by Cracked. com
What’s the Big Deal? What little we do have from this collection was influential enough to help Italy introduce the world to the Renaissance. There are still mysteries of Rome that we’ll likely never find answers for, but if this collection had survived intact, that wouldn’t be the case.
Why We’ll Never See It: It was damn near a thousand years after the fall of the Roman Empire before Europe began to realize that old books might be something worth holding on to. By the time anyone checked in on this 142-volume behemoth to see how it had managed over those ten centuries or so when nobody cared about books, there were only thirty-five volumes remaining. The rest are lost to history, likely hidden in the basement of some seemingly innocuous building, waiting to have their location ratted out by the guy who wrote The Da Vinci Code.
The Half-Life’s Work of Nikola Tesla
Before he moved to Colorado Springs to help Wolverine do magic tricks in 1899, Tesla’s work could be found at 35 South Fifth Avenue in New York City. He kept a collection of equipment, notebooks, and lab data there, all surrounded, we like to imagine, by a secure perimeter of Tesla coils.
What’s the Big Deal? It was during his time in New York that Tesla did the majority of his work on something called unified field theory. Scientists today still haven’t figured it out, but Tesla claimed to have nailed it by 1894.
Why We’ll Never See It: Unfortunately, a suspicious fire started (or was started?) in the basement of the apartment building that housed his lab. Everything, including half of Tesla’s entire life’s work, was lost.
Technology Does Not Advance Steadily So Much as It Wanders Around Like a Lost Drunk
THE MYTH: Our ancestors may have invented fire, language, wheels, and the missionary position, but we’re the ones who invented the good stuff.
Look around you. Between our iPads, Spanx, and the ability to stop live TV, we’re living in a world of technological wonder. And most of it originated in the twentieth century.
THE TRUTH: With not much more than beaver pelts and spit to work with, our ancestors invented some pretty fancy things. Maybe they didn’t have jet packs, but neither do you, so shut up.
Submarines
YOU ASSUMED . . .
Most people will tell you that submarines were invented right around World War I, since that’s when they started to show up in our movies. Sci-fi nerds might even place the date as far back as 1870, the year Jules Verne predicted the invention in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
ACTUALLY INVENTED IN . . .
The first description of a submersible ship that did not involve magic, witches, or copious amounts of booze actually came in 1580 from William Bourne, an English innkeeper who designed a way for ships to decrease and increase volume to change density. Since Bourne was an innkeeper and preferred to breathe air, the world had to wait until 1623 for the first submarine to actually be built. Dutchman Cornelius Drebbel’s submarine was propelled by twelve oarsmen and could sink to a depth of fifteen feet.
FIGURE 3.18 The first submarine was a flounder-shape marvel of engineering that you had to be a suicidal lunatic to step inside. Also based on the designs, you may have had to operate the propeller crank with your penis.
Just thirty years later, Belgium, presumably tired of “superior waffle technique” being its only weapon, built a submarine for war. The good old U.S. of A. got in on the action, trying to use submarines in the Revolutionary War. In 1776, Ezra Lee piloted the Turtle, a submarine built by sixteen-year-old Yale alumnus David Bushnell. The Turtle’s weapon was a drill to make holes in enemy ships and put time bombs into the holes. We can only guess patriot General Wile E. Coyote came up with that one.
Cars
YOU ASSUMED . . .
Cars were invented in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, or whatever the hell that World of Motion ride at EPCOT said.
ACTUALLY INVENTED IN . . .
A French inventor named Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot built one before the American Revolution. Back when most people were blaming their diseases on fairies and the evil eye, Cugnot had one great idea—a horse carriage minus the stupid, smelly horse. In 1769, he finally finished his horseless carriage: a steam-engine-powered automobile that looked like a steampunk Big Wheel.
FIGURE 3.19 Invented years before it had any right to exist, the first car was a testament to French ingenuity, and then a testament to French indifference in the face of anything not immediately related to food and sex.
It could carry four tons while traveling at the breakneck speed of two and a half miles per hour (people had really weak necks in those days).
While testing his vehicle in 1771, Cugnot lost control and discovered the unique sensation we’ve come to know as “crashing into a brick wall.” He ran out of money to improve his invention, and while the French government was interested in continuing with the idea, a little uprising of the people called the French Revolution put an end to that.
Batteries
YOU ASSUMED . . .
If you have any idea when batteries were invented, you probably think it was in 1800, by Italian Alessandro Volta (where the word “volt” comes from). His was an improvement on fellow Italian Luigi Galvani’s battery-type invention that involved attaching metal to a dead frog’s leg, establishing the historical animosity between experimental scientists and frogs.
Alessandro Volta, on the other hand, replaced frogs with cardboard soaked in salt water, producing what was thought to be the world’s first battery.
ACTUALLY INVENTED IN . . .
Around 200 B.C.
In 1938, German archaeologist Wilhelm König (who died a few years later in a face-melting Ark of the Covenant–related accident) discovered a clay jar that would come to be known as the Baghdad Battery. (See Figure 3.20 for what a battery looked like back then.)
Some scientists propose that it was used to relieve pain, while other scientists point out that electric stimulation would be ineffective when compared to painkillers available at the time, such as heroin opiates and cannabis. It’s hard to disagree with that argument.
FIGURE 3.20 This six-inch-tall clay pot delivered the voltage of a modern AA battery. On the plus side (battery pun!) they’d make TV remotes impossible to lose. Also, one of those parts was probably used to smoke weed out of.
The Automatic Door
YOU ASSUMED . . .
It’s not one of those inventions that you spend a lot of time thinking about, but you certainly don’t picture Old West cowboys waiting patiently for their swinging saloon doors to open automatically. Most of us think of self-opening doors as mid-twentieth-century inventions, like hula hoops and rights for women. American history books that bother to record the feat give the honors to Dee Horton and Lew Hewitt in 1954. Horton and Hewitt designed them after noticing how strong winds would mess with people’s door-opening abilities.
ACTUALLY INVENTED IN . . .
Around 50 B.C. or so, by Hero of Alexandria. The fantastically named Hero was a Greek engineer, mathematician, inventor, teacher, and general overachiever who died before any of the stuff in the New Testament happened. He is credited with numerous inventions, but his most celebrated was the aeolipile, which is not a type of airborne hemorrhoid, but an early steam engine.
The invention was used to spice up religious ceremonies with some special effects. It consisted of an altar, to be placed in front of some large, heavy temple doors, and all manner of pulleys, buckets, fire, and water. It was kind of like Mouse Trap, but instead of catching mice, it made the masses think the breath of God had opened the doors.
The Flamethrower
YOU ASSUMED . . .
The flamethrower is believed to have been invented in 1901 by the Germans, who are widely known for inventing some of the coolest evil stuff on earth (go Google “Nazi tornado cannon”). Richard Fiedler created the Flammenwerfer for the German army, just in time to capitalize on the twentieth century’s demand for horrible, skin-melting weapons. But it wasn’t until World War II
that the United States invented a flamethrower that could fire continuous streams of burning fuel.
ACTUALLY INVENTED IN . . .
The seventh century, by the Greeks. Around A.D. 672, a Syrian refugee and engineer invented what would come to be known as Greek fire. This was a secret formula invented by the Byzantine Greeks and used in naval battles to burn ships and in land battles to burn people.
Initially, it was fired from ships through a hand pump, but later a more mobile, land-based artillery weapon that fired a stream of flames was developed. Greek fire could not be put out with water alone, and it would stick to surfaces and ignite on contact. For this reason it has been compared to napalm, although no one liked the smell of Greek fire in the morning, because due to its volatile and unpredictable nature, if you smelled it, you were probably on fire. When the Byzantine Empire fell, the formula for Greek fire was lost along with it.
Two Relatively Mundane Things That Would Have Blown Abraham Lincoln’s Goddamn Mind
Abraham Lincoln has been dead for only 150 years. That might sound like a lot of time until you realize that the soldiers he commander-in-chiefed during the Civil War lived into the 1950s, and that one of their wives lasted until 2004. It was recent enough for there to be tons of photos that capture the shaved Sasquatch of a president. But before you go thinking that Civil War–era celebs were just like us, let’s take you through a few of the things that were futuristic, sci-fi technologies at the time of his death.
DOORKNOBS
If President Lincoln got up to leave the room where he sat for the picture that became the Lincoln Memorial and encountered a door that had to be opened by a knob, he wouldn’t have known what to do, because doorknobs weren’t invented until 1878. Lincoln would have just ripped the door off its hinges, because he was a monster, but look at it this way: Your grandparents knew people who remembered having to adapt to these new-model doors with their fancy knob-turning technology.
THE QUESTION “WHAT TIME IS IT?”
The idea that there would be one single time that everyone could consult would be new to him. He’d probably catch your drift, because he was a smart guy, but “What time do you have?” was more common, since the expectation was that everyone’s watch would have a different one. Clocks and watches at the time were used like egg timers. They gave you a sense of when you had to be at your duel, but there was zero expectation that they would all reflect a single time. The world didn’t agree on the answer to that question until 1880, once the establishment of strict railway schedules required them to.
Things That Happened Way More Recently Than You Think
The Guillotine Was France’s Official Method of Execution Until 1981
THE MYTH: A guillotine execution is the perfect symbol of a terrifying practice from a barbaric, primitive era—it drops a huge blade on your neck, and your severed head falls into a basket in front of a cheering crowd.
It’s easy to forget that the entire point of the method was that it was considered humane; the alternative execution method for French nobility was usually getting their heads chopped off with a sword or an ax, which sometimes took several painful whacks.
But it’s all ancient history now, right? Uh, right? France?
THE TRUTH: The French government was lopping off heads right through the disco era. They didn’t do it in town squares in front of crowds—they had the decency to switch to private executions in . . . 1939.
Between 1940 and 1977, dozens of criminals were executed by the National Razor, just in the privacy of their prisons.
So around the same time that Star Wars was playing in theaters and Apple Computer was getting its start, a convicted murderer could still hear a judge say, “You are hereby sentenced to have your freaking head severed from your body.” It’s hard to imagine.
FIGURE 3.21 Wood carving of French execution from 1978.
People Were Settling Disputes via Duel Until the Late 1960s
THE MYTH: Think back on the last time you walked out onto your cul-de-sac and saw your neighbors resolving a property-line spat via a gentleman’s duel with swords or comically oversize pistolas.
It’s probably been a while, right? That’s because dueling as a method of conflict resolution died out in the powdered-wig days.
THE TRUTH: Well, not completely. We’ve seen the video for “Beat It,” after all. And in real life, you have people like French politicians René Ribière and Gaston Paul Charles Defferre, who decided that the only way to settle their differences was in an old-fashioned épée duel—in 1967.
Their disagreement, by the way, came when Defferre called Ribière a name for fidgeting too much during a debate. So, obviously, blood needed to be spilled.
Ribière lost the duel, which was formally refereed by another colleague. The good news was that Ribière didn’t die during the fight—he just got slashed twice before he quit. Which is a good thing for Defferre, since this was France and he’d presumably have been facing the guillotine.
Italy Didn’t Exist During the Italian Renaissance; France Didn’t Speak French During the French Revolution
THE MYTH: As different as history might have looked, what with its lack of doorknobs and such, some things have never changed: There were various nations each living under their own laws and languages.
So when someone describes a war in history, we imagine armies from different countries squaring off, just like today. We talk about the Italian Renaissance like it was a single movement driven by one country, probably fueled by the superior Italian public schools of the time or something.
THE TRUTH: We put history in terms of nations because that’s all we’ve ever known, but the truth is that nations are a pretty recent invention.
Up until the late eighteenth century, people were loyal to their family, their ethnic group, or their local city-state, and that’s about it. Declaring allegiance to something that you couldn’t see while standing on your roof was about as common as feudalism is today.
Most nations of the time were really just a collection of ethnic enclaves, usually speaking multiple languages within the country. Take France. Despite the perception that they won’t serve you coffee if they detect an American accent, France barely spoke French for most of its history. In 1789, in the thick of the French Revolution, only 12 to 13 percent of the people who lived in France actually spoke French fluently; the rest spoke a variety of local patois.
During the Italian Renaissance, Italy was a cluster of warring city-states. There was an underground nationalist movement, but the Roman Catholic Church was pretty good at keeping them off balance. In fact, some have argued that the Renaissance can be seen as a propaganda battle between the two sides, with famous thinkers like Machiavelli and Dante writing the period’s most famous works with messages of secular and national leadership. The pope, not interested in losing his cushy spot as the only person who could make decisions on the peninsula, showed the secular side how you wage a propaganda war by funding, well, pretty much every piece of art you studied from the period.
Instead of cheesy propaganda posters and uncomfortably racist Bugs Bunny cartoons, the pope paid Michelangelo to sculpt David, those epic frescoes Leonardo and Michelangelo worked on in Florence’s Salone dei Cinquecento, even the whole damn Vatican. All just one big political ad.
Gender Roles You Think Go Back to the Hunter-Gatherer Days Are Relatively Recent Inventions
THE MYTH: The debate over how to teach kids about gender roles has been raging in the media for decades.
And while we’re all for equality and letting your five-year-old’s freak flag fly, it seems a bit like needless meddling—why start messing with something that’s worked since the caveman days? You can’t argue with biology. Women carry the babies; men have the upper-body strength to tackle gazelles. Nobody made that up out of thin air.
THE TRUTH: Take a look at the baby on the left in Figure 3.22. Cute, right? Now look to the right to see what she looked like all grown up: She’s the one in the wheel
chair.
FIGURE 3.22 As a child, FDR’s mom dressed him up like a girl, and look what happened to his legs!
Yeah, that’s FDR in the dress. In those days, it was common to throw every kid into a dress, because who gives a shit? The idea that pink is for girls and blue is for boys started around 1940, and it actually used to be the exact opposite.
So it turns out the real danger of dressing your child androgynously is the possibility of your kid growing up to get elected president of the United States four times in a row.
Most of what we think of as traditional or natural gender roles are actually constructed by our society, and often almost totally arbitrary. For instance, our culture is actually the exception for thinking that it’s unmanly to cry. Japanese samurai, medieval heroes, and even Beowulf himself cried like babies throughout their adventures. As recently as the nineteenth century, male tears were actually celebrated as a sign of honesty, integrity, and strength. And not in the “You’re brave enough to show your weakness” way, but just as a symbol that you actually gave a crap. Odysseus (the guy who killed a Cyclops and frickin’ won the Trojan War) would break down into tears periodically, at least once just because he listened to an emotional song.
3.D
History Had Sex
Boners Were Not Invented in Your Pants!
It turns out that 95 percent of history was fueled by mankind’s urge to bang. But you wouldn’t know that by looking at your average history books, which are more about “dates” and “wars” and “facts” than “boinking.” Which is too bad, because by placing a fig leaf over the naughty bits of history, we miss out on a lot of what makes civilization tick (mostly boobs and wieners, it turns out).