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.
