History
Discover facts about history. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
History
The Spanish Inquisition kept remarkably boring records
Forget the dramatic torture chambers of popular imagination; the real terror of the Spanish Inquisition was their accounting department. They operated as a…
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Hippopotamus literally translates to river horse in Greek
Ancient naming conventions were nothing if not incredibly literal. When ancient Greeks first laid eyes on a massive, aggressive, semi-aquatic mammal wallowing…
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Why spaces appeared between words
You can thank bored scholars on a rainy island for your ability to skim a paragraph. Because they were trying to learn a language they didn't natively speak,…
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Korean clocks once used puppets to announce the time
Why just look at the time when a mechanical doll can literally aggressively announce it? Fifteenth-century Korean engineers built massive plumbing-powered…
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Victorian men had teacups for their mustaches
First-world problems in the 1850s required highly specific ceramic engineering. Victorian men meticulously styled their massive mustaches using heavy wax to…
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The pope who sold the papacy to get married
Pope Benedict IX was a catastrophic, completely embarrassing disaster of a religious leader. He was incredibly corrupt, constantly plotting, and eventually…
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The organ piece whose finale comes in 2640
Patience is a virtue, but this is ridiculous. An avant-garde organ piece in a German church is currently playing so slowly that the chords only change every…
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In Sengoku Japan, yesterday’s ally could be today’s enemy
A century of endless civil war meant loyalty was an incredibly flexible concept. Warlords routinely signed blood oaths one day only to aggressively flank and…
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The rooster that went on trial for laying an egg
Talk about punishing a biological miracle. In 1474, the town of Basel held a highly formal trial for a rooster that supposedly laid an egg, ultimately burning…
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Oxygen discovery was published years after finding it
In the academic world, procrastinating can literally cost you the discovery of the air we breathe. A brilliant chemist managed to isolate pure oxygen gas but…
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The king whose jaw was deformed by inbreeding
Generations of relentless royal inbreeding produced a monarch whose face practically defied basic biology. The Spanish king had a lower jaw so severely…
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The executioner who kept a diary of 706 punishments
When your dad is forced into the head-chopping business, you log your decapitations like a deranged corporate accountant. In the 16th century, executioner…
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Ancient elites paid to drink breast milk
Forget retirement homes; rich elders in ancient China just bought breast milk. They believed drinking it directly from wet nurses would restore their fading…
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Ancient Egyptians put miniature bakeries in tombs
You can't take your riches with you, but you definitely need carbs in the afterlife. Elaborate tombs often included intricate, miniature wooden models of…
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Newton and Hooke's bitter fight over gravity
The scientific revolution was mostly just brilliant men acting like incredibly petty toddlers. Robert Hooke practically invented modern microscopy, but he…
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Vermeer painted only about 34 pictures
Talk about doing the absolute bare minimum to achieve historical immortality. Vermeer worked at such a hilariously glacial pace that he only managed to finish…
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Stalin had foreign leaders’ feces analyzed
Trust issues are normal in politics, but stealing your allies' bio-waste is just deranged. Soviet secret police created special toilets to harvest the…
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Massive Egyptian statue was carved from a single stone block
Building an enormous monument usually involves carefully stacking smaller pieces over decades. The builders of the Great Sphinx looked at a massive,…
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The pope accused of running a Vatican brothel
Holy infallibility apparently has a few historical loopholes. Pope John XII took the papacy in the 10th century and immediately turned the Lateran Palace into…
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NASA renamed spacesuit sizes to stop urine leaks
Even in the cold, unforgiving vacuum of space, male ego ruins everything. During the Apollo missions, astronauts wore essentially highly engineered space…
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When a cloudy week defeated the sundial
Relying on literal shadows to tightly manage your schedule worked wonderfully until a cloudy week in winter completely ruined your entire itinerary.
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When German nobles launched live foxes into the air
Because being rich in the 17th century meant you had way too much free time. Nobles would stand in a field holding a long sling, waiting for a terrified fox…
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The Vatican's telescope sits on the Pope's summer estate
Because looking for divine answers down here clearly wasn't working, the Catholic Church operates an advanced astronomical observatory right on the roof of…
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First calculator was a massive mechanical box
Doing taxes in the seventeenth century required serious arm strength. Pascal invented a gear-driven box that could add and subtract via a complex series of…
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