History Enthusiasts Are Sharing History Facts That Many People Would Find Shocking (50 Facts)

Many people know about the Suffragettes who won the vote for some UK women in 1918. Many people don't know that prior to 1918 men did not have universal suffrage. 1918 is also the date which non landowning men got the vote. Prior to that the vote had been only for wealthy landowning lords, just 5% of the population. Over a period of the preceding 80 years concessions were slowly made to allow more men, and then some women to vote.

We are closer to the time of the T-Rex than the T-Rex is to the time of the Stegosaurus.

That in 2006 the earth was hit by a gamma ray burst from a distant supernova that stripped away about 6% of our top atmosphere (its fine now). If it had been bigger it would've wiped everything on earth out (and by bigger I mean if it was 20-25%).

It took about 4 times longer to get from copper swords to steel swords, than it took from steel swords to atomic bombs.

Europeans are able to tolerate lactose better than most ethnic groups because our ancestors kept drinking milk even tough it would make them s**t their pants. Just too good to let a bit of shotgun s**t ruin it.

The first telephones didn't ring. Owners had no way of knowing if there'd be someone on the other end when they picked it up. It took a year or two to create the noise alert.

Your ancestors did not eat purer food and the preservatives we have now are a thousand times more preferable to what went on before the food safety reforms of the mid 1900s to 1910s. Even in the so-called more pastoral times had no sense of germ theory. Your food - say, a loaf of bread - would be coughed on, sweated on, possibly stomped on or chewed up at some points (esp in bread baking, they'd stomp it down), throw chalk and other adulterants like metal powders in it, and bake it in a dirty oven with unwashed hands, and placed in open fly-ridden air for display and sale.

Also, olives are only mushy and rubbery now because freshly canned olives gave so many people deathly food poisoning in the mid-50s, that they now cook 'em in the can like tuna or shredded chicken to avoid another disaster.

People used to get their feet X-rayed at the shoe store to check their shoe fit.

Within a single person's lifetime, we went from all transportation being by horses, ships, and trains, to landing a man on the moon.

Did you know that during the 17th century, wealthy Europeans would consume parts of mummies for medicinal purposes? Yeah, they actually believed that mummy powder could cure everything from headaches to stomach ulcers. Imagine reaching for a jar of ground mummy remains instead of aspirin!

Hitting children in school was still legal when I was there and I'm only 43.

Approximately 8% of Canadians were enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force during World War I.

That isn't 8% of eligible Canadians, or 8% of Canadian men; that's 8% of the entire population of Canada. If a similar proportion enlisted in the United States today, there would be 26 million people serving in the US Armed Forces.

Napoleon was actually 5 foot 7 inches not 5'2.

The tram was invented by a Mr. Train

King George III was personally *against* the Stamp Act, and in NY a statue was erected of him in thanks for his role in appealing it

Nelson Mandela was listed as a terrorist threat (and remained on the terrorist watch-list) in the USA up until 2008.

A military plane carrying two nuclear warheads broke apart and crashed in North Carolina. The state would have gotten nuked if it weren't for a single safety switch preventing detonation. These nukes were bigger than the ones we used in Japan.

Read up on the 1961 Goldsboro B-52 crash.

The fact that sturgeons survived the fall of the meteorite that destroyed the dinosaurs, and have not evolved in any way since then.

The last use of the guillotine in France and the release of the first*Star Wars* movie occurred in the same year - 1977.

The unfair taxation the US revolted against was actually very fair and only a fraction of what British in other colonies were paying.

We put man on the moon before wheels on suitcases.

The British pet massacre. In 1939, about 400,000 cats and dogs were killed in order to prepare for World War II food shortages. This was approximately 1/4 of the pets in England.