These 36 Historical Facts Will Mess With Your Perception Of Time

The two were both born in 1926 and once met each other, at the premiere of The Battle of the River Plate in London’s Leicester Square. Monroe was there to accompany her then husband Arthur Miller. You can see her here in the receiving line of guests waiting to shake the young Queen’s hand.

Harriet the tortoise was reportedly collected by Charles Darwin during his 1835 visit to the Galápagos Islands as part of his round-the-world survey expedition, transported to England, and then brought to her final home, Australia, by a retiring captain of the Beagle. However, some doubt was cast on this story by the fact that Darwin had never visited the island that Harriet originally came from. She had an estimated age of 175 by the time she finally died at Steve Irwin's zoo!

Scientists have determined that wooly mammoths were still roaming the Earth until about 1650 BC, the giant creatures could be found on an island off the coast of eastern Russia at the time. Meanwhile, the oldest of the 'Great Pyramids' in Egypt, the Pyramid of Djoser was constructed between 2630 BC–2611 BC, meaning that while man was busy building some of the most incredible structures ever made, wooly mammoths were still doing their thing.

The Aztec Empire, began as an alliance of three Nahua altepetl city-states. These three city-states ruled the area in and around the Valley of Mexico from 1428 until the combined forces of the Spanish conquistadores and their native allies under Hernán Cortés defeated them in 1521. Aztec culture had rich and complex mythological and religious traditions, as well as achieving remarkable architectural and artistic accomplishments.

Meanwhile in England, Oxford University was already well-established. It has no known date of foundation, but there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world's second-oldest university in continuous operation. It grew rapidly from 1167 when Henry II banned English students from attending the University of Paris.

Source: Wikipedia (1,2)

George Washington died peacefully at home on December 14, 1799, aged 67 years old. A soldier, farmer, and statesman, as well as the first President of the United States under the U.S. Constitution, Washington was commonly referred to as the "Father of His Country" by his compatriots. He, like anyone else at the time, didn't know that dinosaurs existed because they were not scientifically recognized as such until 1824, when British naturalist William Buckland first described Megalosaurus, now regarded to be the first dinosaur to be scientifically named.

Nintendo, the Japanese gaming company associated with video game legends such as Mario, Donkey Kong, Zelda and the Pokemon characters is actually much older than the video game era. They originally made playing cards called hanafuda, and the company was founded way back in 1889, when the infamous Jack the Ripper was creating havoc on the streets of London. The true identity of the Ripper has never been discovered, and he was a prime suspect in the murder of the unidentified woman known as 'The Pinchin Street Torso,' because that is all that remained of her. This happened only weeks before Nintendo came into existence.

One of the most discussed Jewish victims of the Holocaust, Anne Frank gained fame posthumously with the publication of The Diary of a Young Girl, in which she documents her life in hiding from 1942 to 1944, during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. It is one of the world's most widely known books and has been the basis for several plays and films.

Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Baptist minister and activist who became the most visible spokesperson and leader in the civil rights movement from 1954 until his death in 1968. King is best known for advancing civil rights through nonviolence and civil disobedience, tactics his Christian beliefs and the nonviolent activism of Mahatma Gandhi helped inspire. Both of these symbols of resistance were born in the same year, 1929.

Source: Wikipedia (1,2)

Would you like to visit a living thing, still alive today, that was around in the time of wooly mammoths? It turns out that actually you can! The world's oldest tree is a Great Basin bristlecone pine located in White Mountains, California, and is dated at 5067 years old.

To put that into perspective, isolated populations of wooly mammoths on Wrangel Island didn't finally go extinct until 4,000 years ago, with the small island in the Arctic Ocean serving as a santuary for the great beasts, forced from the mainland by humans and climate change long before.

Star Wars premiered in the U.S. on May 25th 1977. At the same time this futuristic sci-fi was wowing audiences around the world, the medieval practice of death by guillotine was still taking place in France, where Hamida "Pimp Killer" Djandoubi was beheaded for the torture and murder of a young woman. This was the last use of the guillotine in France, nobody else has been executed using any means since.

People often assume that the first Europeans to settle in the United States came with the landing of the pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, MA, in ships sailed from England in 1620. However Spanish explorers had been in the Southwest for almost a century by that time, and in 1610 began building the 'Palace of the Governers' in Santa Fe, already a thriving settlement. So when people say shit like 'speak English, this is America,' point out this fact!

Switzerland is often seen as one of the, if not the, most progressive nations on Earth. It comes as a surprise then that women weren't granted the right to vote until 1971, 65 years after Finland become the first European country to do so.

By that time, NASA had already landed on the moon, and were driving a moon buggy around! In the meantime however, Switzerland has caught up massively in terms of women's rights and the gender gap, ranking at number 11, well ahead of the United States at number 45.

The original fax machine, the "Electric Printing Telegraph" was patented in 1843 by Scottish inventor Alexander Bain, the same year that about 1,000 people set off West for Oregon, forming a huge wagon train on what is now known as the Oregon trail. This set the tone for Westward expansion in the USA, and is the beginning of the 'Great Migration.'

Hanging used to be a common punishment in the UK, and wasn't abolished until 1868. Micheal Barrett was the last to be executed in this manner, in Newgate prison, London, in front of a large crowd of people.

5 years earlier in 1863, the first journey of the London Underground took place. With a station in operation close by the Newgate prison, it is entirely feasible that many Londoners would take the tube to go and watch somebody get hanged.

Princess Diana and Mother Teresa died just days apart, in 1997. Princess Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris on August 31st, while Mother Teresa died on September 5th after a struggle with declining health. She died in India and received a state funeral from the Indian government, in gratitude for her service to the poor of all religions in the country.

While Alfred Wegener proposed his theory of continental drift back in 1912, his ideas were not taken seriously by many geologists, who pointed out that there was no apparent mechanism for continental drift. Specifically, they did not see how continental rock could plow through the much denser rock that makes up oceanic crust. Wegener could not explain the force that drove continental drift, and his vindication did not come until after his death in 1930. It wasn't until 1967 that the theory of plate tectonics was accepted by the scientific community, by which time NASA and the Soviet Union were already exploring well beyond the Earth's crust, they were launching rockets into space and preparing to land on the moon.

While McDonald's is traditionally associated with the good times and affluence of 1950's America, the very first restaurant was opened much earlier, on May 15th 1940. Just 5 days later, the first prisoners arrived at the Auschwitz concentration camp in what is now Poland.

Maudie Hopkins married Civil War veteran William M. Cantrell in 1934, when she was 19 years old. She says that it was poverty that drove her to marry the former soldier of the Confederate States Army, who was 86 at the time. Hopkins passed away in 2008 in Lexa, Arkansas aged 93, which meant that a Civil War Veteran's widow was still alive when President Obama became the first African-American to serve as President.

Modern calculus was developed in 17th-century Europe by Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (independently of each other, first publishing around the same time) but elements of it appeared in ancient Greece, then in China and the Middle East, and still later again in medieval Europe and in India.

Harvard was established in 1636 and named for its first benefactor clergyman John Harvard. Harvard is the United States' oldest institution of higher learning, and its history, influence, and wealth have made it one of the world's most prestigious universities. Calculus was off the curriculum for the first few years for obvious reasons, it hadn't been recognized yet!

Source: Wikipedia (1,2)

The 'unsinkable' Titanic sank in 1912, going down in the North Atlantic Ocean, four days into the ship's maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City.

In the same year pharmaceutical giant Merck was interested in developing substances that stopped abnormal bleeding, and one of its chemists, Anton Köllisch, synthesised MDMA to avoid a patent by rival Bayer. The drug was of no particular interest to Merck at the time, and they only came back to research the substance sporadically over the next few years. It wasn't until 1975 that psychoactive effects of the drug began to be taken seriously, and recreational use spread thereafter through personal networks of psychotherapists, psychiatrists, users of psychedelics, and yuppies.

Source: Wikipedia