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30 Historical Tidbits Most People Remain Blissfully Unaware Of

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30 Historical Tidbits Most People Remain Blissfully Unaware Of

August 25, 2024

Welcome! And congrats on being one of the chosen few who has been gifted these historical facts!

As you’ll come to learn, not too many people around you know about them, so like us, you’re about to get a whole new smug sense of superiority. And it grows with each fact you read. It’s great.

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30

Pinball used to be considered a seedy thing. In the 1930s, New York City declared pinball a game of chance, and therefore illegal gambling. For the next four decades, the city waged war against the vice machines, with thousands seized, destroyed, and dumped into the ocean. POINTS 10 WHENLIT POINTS 10 MC-334-1 WHENLIT CRACKED.COM — Source

29

Royal nipples were a big deal in Ireland. Old-timey Irish people showed subservience to the king not by kneeling or bowing, but by kissing his nipple. The symbolism was so strong, failed kings risked having their nipples cut off, illustrating the loss of their right to rule. CRACKED.COM — Source

28

CRACKED.COM Mammoths were hopelessly inbred. Research has shown that in their final days, woolly mammoths got so desperate for sexual mates that they started inbreeding. The sad reality is that the last woolly mammoths basically cousin-banged their genetic code into oblivion. — Source

27

Old Faithful (yes, the geyser) was used as a Laundromat. In the late 1800s, wary travelers who made it to the land which would become Yellowstone didn't need to carry on with dirty clothes-they'd just drop them in Old Faithful's bubbling pool. The clothes would come out clean, and warm too. CRACKED.COM — Source

26

Old-timey doctors believed booze could make you catch fire Since the 17th century, there have been scientific reports of people spontaneously combusting from having entirely too much flammable vapor in their bodies as a result of drinking. Cases came to a head in Victorian England- maybe because doctors weren't fans of alcohol. CRACKED.COM — Source

25

The Four Corners Monument was placed on the wrong spot. - au UKIA The monument marks where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah meet-but due to the limitations of 19th-century surveying, it is 1,800 feet from where it should be. A 1925 Supreme Court ruling basically says, hey, let's just chill and pretend that it's in the right place. CRACKED.COM — Source

24

Arthur John Priest survived the Titanic-and several TITANIC more sinkings. LITERPOOL The Titanic was only the beginning of Priest's career as the world's most accursed seaman. Не later stoked furnaces aboard the Alcantara, the Britannic, and the Donegal-and they all went to the bottom. Не called it quits after a few more close calls. CRACKED.COM — Source

23

CRACKED.COM THE BIBLICAL PLAGUE OF FROGS MIGHT HAVE BEEN JUST ONE HUGE FROG. We imagine the plague as a whole lot of frogs getting everywhere-but according to some medieval rabbis, it was just one big-ass frog that covered the entire land of Egypt with its gigantic body (and spawned normal-sized frogs every time it was hit). — Source

22

CRACKED.COM JAMES BOND MAY BE NAMED AFTER A CHURCH IN CANADA. Officially, lan Fleming named his spy after the author of a book on birds. But maybe it isn't a coincidence that Fleming spent a couple weeks in Toronto in 1942, just down the street from St. James Bond United Church (an amalgamation of two other churches, St. James and Bond Street). — Source

21

COINS WERE FIRST RIDGED TO STOP CRIME. Back when coins were made of precious metals, enterprising felons would file a bit of gold or silver off each coin-a practice known as clipping. It was the Romans who first carved ridges into coins, to know if someone had clipped them. CRACKED.COM — Source

20

CRACKED.COM SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER WAS BASED ON A BIG LIE. The New York Magazine article Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night made disco mainstream overnight, and the movie was based on it-too bad that it was all lies. Reporter Nik Cohn made up Tony Manero (and everything else) after he failed to get any good interviews. — Source

19

YOUR CLUNKY HEATING RADIATOR IS THE RESULT OF A PANDEMIC. During the 1918 flu pandemic, cities ordered people to keep their windows open, even on frigid days. That meant that big radiators were needed to keep the cold at bay. And now you know why your old, ugly radiator overheats your apartment. CRACKED.COM — Source

18

Peter the Great shaved people against their will. The late 17th-century Tsar wanted Russia to be more like Europe-and that included the lack of beards. Not only did he tax bushy facial hair, but would forcibly shave his guests, and eventually anyone he came across. (Making things worse, he wasn't exactly a good barber.) CRACKED.COM — Source

17

Apollo 12 was struck by lightning. Twice. When Apollo 12 took off in November 1969, the rocket was struck by lightning twice in a span of 20 seconds. Mission Control thought the damage would make it impossible for the astronauts to return to Earth after their mission. (Luckily, they were wrong.) CRACKED.COM — Source

16

The American Medical Association torpedoed universal health care. The National Physicians' INSERT CON Committee (often described as a lobbying front for the PUSH BUTTON AMA) opposed public health care since the late '30s-and FLU in 1945, they ramped up their MEASLES campaigning with BROKEN LEG scaremongering cartoons OPERATION about the dangers of ETC socialized medicine, to sink Truman's health care bill. LLS GRACKED.COM — Source

15

CRACKED.COM George Patton thought he had fought for ages. General Patton believed in reincarnation, and thought he had lived through many lives- always as a soldier. Не claimed to have served under Julius Caesar and Napoleon, among many others. It's not clear how he reconciled this with his devout Christian beliefs. — Source

14

CRACKED.COM Belgium attempted to use cats to deliver mail. In 1879, in the city of Liège, the Belgian Society for the Elevation of the Domestic Cat had the idea of using cats in the same way as carrier pigeons, giving them small waterproof postbags. The results were disappointing, and the experiment was cancelled. — Source

13

Angela Lansbury moved overseas to get away from Charles Manson. In the late 60s, Lansbury's children weren't in the safest environments: Her son Anthony had drug problems, and her daughter Deirdre rolled with the Manson family. So she up and moved the family to Ireland, saving Deirdre from being involved in any murders. CRACKED.COM — Source

12

The Nigerian Prince has been around for 200 years. Rich people randomly offering you big bucks if you help them out of trouble was already a scam genre in the early 19th century. Later, in the 1890s, scammers got to claiming in their letters that they were prisoners of the Spanish- American war, earning the scheme the name the Spanish prisoner. - 96 VIA OF - - - CRACKED.COM — Source

11

Richard III wasn't as evil as Shakespeare made him out to be. There's no indication that Richard III killed any of the people Shakespeare wrote he did (and he wasn't a hunchback, either). It's possible that Shakespeare intended the king to be a stand-in for Robert Cecil, a member of a powerful family the Bard wasn't a fan of. CRACKED.COM — Source

10

Tijuana Bibles were your grandad's Rule 34. There wasn't an internet in the 1930s, but that doesn't mean no one was drawing Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck going at it with each other. Tijuana Bibles were small, crudely- printed NSFW comics, featuring cartoon characters, celebrities, politicians, and the like. MICKEY MOUSE AND DONALD CRACKED.COM NIKI — Source

9

Sean Connery socked a gangster. While shooting a movie in the 1950s, Connery got very friendly with co-star Lana Turner, which annoyed Turner's boyfriend, a mobster called Johnny Stompanato. Stompanato showed up in the set to threaten Connery with a gun- which the future James Bond swatted out of his hand, before leveling the gangster with a right hook. CRACKED.COM — Source

8

CRACKED.COM George washington was a huge whisky producer (for a short time). After retiring from politics in 1797, Washington set up a whisky distillery in his land. During its first year, the distillery sold nearly 11,000 gallons of booze, and was one of the biggest in the U.S. But Washington soon died, and his nephew couldn't successfully continue the operation. — Source

7

CRACKED.COM steven wright won an Oscar. The Appointment of Dennis Jennings is a al 30-minute-long, dark comedy written by Jennings, and starring Jennings himself along with Rowan Atkinson. You never heard of it? That's weird, considering it R T took home the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film in 1989. — Source

6

White slaves helped end slavery. The American North wasn't much less racist than the South, and many weren't sold on the whole emancipation thing. To win them over, abolitionists started highlighting white slaves on popular magazines (who were enslaved because they had some black ancestor). Suddenly, owning people seemed inhumane. CRACKED.COM — Source

5

CRACKED COM cain's Jawbone is a puzzle that only four people have been able to solve. In 1934, puzzle writer Edward Mathers (a.k.a. Torquemada) published Cain's Jawbone, a novella of 100 cryptic, out-of- order pages. The challenge was to rearrange the pages in the correct sequence and solve the murders. The task proved so hard that only four people have ever completed it. — Source

4

MIT intentionally irradiated children (with Quaker's help). In the 1940s, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology decided to study how the body absorbs nutrients by feeding disabled and abandoned children radioactive oatmeal. The experiment was government-sanctioned and sponsored by Quaker Oats, who even supplied the tainted cereal. CRACKED.COM — Source

3

overeager investors bought shares for the wrong Twitter. Some time before Twitter went public in 2013, investors spotted some very cheap shares with the code TWTRQ, and snapped them up thinking they were out early. As it turned out, those were for a company called Tweeter Audio and Video - and were dirt cheap because the outfit had just gone bankrupt. CRACKED.COM — Source

2

INGREDIE THE Tomato مزير Spice ge STORA whete PROH 57 ketchup was a medicine. In 1834, Ohio physician John C. Bennet began selling tomato ketchup as a medicine for all kinds of ailments. The condiment was a medical fad until around 1850, when studies showed that its miraculous healing properties were (amazingly) not real. CRACKED.COM — Source

1

The discoverer of Halley's comet originated the Hollow Earth theory. Trying to explain shifts in the Earth's magnetic field, Edmund Halley speculated in 1692 that the planet contained three nested, smaller spheres, rotating in different directions. And for some reason he added that whole civilizations lived there, like in so many floors of a tenement building. CRACKED.COM — Source

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