your memories of 1982 are as distant as someone in 1982 recalling 1942. Time flies, and history is full of surprises!
Thanks for joining this journey through time. We hope these facts have given you a new perspective on history!
Using the facts from the article, create a visual timeline that highlights the surprising overlaps in historical events and inventions. Include at least five events or inventions and illustrate how they relate to each other in time. This will help you visualize the connections and better understand the concept of historical timelines.
Choose one surprising fact from the article, such as the founding of Nintendo or the lifespan of Greenland sharks, and conduct further research on it. Prepare a short presentation to share with the class, including additional interesting details you discover. This will deepen your understanding of the topic and improve your research skills.
Participate in a class debate on how our perception of time can be warped by historical events. Use examples from the article to argue whether certain events feel closer or further away than they actually are. This activity will enhance your critical thinking and public speaking abilities.
Write a short story imagining a day in the life of someone living during one of the historical periods mentioned in the article. Incorporate at least three historical facts or events to make your story realistic and engaging. This exercise will help you connect creatively with historical contexts.
Choose two historical events or figures from the article and create a Venn diagram to compare and contrast them. Focus on their time periods, significance, and any surprising connections. This will help you analyze historical information and identify patterns or differences.
Here’s a sanitized version of the provided YouTube transcript:
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The fax machine in my mind is a product of the 1980s, but Scottish inventor Alexander Bain actually patented the first electric printing telegraph in 1843. Meanwhile, not too far away, Charles Dickens was busy publishing “A Christmas Carol.” Who knew Ebenezer Scrooge would prove to have more staying power than the fax machine? Both are older than Italy; at least as a modern state, Italian unification dates back to 1861.
Hi, I’m Erin McCarthy, editor-in-chief of Mental Floss. Welcome to the List Show! Thanks to YouTube commenter Erica B, who pointed out that Abraham Lincoln could have temporarily received what’s basically a fax from a samurai. Today’s episode is all about facts that will warp your perception of time. We’ll talk about how some prehistoric animals lived much closer to us than you might realize and how the guillotine lasted way beyond the French Revolution.
It would be hard to teach an art history class without mentioning Salvador Dali’s “The Persistence of Memory.” The same could be said for Willem de Kooning’s “Women” series. At this point, these pioneering painters seem more like historical figures than contemporary celebrities, so it might surprise you to learn that Dali only died in 1989, the same year “Weekend at Bernie’s” premiered. De Kooning lived until 1997.
If you thought Nintendo sprang up in the 1980s to take the video game industry by storm, think again. It did spring up in the 1980s, just not the 1980s you might be thinking of. Fusajiro Yamauchi founded the company in Kyoto way back in 1889, selling Japanese playing cards called hanafuda. So, Nintendo was technically as old as the Eiffel Tower, which opened at the World’s Fair that same year.
Now let’s look at two things that lasted a lot longer than you may realize. Exhibit A: the Ottoman Empire. Though Osman I established the Empire around 1299, its real heyday didn’t happen until Suleiman the Magnificent held the reins in the mid-16th century. The Ottoman Empire is often associated with 1453, the year Ottoman forces captured Constantinople, effectively terminating the Byzantine Empire. However, the Ottoman Empire didn’t dissolve in the 1600s, 1700s, or even the 1800s. It was still around when Walt Disney released his first animated cartoons in 1920. The Ottoman Army fought with the Central Powers during World War I, suffered catastrophic losses, and surrendered most of its land holdings to Allied powers in the aftermath. The precise end date of the Empire is typically cited as 1922, when Turkish leaders abolished the title of Sultan for good.
France’s last state-sanctioned guillotine execution wasn’t during the late 18th century’s Reign of Terror; it was in 1977, the same year sci-fi fans were turning out in droves to see a little film called “Star Wars.” In fact, the guillotine remained France’s official method of execution from the French Revolution until the death penalty was abolished altogether in 1981.
You’d have to be a vampire to have outlived the guillotine’s entire rise and fall, or a Greenland shark. In a 2016 study, scientists radiocarbon dated tissue from the eyes of Greenland sharks to determine their ages. The oldest one, a nearly 16.5-foot-long female, was estimated to be 392 years old, give or take 120 years. Assuming the shark fell on the conservative side of the spectrum, it would have been around 272 years old, meaning it was born around 1744, making it older than some of the Founding Fathers. The opposite end of the spectrum would put her at 512 years old, with a birthday in 1504, which is five years before Henry VIII was crowned King of England. There are very possibly sharks still swimming in the ocean right now that predate the United States and every modern-day country in the Americas.
Bowhead whales can’t quite compete with that, but dating of their eye tissue revealed that one had died at 211 years old. So, bowheads that managed to live through the mid-19th century golden age of American whaling could still be swimming in oceans today.
If most of your knowledge about woolly mammoths comes from the “Ice Age” movies, you might assume they existed in a world where humans hadn’t yet found their footing. However, Egypt’s three main Pyramids of Giza were constructed somewhere between 2550 and 2490 BCE. Granted, most woolly mammoths had already died out around 10,000 years ago, but bones found on Siberia’s Wrangel Island were estimated to be only about 3,700 years old, meaning some woolly mammoths were still around in the 1600s BCE, nine centuries after the Egyptians broke ground on the pyramids.
If there were some sort of groundbreaking ceremony for that construction project in 2550 BCE, Cleopatra definitely didn’t attend. Egypt’s most iconic queen wouldn’t be born for another 2,480 years, around 69 or 70 BCE. In other words, she’s about 400 years closer to our era than she was to the construction of the pyramids.
Here are a couple of different ways to put that in perspective: One, the pyramids felt roughly as old to Cleopatra as Socrates does to us. Two, she technically came closer to owning an iPhone than she did to seeing the Giza Pyramids under construction.
Our tendency to lump large chunks of history together is never more apparent than with dinosaurs. It’s easy to assume that all of our favorite prehistoric species coexisted until that infamous meteor wiped them out in one fell swoop, but that’s not how it went down. The Stegosaurus, for example, lived during the late Jurassic Period, roughly between 159 and 144 million years ago. The T-Rex didn’t appear until the last leg of the Cretaceous Period, some 68 million years ago. In the span between the two dinosaurs, you could fit the entire course of human history, including the millions of years occupied by our early ancestors, approximately 12 times over.
In his 1977 book “The Dragons of Eden,” Carl Sagan came up with a way for us to conceptualize our place in such a long timeline: the cosmic calendar, which condenses the whole history of the universe into one calendar year. If the Big Bang happened on January 1st, humans didn’t appear until December 31st, and not even in the morning. According to astrophysicist Ethan Siegel, the first life on Earth came into existence in late September, and the first sexually producing organism, a single-celled eukaryote, materialized on December 2nd. The last non-avian dinosaurs didn’t die out until December 17th, and Homo sapiens finally showed up around 11:48 PM on December 31st. We didn’t invent the wheel or writing until about 12 seconds before the new year on the cosmic calendar.
Something like the American Civil War doesn’t exactly qualify as having happened a long time ago, and Helen Viola Jackson may have felt its recency more than most. Jackson, the last known living widow of a Civil War veteran, died in 2020. To be fair, she was 101 years old and had married her late husband when he was already in his 90s. When Jackson was a teenager in 1930s Missouri, her father asked her to do some housework for James Bolin, an elderly widower who served on the Union side as a private in the Missouri Cavalry’s 14th Regiment. He eventually presented Jackson with a business proposition: marry me, and you’ll get my military pension when I die. They tied the knot on September 4th, 1936, when Bolin was 93 and Jackson was 17. She kept her last name, continued living at home, and kept her husband a secret due to the scandalous nature of their age difference.
You’ve heard the joke about how sliced bread was the best thing since Betty White. The facts hold up: sliced bread first hit shelves in 1928, and Betty White was born in 1922. But what about the one about how canned beer was the best thing since Dianne Feinstein? Okay, nobody’s ever said that, but it is true that the parents of the future Democratic senator from California couldn’t buy a can of beer to celebrate, partly because the country was still under prohibition. She was born in June 1933, and the 21st Amendment ending prohibition wasn’t ratified until December. The first commercially available canned beer went on sale to the public in January 1935, just in time for the future senator’s terrible twos.
As of filming, there are four senators who were born before canned beer. We’ve known about Pluto the planet for about as long as we’ve known about Pluto the cartoon dog. The planet was discovered in February 1930, and the dog debuted in Disney’s animated short “The Chain Gang” just months later. He wasn’t named in the film, and when he appeared in another short, “The Picnic,” that same year, he was actually called Rover. Rover was re-christened Pluto in 1931’s “The Moose Hunt.” While it’s long been speculated that the planet inspired the name, nobody can say for sure.
This next and last revelation might not make you feel so young, even if it’s not exactly new information: 1982 was 40 years ago. Let’s say, for the purpose of this thought experiment, that you were born in 1972. It’s now 2022, and you’re talking to a 10-year-old about your formative memories from 1982, seeing “E.T.” in theaters, hearing “Eye of the Tiger” whenever you turn on the radio, etc. That’s roughly the equivalent of a 50-year-old in 1982 telling you at age 10 all about the year 1942: Casablanca, Glenn Miller, World War II.
Feel old yet? Thanks for watching Mental Floss on YouTube! We’ll see you next time.
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This version removes any informal language, personal anecdotes, and specific names that may not be relevant to the main points, while maintaining the overall content and structure.
History – The study of past events, particularly in human affairs. – History provides insight into the cultural and political developments that have shaped modern societies.
Art – The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture. – The Renaissance period was a golden age for art, producing masterpieces that continue to influence artists today.
Empire – An extensive group of states or countries under a single supreme authority, formerly especially an emperor or empress. – The Roman Empire was one of the most powerful and influential civilizations in ancient history.
Guillotine – A machine with a heavy blade sliding vertically in grooves, used for beheading people, especially during the French Revolution. – The guillotine became a symbol of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution.
Pyramids – Monumental structures with a square or triangular base and sloping sides that meet in a point at the top, especially those built as royal tombs in ancient Egypt. – The pyramids of Giza are among the most iconic and enduring symbols of ancient Egyptian civilization.
Cleopatra – The last active ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt, known for her beauty, intelligence, and political acumen. – Cleopatra’s alliances with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony were pivotal in the power struggles of the Roman Republic.
Dinosaurs – A diverse group of reptiles of the clade Dinosauria that were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates for over 160 million years. – The discovery of dinosaur fossils has provided valuable insights into the Earth’s prehistoric past.
Civil War – A war between citizens of the same country. – The American Civil War was a pivotal conflict that determined the fate of slavery in the United States.
Inventions – The action of inventing something, typically a process or device. – The Industrial Revolution was marked by numerous inventions that transformed manufacturing and transportation.
Creatures – Living beings, especially animals. – Medieval art often depicted mythical creatures, blending imagination with the natural world.
