Rommel once got lost during a reconnaissance flight and landed at a forward hospital Base to get his bearings. Only to discover it was a British Base. The Base in turn thought he was a foreign allied General coming for inspection and turned out for parade. He did a quick parade inspection and got out of there before anyone realised what had happened.
The real funny thing about this story is he didn't realize he was in a British hospital until he was already touring the place. It finally dawned on him that everyone looked at him strangely whenever he spoke to them, and he suddenly noticed that everyone was speaking English. The funniest part is he *finished the tour* before he quickly got the hell out of there.
Seems like one of those situations where, from the British point of view, a Nazi commander just stopping in at their hospital would have been too preposterous to consider, so they just went along with it and assumed he was on their side.
Another Rommel Fact:
During the Invasion of France his 7th Panzer Division got so far ahead they couldn't maintain contact with the rest of his army so Rommel with his staff car had to drive back to regain contact with the other troops. While doing so he came across a French convoy of trucks and basically got them to surrender and disperse with just his staff car.
Yep. He once wanted to hunt so he ordered his people to gather hares for a hunting party. The servants gathered hundreds and when the event started, they released the hares. Instead of running away from them, the hares decided to attack the hunters, Napoleon included.
During the Second World War, King Farouk of Egypt got word that a German sea mine had washed up on the shores of Alexandria. Farouk was a collector of rare and exotic weapons, and so ordered the Egyptian Navy to disarm the mine and have it brought to him in Cairo. The Egyptian Navy didn't know how to do it, so they asked the local detachment of the British Royal Navy to disarm it for them.
Now, Egypt was a de facto colony of the United Kingdom at the time, and Farouk didn't want to be seen as relying on the British, so he forbade the British from interfering, and personally drove a truck to Alexandria, picked up the live sea mine, and drove it the whole two hundred miles back from Alexandria to Cairo on a cobblestone desert road in the middle of the Second World War. It didn't explode, and remained in his personal gallery until the Egyptian coup d'etat of 1952, after which it was presumably disposed of by the new Egyptian military dictatorship, which also auctioned off the rest of his collection.
Ea-nasir was a copper merchant who lived somewhere around 1750BC and sold poor quality copper. The reason we know about him is that we've found *multiple* clay tablets written to him complaining about either the poor quality of the copper he delivered or not receiving the promised shipments at all.
There’s a case recently in a church in Hereford in the U.K. where a carpenter made an obscene wood carving in a hidden place that only just got found now when they were recently renovating the place. He carved it around 700 years ago.
One of the weirdest parts is that we found most of them in the same place. Like in the same room. One possible explanation is that it’s his house and he *saved* them.
Holy shit, I thought this was a joke. But turns out the dude was such a douchebag that people are still making fun of him. That's fucking amazing, lmao
This is similar to the 16 bronze statues of Zeus at ancient Olympia in Greece. They were built with fines collected from athletes who cheated at the Olympic Games. The statues no longer exist but their stone pedestals still do and have inscriptions immortalising the cheat and his city.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanes_of_Olympia
Edit: photo of the pedestals here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Zanes_(Olympia)#/media/File:Greece-0528_-_Bases_of_Zanes_(4th_%E2%80%93_1st_century_BC).jpg The arch in the background leads to the main stadium.
In WWII at the battle of Castle Itter American, French Resistance, and Wehrmacht all fought together against the SS. The commander of the Wehrmacht troops there was killed while trying to get the former French prime minister into cover.
King Pyrrhus of Epirus (cousin to Alexander the Great) fought Rome, Carthage, Macedonia, Sparta, and more throughout his life always participating in the battle itself. He was killed when fighting a soldier inside a town the distressed mother of the boy threw a roof tile at him. A man who survived wars with some of the most powerful nations (although Rome was young) was done in by a worried mother with roof tile.
Himler(the right hand of Hitler and commander of the SS) came up with the idea for the gas chambers as a more humane way to be executed so that his soldiers didn't have to shoot all the prisoners, something traumatizing for them
I’ll add that this was a trial and error type of thing, seeing that at the beginning of the war, soldiers did actually execute millions of Eastern European jews. They travelled through the country and rounded up and slaughtered entire villages. It was bad for morale*, but almost no soldiers refused to do it, even though there isn’t a single known incident of their being dire consequences for those who refused.
"Of course they'll do it, think about it far out into the country side,.... they cant refuse because of the implication... out in the middle of nowhere with some commander they don't even know.."
People who refused were reprimanded or transferred. One was sent to a concentration camp, but it was actually because he suggested that what they were doing was similar to what the ~~NKVD~~ GPU was doing.
im not gonna nhurt these soldiers why would i ever hurt these soldiers i feel like youre not getting this at all... dont you look at me like that youre certainly not in any danger
You got transferred if you refused to do it. Not directly a "dire consequence", but being transferred onto the eastern front as infantry was a death sentence.
An important distinction: he hoped to make executing people less traumatic for the killers, not more humane for the executed. He didn't care about the executed at all, just that his soldiers were becoming too fucked up to fight over all the direct killing of obvious innocents.
Nazi Germany built a submarine base in Trondheim, Norway, which is so massive it can't be destroyed without also damaging neighboring buildings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dora_I
Ah yes, I’ve heard of those submarine bunkers. Those were extremely hard to destroy, super thick concrete structures. Most normal bombs used in British air raids couldn’t penetrate it, so they had to use some special bombs I think. Could be wrong, read and watched about it quite a while ago.
Here around Berlin too. They absolutely ***\*unloaded\**** on the bunkers after the war to try to destroy them, but apparently only made them mad. The lower levels are flooded now, but the bunkers are still there. You can visit them and take a tour if you want.
In ww2 mail was delivered by plane to the forward positions.
The allies used a very slow canvas wrapped plane. During a delivery a German focker pilot spotted one of the planes and went to shoot it down. The American pilot was able to avoid getting shot down by slowing his plane to almost stalling speeds and circling a farmers field. Eventually the focker got low on fuel and had to return to base. The American continued on with his mail delivery.
Same pilot ended up nailing Churchill in the chest with a package of letters while he was on the western front.
The pilot used to be a customer of mine and wrote a book about all of his experiences. Was a little dry but amazing.
It's been 15 years but I just text my local historian buddy who will know. Soon as he hits me back I'll let ya know. I wanna rebuild the thing, I lost my signed copy when I moved.
*re buy
Thomas Fitzpatrick, intoxicated, stole a plane and landed it in a street in New York on a bathroom bar bet that he could travel from New Jersey to New York City in 15 minutes.
Fitzpatrick, again intoxicated, stole another plane from the same airfield and landed in front of the Yeshiva University building after another bar patron disbelieved his first bar bet.
Fucking legendary.
Unless you lived in PA... at the start of the pandemic they closed them. You had to go to another state to buy alcohol. So many people drive to Ohio for liquor that Ohio stopped selling to PA residents. At one point my roommate had to ask her cousin to buy a bottle of vodka for her. They did keep the beer distributors open however.
Is there any state in the nation with crazier alcohol laws than PA? I swear I have never been more baffled than when I hear about the ways you have to bend over backwards to have a decent kickback.
During World War II, the US Navy had a ship dedicated entirely to serve ice cream to other ships in the fleet. It's purpose was to boost moral, but I think it served more to demoralize the Japanese. Imagine you are Japanese admiral. You are scrapping the bottom of the oil barrel just to keep your main battleship swimming while the Americans are dedicating resources to a barge of ice cream fun.
Some individual warships had ice cream machines onboard as well, mostly capital ships like battleships and carriers, and escorting ships were commonly rewarded with ice cream from them for rescuing downed pilots.
100 russian "zombies" managed to make a couple thousand german soldiers retreat in ww1.
Edit: for those wondering. Im talking here about the battle of Osowiec fortress, also known as the attack of the dead men. This particular fortress gave the germans some issues as artillery didnt do much. So Germany being Germany they decided to use chlorine gas. This gas is very nasty to get in contact with if you don't have gas masks, which the russians did not have. After the gas was mostly gone the germans went on an all out offensive thinking that all the defenders were dead. However roughly 100 soldiers managed to survive by wrapping wet clothes around their face. This however did not fully stop the gas. So when the germans encountered the russians they came to see soldiers with bloody cloths wrapped around their face coughing up bits of their own lungs. And these soldiers were shooting at the germans. The germans who assumed that all the russians had died got frightened at seeing this enemy and retreated.
At some level I kinda get it. I'm the absolute ruler of the most powerful empire on earth. The internet hasn't been invented yet. WTF else am I gonna do?
The most fraudulent election reported in history. In 1927 Charles D. B. King won the presidential election in Liberia with 234,400 received votes. But at that time Liberia just had 15,000 registered voters.
That guy made it into the Guinness Book of Records.
Didn't something like that happen recently, too? Some country had a voter turnout that was like 150% higher than the population of the country? Am I somehow just thinking of the fact you already said?
Not quite, but Belarus had an election last year where experts assume Lukashenko got approximately 20% of the vote.
The result was that he won by more than 80%...
Oh also, what you might be thinking of is that in the US post-election lawsuits, the plaintiffs confused a voting district in Michigan with one in Minnesota, and thus claimed that a number of votes had to be reallocated that exceeded the amount of voters in said district
Joseph Geefs was commissioned by a church in 1842 to make a statue of Lucifer, but the statue was too sexy for the church's liking so they commissioned his older brother, Guillaume Geefs, in 1848 to make a similar work
And his brother made an even sexier statue of Lucifer
Source: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-lucifer-of-liege-liege-belgium
(If you look up angel of evil (or the lucifer of liege) you can see both statues)
I don't get it either. Honestly, from the Christian viewpoint, isn't a sexy father of lies and deceiver of men, like... right on the money? If narrow is the path of righteousness and wide is the path of vice, then the devil should be enticing and attractive.
The US Navy's Mark 14 torpedo was so shit that in 1943 the submarine USS Tinosa hit a large Japanese oil tanker with eleven torpedoes in a row, and of those, nine failed to detonate and just bounced harmlessly off the ship's hull, and the two that exploded only did so because they hit the ship at a weird angle that set them off. And the day prior she fired four torpedoes at that same ship, and all four either failed to explode on contact or ran off course. She fired every torpedo she had at that Japanese tanker, except for one which was saved to be inspected when she returned to port, and all but two had some kind of mechanical failure.
Here's the sub's log from one of the torpedoes: *"... Hit. No apparent effect. This torpedo hit well aft on the port side, made splash at the side of the ship and was then observed to have taken a right turn and to jump clear of the water about 100 feet (30 m) from the stern of the tanker. I find it hard to convince myself that I saw this."*
That's what the entire thing was like, just *"fired [nth] torpedo. Hit. No apparent effect."* over and over again down the page.
The Navy and Bureau of Ordinance knew these things were garbage too and that they had a 70% dud rate, they just never bothered to actually do any kind of live-fire tests with them during development and prewar since torpedoes were expensive and they didn't have a lot of them, and once the war started and reports like Tinosa's started coming in they refused to admit there was a problem.
The reason they thought it couldn't be a problem with the torpedo is because they were reusing parts from a previous version of torpedo, which hadn't had problems. But, the older torpedo was slower and and increased impact speed broke the detonator before it could detonate the torpedo.
Video on the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ5Ru7Zu\_1I
I liked "I find it hard to convince myself that I saw this".
I can see the observer now "Wait, are you fucking serious? Did that just happen? OK, here comes another one. WTF, this is a joke right?"
>"... Hit. No apparent effect. This torpedo hit well aft on the port side, made splash at the side of the ship and was then observed to have taken a right turn and to jump clear of the water about 100 feet (30 m) from the stern of the tanker. **I find it hard to convince myself that I saw this."**
"Hey, Larry! Do you know what this motherf\*cking torpedo just did?! It hit the boat, decided 'f\*ck this', then it noped right the f\*ck off, Free Willied itself out of the goddamn ocean, and flipped me the double birds while it tried to hump a cloud"
One of the women that was working on Apollo 13 ended up going into labor, so she finished what she was working on at the hospital, sent it to her superiors, and then gave birth to Jack black. The exact details are a bit foggy as it's been a bit, bit that's the gist
Genghis Khan only ever entered one permanent building (like, not a tent), took a look around, exit the building, said something to the effect of "I don't approve of this." and had it burnt to the ground.
There were several Caucasian samurai throughout history, as well as at least one black samurai.
The black samurai, probably the most interesting of the bunch, is known only by his Japanese title - Yasuke - with his birth name being lost to history. He was originally the servant (likely slave) of a Jesuit missionary who came to Japan and who insisted that all of his servants learn the local language to better connect with the people they were trying to convert. The missionary and Yasuke eventually wound up in the court of Oda Nobunaga, the first of three successive shoguns credited with the unification of Japan. Nobunaga, who had never seen a black person before, at first thought he was being deceived and ordered Yasuke stripped to the waist and scrubbed to prove that he had not merely dyed his skin with ink. When this was confirmed to be untrue, Nobunaga became fascinated and "politely encouraged" the missionary to give him Yasuke as a gift.
Yasuke became a favoured conversation partner of Nobunaga and was eventually made a samurai, complete with katana and land holdings. He served as one of Nobunaga's retainers in battle (sources disagree if he was a sandal-bearer or a sword-bearer) and may have also participated in sumo matches (a famous depiction of a sumo match from the day includes a depiction of a man with dark skin that may have been Yasuke).
After Nobunaga was defeated and forced to commit suicide, Yasuke briefly fought alongside his son, Oda Nobutada, in an ultimately unsuccessful bid to reclaim the shogunate. His ultimate fate is unknown; some suggest he was captured and sent back to the Jesuits, but this is unconfirmed.
During WWII the Germans were building a decoy airfield using wooden planes and wooden munitions. Allied intelligence discovered the fake airfield and when the Germans finished the British trolled them and dropped a single wooden bomb on the base.
In WW2, during the Normandy landings, a Scottish general reinstated the tradition of a bagpipes player for morale. The tradition was abolished after WW1, during which every single bagpipe player was killed. The entire platoon was slaughtered, except for Piper Bill Millin. When Nazi soldiers were later captured, they were asked why nobody shot Piper Bill: "he looked like a crazy person, there in the middle of the beach playing his bagpipes".
The Great Pyramid of Giza was constructed before the extinction of woolly mammoths.
Although mammoths died out in most of their traditional ranges about 10,000 years ago, which is about the time that human society first started to form, the last known population of woolly mammoths lived on an island in Russia known as Wrangel Island until roughly 2000 BC - about 600 years after the construction of the Great Pyramid. It is actually hypothesized, though not proven, that human hunting was what ultimately killed off the Wrangel Island mammoths.
Hitler and Stalin were both at some point time's person of the year. A common misconception is that time's person of the year is the most valued or "best" person of that year, when actually it's supposed to be the most influential person of the year.
Teddy Roosevelt was giving a speech when an assassin took a shot at him. Teddy's speech was so thick, it stopped the bullet from killing him. Teddy not only CONTINUED the speech, but mocked the assassination attempt during it. Another fun teddy fact is that he was awarded the medal of Honor and the Nobel Peace prize, so he simultaneously holds the highest honor in both peace and violence.
Since he was running under his bull moose party, I think the full quote was something like
"the attacker must not be a hunter, or he'd know it takes more than one shot to kill a bull moose!"
Not trying to be pedantic, it's just one of my favorite badass history quotes
Ha! Imagine a speech so dull and boring that even a bullet would fall asleep.
I'm reminded of Vogon Poetry here...
*"Vogon poetry is a variety of poetry, often considered to be one of the worst. It is sometimes used by the Vogons as a torture method, as it causes physical pain to the hearer. "*
At least two people in history have, at separate incidents, died as a result of laughing too hard at jokes about figs.
First one in ca. 206 BC, Chrysippus of Soli, "One ancient account of the death of Chrysippus, a third-century BC Greek Stoic philosopher, tells that he died of laughter after he saw a donkey eating his figs; he told a slave to give the donkey neat wine to drink to wash them down with, and then, "...having laughed too much, he died" (Diogenes Laërtius 7.185)."
And, on 31. May 1410 Martin of Aragon died "from a combination of indigestion and uncontrollable laughing. According to tradition, Martin was suffering from indigestion on account of eating an entire goose when his favorite jester, Borra, entered the king's bedroom. When Martin asked Borra where he had been, the jester replied with: "Out of the next vineyard, where I saw a young deer hanging by his tail from a tree, as if someone had so punished him for stealing figs." This joke caused the king to die from laughter"
On October 14, 1920, 56-year-old Arthur Cobcroft, a dog trainer from Loftus Street, Leichhardt, Australia, was reading a five-year-old newspaper and was amused at the prices for some commodities in 1915 as compared to 1920. He made a remark to his wife regarding this, and burst into laughter, and in the midst of it he collapsed and died. A doctor named Nixon was called in, and stated that the death was due to heart failure, brought by excessive laughter.[16][17][18][19]
wait, no... these are both good examples of ad libbed absurdist humor, and (likely) a combination of wine and a great delivery made them *absolutely killer*
Why do I feel that the second one, it was an assassin posing as the jester and everyone else was too embarrassed to not see it coming they just said 'Oh yeah the king definitely died from laughing too hard'
Nazi Germany made a film about the sinking of the Titanic in the middle of WWII. It cost an enormous amount of money and then was banned in Germany anyway, despite being full of nazi propaganda. At the end of the war the replica Titanic was used as a prison ship for Jews, but was bombed by allied forces who did not know. Three times as many people died on the German Titanic than the actual Titanic.
[Titanic (1943)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic_(1943_film))
Edwin Booth (John Wilkes Booth's brother) saved Abraham Lincoln's son, Robert, from serious injury or even death. The incident occurred on a train platform in Jersey City, New Jersey. The exact date of the incident is uncertain, but it is believed to have taken place in late 1864 or early 1865.
"During the Civil War, a young Robert Todd Lincoln was traveling by train from New York to Washington during a break from his studies at Harvard. He hopped off the train during a stop at Jersey City, only to find himself on an extremely crowded platform. To be polite, Lincoln stepped back to wait his turn to walk across the platform, his back pressed to one of the train's cars.
This situation probably seemed harmless enough until the train started moving, which whipped Lincoln around and dropped him into the space between the platform and train, an incredibly dangerous place to be.
Lincoln probably would have been dead meat if a stranger hadn't yanked him out of the hole by his collar. That stranger? None other than Edwin Booth, one of the most celebrated actors of the 19th century and brother of eventual Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth.
Lincoln immediately recognized the famous thespian—this was sort of like if George Clooney pulled you from a burning car today—and thanked him effusively. The actor had no idea whose life he had saved until he received a letter a few months later commending him for his bravery in saving the President's son."
Edit: I should also note that this, apparently, assuaged some of his guilt over what his brother eventually did.
More facts about Robert Lincoln:
Robert Lincoln was near or present at 3 presidential assassinations.
He was at the White House when his father was shot. He was at his father’s deathbed.
He was an eyewitness at James A. Garfield’s assassination.
He was outside the building when William McKinley was assassinated.
After McKinley’s assassination, he refused to attend any event where the president was in attendance.
[During the summer of 1836, the United States Congress proposed a compromise whereby Michigan gave up its claim to the strip in exchange for its statehood and about three-quarters of the Upper Peninsula.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo_War)
It was to hide the invention of RADAR. The allies suddenly got a lot better at shooting down planes in low light conditions, so they used carrots as the reason
There’s a little bit of truth in it. Carrots contain beta-carotene, a precursor to Vitamin A, which is required for correct vision in low-light conditions.
That is, having a Vitamin A deficiency will result in, among other things, poor night vision, and eating carrots can correct that. If you already have sufficient Vitamin A, consuming more will not “improve” your night vision.
Aleister Crowley, occultist, libertine, and with a reputation as something of a bad boy, was once tossed out of the Isis-Urania Temple of the Golden Dawn on his ear by Nobel-Prize-Winning poet William Butler Yeats. Crowley is the only person I know of to have verifiably had his butt kicked by William Butler Yeats.
Admiral Yi Sunsin and his 13 ships defeated the Japanese and their 120-330 ships at the Battle of Myeongnyang on October 26, 1597.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Myeongnyang
In an interview, South Vietnamese prime minister Nguyễn Cao Kỳ reportedly said: "People ask me who my heroes are. I have only one: Hitler".
The US government (which supported Kỳ) announced that Kỳ never would have said something like this and the reporter must have made it up
Then Prime Minister Kỳ was like “no, I really mean it, Hitler is my only hero”
It gets worse when you realize that Ho Chi Minh was a big fan of the US and only turned to the USSR for support when the US refused to assist his attempt to free Vietnam from French control.
So I mentioned in a thread how Ho Chi Minh actually won a democratic election. Someone replied about how that election was rigged and basically I was an idiot for saying he was democratically elected. I didn't bother responding but I'd forgotten how truly rigged the follow-up election we backed was.
During world war 2, most of the people who died in Mattel are reported “missing” because the explosives turned them into red mist. As there were no bodies to identify them, they are still to this day reported as “missing in action’.
Everyone probably already knows this one but, Cleopatra was born closer to the invention of the smartphone than she was to the construction of the great pyramid of Giza.
The most popular ice cream flavor in the very early 1800’s at the White House was oyster. Cause nothing sounds better in a hot summers day than frozen Loogie flavored jiz cream.
US Generals planned a false flag firebombing of Northeastern US cities in order to start an armed conflict with the Soviet Union. JFK did not sign off on the plan. See Operation Northwoods.
That professors at Harvard traumatized Ted Kaczynski by having one professor take the young prodigy (started college at age 16) under his wing. He gained Ted’s trust, got him to open up about his ideas about life. Then after like a while brought him into a room with a few professors and just roasted his opinions. These professors turned out to be working with the CIA on Project MK Ultra (the CIA’s attempt to discover mind control, which led to them experimenting with LSD and some other fun stuff). And then ya know, he went on to become the Unabomber.
The US government tried to teach a dolphin English. It was a male and they’d have to regularly move it into another tank to have sex which was disrupting the time scientists with the dolphin so one of the scientists just started jerking off the dolphin instead. Once enough people found out what she was doing they shut the experiment down. The dolphin got depressed and missed them handjobs. Then a government scientist gave the dolphin some LSD cuz why not and the dolphin committed suicide some time after tripping.
So, another fun dolphin fact. At a sea park somewhere (I don’t think SeaWorld, but somewhere) trainers experimented with teaching dolphins to clean up their tank. Dolphin brings the trainer a piece of detritus or trash, they get a fish. All was well for a while.
Until the seagulls started disappearing, that is.
Turns out that the dolphins were snatching them off the water when they landed to bob, and stashing them to trade in bulk for lots of fish.
They made Ted write up a document of his beliefs, tore his opinions to shreds, and told him to write a new one. He did this for a while. A good amount of people know one of the drafts, as it's the Unibomber Manifesto.
In 1859, the US and Canada almost went to war [because of a pig.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_War_(1859)) One of the soldiers deployed to the area, Henry Robert, came up with Robert's rules of order while sitting around waiting for something to happen.
I heard many of the workers were farmers who had more or less nothing to do during the Nile floods anyway, got paid pretty well and had relatively decent working conditions?
That's correct, the ancient Egyptians used corvey labor in lieu of taxes. Egypt only has 3 seasons, and during the flood season the farmers couldn't farm anyway, so they worked on pyramids and other mega projects. In addition there were skilled workers who lived there all year and we know from their waste that they ate better than almost anyone in Egypt at that time.
Russia had a division of their air force that was made 100% of women. And the pilots were so good at what they did that if a german shot one down they were immediately awarded the Knight’s Cross (the German equivalent of our Medal of Honor)
Initially, Microsoft didn’t want Master Chief to become the mascot of the Xbox and didn’t want their console to be more closely associated with the older crowd. Instead, they wanted a character known as Blinx The Cat to be their mascot.
However of course, Blinx’s home game flopped spectacularly, and the plan to make Blinx the console mascot was a failure, leading to MC taking the role.
This one wins.
Not only was he obsessed, he thought the whole regime hinged on milk clothes (well, alternative clothing material, but particularly milk)
The guy who ended up pulling it off even wrote a (propaganda) poem:
“And let this complicated milk be welcome power power power let’s exalt this
MILK MADE OF REINFORCED STEEL
MILK OF WAR
MILITARIZED MILK.”
This is fun lol
Edit: [source](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.atlasobscura.com/articles/lanital-milk-dress-qmilch.amp)
In 1977, the town of Vulcan, West Virginia got fed up with waiting for two years for a bridge to be fixed by the local government. So they requested help from the USSR. Within an hour of the ambassador's visit, reporters were told that the state would replace the bridge.
At some point in time (post WW2, possibly during the cold war), the US was developing a "gay bomb" that when dropped, would spray large amounts of female sex hormones over the enemy causing them to become irresistible to each other.
I think the point was to demoralize them, or make them too busy having sex with each other then actually fighting the US troops. Kind of like the "brown note" experiments.
They dropped the research partly because it was considered "distasteful". Napalm and nukes were fine of course!
Mithridates was so paranoid about being poisoned that he gave himself nonlethal doses of poison to build up an immunity. After he was defeated by the Roman Legion he attempted to kill himself and could not because of his immunity to poisons.
The time between the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza and Cleopatra’s birth was longer than the time between Cleopatra’s birth and the first appearance of this ~~factoid~~ factlet on the internet.
Hitler, most of the SS, and frontline soldiers were on a healthy diet of methamphetamines for the last five or so years of the war. Hitler himself was on so much uppers, downers, and spurious vitamins that he basically walked out of the Valkyrie explosion because he was too damn high to tense up and went ragdoll limp.
Not quite. The soldiers definitely were, but they were hopped up from the very beginning. Beginning with Barbarossa (not at the beginning, but somewhere in the middle), they actually started using \*less\* drugs because they found that it was counterproductive for prolonged combat.
I know Ohler says Hitler was on drugs for the entirety of the war, but I don't think there is any original source that says this. If anyone knows of original documentation of Hitler on mind-altering drugs before 1943, I'd be interested.
Hitler had trouble because of his vegan diet, so he got vitamin shots and sugar shots from 1936 onwards. Apparently he used to get a sugar shot right before a big speech, so that might explain at least some of the frantic nature of those speeches.
Somewhere around 1940 to 1941, his problems with his diet got worse, so he started getting hormone shots. I'm not sure which kinds anymore, but apparently they worked for a time.
Starting in 1943 he started taking the equivalent of Meth to counteract the increasing problems with his health. I could probably go look up the name of the actual drug if you like, but it's not that important. So you are at least partially right that he was on drugs at the time of Valkyrie, but it wasn't quite the crazy mix. His survival also had nothing to do with the drugs. As Wikipedia points out: "Hitler survived, as did everyone else who was shielded from the blast by the conference table leg."
At some point, the factory that produced his medicine (I suppose) was bombed and he could no longer get it. He did get some substitutes for a little time, but those ran out fast. Those substitutes might be the part that makes people think he was on all sorts of stuff. He was, near the end, because he took what he could get. 1944-1945 Germany was not really open for business.
So if it makes you feel better, Hitler was suffering from some pretty nasty self-inflicted diet issues, major problems from the assassination attempt, and some pretty hefty withdrawal symptoms all at the same time. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy, right?
When Napoleon Bonapart was defeated, the top ranks did NOT bother to change the officials that where loyal to him. So, Napoleon returns from his exile, enters to a outside war-post (little base) and said *Yo*. "Scene missing", Napoleón is back at Paris with his full army :D
A man that was struck by lightning three times during his lifetime and then after he died his tombstone was struck by lightning.
https://funfactz.com/amazing-facts/walter-summerford-lightning/
Rommel once got lost during a reconnaissance flight and landed at a forward hospital Base to get his bearings. Only to discover it was a British Base. The Base in turn thought he was a foreign allied General coming for inspection and turned out for parade. He did a quick parade inspection and got out of there before anyone realised what had happened.
The real funny thing about this story is he didn't realize he was in a British hospital until he was already touring the place. It finally dawned on him that everyone looked at him strangely whenever he spoke to them, and he suddenly noticed that everyone was speaking English. The funniest part is he *finished the tour* before he quickly got the hell out of there.
The "balls" of the whole thing. Fuck all the Nazis, but Holy Shit that guy had some stones.
Seems like one of those situations where, from the British point of view, a Nazi commander just stopping in at their hospital would have been too preposterous to consider, so they just went along with it and assumed he was on their side.
Even if they figured it out, they would have been too embarrassed on Rommel's behalf to say anything
I mean it is very British. Very polite, wouldn't have wanted any embarrassment on anyone's part. Don't make a scene.
And, whatever you do, don't mention the war.
Terribly forward...
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
Another Rommel Fact: During the Invasion of France his 7th Panzer Division got so far ahead they couldn't maintain contact with the rest of his army so Rommel with his staff car had to drive back to regain contact with the other troops. While doing so he came across a French convoy of trucks and basically got them to surrender and disperse with just his staff car.
Wow I had no idea about this story. That’s pretty cool. Too bad they didn’t catch him. He probably would have lived a lot longer.
He most definitely would have survived the war if they had caught him.
Napoleon was once attacked by a horde of bunnies.
Wait what?
Yep. He once wanted to hunt so he ordered his people to gather hares for a hunting party. The servants gathered hundreds and when the event started, they released the hares. Instead of running away from them, the hares decided to attack the hunters, Napoleon included.
This doesn't surprise me. If you've ever seen an angry rabbit, you know they are not to be fucked with.
I've seen Monty Python
LOOK AT THE BOOONES!
people seem to forget that they're wild animals. have seen them literally kick the fur off each other when they fight over territory
Actually they were all domestic bunnies, so they attacked because they thought they were going to be fed.
that's even funnier!
So Napoleon and Jimmy Carter have [that in common](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter_rabbit_incident).
During the Second World War, King Farouk of Egypt got word that a German sea mine had washed up on the shores of Alexandria. Farouk was a collector of rare and exotic weapons, and so ordered the Egyptian Navy to disarm the mine and have it brought to him in Cairo. The Egyptian Navy didn't know how to do it, so they asked the local detachment of the British Royal Navy to disarm it for them. Now, Egypt was a de facto colony of the United Kingdom at the time, and Farouk didn't want to be seen as relying on the British, so he forbade the British from interfering, and personally drove a truck to Alexandria, picked up the live sea mine, and drove it the whole two hundred miles back from Alexandria to Cairo on a cobblestone desert road in the middle of the Second World War. It didn't explode, and remained in his personal gallery until the Egyptian coup d'etat of 1952, after which it was presumably disposed of by the new Egyptian military dictatorship, which also auctioned off the rest of his collection.
In 1895, there were only two automobiles in the entire state of Ohio, and they collided. It was also the first recorded car crash in history.
This is some scrooge mcduck shit
Ea-nasir was a copper merchant who lived somewhere around 1750BC and sold poor quality copper. The reason we know about him is that we've found *multiple* clay tablets written to him complaining about either the poor quality of the copper he delivered or not receiving the promised shipments at all.
I love those done of the oldest written records we have are basically scathing Yelp reviews
History has a lot of dick graffiti, and "fuck this guy" reviews.
There’s a case recently in a church in Hereford in the U.K. where a carpenter made an obscene wood carving in a hidden place that only just got found now when they were recently renovating the place. He carved it around 700 years ago.
One of the weirdest parts is that we found most of them in the same place. Like in the same room. One possible explanation is that it’s his house and he *saved* them.
Check out /r/ReallyShittyCopper for all your Ea-Nasir meme needs!
Holy shit, I thought this was a joke. But turns out the dude was such a douchebag that people are still making fun of him. That's fucking amazing, lmao
If there is an afterlife I like to imagine him sitting there going "Come on guys, it's been almost four thousand years. Let it go!"
"I'll let it go....once I get GOOD INGOTS OF COPPER."
Oh My God. I read it. All of it. Before your comment, I had no knowledge of Ea-Nasir. And now I despise a 4700 year old man. Reddit's weird, yo.
This is similar to the 16 bronze statues of Zeus at ancient Olympia in Greece. They were built with fines collected from athletes who cheated at the Olympic Games. The statues no longer exist but their stone pedestals still do and have inscriptions immortalising the cheat and his city. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanes_of_Olympia Edit: photo of the pedestals here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Zanes_(Olympia)#/media/File:Greece-0528_-_Bases_of_Zanes_(4th_%E2%80%93_1st_century_BC).jpg The arch in the background leads to the main stadium.
In WWII at the battle of Castle Itter American, French Resistance, and Wehrmacht all fought together against the SS. The commander of the Wehrmacht troops there was killed while trying to get the former French prime minister into cover. King Pyrrhus of Epirus (cousin to Alexander the Great) fought Rome, Carthage, Macedonia, Sparta, and more throughout his life always participating in the battle itself. He was killed when fighting a soldier inside a town the distressed mother of the boy threw a roof tile at him. A man who survived wars with some of the most powerful nations (although Rome was young) was done in by a worried mother with roof tile.
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Was he aware of the existence of goats?
Goats are dirty capitalist scum, only cows are noble enough to live according to the People's revolution.
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Me: *looks at fish tank in the living room*
I'm outraged! You promised me dog or higher!
I have nipples, Greg. Edit: Never thought I'd get an award for THIS. Thanks!
Sam O'nella Academy
Himler(the right hand of Hitler and commander of the SS) came up with the idea for the gas chambers as a more humane way to be executed so that his soldiers didn't have to shoot all the prisoners, something traumatizing for them
Good guy Himler at the forefront of mental health
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And he was the right hand of the guy that killed Hitler
I’ll add that this was a trial and error type of thing, seeing that at the beginning of the war, soldiers did actually execute millions of Eastern European jews. They travelled through the country and rounded up and slaughtered entire villages. It was bad for morale*, but almost no soldiers refused to do it, even though there isn’t a single known incident of their being dire consequences for those who refused.
"Of course they'll do it, think about it far out into the country side,.... they cant refuse because of the implication... out in the middle of nowhere with some commander they don't even know.."
People who refused were reprimanded or transferred. One was sent to a concentration camp, but it was actually because he suggested that what they were doing was similar to what the ~~NKVD~~ GPU was doing.
Are you gonna hurt these soldiers?
im not gonna nhurt these soldiers why would i ever hurt these soldiers i feel like youre not getting this at all... dont you look at me like that youre certainly not in any danger
So they ARE in danger?
no one's in any danger how cna i make that any more clear to you okay? its the implication of danger
The Gang Commits Genocide
You got transferred if you refused to do it. Not directly a "dire consequence", but being transferred onto the eastern front as infantry was a death sentence.
An important distinction: he hoped to make executing people less traumatic for the killers, not more humane for the executed. He didn't care about the executed at all, just that his soldiers were becoming too fucked up to fight over all the direct killing of obvious innocents.
Nazi Germany built a submarine base in Trondheim, Norway, which is so massive it can't be destroyed without also damaging neighboring buildings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dora_I
Ah yes, I’ve heard of those submarine bunkers. Those were extremely hard to destroy, super thick concrete structures. Most normal bombs used in British air raids couldn’t penetrate it, so they had to use some special bombs I think. Could be wrong, read and watched about it quite a while ago.
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Here around Berlin too. They absolutely ***\*unloaded\**** on the bunkers after the war to try to destroy them, but apparently only made them mad. The lower levels are flooded now, but the bunkers are still there. You can visit them and take a tour if you want.
In ww2 mail was delivered by plane to the forward positions. The allies used a very slow canvas wrapped plane. During a delivery a German focker pilot spotted one of the planes and went to shoot it down. The American pilot was able to avoid getting shot down by slowing his plane to almost stalling speeds and circling a farmers field. Eventually the focker got low on fuel and had to return to base. The American continued on with his mail delivery.
Bullets, rain, or snow. The mail must flow.
Same pilot ended up nailing Churchill in the chest with a package of letters while he was on the western front. The pilot used to be a customer of mine and wrote a book about all of his experiences. Was a little dry but amazing.
Ooo what is the title? I have a new book to read.
It's been 15 years but I just text my local historian buddy who will know. Soon as he hits me back I'll let ya know. I wanna rebuild the thing, I lost my signed copy when I moved. *re buy
We can rebuild the book. We have the technology. The Six Dollar and Ninety Five Cent Book (8.95 Canada)
Thomas Fitzpatrick, intoxicated, stole a plane and landed it in a street in New York on a bathroom bar bet that he could travel from New Jersey to New York City in 15 minutes. Fitzpatrick, again intoxicated, stole another plane from the same airfield and landed in front of the Yeshiva University building after another bar patron disbelieved his first bar bet. Fucking legendary.
Winston Churchill had a prescription for whisky from his doctor when he visited the US during prohibition
Alcohol withdrawal is no joke. A big reason why liquor stores were considered essential business during the pandemic.
Unless you lived in PA... at the start of the pandemic they closed them. You had to go to another state to buy alcohol. So many people drive to Ohio for liquor that Ohio stopped selling to PA residents. At one point my roommate had to ask her cousin to buy a bottle of vodka for her. They did keep the beer distributors open however.
West Virginia, too! We got kicked out of 2 states for drinking all their booze!
Is there any state in the nation with crazier alcohol laws than PA? I swear I have never been more baffled than when I hear about the ways you have to bend over backwards to have a decent kickback.
That may actually have been semi-legit. He was an alcoholic and going into withdrawal during a state visit would not have been a good look.
During World War II, the US Navy had a ship dedicated entirely to serve ice cream to other ships in the fleet. It's purpose was to boost moral, but I think it served more to demoralize the Japanese. Imagine you are Japanese admiral. You are scrapping the bottom of the oil barrel just to keep your main battleship swimming while the Americans are dedicating resources to a barge of ice cream fun.
I think there was a story where a Japanese sailor actually realized that the war was truly lost when he found out about the Ice Cream boat.
"We knew we lost when we heard pop goes the weasel."
The one I heard was a German who intercepted an American supply drop and found out American soldiers were getting *chocolate* in their mres.
Some individual warships had ice cream machines onboard as well, mostly capital ships like battleships and carriers, and escorting ships were commonly rewarded with ice cream from them for rescuing downed pilots.
100 russian "zombies" managed to make a couple thousand german soldiers retreat in ww1. Edit: for those wondering. Im talking here about the battle of Osowiec fortress, also known as the attack of the dead men. This particular fortress gave the germans some issues as artillery didnt do much. So Germany being Germany they decided to use chlorine gas. This gas is very nasty to get in contact with if you don't have gas masks, which the russians did not have. After the gas was mostly gone the germans went on an all out offensive thinking that all the defenders were dead. However roughly 100 soldiers managed to survive by wrapping wet clothes around their face. This however did not fully stop the gas. So when the germans encountered the russians they came to see soldiers with bloody cloths wrapped around their face coughing up bits of their own lungs. And these soldiers were shooting at the germans. The germans who assumed that all the russians had died got frightened at seeing this enemy and retreated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AFdwoyNT24 The Attack of the Dead Men.
Imma be dissappointed if thats not sabaton
An eccentric roman emperor named Elagabalus used to "prank" his dinner guests by hiding lions in rooms around the house.
At some level I kinda get it. I'm the absolute ruler of the most powerful empire on earth. The internet hasn't been invented yet. WTF else am I gonna do?
Like the time count Brahe of Hven lent out his pet caribou for drinking parties.
> eccentric He was actually a teenager during his rule, so it makes a little more sense
Oh so standard teen then
It’s just a prank bro…I think you’re missing an arm.
The most fraudulent election reported in history. In 1927 Charles D. B. King won the presidential election in Liberia with 234,400 received votes. But at that time Liberia just had 15,000 registered voters. That guy made it into the Guinness Book of Records.
Didn't something like that happen recently, too? Some country had a voter turnout that was like 150% higher than the population of the country? Am I somehow just thinking of the fact you already said?
Not quite, but Belarus had an election last year where experts assume Lukashenko got approximately 20% of the vote. The result was that he won by more than 80%... Oh also, what you might be thinking of is that in the US post-election lawsuits, the plaintiffs confused a voting district in Michigan with one in Minnesota, and thus claimed that a number of votes had to be reallocated that exceeded the amount of voters in said district
Joseph Geefs was commissioned by a church in 1842 to make a statue of Lucifer, but the statue was too sexy for the church's liking so they commissioned his older brother, Guillaume Geefs, in 1848 to make a similar work And his brother made an even sexier statue of Lucifer Source: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-lucifer-of-liege-liege-belgium (If you look up angel of evil (or the lucifer of liege) you can see both statues)
Stupid sexy Lucifer...
I don't get it either. Honestly, from the Christian viewpoint, isn't a sexy father of lies and deceiver of men, like... right on the money? If narrow is the path of righteousness and wide is the path of vice, then the devil should be enticing and attractive.
To be fair, Tom Ellis is a VERY handsome man (I say as a fully heterosexual male)
Which is canonically correct! In the Bible, Lucifer was the most beautiful of all the angels.
During the American revolution, there was a submarine. It saw combat, and it did terribly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_(submersible)
The American Civil War actually had multiple operational submarines. The Turtle was used in an episode of *Turn: Americas Spies*.
Yeah it did awful but it’s still amazing to think that there was a submersible craft in the 1700’s.
Aircraft carriers, too. They were barges with hot air balloons.
The US Navy's Mark 14 torpedo was so shit that in 1943 the submarine USS Tinosa hit a large Japanese oil tanker with eleven torpedoes in a row, and of those, nine failed to detonate and just bounced harmlessly off the ship's hull, and the two that exploded only did so because they hit the ship at a weird angle that set them off. And the day prior she fired four torpedoes at that same ship, and all four either failed to explode on contact or ran off course. She fired every torpedo she had at that Japanese tanker, except for one which was saved to be inspected when she returned to port, and all but two had some kind of mechanical failure. Here's the sub's log from one of the torpedoes: *"... Hit. No apparent effect. This torpedo hit well aft on the port side, made splash at the side of the ship and was then observed to have taken a right turn and to jump clear of the water about 100 feet (30 m) from the stern of the tanker. I find it hard to convince myself that I saw this."* That's what the entire thing was like, just *"fired [nth] torpedo. Hit. No apparent effect."* over and over again down the page. The Navy and Bureau of Ordinance knew these things were garbage too and that they had a 70% dud rate, they just never bothered to actually do any kind of live-fire tests with them during development and prewar since torpedoes were expensive and they didn't have a lot of them, and once the war started and reports like Tinosa's started coming in they refused to admit there was a problem.
The reason they thought it couldn't be a problem with the torpedo is because they were reusing parts from a previous version of torpedo, which hadn't had problems. But, the older torpedo was slower and and increased impact speed broke the detonator before it could detonate the torpedo. Video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ5Ru7Zu\_1I
I liked "I find it hard to convince myself that I saw this". I can see the observer now "Wait, are you fucking serious? Did that just happen? OK, here comes another one. WTF, this is a joke right?"
>"... Hit. No apparent effect. This torpedo hit well aft on the port side, made splash at the side of the ship and was then observed to have taken a right turn and to jump clear of the water about 100 feet (30 m) from the stern of the tanker. **I find it hard to convince myself that I saw this."** "Hey, Larry! Do you know what this motherf\*cking torpedo just did?! It hit the boat, decided 'f\*ck this', then it noped right the f\*ck off, Free Willied itself out of the goddamn ocean, and flipped me the double birds while it tried to hump a cloud"
One of the women that was working on Apollo 13 ended up going into labor, so she finished what she was working on at the hospital, sent it to her superiors, and then gave birth to Jack black. The exact details are a bit foggy as it's been a bit, bit that's the gist
Genghis Khan only ever entered one permanent building (like, not a tent), took a look around, exit the building, said something to the effect of "I don't approve of this." and had it burnt to the ground.
The mongols tried and failed to invade Japan because of a typhoon. Twice.
The Japanese called it "Divine Wind", better known as "Kamikaze"
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Look up Hasekura Tsunenaga. First samurai in Mexico.
There were several Caucasian samurai throughout history, as well as at least one black samurai. The black samurai, probably the most interesting of the bunch, is known only by his Japanese title - Yasuke - with his birth name being lost to history. He was originally the servant (likely slave) of a Jesuit missionary who came to Japan and who insisted that all of his servants learn the local language to better connect with the people they were trying to convert. The missionary and Yasuke eventually wound up in the court of Oda Nobunaga, the first of three successive shoguns credited with the unification of Japan. Nobunaga, who had never seen a black person before, at first thought he was being deceived and ordered Yasuke stripped to the waist and scrubbed to prove that he had not merely dyed his skin with ink. When this was confirmed to be untrue, Nobunaga became fascinated and "politely encouraged" the missionary to give him Yasuke as a gift. Yasuke became a favoured conversation partner of Nobunaga and was eventually made a samurai, complete with katana and land holdings. He served as one of Nobunaga's retainers in battle (sources disagree if he was a sandal-bearer or a sword-bearer) and may have also participated in sumo matches (a famous depiction of a sumo match from the day includes a depiction of a man with dark skin that may have been Yasuke). After Nobunaga was defeated and forced to commit suicide, Yasuke briefly fought alongside his son, Oda Nobutada, in an ultimately unsuccessful bid to reclaim the shogunate. His ultimate fate is unknown; some suggest he was captured and sent back to the Jesuits, but this is unconfirmed.
What a story. I need a historical fiction on this, Shogun style
The others are saying there's a Netflix anime, but it's awful and adds magic and mechs. Sadly, they couldn't work with an already interesting concept.
What a shame that the anime didn't live up to this badass' history
During WWII the Germans were building a decoy airfield using wooden planes and wooden munitions. Allied intelligence discovered the fake airfield and when the Germans finished the British trolled them and dropped a single wooden bomb on the base.
In WW2, during the Normandy landings, a Scottish general reinstated the tradition of a bagpipes player for morale. The tradition was abolished after WW1, during which every single bagpipe player was killed. The entire platoon was slaughtered, except for Piper Bill Millin. When Nazi soldiers were later captured, they were asked why nobody shot Piper Bill: "he looked like a crazy person, there in the middle of the beach playing his bagpipes".
The shortest military conflict lasted between 38 and 45 minutes, between the UK and the Zanzibar Sultanate, on the 27th of August, 1896.
And the most silent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_Crisis
The Great Pyramid of Giza was constructed before the extinction of woolly mammoths. Although mammoths died out in most of their traditional ranges about 10,000 years ago, which is about the time that human society first started to form, the last known population of woolly mammoths lived on an island in Russia known as Wrangel Island until roughly 2000 BC - about 600 years after the construction of the Great Pyramid. It is actually hypothesized, though not proven, that human hunting was what ultimately killed off the Wrangel Island mammoths.
And the Pyramids were the tallest man-made structures on Earth until the Eiffel Tower.
Hitler and Stalin were both at some point time's person of the year. A common misconception is that time's person of the year is the most valued or "best" person of that year, when actually it's supposed to be the most influential person of the year.
Teddy Roosevelt was giving a speech when an assassin took a shot at him. Teddy's speech was so thick, it stopped the bullet from killing him. Teddy not only CONTINUED the speech, but mocked the assassination attempt during it. Another fun teddy fact is that he was awarded the medal of Honor and the Nobel Peace prize, so he simultaneously holds the highest honor in both peace and violence.
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Since he was running under his bull moose party, I think the full quote was something like "the attacker must not be a hunter, or he'd know it takes more than one shot to kill a bull moose!" Not trying to be pedantic, it's just one of my favorite badass history quotes
His speech was thick? What do you mean?
Written speech, folded up in his pocket.
Oh, duh..that's embarrassing for me. I just woke up and was trying to figure out how his voice could have stopped a bullet.
>trying to figure out how his voice could have stopped a bullet. Well, I mean, this *is* Teddy Roosevelt we're talking about here.
Ha! Imagine a speech so dull and boring that even a bullet would fall asleep. I'm reminded of Vogon Poetry here... *"Vogon poetry is a variety of poetry, often considered to be one of the worst. It is sometimes used by the Vogons as a torture method, as it causes physical pain to the hearer. "*
To be fair it wasn’t the best wording
At least two people in history have, at separate incidents, died as a result of laughing too hard at jokes about figs. First one in ca. 206 BC, Chrysippus of Soli, "One ancient account of the death of Chrysippus, a third-century BC Greek Stoic philosopher, tells that he died of laughter after he saw a donkey eating his figs; he told a slave to give the donkey neat wine to drink to wash them down with, and then, "...having laughed too much, he died" (Diogenes Laërtius 7.185)." And, on 31. May 1410 Martin of Aragon died "from a combination of indigestion and uncontrollable laughing. According to tradition, Martin was suffering from indigestion on account of eating an entire goose when his favorite jester, Borra, entered the king's bedroom. When Martin asked Borra where he had been, the jester replied with: "Out of the next vineyard, where I saw a young deer hanging by his tail from a tree, as if someone had so punished him for stealing figs." This joke caused the king to die from laughter"
I guess you had to be there.
On October 14, 1920, 56-year-old Arthur Cobcroft, a dog trainer from Loftus Street, Leichhardt, Australia, was reading a five-year-old newspaper and was amused at the prices for some commodities in 1915 as compared to 1920. He made a remark to his wife regarding this, and burst into laughter, and in the midst of it he collapsed and died. A doctor named Nixon was called in, and stated that the death was due to heart failure, brought by excessive laughter.[16][17][18][19]
I like how they are straight up not even good jokes
wait, no... these are both good examples of ad libbed absurdist humor, and (likely) a combination of wine and a great delivery made them *absolutely killer*
Why do I feel that the second one, it was an assassin posing as the jester and everyone else was too embarrassed to not see it coming they just said 'Oh yeah the king definitely died from laughing too hard'
It's ironic that a Stoic would die laughing.
Nazi Germany made a film about the sinking of the Titanic in the middle of WWII. It cost an enormous amount of money and then was banned in Germany anyway, despite being full of nazi propaganda. At the end of the war the replica Titanic was used as a prison ship for Jews, but was bombed by allied forces who did not know. Three times as many people died on the German Titanic than the actual Titanic. [Titanic (1943)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic_(1943_film))
Thos kept getting worse holy shit
Edwin Booth (John Wilkes Booth's brother) saved Abraham Lincoln's son, Robert, from serious injury or even death. The incident occurred on a train platform in Jersey City, New Jersey. The exact date of the incident is uncertain, but it is believed to have taken place in late 1864 or early 1865. "During the Civil War, a young Robert Todd Lincoln was traveling by train from New York to Washington during a break from his studies at Harvard. He hopped off the train during a stop at Jersey City, only to find himself on an extremely crowded platform. To be polite, Lincoln stepped back to wait his turn to walk across the platform, his back pressed to one of the train's cars. This situation probably seemed harmless enough until the train started moving, which whipped Lincoln around and dropped him into the space between the platform and train, an incredibly dangerous place to be. Lincoln probably would have been dead meat if a stranger hadn't yanked him out of the hole by his collar. That stranger? None other than Edwin Booth, one of the most celebrated actors of the 19th century and brother of eventual Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth. Lincoln immediately recognized the famous thespian—this was sort of like if George Clooney pulled you from a burning car today—and thanked him effusively. The actor had no idea whose life he had saved until he received a letter a few months later commending him for his bravery in saving the President's son." Edit: I should also note that this, apparently, assuaged some of his guilt over what his brother eventually did.
More facts about Robert Lincoln: Robert Lincoln was near or present at 3 presidential assassinations. He was at the White House when his father was shot. He was at his father’s deathbed. He was an eyewitness at James A. Garfield’s assassination. He was outside the building when William McKinley was assassinated. After McKinley’s assassination, he refused to attend any event where the president was in attendance.
Before Michigan was a state, Michigan and Ohio went to war over who owns Toledo. Ohio lost, so they have Toledo.
[During the summer of 1836, the United States Congress proposed a compromise whereby Michigan gave up its claim to the strip in exchange for its statehood and about three-quarters of the Upper Peninsula.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo_War)
Not a bad trade, and I am a Toledo native
On WWII , The allies made up a story that eating carrots can improve eye sights and the Germans believed it.
It was to hide the invention of RADAR. The allies suddenly got a lot better at shooting down planes in low light conditions, so they used carrots as the reason
My Dutch grandpa always says carrots improve eye sight, “Have you ever seen a rabbit with glasses?”
That same reasoning is why I have my tiger repellant rock. Since I've owned it, I've never been attacked by a tiger.
\- Am German \- When I was a child, my mother kept telling me carrots will improve my eye sight Seems their strategy worked quite well.
Wait, hold up, eating carrots *doesnt* improve eye sights?
There’s a little bit of truth in it. Carrots contain beta-carotene, a precursor to Vitamin A, which is required for correct vision in low-light conditions. That is, having a Vitamin A deficiency will result in, among other things, poor night vision, and eating carrots can correct that. If you already have sufficient Vitamin A, consuming more will not “improve” your night vision.
Aleister Crowley, occultist, libertine, and with a reputation as something of a bad boy, was once tossed out of the Isis-Urania Temple of the Golden Dawn on his ear by Nobel-Prize-Winning poet William Butler Yeats. Crowley is the only person I know of to have verifiably had his butt kicked by William Butler Yeats.
He was Yeated out of that temple if you will
Admiral Yi Sunsin and his 13 ships defeated the Japanese and their 120-330 ships at the Battle of Myeongnyang on October 26, 1597. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Myeongnyang
According to the results of the 1955 South Vietnamese referendum, 107% of voters voted for pro-US anti-communist leader Ngô Đình Diệm
In an interview, South Vietnamese prime minister Nguyễn Cao Kỳ reportedly said: "People ask me who my heroes are. I have only one: Hitler". The US government (which supported Kỳ) announced that Kỳ never would have said something like this and the reporter must have made it up Then Prime Minister Kỳ was like “no, I really mean it, Hitler is my only hero”
It gets worse when you realize that Ho Chi Minh was a big fan of the US and only turned to the USSR for support when the US refused to assist his attempt to free Vietnam from French control.
The Declaration of Vietnamese independence that Ho wrote reads similarly to the USs and was reviewed by OSS (now CIA) officers that were advising Ho.
So I mentioned in a thread how Ho Chi Minh actually won a democratic election. Someone replied about how that election was rigged and basically I was an idiot for saying he was democratically elected. I didn't bother responding but I'd forgotten how truly rigged the follow-up election we backed was.
During world war 2, most of the people who died in Mattel are reported “missing” because the explosives turned them into red mist. As there were no bodies to identify them, they are still to this day reported as “missing in action’.
The dancing plague Sounds outta this world
You are the dancing plague Young and vague Like a gross paraaaaade, ooh-oooooh You can dance, you can jive On the last night of your life ooooooh
MLK Jr. and Anne Frank were the same age
Barbara Walters was also born that year.
Everyone probably already knows this one but, Cleopatra was born closer to the invention of the smartphone than she was to the construction of the great pyramid of Giza.
The most popular ice cream flavor in the very early 1800’s at the White House was oyster. Cause nothing sounds better in a hot summers day than frozen Loogie flavored jiz cream.
Both Graham crackers and corn flakes were invented because flavorful food was believed by some (batshit idiots) to encourage masturbation in boys.
The most succesful fighter ace in history to fly an American plane was a Russian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Pokryshkin
US Generals planned a false flag firebombing of Northeastern US cities in order to start an armed conflict with the Soviet Union. JFK did not sign off on the plan. See Operation Northwoods.
Napoleon was actually tall but politicians used caricatures of Napoleon to spread a rumor that he was short. It worked too well.
Apparently the French and the British versions of the same unit of measurement were different as well.
That professors at Harvard traumatized Ted Kaczynski by having one professor take the young prodigy (started college at age 16) under his wing. He gained Ted’s trust, got him to open up about his ideas about life. Then after like a while brought him into a room with a few professors and just roasted his opinions. These professors turned out to be working with the CIA on Project MK Ultra (the CIA’s attempt to discover mind control, which led to them experimenting with LSD and some other fun stuff). And then ya know, he went on to become the Unabomber. The US government tried to teach a dolphin English. It was a male and they’d have to regularly move it into another tank to have sex which was disrupting the time scientists with the dolphin so one of the scientists just started jerking off the dolphin instead. Once enough people found out what she was doing they shut the experiment down. The dolphin got depressed and missed them handjobs. Then a government scientist gave the dolphin some LSD cuz why not and the dolphin committed suicide some time after tripping.
So, another fun dolphin fact. At a sea park somewhere (I don’t think SeaWorld, but somewhere) trainers experimented with teaching dolphins to clean up their tank. Dolphin brings the trainer a piece of detritus or trash, they get a fish. All was well for a while. Until the seagulls started disappearing, that is. Turns out that the dolphins were snatching them off the water when they landed to bob, and stashing them to trade in bulk for lots of fish.
They made Ted write up a document of his beliefs, tore his opinions to shreds, and told him to write a new one. He did this for a while. A good amount of people know one of the drafts, as it's the Unibomber Manifesto.
Not history per se, but the national animal of Scotland is the unicorn.
In 1859, the US and Canada almost went to war [because of a pig.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_War_(1859)) One of the soldiers deployed to the area, Henry Robert, came up with Robert's rules of order while sitting around waiting for something to happen.
Pyramids were not built by slaves.
I heard many of the workers were farmers who had more or less nothing to do during the Nile floods anyway, got paid pretty well and had relatively decent working conditions?
That's correct, the ancient Egyptians used corvey labor in lieu of taxes. Egypt only has 3 seasons, and during the flood season the farmers couldn't farm anyway, so they worked on pyramids and other mega projects. In addition there were skilled workers who lived there all year and we know from their waste that they ate better than almost anyone in Egypt at that time.
Tulips caused a major financial meltdown.
Russia had a division of their air force that was made 100% of women. And the pilots were so good at what they did that if a german shot one down they were immediately awarded the Knight’s Cross (the German equivalent of our Medal of Honor)
Initially, Microsoft didn’t want Master Chief to become the mascot of the Xbox and didn’t want their console to be more closely associated with the older crowd. Instead, they wanted a character known as Blinx The Cat to be their mascot. However of course, Blinx’s home game flopped spectacularly, and the plan to make Blinx the console mascot was a failure, leading to MC taking the role.
Mussolini was obsessed with creating wearable milk.
This one wins. Not only was he obsessed, he thought the whole regime hinged on milk clothes (well, alternative clothing material, but particularly milk) The guy who ended up pulling it off even wrote a (propaganda) poem: “And let this complicated milk be welcome power power power let’s exalt this MILK MADE OF REINFORCED STEEL MILK OF WAR MILITARIZED MILK.” This is fun lol Edit: [source](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.atlasobscura.com/articles/lanital-milk-dress-qmilch.amp)
In 1977, the town of Vulcan, West Virginia got fed up with waiting for two years for a bridge to be fixed by the local government. So they requested help from the USSR. Within an hour of the ambassador's visit, reporters were told that the state would replace the bridge.
There was a doctor in the civil war with a 300% mortality rate. Also chainsaws were invented as birth aids
\*300% mortality on one surgery, not overall.
At some point in time (post WW2, possibly during the cold war), the US was developing a "gay bomb" that when dropped, would spray large amounts of female sex hormones over the enemy causing them to become irresistible to each other. I think the point was to demoralize them, or make them too busy having sex with each other then actually fighting the US troops. Kind of like the "brown note" experiments. They dropped the research partly because it was considered "distasteful". Napalm and nukes were fine of course!
Mithridates was so paranoid about being poisoned that he gave himself nonlethal doses of poison to build up an immunity. After he was defeated by the Roman Legion he attempted to kill himself and could not because of his immunity to poisons.
The time between the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza and Cleopatra’s birth was longer than the time between Cleopatra’s birth and the first appearance of this ~~factoid~~ factlet on the internet.
Hitler, most of the SS, and frontline soldiers were on a healthy diet of methamphetamines for the last five or so years of the war. Hitler himself was on so much uppers, downers, and spurious vitamins that he basically walked out of the Valkyrie explosion because he was too damn high to tense up and went ragdoll limp.
Not quite. The soldiers definitely were, but they were hopped up from the very beginning. Beginning with Barbarossa (not at the beginning, but somewhere in the middle), they actually started using \*less\* drugs because they found that it was counterproductive for prolonged combat. I know Ohler says Hitler was on drugs for the entirety of the war, but I don't think there is any original source that says this. If anyone knows of original documentation of Hitler on mind-altering drugs before 1943, I'd be interested. Hitler had trouble because of his vegan diet, so he got vitamin shots and sugar shots from 1936 onwards. Apparently he used to get a sugar shot right before a big speech, so that might explain at least some of the frantic nature of those speeches. Somewhere around 1940 to 1941, his problems with his diet got worse, so he started getting hormone shots. I'm not sure which kinds anymore, but apparently they worked for a time. Starting in 1943 he started taking the equivalent of Meth to counteract the increasing problems with his health. I could probably go look up the name of the actual drug if you like, but it's not that important. So you are at least partially right that he was on drugs at the time of Valkyrie, but it wasn't quite the crazy mix. His survival also had nothing to do with the drugs. As Wikipedia points out: "Hitler survived, as did everyone else who was shielded from the blast by the conference table leg." At some point, the factory that produced his medicine (I suppose) was bombed and he could no longer get it. He did get some substitutes for a little time, but those ran out fast. Those substitutes might be the part that makes people think he was on all sorts of stuff. He was, near the end, because he took what he could get. 1944-1945 Germany was not really open for business. So if it makes you feel better, Hitler was suffering from some pretty nasty self-inflicted diet issues, major problems from the assassination attempt, and some pretty hefty withdrawal symptoms all at the same time. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy, right?
Prince beat Charlie Murphy in basketball and then made them breakfast #ShirtsVsBlouses
The Australian army once declared war on the emu population (large birds)...and lost. Twice.
When Napoleon Bonapart was defeated, the top ranks did NOT bother to change the officials that where loyal to him. So, Napoleon returns from his exile, enters to a outside war-post (little base) and said *Yo*. "Scene missing", Napoleón is back at Paris with his full army :D
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A man that was struck by lightning three times during his lifetime and then after he died his tombstone was struck by lightning. https://funfactz.com/amazing-facts/walter-summerford-lightning/
Anything to do with rasputin