History is full of surprises… and inaccuracies. Some of the common stories we’ve heard for years aren’t quite what they seem. From misunderstood inventions to myths about legendary figures, it’s time to set the record straight on some of history’s most popular misconceptions.
Napoleon Was Short
Napoleon wasn’t as short as you have heard he was. He was by no means a towering man, standing at 5’2”—but keep in mind that’s pre-Revolution measurements. In modern measurements, you’d say he was 5’6”. He was a bit taller than average, and no one in his era made any specific remarks regarding his height.
Einstein Failed Math
This myth was discussed by Einstein himself in his lifetime, and its origins are unclear. While the genius mathematician struggled in subjects such as botany and language, he always received top marks in the field that would make him a household name.
Cleopatra Was Egyptian
While Cleopatra was the queen of the Ptolemaic Empire of Egypt, she herself may not have been Egyptian. She styled herself as the reincarnation of the goddess Isis, but her family was Greek. In fact, Cleopatra was the first Ptolemaic ruler to speak the Egyptian language, as the other people in her family refused to learn it. Some scholars debate that her birth mother was part of the Egyptian clergy, but it is unproven.
How Vikings Looked
Pop culture Vikings have horned helmets and plentiful runic tattoos. However, neither of these features were likely present in reality. Contemporary descriptions of Vikings make no note of tattoos, which would have been exceptionally odd at the time, and the only Viking helmet we’ve ever discovered is a simple iron helmet with no decoration.
300 Spartans
While three hundred Spartans defended the pass in Thermopylae against a Persian military force, that’s only part of the story. There were at least 4,000 soldiers on the Greek side, it’s just that only three hundred of them hailed from Sparta! It’s a bit disingenuous to leave their allies out of the discussion.
Ben Franklin and the Kite
The image of Franklin flying a kite in a thunderstorm and “discovering” electricity is, at best, greatly exaggerated. Electricity was already scientifically understood in some form before Franklin’s time. Franklin himself even published a diagram for a lightning rod a month before the supposed kite-flying ever took place. The only source for the kite story is Franklin’s own pal, Joseph Priestley, who wrote about it 15 years after it supposedly took place.
Mussolini and the Trains
Sometimes you’ll hear grumpy people who are waiting on a delayed transport grumble about the Italian dictator who “at least got the trains running on time.” This is absurd fascist propaganda and far from the truth. While train schedules tightened up around the time Mussolini took power, historians give credit to other politicians who came before him. During his reign, public transportation schedules crumbled largely due to the events of the Second World War. Go figure.
Who Built the Pyramids?
A controversial claim from Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1977 sparked a rumor that Jewish slaves were forced to build the Great Pyramids in Egypt. However, this can’t be possible: the Jewish faith didn’t exist at the point in history when Egyptian pharaohs commissioned the creation of the pyramids.
Van Gogh’s Ear
The story goes that accomplished painter Vincent Van Gogh chopped his own ear off and gave it to a French prostitute because he was so unstable. However, this is a lie fabricated by Paul Gauguin, a rival of Van Gogh’s, who himself nicked off the earlobe with a fencing rapier in a nasty falling out. Gauguin spread the rumor that Van Gogh did it himself to humiliate and discredit his hated rival.
Richard III
Contrary to Shakespeare’s version of events, Richard III was not a hunchback, nor was he a cartoonishly evil usurper. He held his nephews, Edward V and Richard of Shewsbury, in the Tower of London and took the throne for himself, but he was backed by an assembly of both lords and commoners to take over the realm as king. Sources differ regarding whether or not he had his nephews executed, though. Richard III’s remains were discovered in 2012, revealing that, while he suffered from scoliosis, he was not a hunchback.
Washington’s Teeth
Some sources attest that George Washington had wooden dentures that appalled guests who visited him when he became the country’s first president. However, there’s no evidence of this. It’s known he had dentures made of gold, ivory, and even lead, but the wooden rumor likely started due to his love of port wine staining his dentures brown or dark red.
Columbus’s Rationale
Christopher Columbus did not set out to prove the earth was round. Rather, Columbus was looking for new ways to navigate to India via circumnavigation, and his opponents simply contended that he underestimated the size of the planet and didn’t pack enough supplies for the trip. The myth that Columbus set out to prove that the world was round originated with Washington Irving’s book The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, published in 1828.
Medieval Flat Earth Beliefs
While the Middle Ages are known as a time of scientific regression, Europeans understood that the Earth is round. This had been mathematically proven centuries earlier by Greek scientists viewing shadows cast by measuring tools at various points on the planet. The arguments medieval scholars had about the planet regarded its exact size and the possibility of other people living on the opposite side of the planet, not its shape.
Thomas Crapper’s Inventions
Thomas Crapper was a plumber and manufacturer of water closets, but he did not invent the flushable toilet, contrary to popular belief. With a name like “Crapper,” it has to be true, though, right? The guy’s name means toilet! Well, again, no: the word “crappe,” meaning waste, dates to the 13th Century. The first flush toilet was probably Sir John Harington, who installed such a device at Queen Elizabeth’s Surrey palace in the 16th Century.
Let Them Eat Cake
Marie Antoinette likely never said that her subjects should “eat cake” since they were out of bread. This famously out-of-touch line was used as a way to demonize her before and after her public execution, but there’s no evidence she ever said it. In fact, these exact words were attributed to various other nobles in the decades leading up to the French Revolution.
The British are Coming!
Paul Revere is often depicted as shouting “the British are coming!” as he rides through the Massachusetts countryside to warn of the approaching soldiers. However, the colonists would have viewed themselves as British, thus making it impossible he would have shouted such a phrase. Moreover, there were already British troops camping all over the region, so shouting their arrival would tip the colonists’ hand. Instead, Revere likely carried his message to high-ranking people and whispered about the arrival of the “regulars.”
Newton and the Apple
The story goes that an apple once plunked onto Sir Isaac Newton’s head, suddenly giving him the idea of the concept of gravity. However, in the mathematician’s own telling, the apple never hits him on the head. In fact, he doesn’t even describe an apple falling in his telling, but instead describes his process of dwelling on the idea of an apple falling while sitting under the shade of an apple tree with a friend in 1666. That story, notably, comes from biographer William Stukeley, who remembered this conversation sixty years later in 1726.
Spanish Flu
Why is Spanish flu called that? Well, it broke out during the height of the Great War, leading many countries suffering from this pandemic to hide the truth of it to not give their enemies any insight into their health issues. Spain was the first country to openly discuss the disease, leading to every other country to adopt the name “Spanish flu,” despite the illness likely originating in Kansas.
Coca-Cola Invented Santa Claus
This one isn’t so much a mistaken fact as a bit of a misleading statement. The popularity of the red clothing and white trim seen on modern depictions of Santa Claus is a result of a highly successful 1930s Coke ad campaign. However, Santa himself and the reindeer and sleigh included in stories about him were mainly created by Clement Clarke Moore in an 1822 poem.
Thomas Edison and the Lightbulb
Thomas Edison gets credit for a whole host of inventions he actually had no hand in creating. Case in point: he didn’t invent the lightbulb, despite what your gut instinct tell you. Canadian inventors Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans actually pioneered the research that led to the modern lightbulb, Edison just bought the patent for the invention in 1879 after the Canadians ran out of funding to continue their research. This set up a legal battle over ownership of the completed product.
Plate Mail
A common misconception about knights in plate mail holds that they needed to be lifted onto their horses with a crane. This isn’t true of normal combat armor, which would have been no more than 55 pounds at the heaviest. Knights trained to fight in such armor were known to be agile and capable of running and jumping without issue due to the weight being spread evenly across their bodies. The excessively heavy misconception is likely due to the absurdly massive, nearly ceremonial armor used in jousting tournaments long after the Middle Ages.
Magellan Circumnavigated the Globe
If you ask a random person on the street who was the first person to ever circumnavigate the globe, many will tell you that it was Portuguese sailor Magellan. That’s not entirely correct: Magellan himself died in the Philippines during his fleet’s journey around the world. Only one ship from the fleet made it back to Spain, captained by Magellan’s lieutenant, Juan Sebastian Elcano.
The Autobahn
Another popular misconception about fascism holds that Hitler, or at least the Third Reich, invented the modern highway when the Fuhrer unveiled a portion of the Autobahn in 1935. However, 14 years prior, the Automobil-Verkehrs- und Übung-Strasse was opened to the public. It’s the actual first highway and has nothing to do with the then-nonexistent Nazi Party.
Jesus’s Birthday
A lot of folks, religious and otherwise, are intimately aware with the date of Jesus’s birth. It’s Christmas Day, Year 0. Except… it isn’t. Jesus was definitely a real person (who was, in fact, born in Bethlehem sometime between 6 BC and 4 BC), but the Biblical recounting of his birth has telltale indications he was born in the summer. December 25 was chosen by the church in 353 as the date of the celebration of his birth as a way to counter popular pagan festivities centered around the winter solstice.
Nero Playing Music While Rome Burns
A popular myth about Nero is that the Roman Emperor played his lyre and sang songs to himself while watching Rome burn in 64 AD. However, Nero himself lost numerous homes and works of art in the blaze, which incensed him and lead him to blame the fire on the then-new religion of Christianity. His brutal persecution of early Christians led to a countercultural pushback against his government, with Christians countering that Nero himself was responsible for the fires. In reality, the blaze was likely accidental and spread quickly due to the dry, windy conditions of Italy in the summertime.
The Salem Witch Trials
The Salem Witch Trials were a very real epidemic of mass hysteria over perceived black magic, but the women (and men!) accused of consorting with the devil weren’t actually burned at the stake in the colonies. That was a uniquely European practice. That didn’t make things much better for the victims of the Salem Witch Trial, however, they were hanged instead. No less horrific, but it is a common misconception of the Salem Witch Trials.
Related: 10 Bizarre Cases of Real World Mass Hysteria
The Stock Market Crash
You’ve heard this one before: after the stock market crashed in 1929, many bankers jumped out of windows due to the immense amount of money they saw suddenly erased from their ledgers. Winston Churchill helped spread this rumor. However, independent research has shown that there was no uptick in suicides on Wall Street linked to the 1929 crash.
Read More: 9 Historical Women Who Changed the Course of History
