Get Premium
Dark mode theme is available exclusively for premium users. Learn more about the benefits of subscribing.
No fees, cancel anytime.
Dark Mode 
No fees, cancel anytime 
Somehow, thinking back about history lessons brings back nothing but a feeling of insurmountable boredom. Yup, the history lessons we’ve had at school brought no joy with all the dates of historical events and horribly bland teaching. Thankfully, later on, the internet was invented (kidding, we’re not that old here!), and we found out how exciting and jaw-dropping our history truly is! And, to share this discovery with you, we’ve compiled a list full of the coolest and the most incredible historical facts. Yup, some of these cool facts are definitely unbelievable, but you’ll see that for yourself.
So, this list will take you down the road of the unexplained as some of these weird historical facts seem to be related more to aliens than to humans. However, if kooky isn’t really your cup of tea, this list also boasts a myriad of fun historical facts. You know, something that wasn’t oh so funny when it actually happened, but now, in retrospect, it looks purely hysterical. In fact, these pieces of interesting history might shed a whole new light on humanity for you! Not necessarily its good part, but exciting nonetheless.
Now, the main question here is this - are you ready to dig deeper with these interesting historical facts? If so, then scroll on down below and check them out! Be sure to give the most unbelievable facts your vote and share this article with all the history buffs you know.
This post may include affiliate links.
#1
Marie Curie, the famous nobel prize-winning physicist’s notebook still can not be handled safely as it is still radioactive.
RELATED:
#2
The word 'quarantine' comes from 'quarantena', meaning “forty days” in 14th century Venetian. The Venetians imposed a 40-day isolation of ships and people arriving in their lagoon during the Black Death.
#3
Since 1945, all British tanks have been equipped with tea-making equipment and facilities.
#5
Charlie Chaplin enrolled in a Charlie Chaplin lookalike competition and he came 20th in rank.
#6
Columbus didn't actually 'discover' America. The Vikings' had early expeditions to North America around the year 1000 A.D.
#7
The Germans and British soldiers paused the war for a day during Christmas Day 1914. They sang, drank and celebrated together.
#9
The pyramids of Giza were built when pre-historic woolly mammoths were still walking the earth.
#10
Vincent van Gogh painted his masterpiece "The Starry Night" in 1889, the same year that Nintendo formed as a corporation.
#11
The Olympics used to award medals for art.
#13
A lot of history's disasters were caused by sleep deprivation.
#14
One of the most successful pirates in history is a woman - Ching Shih.
Scout Finch 2 years ago
I would measure my success by the size of my booty. I'll be here all week.
#15
There is more time separating Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex than Tyrannosaurus Rex and us.
#17
In the battle of Pelusium, the Persians knew that Egyptians worshipped cats and were forbidden to kill them. So the Persians used them as shields.
Potato Panda 2 years ago
Don't worry, they didn't actually use real live cats, they just painted cats on the sheilds
#18
In Renaissance France, a woman could take her husband to court if he was impotent.
#19
The 1985 discovery of the Titanic stemmed from a secret United States Navy investigation of two wrecked nuclear submarines.
#20
In WW1 an estimated 37 million people lost their lives and in the last year of WW1 the Spanish flu broke out. The flu took an estimated 50 million lives worldwide.
#21
46 BC was 445 days long and is the longest year in human history. Nicknamed the annus confusionis, or “year of confusion”, this year had two extra leap months inserted by Julius Caesar.
Timmy Pillinger 2 years ago
Roman elections were at a fixed time I'm but the chief priest who was elected got to decide on any leap days weeks or months so they sometime altered when the election was by adding time to the calendar
#22
During the Victorian period, it was normal to photograph relatives after they died.
Scout Finch 2 years ago
Isn't that wild? It also was really expensive. Watch "Ask a Mortician" on YouTube. She has an episode about it.
#23
Albert Einstein could’ve been the president of Israel.
The pizza girl is here! 2 years ago (edited)
Israel has prime ministers, not presidents. They also have presidents but he wasn't offered that.He denied the offer, he was offered it because he was jewish. Instead of him, David ben gorion was the first prime minister of Israel.
#24
Space travel was first proposed in the 1600s.
#25
A Japanese soldier never realized WWII was over until 1974.
#27
Mauritania is the world’s last country to abolish slavery, and the country didn’t make slavery a crime until 2007.
#28
A 17-Year-Old high school student designed the current U. S. flag.
#29
The Leaning Tower of Pisa was never upright.
Vix Spiderthrust 2 years ago
Mussolini tried to fix it by pouring concrete into the foundations, which made it worse.
#31
Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896 is generally considered to be the shortest war in history, lasting for a grand total of 38 minutes.
Henry Russell 2 years ago
the british went bombed the palace with only one casualy for them and 500 for the zanzibar . the palace was immediatly destroyed and a white flahg was raised above what was left of the palace
#32
Nordlingen is a German town built inside a 14 million-year-old meteorite crater.
#33
Before alarm clocks, knocker-uppers was a profession where they had to go and wake up by knocking on the doors of the townsman houses.
Catpawsarethebest 2 years ago
Always wondered how the knocker-uppers knew when to wake up. Did they have other knocker-uppers? Who might also have knocker-uppers? Maybe those knocker-uppers were people who went to bed late and they woke up the next set of knocker-uppers so they could be awake to wake the later knocker-uppers and so on?
#35
John F. Kennedy, Anthony Burgess, Aldous Huxley, and C.S. Lewis all died on the same day.
#36
100 imposters claimed to be Marie Antoinette’s dead son.
#37
Captain Morgan was a real person.
#38
Richard Nixon was an extremely talented musician. He played five instruments in total: piano, saxophone, clarinet, accordion, and violin.
#40
In her later years, Queen Elizabeth I’s teeth were black and decayed from too much sugar.
#42
In 1834, ketchup was sold as a cure for indigestion by an Ohio physician named John Cook.
#43
The first toy advertised on TV is Mr. Potato Head.
#44
The first one GB hard drive was made in 1980 and had a price of forty thousand USD.
Ashley Conover 2 years ago
To give you an idea for reference, in 1994, the computer I used mostly, had a 400 MB hard drive. So, even in 1994, 1 GB was a lot, but certainly not impossible. So, $40K 24 years earlier, sure. In 1980 though, tapes were more commonly used for large data storage. There was a time of divergence though when the UK was mostly tape and the US was disk, due to Sony making disk drives and being big in the US. For example, there is a lot of 8 bit software that was written to normal audio cassettes. You can put them in a tape player and it's similar to modem sounds. also, in 1994, a cdrom had about 650-800 MBs of storage, which was twice as big as the hard drive on that PC. Can you imagine only a few years later what CD burning brought to the table when the prices started finally coming down. -My best friend's response. He's a computer geek. He can build them, write programs, etc.
#45
One of the reasons Hollywood moved from New York to Los Angeles is to escape Thomas Edison’s patents.
#46
The shipbuilders Harland and Wolff insist that the Titanic was never advertised as an unsinkable ship.
#47
In the Salem witch trials, the accused witches weren’t actually burned at the stake. The majority were jailed, and some were hanged.
#48
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton lost the nuclear launch codes.
#49
Winston Churchill smoked 8 to 10 cigars a day.
#50
The British Royal Air Force accidentally sunk a ship full of holocaust victims in 1945.
#51
Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Jr. were both born in 1929.
The pizza girl is here! 2 years ago
So.. they're roughly the same age? Something doesn't add up for me here timeline-wise
#52
Gandhi wrote Hitler a letter imploring him to rethink the war.
#54
Turkeys were once worshipped like gods.
#55
The former head of Cuban intelligence, Fabian Escalante, told a British documentary team the CIA had tried to kill Fidel Castro more than 600 times, over a period of about 40 years.
#57
The Soviet Union and the United States were supposed to go to the Moon together during the Cold War.
#59
Genghis Khan created one of the first international postal systems.
#60
Tablecloths were originally designed to be used as one big, communal napkin.
#62
The U.S. government poisoned alcohol during prohibition.
#64
The automobile was first invented and perfected in Germany and France in the late 1800s.
Timmy Pillinger 2 years ago
Arguably the first automobile was invented in Cornwall at the beginning of the 19th century by Richard Trevithick. It was steam powered slow and clunky and there's a reason why later pioneers are remembered and and he isn't.
#65
The Great Molasses Flood killed 21 people and injured 150 others in Boston.
#66
Historians became a professional occupation in the late 19th century.
Jessica Wood 2 years ago
Technically one of the duties of bards was to preserve history through oral storytelling.
#68
The shortest term for a U.S. president was only 2 months.
#69
Since the end of WWI, over 1,000 people have died from leftover unexploded bombs.
#72
Lyndon B. Johnson gave interviews from the bathroom.
#74
In 1913 Stalin, Hitler, Trotsky, and Tito all lived in Vienna for a couple of months.
#75
When the USS Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine on 30 July 1945 survivors were left in the water for four days, during which time around 600 men died of exposure, dehydration, and shark attacks. Estimates of the number who died from shark attacks range from a few dozen to almost 150.
Kim Kermes 2 years ago
They were returning from delivering the A bombs to Tinian Island, a very secret mission. Part of the reason for the delay in rescue is that secrecy. Interesting story.
#76
Napoleon took an estimated 150,000 horses with his army as he rode into Russia in 1812, only an estimated 1,600 came back.
#78
In WWI French made a fake Paris to try and fool German bomber pilots.
#79
The Dutch declared a war against the Royalists but no battles happened. It went on for 335 years.
#80
The earliest known lottery was during the Chinese Han Dynasty between 205 – 187 BC.
#81
In 1710, Native American leaders traveled to Britain to visit the Queen.
pamela nichols 1 year ago
Native American leaders thought white men were men of honor. Broken treaties after broken treaties prove almost fatal. Annihilation was their goal. The quest for ownership of everything is the ultimate goal.
#83
Andrew Jackson had a vulgar parrot.
Timmy Pillinger 2 years ago
There are so many vulgar things about Andrew Jackson why not just have one more
#85
The Kentucky meat shower is still unexplained.
Bob La Capra 2 years ago
The Kentucky meat shower was an incident occurring on March 3, 1876, when what appeared to be chunks of red meat fell from the sky near Olympia Springs in Bath County, Kentucky. The most popular explanation is that a group of vultures regurgitated their meals after being startled into taking flight. The exact type of meat was never identified.
#86
Between 1900 and 1920, Tug of War was a legitimate event at the Summer Olympics.
#87
Fox Tossing was once a popular sport.
#88
Pope Pius II’s 'The Tale of Two Lovers', an erotic novel, was the 15th century’s most popular book.
#89
Paul Revere never actually shouted, "The British are coming!"
#90
Thanksgiving, as most Americans have been taught is not exactly accurate. In truth, native people did not willingly hand off their country to the invaders.
#91
The Aegean Sea owes its name to a man who jumped in it and died.
#92
The supposed Iron Maiden torture device never actually existed.
Timmy Pillinger 2 years ago
No it existed alright - along with lots of a fake mediaeval stuff the Victorians made
#93
The earliest known bronze gun, that employed gunpowder, was from the early Yuan dynasty and dates back to 1332.
#94
The Circus Maximum in Rome is still the largest capacity sports arena ever built.
#95
Using forks used to be seen as sacrilegious.
#97
Humanity received the first extraterrestrial signal in 1977.
Nathaniel 2 years ago
Not at all true. This "fact" refers to the famous Wow signal, for which we have not got an explanation for. We have been receiving extra-terrestrial signals since the dawn of time, given background radiation and signals from stars. If, by extra-terrestrial you mean alien intelligence then no, we are not aware of any extra-terrestrial aliens.
#98
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Founding Fathers and the 2nd and 3rd Presidents of the United States respectively, died within hours of each other on July 4.
Jackson Clark 2 years ago (edited)
John adams last words, not knowing Jefferson had died earlier in the day, was to tell Jefferson that he was the greatest friend he (Adams) had ever had
#99
George Washington opened a whiskey distillery after his presidency.
#100
The 1929 Wall Street crash did not cause a rash of suicides.
#102
Helicopter hieroglyphs were once found in an Egyptian petroglyph.
What do you think ?
Nathaniel 2 years ago
There is a downvoting troll prowling again, I have seen my comments as well as the comments of Scaggsy and others. I have upvoted any I have seen down voted.
Nathaniel 2 years ago
Another lazy list of "facts" The third one I have seen in the space of a week? Ambiguous, without context or details, and some facts just plain wrong. It is not Bored Panda, it is Lazy Panda.
Bob La Capra 2 years ago
True but if it inspires you to research the "fact" and possibly learn something, even trivial, that's worth something, no?
Load More Replies...
ARMYCHAMEALON 2 years ago
People saying this is worthless but in reality knowledge is power and even trivial facts( they did get some wrong) are good yo know
Nathaniel 2 years ago
There is a downvoting troll prowling again, I have seen my comments as well as the comments of Scaggsy and others. I have upvoted any I have seen down voted.
Nathaniel 2 years ago
Another lazy list of "facts" The third one I have seen in the space of a week? Ambiguous, without context or details, and some facts just plain wrong. It is not Bored Panda, it is Lazy Panda.
Bob La Capra 2 years ago
True but if it inspires you to research the "fact" and possibly learn something, even trivial, that's worth something, no?
Load More Replies... ARMYCHAMEALON 2 years ago
People saying this is worthless but in reality knowledge is power and even trivial facts( they did get some wrong) are good yo know
You May Like 50 Fascinating History Facts And Pics To Leave You Intrigued 50 ‘Weird History’ Pics That May Rewrite The Narrative Of How You Think The Past Went (Best Of All Time) 30 Color Photos Photographers Took 100 Years Ago That Still Mesmerize Us Today
Viktorija Ošikaitė
Mantas Kačerauskas
Mariia Tkachenko
Related on Bored Panda
