Facts about history
History keeps producing facts that ruin your sense of time. A war shorter than a lunch break, an empire that overlaps with the invention of the fax machine, a queen who lived closer to the Moon landing than to the pyramids. The entries here favour events with solid documentation, and each one explains the context that makes the surprise make sense rather than leaving it as a bare curiosity.
The University of Oxford is older than the Aztec Empire.
Teaching at Oxford was under way by 1096 and the university grew rapidly after 1167. The Aztec capital Tenochtitlan was founded in 1325, and the Aztec Empire itself formed in 1428.
Cleopatra lived closer in time to the Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid.
The Great Pyramid of Giza was completed around 2560 BC. Cleopatra died in 30 BC, roughly 2,500 years later. The Moon landing in 1969 was about 2,000 years after her death.
The shortest war in history lasted about 40 minutes.
On 27 August 1896, Britain went to war with the Sultanate of Zanzibar after a sultan Britain did not approve of took the throne. British ships opened fire on the palace at 9:02 and the sultan's flag came down before 9:45.
Vikings reached North America about 500 years before Columbus.
At L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, archaeologists have excavated a Norse settlement with timber buildings and iron-working. Tree-ring evidence dates wood cut there to the year 1021.
Napoleon was not short. He was about 1.70 metres tall, average for a Frenchman of his day.
His height was recorded in French inches, which were longer than English ones, so 5 foot 2 in French units became a misleading 5 foot 2 in British newspapers. British cartoonists happily ran with the image of a tiny tyrant.
Nintendo was founded in 1889 as a maker of hand-painted playing cards.
Fusajiro Yamauchi started the company in Kyoto to produce hanafuda, traditional Japanese flower cards. Nintendo made cards for more than 70 years before trying toys, and released its first video game console in 1977.
The Eiffel Tower was meant to be torn down after 20 years.
It was built as the entrance to the 1889 World's Fair with a permit that expired in 1909, and many Parisian artists called it a monstrosity. It was saved because it turned out to be a perfect antenna for the new science of radio.
Woolly mammoths were still alive when the Egyptian pyramids were being built.
Most mammoths died out around 10,000 years ago, but a small population survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean until roughly 2000 BC. The Great Pyramid was completed around 2560 BC.
The fax machine was patented more than 30 years before the telephone.
Scottish inventor Alexander Bain patented an electric printing telegraph in 1843 that could transmit images over wires. Alexander Graham Bell's telephone patent came in 1876.
Roman concrete can heal its own cracks, which is why the Pantheon is still standing after 1,900 years.
Researchers found that lumps of lime in Roman concrete dissolve when water enters a crack and then recrystallise, sealing the gap. The Pantheon's dome remains the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world.
Iceland's parliament, the Althing, was founded in the year 930 and still meets today.
For centuries the Althing gathered outdoors every summer at Thingvellir, where chieftains made laws and settled disputes. It is one of the oldest parliamentary institutions in the world.
Harvard University is older than calculus.
Harvard was founded in 1636. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz developed calculus independently in the 1660s and 1670s, and it was not published until the 1680s.
In October 1582, ten days simply disappeared from the calendar.
To fix the drift of the old Julian calendar, Pope Gregory XIII decreed that Thursday 4 October 1582 would be followed directly by Friday 15 October. Nobody in Catholic Europe was born or died on the dates in between.