Stupid History: Tales of Stupidity, Strangeness, and Mythconceptions Throughout the Ages

by Leland Gregory

  According to the environmental group Greenpeace,

  an estimated fifty nuclear warheads, most of them

  from the former Soviet Union, still lie on the

  bottom of the world’s oceans.

  Still More Bizarre Book Titles

  • New Guinea Tapeworms and Jewish Grandmothers: Tales of Parasites and People, Robert S. Desowitz (1981)

  • Sex After Death, B. J. Ferrell and D. E. Frey (1983)

  • How to Get Fat, Edward Smith (1865)

  • How to Cook Husbands, Elizabeth Strong Worthington (1899)

  • Cold Meat and How to Disguise It, M. E. Rattray (1904)

  • Sex Life of the Foot and Shoe, William Rossi (1977)

  • How to Be Happy Though Married, E. J. Hardy (1885)

  • Let’s Make Some Undies, Marion Hall (1954)

  • One Hundred and Forty-one Ways of Spelling Birmingham, William Hamper (1880)

  From late July into early September, everyone cranks

  up the air-conditioning in anticipation of the sweltering

  dog days of summer. It certainly is an apropos name—

  because, like overheated dogs, we just want to lie around,

  drink a lot of cold beverages, and pant. But the dog days

  of summer aren’t named after dogs. They’re named after

  Sirius, the Dog Star, which prominently rises and sets

  with the sun during this time of year. The ancients thought

  the heat of Sirius combined with the heat from the sun

  created this doggone hot time of the year.

  All the News That’s Fit to Print

  Earlier, I gave examples of contradictory reporting of modern events, and if we can’t even get the facts straight immediately after they happen, how are we going to keep history straight? We can’t. Here are more examples of newspaper articles, published on the same day, with very different viewpoints:• “Trade Perks Up” (Independent, 1/29/1987)

  • “Trade Deficit Worst on Record” (Independent, 1/29/1987)

  Or how about these:• “Growth Rate Slows in Third Quarter” (Financial Times, 12/20/1986)

  • “Economy Grows 2%” (Independent, 12/20/1986)

  • “Economy at 1% Growth” (Daily Telegraph, 12/20/1986)

  • “Economy Well Short at Only 0.3%” (Guardian, 12/20/1986)

  • “A Growing Economy” (Today, 12/20/1986)

  Despite its name, the century plant does not bloom

  every hundred years. In fact, in favorable climates,

  it could be called the “decade plant” because it

  usually blooms every five to ten years. The century

  plant has been known, however, to take as long as

  sixty years to bloom.

  Getting Down to Brass Tacks

  At the same time explorer Samuel Wallis discovered the Tahitian Islands in June 1767, his crewmen discovered the native women would trade sex for iron nails. The Tahitians found many uses for iron nails, and they soon became more precious than silver or gold. Soon a very precarious condition evolved: On the one hand, you had beautiful exotic women willing to “do anything” for iron nails, and on the other hand, you had lonely, bored sailors with nothing to do but figure out how to get their hands on iron nails—thereby getting their hands on the beautiful exotic women. And at the heart of the dilemma was the HMS Dolphin—a wooden ship held together by iron nails. Captain Wallis was forced to forbid the trade. “It was soon found that all the belaying cleats had been ripped off,” wrote the captain in his log, “and that there was scarcely one of the hammock nails left.” The nail crisis came to a head when a Mr. Pinckney’s robust transactions led to the collapse of the mainsail. I’m not sure about this, but it’s possible this is where “nailing” or “getting nailed” became synonymous with sex.

  Myth

  The forbidden fruit said to be plucked from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and eaten by Adam and Eve was an apple.

  Truth

  Not sure. The Bible references only the “fruit of the tree” (Genesis 3:3) and names no particular fruit. In Christianity, the fruit is usually portrayed as an apple, but in Judaism, it is thought to be a fig, grapes, a citron, or wheat.

  First in Our Hearts, Maybe . . .

  Here’s something about the presidents we all know is correct: George Washington was the first president of the United States. Nope. Think about it: The original thirteen colonies of the United States claimed their independence from England through the Declaration of Independence signed in 1776. Okay. Now, George Washington wasn’t elected president of the United States until 1789. That means there is a gap of thirteen years between the founding of our nation and the election of the first president. Who ran the country during those first thirteen years? John Hanson, that’s who. John Hanson was elected “President of the United States in Congress Assembled” by a unanimous vote of Congress on November 5, 1781. He served for one year.

  Hanson was then followed by Elias Boudinot, the second president of the United States; Thomas Mifflin, the third president; Richard Henry Lee, the fourth; Nathan Gorman, the fifth; Arthur St. Claire, the sixth; and Cyrus Griffin, the seventh. And coming in at number eight is good old George Washington.

  One overlooked fact about the Boston Tea Party

  of December 16, 1773, is that the colonists, dressed as

  Indians, inadvertently chose low tide to throw the party—

  and the tea—overboard. What happened was that the

  nearly 350 crates of tea piled up in the shallow water,

  and the partygoers had to jump overboard and smash open

  the crates to make sure the tea was ruined.

  A Pachyderm of Lies

  An article in the April 1984 edition of Technology Review titled “Retrobreeding the Woolly Mammoth” described an effort by Soviet scientists to bring the woolly mammoth back from extinction. The article explained that DNA, taken from a woolly mammoth found frozen in the Siberian ice, was injected into living elephant cells. The elephant served as a surrogate mother for the hybrid cells, which gestated full-term, producing the first “mammontelephas.” The heads of the project were reported as being one Dr. Sverbighooze Nikhiphorovich Yasmilov of the University of Irkutsk and a Dr. James Creak of MIT. But the story of the newly created woolly mammoth was nothing but a shaggy dog story concocted as an April Fools’ joke by Diana Ben-Aaron. However, before the story became known as a hoax, it was widely reported in the mainstream media as a real mammoth scientific breakthrough. Another example of the news media getting the woolly pulled over their eyes.

  The gray whale is actually black.

  A Token of Their Appreciation

  In October 1971, the Arbeia Roman Fort and Museum in South Shields, England, was proudly displaying an exhibition of Roman artifacts found nearby. (The museum is located near the end of Hadrian’s Wall, built by the Romans around A.D. 160.) One case contained a Roman sesterce coin, identified by museum experts as having been minted sometime between A.D. 135 and A.D. 138.

  But one visitor, nine-year-old Fiona Gordon, claimed to have seen similar coins much later than that—given out as a token by a local soda bottler. She pointed out the soda bottler’s trademark on the reverse of the coin. The R museum officials had originally taken to mean “Roman” actually stood for the soft drink manufacturer—Robinson’s. The realization they had been displaying a fake Roman coin made the curators feel like glutei maximi.

  Saying someone is “attracted like a moth to a flame”

  doesn’t really have the meaning we normally think.

  Moths aren’t actually attracted to light, and the

  only reason they fly straight into bright lights is

  because it confuses their navigation system. Moths

  use light rays from the moon and sun as a guide,

  constantly checking their position against the angle

  of the light rays, but when the source of the light is

  to
o close, it basically overrides this delicate balance,

  and the moth flutters closer and closer to the light.

  Holmes Is Where the Heart Is

  The fictional detective Sherlock Holmes is known for his deductive reasoning, his calabash pipe, his deerstalker hat, and his catchphrase, “Elementary, my dear Watson.” But even fictional characters aren’t safe from being fictionalized. Case in point, my dear reader: Between 1887 and 1927, British writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published four novels and fifty-six short stories about the celebrated detective and his physician-sidekick, Dr. John H. Watson—and not once is a calabash pipe, a deerstalker hat, or the phrase “Elementary, my dear Watson” mentioned. So why are these things attributed to him? Over the years, actors portraying the character of Sherlock Holmes have been responsible for embellishing his dress and his speech. Side note: Holmes was a Victorian and wouldn’t have made the fashion faux pas of wearing a deerstalker hat (country apparel) in the city—and I’ve just proven that I’m a dork.

  Charles Dickens’s immortal character Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol blurts out, “Bah, humbug!” when referring to Christmas. It sounds nasty, but what does it mean? The word humbug is an archaic term meaning “hoax,” “jest,” or “fraud.”

  I’ve Heard of Ham-Fisted Before, But . . .

  The British newspaper the Daily Mail reported in April 2000 that Esporta Health Clubs had designed a new line of socks to help people lose weight. Named FatSox, these revolutionary socks, which employed the patented nylon polymer FloraAstraTetrazine, reportedly sucked “excess lipids from the body through the sweat.” Once FatSox were soaked with perspiration, said inventor Professor Frank Ellis Elgood, the wearer simply removed the socks and washed them—removing dirt, grime, smell, and more importantly, fat. The article was reported through worldwide media outlets, and editors who believed this April Fools’ story should wear FatSox instead of hats to decrease the size of their fat heads.

  American patriot Nathan Hale’s last words were not “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” The recently discovered diary of Captain Frederick MacKenzie, who was present at the hanging on September 22, 1776, reported that Hale’s last words were “It is the duty of every good officer to obey any orders given him by his commander-in-chief.” Not nearly as emotional as the ones we’re used to—which in all probability were paraphrased from Joseph Addison’s 1713 drama Cato, wherein a character bemoans, “What pity is it that we can die but once to serve our country!”

  Just Wing It

  A plane with one wing is called a monoplane, a plane with two wings is called a biplane, and a plane with three wings is called a triplane. But what do you call a plane with nine wings? Count Giovanni Caproni’s Ca.60 Transaereo flying boat. Caproni was an Italian nobleman who owned Società Italiana Caproni, Milano—an airplane factory that built bombers for the Allied Forces during World War I and World War II. Caproni dreamed of building a 100-passenger transatlantic airliner that could fly from Italy to New York. Most people thought he could do this only “on a wing and a prayer”—so he hedged his bet and made a plane with nine wings. On March 4, 1921, his test pilot fired up the engines, taxied across Lake Maggiore, took off, and obtained an altitude of about sixty feet. Then for some reason (possibly because it was an engineering monstrosity), the plane suddenly nosedived, disintegrated in midair, and slammed into the lake. The pilot wasn’t hurt, but Caproni’s image as an aircraft designer was.

  The style of wood board called the 2-by-4 does not

  measure 2 by 4 inches, but 1¾ inches by 3½ inches.

  The board originally measures 2 by 4 inches before planing,

  smoothing, and drying.

  Jiminy Cricket, That’s a Big Grasshopper

  On September 9, 1937, the front-page headline of the Tomah (Wisconsin) Monitor-Herald warned people: “Giant Grasshoppers Invade Butts Orchard East of City.” The article explained that grasshoppers had eaten special plant food used on an apple orchard belonging to farmer A. L. Butts and had quickly grown to three feet in length. Accompanying the article were photographs of shotgun-toting hunters tracking down the mutant insects as well as a picture of Farmer Butts holding up a dead grasshopper like a prize fish. The citizens of the town became jumpy and nearly hysterical at the thought of enormous grasshoppers bouncing through the town, destroying their crops, frightening the livestock, and generally wreaking havoc. The article, of course, was a hoax, and Monitor-Herald publisher, B. J. Fuller, along with Farmer Butts (yes, there was an actual Farmer Butts), confessed to making the townsfolk the butt of their elaborate, and pesky, joke.

  What does a “corny” joke have to do with corn?

  I stalked down a kernel of an answer. Corn seed

  catalogs during the late nineteenth and early

  twentieth centuries made for some pretty boring

  reading. So the publishers started including very

  obvious, silly, or just plain stupid jokes to keep their

  readers’ attention. The jokes became popular, and that

  particular type of humor was called a “corn catalog

  joke,” which was shortened to just plain “corny.”

  Really in the Rough

  The Republic of Benin, a small nation in West Africa, doesn’t have a golf course, but a technicality like that never gets in the way of a true duffer like Mathieu Boya. Benin has five airfields within its borders, but only one has a paved runway; it was here at the Benin Air Base (Force Aerienne Populaire de Benin) where Boya routinely practiced driving golf balls. Boya wasn’t playing a round of golf that day in 1987, but he did hit a birdie—actually, he struck a hapless passing seagull. The unconscious gull fell into the open cockpit of a French-built Mirage III fighter taxiing the runway and landed on the pilot’s lap. The bird regained consciousness and began flapping wildly, which startled the pilot, who lost control of the plane and crashed it into the four other Mirage fighter jets sitting on the tarmac. The pilot was okay, and the gull flew out of the cockpit before impact, but all five jets, the entire fighter defense force of the Benin nation, were completely destroyed. So the errant ball flew into the flying bird who landed on the flyboy and ended the flights of the Benin Air Force.

  Cutting Off Your Circulation

  Unhappy with the depth of reporting in English newspapers, Lionel Burleigh decided to publish his own paper in 1965 called the Commonwealth Sentinel. Burleigh worked diligently for weeks writing articles, promoting the newspaper on billboards, selling advertising space, and printing up 50,000 copies to make the first edition a success. On February 6, after the newspaper had left the printers, an exhausted Burleigh was resting in his hotel room when he was interrupted by a call from the London constabulary. “Have you anything to do with the Commonwealth Sentinel?” the officer asked. “Because there are 50,000 on the outside entrance to Brown’s Hotel and they’re blocking Albemarle Street.” With the hundreds of details to attend to when publishing a newspaper, Burleigh had forgotten one: He never got a distributor. Britain’s “most fearless paper” folded the following day.

  Pope John XXI, who served as pope for only eight months, added a new wing to his palace at Viterbo, Italy. The workmanship was shoddy, and on May 12, 1277, while the pope lay sleeping, part of the roof fell in, and he was seriously injured. John XXI became just another name and number on the long list of popes after he succumbed to his wounds and died eight days later.

  X-ing Out Christmas

  You would think the Puritans, who were known for their religious fervor, must have loved Christmas—but they didn’t. In fact, a law was passed in 1659 outlawing the celebration of Christmas. A five-shilling fine was levied against anyone “found observing, by abstinence from labor, feasting or any other way, any such days as Christmas day.” They considered Christmas “an extreme forgetfulness of Christ, by giving liberty to carnal and sensual delights.” For being Puritans, they sure talked about sex a lot, didn’t they?

  It’s not likely
that any of the “traditional” Thanksgiving foods were served by the Pilgrims in 1621. It’s true they had a feast, but it was not called a feast of “thanksgiving,” as that implied to the devoutly religious colonists a day of fasting and prayer. It is possible they had turkey, but only the term fowl is used. It is known that the Indians brought five deer for the feast and it lasted for three days and was a one-time occurrence—not the beginning of a tradition. But one thing is sure—there was no apple pie. Apples are not native to North America—they came from Europe and West Asia.