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.
