49 Fun Facts About Historical Trivia Facts

The shortest recorded war, between Britain and Zanzibar in 1896, lasted roughly how long?

It lasted about 40 minutes: British warships opened fire at 9:02 a.m. on 27 August 1896 and the sultan's palace had surrendered by roughly 9:40.

Teaching at which university is documented as early as 1096?

Oxford: teaching there is recorded from 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world, older than the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, founded in 1325.

The Great Fire of London in 1666 started in a bakery on which street?

The fire began on 2 September 1666 in Thomas Farriner's bakery on Pudding Lane and went on to destroy more than 13,000 houses and St Paul's Cathedral.

Which agency, approved by Lincoln the day he was shot, was founded in 1865 to fight counterfeit money?

The Secret Service was created in 1865 inside the Treasury to suppress counterfeit currency; it took on full-time presidential protection only after William McKinley's assassination in 1901.

By legend, Caligula planned to give which office to his favourite horse, Incitatus?

Suetonius wrote that Caligula intended to make Incitatus consul; it never happened, and some historians read the story as a jibe at the Senate rather than madness.

How many years did the Hundred Years' War between England and France actually last?

It lasted 116 years, running with long truces from 1337 to 1453, and ended with England holding almost nothing in France but Calais.

L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland is the only confirmed North American settlement of which people?

Roughly five centuries before Columbus. Tree-ring evidence pins Norse activity there to the year 1021.

Woolly mammoths survived where in the Arctic until about 2000 BC, centuries after the Great Pyramid was finished?

Wrangel Island, off Siberia's Arctic coast, held an isolated herd that survived until roughly 2000 BC, outliving every mainland mammoth population by thousands of years.

Nintendo was founded in Kyoto in 1889 to make what?

Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Nintendo in 1889 to make hanafuda playing cards; the company did not release its first video game until the 1970s.

Alexander Bain's 1843 'electric printing telegraph' patent was an early version of which device?

A commercial fax service ran between Paris and Lyon in 1865, eleven years before the telephone was invented.

What saved the Eiffel Tower from being dismantled 20 years after the 1889 World's Fair?

Its usefulness as a radio antenna: Gustave Eiffel's radiotelegraphy experiments from 1903 gave the tower a military purpose, so Paris let it stand when its 20-year permit ended in 1909.

As a young man, Julius Caesar was kidnapped and held for ransom by whom?

Pirates: Cilician pirates seized Caesar around 75 BC. Plutarch says he joked that he would return and crucify them, and after his ransom was paid he did exactly that.

In 1698 Tsar Peter the Great of Russia introduced a tax on what?

Men who paid carried a copper or silver 'beard token' as proof. The tax was meant to push Russians toward clean-shaven Western fashions.

In which year did the last surviving grandson of President John Tyler, born 1790, die?

2025: Harrison Ruffin Tyler died that May aged 96. Born in 1928, 66 years after the president's death, he was the son of Lyon Gardiner Tyler, fathered when John Tyler was 63.

In what year did France carry out its last execution by guillotine?

1977: Hamida Djandoubi was guillotined in Marseille on 10 September 1977, a few months after Star Wars opened in American cinemas. France abolished the death penalty in 1981.

Which country's parliament, the Althing, was established in 930 and claims to be the oldest in the world?

Iceland's Althing first met in 930 at Þingvellir, an open-air site in a rift valley where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates pull apart.

When Coca-Cola launched in 1886, its two key ingredients were caffeine and what?

Cocaine, from coca leaf extract, paired with caffeine from the kola nut. Sold first as a patent medicine, Coca-Cola removed the cocaine from its recipe around 1903.

In which year did women in Switzerland gain the right to vote in federal elections?

1971: a national referendum that February gave Swiss women the federal vote. The canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden held out on local votes until the Federal Supreme Court forced it in 1990.

Which country was the first to give all women the vote in national elections, in 1893?

New Zealand's Electoral Act of 19 September 1893 enfranchised all adult women, who voted for the first time in the general election ten weeks later that November.

What did China's first astronaut, Yang Liwei, say about the Great Wall after his 2003 spaceflight?

NASA says the wall is barely visible from low orbit even in perfect conditions and no more conspicuous than a highway. The Moon claim is a myth.

For most of their history, athletes at the ancient Olympic Games competed how?

Naked: athletes competed nude, and the Greek gymnos ('naked') gives us 'gymnasium'. The Games were held every four years at Olympia from 776 BC for an olive wreath.

In January 1943, US officials briefly banned the sale of what as a wartime conservation measure?

Sliced bread: the ban, meant to save the heavier wax wrapping sliced loaves needed and the steel in slicing machines, drew such outcry that it was lifted after about seven weeks in March 1943.

How were the nineteen people executed for witchcraft at Salem in 1692 put to death?

By hanging: all nineteen were hanged. A twentieth victim, Giles Corey, was pressed to death with stones for refusing to enter a plea, and nobody at Salem was burned.

After President Chaim Weizmann died in 1952, which scientist was offered the presidency of Israel and declined?

Albert Einstein was offered the post after Weizmann's death in November 1952 and declined, saying he lacked both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people.

Construction of the Leaning Tower of Pisa took place in three stages over roughly how many years?

199 years, from 1173 to 1372. It began to sink while the second floor was going up in 1178, and long pauses for war may have let the soil settle enough to stop it toppling.

Mansa Musa gave away so much gold on his 1324 pilgrimage that gold prices fell for years in which city?

Cairo: Musa spent and gave away so much gold there that a gold mithqal fell from 25 silver dirhams to under 22, and the price had not recovered twelve years later.

Contrary to legend, George Washington's false teeth were never made from which material?

Wood: his dentures used hippopotamus ivory, brass, gold and human teeth, but never wood. The wooden-teeth myth appeared in school textbooks well into the twentieth century.

According to the historian Tacitus, where was Nero when the Great Fire of Rome broke out in AD 64?

Tacitus says he hurried back to organise relief. The instrument he supposedly played would have been a lyre; the fiddle did not exist yet.

How must Marie Curie's laboratory notebooks from the 1890s be stored?

In lead-lined boxes because they are radioactive: the notebooks are contaminated with radium-226, whose half-life is about 1,600 years, so readers at the Bibliothèque nationale de France must wear protective clothing.

What kind of entertainment was a Roman 'naumachia'?

A staged naval battle: Titus put on two naumachiae for the Colosseum's opening games in AD 80, one of them reportedly inside the flooded new amphitheatre itself.

Why did Herostratus burn down the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in 356 BC?

To make his name famous forever: under torture he confessed fame was his motive, and Ephesus banned anyone from ever mentioning his name, which obviously did not work.

Which novel was written by a holidaymaker kept indoors by the 1816 'Year Without a Summer'?

Frankenstein: Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and John Polidori were rained in beside Lake Geneva that June, and Byron's ghost-story contest produced her novel, published in 1818.

Cleopatra, who died in 30 BC, lived closer in time to which event than to the building of the Great Pyramid?

The Great Pyramid was built around 2600 BC, roughly 2,500 years before her; the Moon landing came about 2,000 years after.

How long did the Great Pyramid of Giza remain the tallest human-made structure on Earth?

More than 3,700 years: finished around 2560 BC at 146.6 metres, it was not overtaken until Lincoln Cathedral's spire in England around 1311, roughly 3,800 years later.

Kongō Gumi, the world's oldest documented company until 2006, was in which business?

It was founded in AD 578 to build a Buddhist temple in Osaka and was run by the same family for some 40 generations.

On 9 November 1989, what did Günter Schabowski say when asked when new travel rules would take effect?

'As far as I know, immediately, without delay': Schabowski had not been properly briefed on the decree. Crowds rushed the checkpoints that night and the Berlin Wall was effectively open by midnight.

At the peak of Dutch tulip mania in February 1637, a single bulb could sell for more than ten times what?

A skilled craftsman's annual income: at the peak some bulbs changed hands for more than ten times a skilled artisan's yearly earnings. Often called the first recorded speculative bubble, it collapsed within weeks.

How many different men ruled as Roman emperor during the single year AD 69?

Four: Galba, Otho, Vitellius and finally Vespasian, whose Flavian dynasty then built the Colosseum.

In Britain from the 1600s, ketchup was usually made from which main ingredient rather than tomatoes?

Mushrooms: thin, spiced mushroom ketchup was the standard British form through the 1700s and 1800s; other early recipes used oysters, walnuts or anchovies. Tomato ketchup only became standard in the nineteenth century.

The Rosetta Stone, which unlocked Egyptian hieroglyphs, was found in 1799 by soldiers of which army?

They uncovered it while demolishing a wall in a fort. The British took it as a spoil of war and it has been in the British Museum since 1802.

Contrary to the Disney version, whom did Pocahontas actually marry in 1614?

John Rolfe, a tobacco planter, married her in April 1614. She travelled to England with him in 1616 and died at Gravesend in 1617, aged about 21.

What was Abraham Lincoln's 1849 invention, the only patent held by a president, meant to do?

Float stuck boats over shoals with inflatable bladders: patent 6,469 described bellows fixed to a hull to lift a grounded vessel, an idea from his Mississippi flatboat days. It was never manufactured.

In which city did Frau Troffea start a 'dancing plague' in July 1518?

Strasbourg, then a free city of the Holy Roman Empire: within a month somewhere between 50 and 400 people were dancing. Explanations range from ergot poisoning to mass hysteria.

When Pope Gregory XIII's new calendar took effect in October 1582, what date followed Thursday 4 October?

Ten days were deleted to fix the drift the Julian calendar had built up since the Council of Nicaea. Britain did not switch until 1752.

Which university, the oldest in the United States, was founded in 1636, before Isaac Newton was born?

It was named in 1639 for John Harvard, a clergyman who left it his library and half his estate.

In late 1932, the Australian Army fought a losing 'war' with Lewis machine guns against which animal?

The birds split into small, mobile groups and the commander compared individual emus to tanks.

How fast did the wave of molasses travel through Boston's North End in the 1919 Great Molasses Flood?

About 35 mph: a tank holding 2.3 million gallons burst on 15 January 1919 and the wave, estimated at 35 mph and 25 feet high, killed 21 people and injured about 150.

In January 897, Pope Stephen VI put which dead predecessor's corpse on trial in the 'Cadaver Synod'?

Formosus had been dead about nine months; he was found guilty and his papacy declared null.

Which foreign monarch's arbitration settled the 1859 'Pig War' border dispute between the US and Britain?

His commission ruled for the US in 1872, choosing the Haro Strait boundary; the war's only casualty was a pig.