100 History Facts They Didnt Teach You At School

A singing birthday card has more computer power in it than the entire Allied Army of WWII.

The history facts they teach you in school are interesting, sure, but everyone knows that stuff.Its the facts not many people know that make history truly interesting!

For example, did you know that the longest year in history was over 400 days long?! And did you know that Hitler helped design a vehicle that we still drive today?

It makes you wonder how many things about the worlds history you actually know

Well, here wed like to educate you on some of the lesser-known history facts that they dont teach you at school!

Prepare to be amused & amazed with this huge round-up of the top 100 craziest history facts you could ever know!

The nephew and heir of Julius Caesar, Roman Emperor Augustus, had an estimated net worth of $.46 trillion when counting for inflation.

Some say that Mansa Musa, king of Timbuktu, was the worlds wealthiest man as his wealth was apparently too great to count.

However, Augustuss staggering wealthcouldbe measured.

At age 32, when he died, Alexander the Great had conquered and created the largest land-based empire the world has ever seen. It stretched from the Balkans to Pakistan.

In 323 BC, Alexander fell ill, and after 12 days of excruciating pain, he seemingly passed away.

However, his corpse didnt show any signs of rot or decomposition for a whole six days.

Modern-day scientists believe Alexander suffered from the neurological disorder Guillain-Barr Syndrome.

They believe that when he died, he was actually just paralyzed and mentally aware. Basically, he was horrifically buried alive!

Named Ching Shih, she was a prostitute in China. This was until the Commander of the Red Flag Fleet bought and married her.

But rather than just viewing her as a wife, her husband considered her his equal, and she became an active pirate commander in the fleet.

Ching Shih soon earned the respect of her fellow pirates. So much so that after her husbands death, she became the captain of the fleet.

Under Shihs leadership, the Red Flag Fleet consisted of over 300 warships, with a possible 1,200 more support ships. She even had a possible 40,000 80,000 men, women, and children.

They terrorized the waters aroundChina. The Red Flag Fleet was such a fearsome band of raiders that the Chinese government eventually pardoned Ching Shih and her entire fleet just to get them off the high seas!

The athletes did this to imitate the Gods but also to help them easily clear toxins from their skin through sweating after each attempt at a sport.

In fact, the word gymnastics comes from the Ancient Greek words gumnasa (athletic training, exercise) and gumns (naked).

This translates as to train naked.

Julius Caesar is probably the most iconic name associated with the Romans. Likewise, his assassination and death are also highly notorious.

Due to his coup dtat of the Roman Republic and his proclamation of himself as Dictator for Life, along with his radical political views, a group of his fellow Roman senators led by his best friend Brutus assassinated him onMarch 15, 44 BC.

During the assassination, Caesar was stabbed at least 23 times before finally succumbing to his wounds.

He passed away with fabled words to his former best friend Brutus, allegedly being, you too, sweet child?

When you visit or see the Colosseum these days, youll notice how the stone exterior appears to be covered in pockmarks all across its surface.

Whilst you might assume this is just a degradation of the material due to its age, it is actually because it was originally clad almost entirely in marble.

The reason for the pockmarks is after the fall of Rome; the city was looted and pillaged by the Goths. Yes, thats right, the Goths!

They took all of the marble from the Colosseum and stripped it (mostly) down to its bare stone setting.

The holes in the stone are from where the iron clamps and poles attaching the marble cladding to it have been ripped out.

It was originally known as the Amphitheatrum Flavium, or Flavian Amphitheatre, as it was constructed during the Flavian dynasty.

Residents of Rome nicknamed it the Colosseo.

This was due to the fact that it was built next to a 164-foot statue of Emperor Nero known as the colossus of Nero.

Grigori Rasputin was a Russian mystic and supposed holy man. He became friends with the last Russian Tsar and Tsarina.Over time, he came to influence the Russian royals, much to the displeasure of many members of the Russian nobility.

This, combined with his drunkenness and lechery, led to several Russian nobles forming a plot to assassinate the man.

They invited him over to one of their houses, gave him cakes and wine laced with cyanide, all to no effect, and then shot him in the chest.

To their horror, Rasputin started to cough, and they realized he was still alive!

How did they fix the problem? The nobles shot Rasputin two more times once in the head. Finally, they threw his body into the frozen Malaya Nevka River.

A female gladiator was called a Gladiatrix, or Gladiatrices (plural). They were rarer than their male counterparts.

Gladiatrices served the same purpose of executing criminals, fighting each other, and fighting animals in Romes various fighting pits.

Half a millennium before Christopher Columbus discovered America, Viking chief Leif Eriksson of Greenland landed on the Island of Newfoundland in the year 1,000 AD.

TheVikingsunder Leif Eriksson settled Newfoundland as well as discovering and settling Labrador further north in Canada.

Hanns Scharff was a master interrogator who was very much against physical torture and brutality.

His techniques were so successful that the US military later incorporated his methods into their own interrogation schools.

Scharffs best tactics for squeezing information out of prisoners included: nature walks without guards present, baking them homemade food, cracking jokes, drinking beers, and afternoon tea with German fighter aces.

He even took trips to visit fellow POWs and swimming pool parties. And on some rare occasions, even test flights of German fighter aircraft.

Aselephantsare very intelligent and easy to train, it proved easy enough to train them as executioners and torturers.

They could be taught to slowly break bones, crush skulls, twist off limbs, or even execute people using large blades fitted to their tusks.

In some parts of Asia, this method of execution was still popular up to the late 19thCentury.

Starting in 1942, the BBC issued a public appeal for postcards and photographs of mainland Europes coast, from Norway to the Pyrenees.

This was an intelligence-gathering exercise. Initiated by Lieutenant General Frederick Morgan, he was searching for the hardest beaches to defend.

The postcards were sent to the War Office and helped form part of the decision to choose Normandy as the location for the eventual D-Day landings.

Marcus Licinius Crassus was known as the wealthiest man in Rome during his life.

The son of a Consul of Rome, Crassus fought in Sullas Civil War, played a key part in defeating Spartacus and ending the Third Servile War, and formed the first Triumvirate with Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great.

A shrewd man, throughout all he did, Crassus accumulated more and more wealth and it was his thirst for wealth that would eventually lead to his downfall.

Leading his troops in an ill-fated conquest of Parthia (modern-day Iran), Crassus and his forces were brutalized and bested by the Parthians time and time again.

After an unsuccessful parley for peace with the Parthian leaders, Crassus was killed. The Parthians poured molten gold down his throat as a symbol of his thirst for wealth.

Some even say that his gilded head and hands were sent to the Parthian King to keep as trophies of his victory against Crassus and Rome.

Over the course of WWII, the Allied armies dropped roughly 2.7 million tons of bombs over Nazi-occupied Europe. Half of that landed in Germany.

Before any construction work can begin in Germany, the ground must undergo extensive surveys to look for unexploded ordinances.

Sometimes bombs are discovered naturally. One example was from 2011

45,000 people were evacuated from their homes when a drought revealed a 4,000-pound blockbuster bomb lying on the bed of the River Rhine in the middle of Koblenz.

In fact, the Ancient Greeks viewed trousers as effeminate and would mock any men who wore them.

I betHitler, Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt would have killed to get their hands on one of those cards!

The computer chip within them was so powerful by comparison that it would be inconceivable to the leaders of that time how we simply throw them away!

There wasnt a great detail of civil rights in the Middle Ages, and as it turns out, there werent a great of animal rights either. So much so that they were even subject to human justice.

One such case happened in Falaise,France, where a pig attacked a childs face and went on to later die from their wounds.

The pig was arrested, kept in prison, and then sent to court where it stood trial for murder, was found guilty and then executed by hanging!

This is one of those facts that give you some impression of just howexpansivethe life of the Egyptian Empire truly was.

Cleopatra reigned from 51 BC to 30 BC, roughly 2,500 years after the Great Pyramid of Giza was built (between roughly 2580 BC 2560 BC) and roughly 2,000 years before the first lunar landings in 1969.

British Army Officer Henry Shrapnel was the first person to invent an anti-personnel shell that could transport a large number of bullets to its target before releasing them.

This was all at a far greater distance than the current rifle fire at the time.

Before this time, British tank crews had to exit their armored vehicles when they wanted to make a quick coffee.

On the road to Caen in 1944, a German Tiger tank ambushed and destroyed a parked column of almost thirty armored British vehicles in 15 minutes whilst the crew was having an impromptu tea break.

This made the British high command realize if tank crews could make a brew on the go, then they wouldnt be susceptible to being caught with their pants down and their kettles out by the enemy.

So after this, the next British-designed battle tank, the Centurion, came with a boiler fitted to the interior powered by the tanks electric circuits so the crew would never be short of a lovely warm cup of tea!

Complete with a replica of Champs-Elyses and Gard Du Nord, this fake Paris was built by the French towards the end of WWI. It was built as a means of throwing off German bombers and fighter pilots flying over French skies.

It also even had a fake railway that lit up at certain points to provide the illusion from above of a train moving along the tracks!

The secret of how to make Greek Fire was lost with the fall of the Roman Empire.This weapon is so unique and deadly due to the fact that throwing water onto it would only feed the fire. It was almost gelatinous in texture and would stick to things.

It was mostly used in naval warfare, as the large flamethrowers needed for its projectile use could be better accommodated by ships rather than infantry.

The Greek Fire would easily demolish a fleet of wood and canvas ships floating on water.

Hand-written in an unknown language, the Voynich Manuscript has been carbon-dated to roughly 1404 1438.

Some of the pages are missing, and some of them are foldable pull-out pages, while most pages have illustrations.

Hundreds of cryptographers and master codebreakers have tried to decipher it over the years, with none succeeding in grasping its meaning or origin.

During a sea battle in the Pacific Ocean inDecember1940, two Royal Navy ships, the HMSPrince of Walesand the HMSRepulse,were sunk by Japanese fighters.

The following day, Japanese Flight Lieutenant Haruki Iki flew to the location of the battle and dropped two wreaths over the seas.

One to commemorate the pilots of the Japanese Naval Air Force who died. The other is for the sailors of the British Navy, who fought so valiantly to defend their ships.

More than 5,000 tons of bombs were dropped by the Allies on the Axis powers as part of the prelude to the Normandy landings.

Scientists have studied the sand on the beaches of Normandy, and theyve found microscopic bits of smoothed-down shrapnel from the landings.

They estimate that, within 150 years, the beach will have fully lost any remaining shrapnel to rust and erosion.

Its a saying that refers to cheap axe heads flying off their handles when swung backward before a chop.

Popular with Europes aristocracy during the 17thand 18thcenturies, fox tossing would involve a person or a couple throwing afoxas far and as high as they could!

The Mayan people believedturkeyswere the vessels of the Gods and honored them with worship.

They were even domesticated to have roles in religious rites!

The face of the much-loved rum brand was a Welsh privateer who fought against the Spanish alongside the English in the Caribbean.

His full name was Sir Henry Morgan, and he was knighted by King Charles II.

Captain Morgan died in 1688 in Jamaica as a very wealthy man.

Back then, the world was a very intolerant place. More often than not, conquering warlords and emperors werent open to religions other than their own.

Genghis Khan was very different from other conquerors, though, in many different ways.

One was his interest in learning philosophical and moral lessons from other religions.

Despite being a Tengrist, he often consulted with Buddhist monks, Muslims, Christian missionaries, and Taoist monks.

Its fair to say that Edison was one of the worlds most notorious intellectual property thieves.

Of the 1,093 things he smashed a patent on, he stole most of them off real geniuses likeNikola Tesla, Wilhelm Rontgen, and Joseph Swan the latter of whom originally invented the lightbulb!

Einsteinwasnt a citizen of Israel. However, he was Jewish. The German-born physicist was offered the post but turned it down in 1952, saying:

I am deeply moved by the offer from our State of Israel, and at once saddened and ashamed that I cannot accept it. All my life I have dealt with objective matters, hence I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official functions.

If you didnt know anything about Caligula, then this is a pretty good way to get the impression.

He was infamous for his brutality and madness. Caligula fed criminals to animals and had conversations with the moon.

He loved his horse called Incitatus so much that he gave him a marble stall, an ivory manger, a jeweled collar, and even a house!

Caligula made his horse a senator and allegedly planned to make him Consul before his assassination.

He declaredcatsto be agents of devil worshippers. Not all cats, though; it was black moggies in particular.

The Pope declared that they should be exterminated.

Known worldwide for its four degrees lean, this freestanding bell tower was constructed in the 12thCentury.

When construction on the second story started, due to the unstable ground it was built on, the tower started to lean.

After this, the lean only increased as the construction process went on, and it went on to become more iconic than the tower itself!

People used flour bags, potato sacks, and anything made out of burlap.

Because of this, food distributors started to make their sacks more colorful to help people remain a little bit fashionable.

The famous Romantic-period poet was peeved when he found out that Trinity College, Cambridge, didnt allow dogs on campus.

So, to rebel against the mans draconian rules, he decided to bring a tame bear with him to campus.

Whilst the colleges authorities tried to protest, he won his case as the rules didnt explicitly state you couldnt bring abearto campus.

To parade his victory and gloat to the powers that be, Byron often took his bear for walks around campus on a lead!

Called the Althing, it was established in 930 and has stayed as the acting parliament of Iceland since then.

During the Great War, an estimated 200 pounds of explosives were fired per square foot of territory on the Western front.However, not all of these shells exploded.

Every year since the end of the war, something called an iron harvest takes place.

This is the annual harvest or unearthing of unexploded WWI bombs. As well as grenades, artillery shells, and other explosives which occur mainly during the spring planting and autumn harvest in the fields that were once the Great Wars arena.

Since 1919, over 1,000 civilians and ordnance collectors have died from explosions caused by these in France and Belgium.

Nicknamed theannus confusionis, or year of confusion, this year had two extra leap months inserted by Julius Caesar.

This was in order to make his newly-formed Julian Calendar match up with the seasonal year.

This calendar is a variation that is still used in most places across the world today.

Back then, the Sahara Desert was a lush plain full of life and also full of predators.

In 2009, fossil hunters found the remains of crocodiles.These remains had large land-going legs that were capable of galloping across the land at breakneck speeds.

They could easily snap up unlucky dinosaurs in their jaws!

People would dress their newly-deceased relatives in their best clothing and then put them in lifelike poses and photograph them.

They did this to preserve one last image of their dead loved one in a strange form of commemoration.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi was a 29-year-old Naval Engineer on a three-month business trip to Hiroshima. OnAugust 6,1945, theEnola Gaydropped its atomic payload on the city.

Yamaguchi was less than 2 miles from ground zero and was thrown into a potato patch.He survived the blast and was able to make a perilous journey through the devastated city to the railway station.

Here, on August 7th, he boarded a train on an overnight ride to his hometown of Nagasaki.

On the morning ofAugust 9th, he was with some colleagues in an office building when another boom split the sound barrier. A flash of white light filled the sky.

Yamaguchi emerged from the wreckage with only minor injuries on top of his current injuries.He had survived two nuclear blasts in two days.

Fought between Britain and Zanzibar and known as the Anglo-Zanzibar War, this war occurred onAugust 27, 1896.

It was all over the ascension of the next Sultan in Zanzibar and resulted in a British victory.

Dentistry in 1815 wasnt exactly as intricate as it is today. In fact, it was downright savage!

After the Battle of Waterloo, dentists flocked to the battlefield to scavenge teeth from the tens of thousands of dead soldiers.

They then took their bounty to their dental workshops are crafted them into dentures for toothless rich people.

It was part of the Olympic schedule between 1900 and 1920 and occurred at 5 different SummerOlympic Games.

The nation to win the most medals in this was Britain with 5 (2 gold, 2 silver, 1 bronze), then the USA with 3 (1 gold, 1 silver, 1 bronze), while Sweden had one gold medal, France and the Netherlands had one silver medal, and Belgium won a bronze medal.

Due to medicine not being so great, comatose people were sometimes mistakenly buried alive.

In order to counteract these potential blunders, people were buried with little bells above ground. These bells were attached to a string, which went into the coffin.

If the person were buried alive and later woke up, they would tug on the string that would ring the bell above ground.

Someone would hear it and then dig the person out of their premature resting place.

Because of bells attached to coffins back in the day, people wrongly assume that the term saved by the bell comes from people being saved by these coffin bells.

However, the term actually comes from boxing.

It comes from being saved from a knockout or countdown by the ring of a bell, which signals the end of the current round.

Its often said that George Washington had wooden teeth, however, this is as false as the dentures he actually wore.

George had luxury dentures that were made out of gold, lead, and ivory, as well as being a mixture of animal andhuman teeth!

A Roman Triumph was a sort of parade. During this, a Roman General who had conquered new territory for Rome marched through the streets with his troops.

They showed off the spoils of war in front of huge crowds of partygoing spectators.

There were many customs that occurred during a Triumph. One of which was for the returning Roman soldiers to sing crude and banter-like chants about their commanders to the amusement of the crowds.

One that survived history is from Julius Caesars Gallic Triumph. His soldiers sang something like: Romans hide away your wives, the bald adulterer is here.We drank away your gold in Gaul, and now weve come to borrow more!

They would lather their slaves in honey, which would serve a dual purpose of attracting any flies to their slaves rather than themselves, as well as trapping and killing the flies.

This is because urine contains a very high ammonia content, and ammonia is one of the most powerful and readily available natural cleaners on this planet!

As a Brit, this is probably my favorite historical fact on this list!

Pragmatically called mustache cups, these specially-made mugs had guards on them, which prevented a mans mustache from dipping into their warm cup of tea!

Although its not exactly known what the prizes were, its believed that Chinese citizens of this era could draw keno slips (in the way one draws straws) for a nominal fee.

This lottery was created to help fund major government projects, including the construction ofthe Great Wall of China.

Created by Emperor Augustus Caesar for the same reason, to fund government projects such as repair works, the Roman lottery came with prizes that were objects that usually varied in value.

Pretty tame, right? Well, one Roman Emperors lottery prizes werent so friendly at all.

Elagabalus, who reigned between 218 & 222 AD, was known for his cruel running of the lottery.At first, his lottery was pretty brilliant and had prizes such as slaves or houses.

However, not long into his reign, he started having lottery tickets catapulted into crowds of gathered plebs.

He also catapultedlive freakin venomous snakesinto the crowdalongwith the lottery tickets!The prizes tended to be things like dead animals and death sentences. Even goddamn wasps and bees.

It should come as no surprise that he made for a pretty nasty emperor and was assassinated after four years at the age of 18!

Ancient Sparta, during its Classical Age, was an immensely wealthy country. Mainly due to their conquest and domination of a neighboring race named the Helots.

When a Spartan boy reached adulthood and became a man, the Spartan state awarded him with an allotment of public farmland. They also rewarded him with a constituent of Helot slaves to work it.

This basically turned every Spartan citizen into a wealthy member of the conventional upper class. So they didnt have to work for a living.

Still, private property existed, which is important because

Spartan inheritance law was crazy progressive compared to the rest of Ancient Greek inheritance law.When a Spartan man died, his public state-given farmland went back to the state. However, his private land would go to his wife.

A lot of husbands died young in Sparta due to their militaristic culture, and when they did, their widows would often grow their inheritance over the course of their life before their own deaths.

Upontheirdeaths, their land would pass equally toboththeir male and female children.

So, a young woman who married a wealthy man would most likely inherit his fortune young. Then inherit their mothers fortuneandgrow their own, becoming super ultra-rich.

They would then pass that on totheirchildren and on and on, creating a crazy snowball inheritance effect.

Mind-boggling as though it may seem, the University of Oxford first opened its doors to students all the way back in 1096.

It became a fully-fledged university with student housing and a specific curriculum by 1249.

By comparison, the Aztec Empire is said to have originated with the founding of the city of Tenochtitln at Lake Texcoco by the Mexica, which occurred in the year 1325.

Due in part to the surge of wartime patriotism and in part because of conscription, the US Army numbered 12,000,000 soldiers by the end of the war in 1945.

By 1943, the German military had reached 11,000,000 soldiers.

By the end of the war, the Soviet Unions army (as formidable as it was) also reached 11 million soldiers.

The great fire of 1666 apparently traces its way to a bakers oven and caused massive damage across the city of London.

However, despite destroying over 13,500 houses and displacing 80,000 people, it only claimed the lives of 6 unlucky Londoners.

When Bram Stoker released his iconic horror classic in 1897, it was hailed as the most blood-curdling novel of the paralyzed century and terrified audiences worldwide.

However, the titular Count was based on none other than historys own Vlad the Impaler.

As the ruling monarch of Wallachia, a Romanian region of Transylvania, Vlad soon made a fearsome reputation for himself by killing and impaling the still-twitching bodies of his enemies on long sticks which he planted outside his castle and all around his lands.

After Vlads eventual death at the hands of the Ottoman Empire, the history of his descendants is murky, which is what inspired Bram Stokers character ofCount Dracula.

Named Elizabeth Bthory de Ecsed, she was born onAugust 7, 1560.She was accused of torturing and killing over 650 young women. Most of the women were between the ages of 10 and 14.

Her cruelty was limitless. She regularly bathed in the blood of virgins to preserve her youthful looks.

After facing accusations from many people, smallfolk and nobles alike, she was detained. However, she did not face trial due to her familys aristocratic high standing.

Instead, she was privately imprisoned in a windowless room for four years until she died in 1614.

Not just that, but they also had a whole new timekeeping system too!Between 1793 and 1805, the ruling French government used the French Republican Calendar to remove all religious and royalist ties to the old calendar.

It was also part of a wider effort to decimalize France in terms of time, currency and metrication.

The French Republican Calendar had 10-hour days, with 100 minutes to an hour and 100 seconds to a minute.

Whilst this crazy calendar did have 12 months, each one of these months was 30 days. They were all given new names that reflected a meaning for each season.

For example, one in winter was named Nivôse, which is Latin for snow.

One of the reasons the great Khans Mongol army was so lethal is because of their fluid and flexible makeup, as well as their vast communication capabilities.

One of his earliest decrees as Khan was to establish a mounted courier service called the Yam.

The Yam grew into a military postal service spanning multiple borders, complete with a network of post houses and waystations across the whole of his Empire.

What could both the Brits and Ruskies want with this Middle-Eastern neutral country, you ask? Cmon, dont be that guy.

ItsIran,for crying out loud.They wanted all of that oil that sweet, sweet oil and they got it!

By invading the country in 1941 during Operation Countenance, they were jointly able to secure the Iranian oilfields, as well as a secure supply line for the Allied forces.

The Mongolian Emperor was known for siring many, many children at least 11!

Scientists conducted a study in 2003 that showed that one in 200 men share a Y chromosome with the conqueror.

This may not sound like a lot, but you should consider that there are roughly 3.7 billion men on the planet.

That makes a total of around 19 million men ancestors of the Great Khan!

If you ask somebody to name things that are quintessentially Russian, theyll probably say winter, communism, and, of course, vodka.

It should come as no surprise that, after being punched almost all the way to Moscow by the Nazis and then fighting their way back to Berlin, the Russians were pretty elated when they heard the news of the Third Reichs fall.

Jubilation and street parties engulfed the Soviet Union, lasting for days and days even non-drinkers saw this as cause enough to join in with the revelry.

That is, until all of the nations vodka reserves ran out. A mere 22 hours after the partying started.

It wasnt exactly a means of keeping the American spirit up through the darkest financial crisis in its histor.