If You Like Learning The Bizarre Facts From History, Here Are 42 Really Unexpected Ones

The Titanic’s sister ship Olympic was known for hitting ships. She sank a U-Boat during WW1 by running it over and then did it again to the Nantucket Lightship though on accident that time. She also rammed the HMS Hawke which is where the unsinkable thing came from. She was also the only ship of the three to serve a full career and was noted to be in immaculate condition for her age. It’s sad the two others never finished a single civilian crossing. Titanic sank on her maiden voyage and Britannic never even made it to civilian service before being sunk my a sea mine.

I just saw this in a movie I watched today. It rained fish in Denmark about 50 years ago. There is more than one theory as to how that happened.

The 100-year war. That lasted for 116 years, actually.

When you hear about 100-year war that happened in human history, you imagine it was probably exaggeration, and it lasted at most like 55 years or something... But no, it actually lasted LONGER!

30% of Americans supported the British in the Revolution.

There are golf balls still on the moon.

Africans have ~20% of their DNA belonging to a ‘ghost’ hominin.

I.e another species of early human that is extinct and we don’t know anything about. A bit like how Europeans and Asians have ~2% Neanderthal DNA.

Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish Army Officer was accused of spying for Germany at the end of the 19th century. This lead to a very famous polemics between his supporters and his detractors that lasted a few years, even after the army learnt that he wasn't actually guilty and knew the name of the real spy. Despite this, he remained faithful to the Army and was rehabilitated.

A few years after, at the start of WW1, he was the very officer that learnt from a scouting plane crew that the Germans were deviating from their route, realized the importance of this information and transmitted it with the highest priority, allowing the French High Command and the British Expeditionnary Force to launch a successful offensive on the Marne.

The man that was wrongly accused and recognized guilty of one of the worst crimes by his country's army was the one that saved it from its worst military defeat 20 years after.

Julius Caesar was kidnapped and ransomed by pirates. He told them to ask for a higher ransom and that he would find them and crucify them if they let him go. They took the ransom and let him go. He hunted them down and crucified them.

That a T-Rex is closer in time to us then it is to a Stegosaurus .

The first powered flight (1903) and the moon landing (1968) were 66 years apart. A not insignificant number of people were alive and remember both events.

Mexico once had a president who ruled for a whopping 45 minutes.

John Tyler was born in 1790, and was President from 1841 -1845. His last surviving grandchild, Harrison Ruffin Tyler, was alive earlier this year.

More people have been to space then to the bottom of the ocean.

I don't know when exactly it was "discovered", but VERY recently (like past few devades), it was discovered that infants feel pain. So yeah, they used.to perform surgery on infants without anesthesia. In RECENT times. Like in the 80s and maybe 90s even.

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On a side note, most people think animals don't feel pain or are incapable of any kind of sentience and sapience. I believe all life outside of fungi and plants can feel pain. It'd genuinely shock me of mushrooms and grass could feel pain. But yeah, why people dont realize mice or lizards or bats or turtles can feel pain is beyond me. And... no way to prove this (my handwashing moment), but I believe mammals and maybe "lesser" animals can feel dread and despair and such. Develope depression, get traumatized and developed PTSD, etc. I think mammals are much more human than other humans give them recognition for. I also believe that if an animal looks at his or her food bowl and looks away and walks away, that's it considering whether it should eat for pleasure or for hunger. And thus shows decision making.

Besides, we've proven that crows and ravens (birds) are pretty intelligent.

The dancing plague of 1518, or dance epidemic of 1518 (French: Épidémie dansante de 1518; German: Straßburger Tanzwut), was a case of dancing mania that occurred in Strasbourg, Alsace (modern-day France), in the Holy Roman Empire from July 1518 to September 1518. Somewhere between 50 and 400 people took to dancing for weeks. There are many theories behind the phenomenon, the most popular being stress-induced mass hysteria, suggested by John Waller.[1][2] Other theories include ergot poisoning. There is controversy concerning the number of deaths.[3]

t*h I just can’t believe such an insane party went down, stress induced doesn’t sound correct to me (I’m not the smartest though so eh). This sounds like burning man to the max. Maybe some crazy fermented wine or something.

Czech Republic/ former Czechoslovakia as a landlocked country without ever having a navy still has a naval Victory, that didn’t even happen in Europe .

For centuries in western culture, reading silently was considered everything from strange to immoral and potentially dangerous into the 18th century. The danger comes from when people started reading in bed by candle light and there was a chance of the fire spreading by someone who had fallen asleep reading.

Ketchup was sold as medicine in the 1800s.

Pope Leo the first begged its life from the Turkic commander Attila the Hun, in 452 AD. It was because Attila caused great harm to whole Europe and Western Rome, and was on way to attack and end the Western Rome. Surprisingly he accepted and did not attack.

Most writing systems in the world descend from Egyptian Hieroglyphics (Chinese doesn't, but Mongolian, Manchurian and Tibetan do).