What are some events in history that most people would be surprised happened in parallel or at least within the same time period?
Abraham Lincoln could have received a fax from an actual samurai.
All three coexisted at one point in time.
Also, Abraham Lincoln almost joined the Donner Party As he had a job offer in San Francisco
They could have been actual photographs of themselves (or drawn dick pics).
Galileo, the homeboy who discovered Jupiter’s moons and Saturn’s rings, was 43 years old when the first British settlers landed at Jamestown.
There were wooly mammoths living in Russia when the Great Pyramids at Giza were being built
Fucking hell
I came here to post this exact fact from one of my favorite vsauce videos
The last execution by guillotine in France happened while Star Wars A New Hope was already in theaters.
It was just called "Star Wars."
Yeah, I remember seeing it titled A New Hope, and asking "When did that happen? That wasn't there from the start, right? I couldn't have missed that."
Turns out I was right, it was some later interpolation. Lucas doesn't know to leave well enough alone.
I love it that I can find my people so easily.
And Christoffer Lee (Saruman) was at the execution!
He was at the last public excecution which happened in 1939, after this one they were still done but not publicly
Christopher Lee?
No way. Prove it!
Edit: looked it up myself. It is true, everything is true. Can't believe it.
Execution happened September 10th, 1977. Starwars was released May 25, 1977 (in the US.)
The execution happened in September 1977, whereas Star Wars released in May of the same year
Username checked out
Nintendo was founded the same year that hitler was born.
The Brooklyn bridge was being built when Custer’s last stand took place.
The last one just feels like a docudrama
Sharks are about 450-400 million years old. They were around 200 million years before the dinosaurs, and have outlasted them by 65 million years. They're older than the North Star, the rings of Saturn, the Atlantic Ocean, and trees.
And it took 60 million years for the trees to start rotting when they died, because the bacteria to break them down didn't exist. Those trees died, fell over, became peat, and then eventually coal. The trees that were dead and buried trapped carbon dioxide that had been in the atmosphere. 90% of the coal we burn today comes from the period when trees didn't rot, and we're re-releasing all that CO2 back into the atmosphere, from where it's been safely sequestered for 250 million years.
The Appalachian Mountains began forming approximately 1.5 billion years ago. About the same time that sea animals were first evolving bones. The carbon that became the coal under them was deposited approximately 300 million years ago when they formed the central continental divide of the Pangea supercontinent. That was when they were at their highest, estimated to have been about the same height as the modern Alps.
Same vein, the Canadian/Laurentian Shield has areas dating back as far as 4.2 billion years, recall a geo prof in uni suggesting it would have been extremely tall, Wikipedia suggests 12km.
Stuff gets unreal to me at geological timescales.
See libs!? We’re just putting the CO2 back where it belongs! Check and mate climate fear mongers! /s
"Consider: Victorian England: 1837-1901 American Old West: 1803-1912 Meiji Restoration: 1868-1912 French privateering in the Gulf of Mexico: ended circa 1830
Conclusion: an adventuring party consisting of a Victorian gentleman thief, an Old West gunslinger, a disgraced former samurai, and an elderly French pirate is actually 100% historically plausible."
American Old West: 1803-1912
I had no idea it was that young.
This lead me to this fun fact: The last stage coach robbery was 2 years after WWI began.
Last stage coach robbery was 1916
Also, Titanic had already been sitting at the bottom of the Atlantic for 4 years (1912) when that stage coach was robbed.
If you want to see a great (if also absurdly violent and bloody) Western about the dying days of the wild west, check out Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969). Excellent movie, set in 1913.
This was very surprising after having seen a few Western movies from the 1940s. They were already making movies about the period which was in living memory for a lot of people.
Oh yeah it involved trains and was interrupted by the civil war
Holy shit.....
Oh that’s wild, I would not have guessed it even happening in the 1900s
I feel like this is bait for one specific answer... okay, fine, I'll be the one.
MLK Jr, Anne Frank, and Yasser Arafat were all born in the same year (1929). They were all born after Tom Lehrer, who died yesterday, 97 years old.
Edit: Math is hard
Yeah. Super sad. There will be more good ones, other skies and stars, but these good ones are gone, they will now not shine again.
Edit: Math is hard
Someone should write a song about that.
They Might Be Giants probably wrote more than one.
Nah, I just genuinely want to learn new trivia stuff. I already know the common ones like the mammoths and pyramids for example.
Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman were alive at the same time (for about a month).
What a rollercoaster life did ms. Tubman live. Slave, runaway, people smuggler, living during reconstruction, then seeing all the progress going to shit again, and finally the birth of the civil rights movement, before death.
Picasso passed away in the 2 years time between when Soviet Union and US launched their first space station into space.
This feels surprising mainly because I thought Picasso lived in 1400s. But no he just lived a long life in early 20th century.
Although they are both stories based on historical events that have been embellished, the Trojan war and the Hebrews leaving Egypt very well could have been happening at the same time (around 1180 BCE)
There were humans who lived through both the final fall of the (eastern half of) the Roman Empire (May 29, 1453) and the European discovery of the Americas (October 12, 1492). The time between these two critical milestones in European history seems like it should have been much longer than 39 years, 4 months, and 13 days.
Both of these points are common denominators for the end of the european middle ages, so it's not surprising they are close to each other
Romans saw the Americas
Apollo 14 and Women's suffrage in Switzerland (1971)
Laura Ingalls Wilder nearly lived long enough to see a satellite launched into space. She lived through a time when the fastest means of transport went from a steam train to it being a rocket.
There was a whole generation like that.
Battle of Little Big Horn was in June, 1876.
The first telephone call was made March 10, 1876.
Man Walked on the Moon in 1969. A few weeks after the Stonewall Riots.
The summer of 1969 was three of the most influential months in American culture. June: Stonewall riots; July: moon landing; August: Woodstock music festival.
Read about Kitty Hawk in the newspaper at 16 years old, in 1903. Watch men walking on the moon on your TV, at 82 years old.
Fuckin' unreal. Hang out with people who lived through the 20th century, if you ever can, though they are reduced in number now. The perspective they have on things is hard to match. I knew a woman who grew up with black servants in the house who couldn't vote, then marched with MLK, then watched Obama get elected president. And that's everything. Every single aspect of human life, basically, except for a few of the very basics. She was always sort of surprised and amused that I had a "phone" that was a smooth black rectangle that I would control by "stroking" (as she called it) this smooth black surface.
I watched her meet a new person of her generation. First question: Was your husband in the war? Answer was yes. Second question: Did he live? He's not trying to give offense, he just wants to know your situation. He was in the infantry...
Bill Clinton winning the 1992 election against George H. W. Bush to later become the 42nd president of the USA
and
Homosexuality is no longer classified as a mental illness according to WHO's ICD (International Classification of Diseases)
Thanks for raising the LGBT community people don't realise how awful our history is
Groucho Marx died the same month as Elvis Presley.
By some reckonings the American Wild West era ended after World War I did. Either way, that era basically coincided with the rule of Queen Victoria.
The German ship Blücher was sunk during WW2 by a Whitehead Torpedo.
Buffalo Bill likely passed within a few hundred yards of one such torpedo while visiting Britain.
Horse noises
World War 2 happened a few years after after World War 1. If someone didn't already know that it would be pretty surprising I think.
There was also a Persian Empire on the map during World War 1. Qajar Persia specifically.
Ottomans as well
The fax machine was invented almost 2 decades before the outbreak of the American Civil War.
Also an eyewitness to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln talked about it on a TV game show.