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I like this one (not mine):
- The samurai were abolished as a caste in Japanese society during the Meiji restoration in 1867
- The first ever fax machine, the “printing telegraph”, was invented in 1843
- Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865
=> There was a 22 year window in which samurais could have sent a fax to Abraham Lincoln.
And still they didn’t warn him
Historians refuse to debate the great Anti-Lincoln samurai fax conspiracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_submarines
And they could’ve done it from french submarines.
Ooooh that’s a good one
Was there a phone line network intact enough to send a fax from Japan to the United States…?
Wouldn’t have been phone at that point, it’d be wired telegraph. Which I don’t need to elaborate did not go from Japan to the United States but there were exiled Samurai kicking around in Spanish territory for a bit even into the 1800s so possibly one of them could’ve visited the US and sent Lincoln a Fax. Also I think the king of Siam tried to give the Union war elephants during the Civil War which is much weirder.
Missed opportunity.
A few months ago my mother was cleaning the home of grannie who died, and there it was found. An old cookbook, handwritten by grannie, the book it self had a stamp on it (as in caved in leather) that it was made in 1910. from the words of my grandfather this book was given to grandmama by grand grandma.
The mindblowing thing is that this handwriting book which survived both world wars, the fall of communism and the turmoil afterwards, still has easier to follow instructions than most recipes today I see, also no about me and my life section
The one time you might have wanted a touch of personal trivia with your goulash recipe… Good grief!
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Sharks are older than the North Star. (450mya vs. 70mya)
Sharks are older than trees. (450mya vs 390mya)
There was a 20 million year window, in which dead trees just piled up. Nothing could digest the lignin. This is how germany’s brown coal reserves came to be.
The sharks thing actually leads to another fun fact:
Sharks are older than some of the north star, as the noth star is actually a binary star system next to a solo star. I forget what part it’s actually older than, so here’s the source.
And just to be clear, Polaris is not actually the “North Star” all the time. North Stardom rotates around on a 26,000 year period, as the earth precesses. That’s crazy lightning fast spinning on the time scales we’re taking about.
There was a day, 18th April 1930, where the BBC reported no news. It really shocks me because of how different the times are now. I can’t imagine there’s any minute that doesn’t have dozens news stories running
This would be so nice I swear.
IDK if the BBC still does this, but back when I watched, they had a habit of just cutting to some B-roll footage of whatever situation, and just shutting up for a while to let it play out and let the audience breathe a little bit, as a segueway and palate cleanser before whatever the next segment was. Absolute perfection. I cannot imagine the American news doing that (and indeed they do not) without someone losing their job.
I can’t imagine there’s any minute that doesn’t have dozens news stories running
Honestly, that’s your choice. My advice; limit your news to 2 - 3 “channels” (like RSS app, Lemmy), set them up that you have to “open them” (no by-the-side stream) and have days where you just don’t do that.
Yes, i’m easily stressed.
Oh I don’t read much for news. A local paper (which is in a language I barely know), a little on here but most in blocked, and The Onion type publications sometimes.
I still can’t imagine that a news source says “there’s not news now, have some piano” in 2025
I mean, there was still a tremendous amount of things happening in 1930, they just didn’t report on any of it.
Hey, that was my -76th Birthday!
Here’s some wild river history for you:
The great lakes are super big, have huge flow rates, Superior is famously super deep since it’s a continental-rift lake that was widened by glacial retreat … But they only formed like 14,000 years ago when the glaciers retreated…
The river Tyne in England is 30 million years old, just when Antarctica was separating from Australia and South America.
The river Thames is 58 million years old, that’s just after the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs.
The Rhine is at least 240 million years old … From the Triassic era if not earlier.
And then there’s 3 rivers in Appalachia that are ~ 320 million years old… The French Broad river, the Susquehanna river, and (ironically) the New river. They’ve been continuously flowing since the carboniferous period, literally when Pangea first started forming and before any bacteria or enzymes could break down trees (which eventually compacted and became all the coal in the mountains that formed alongside them).
The New river also formed a beautiful gorge where we humans built an awesome bridge and some scenic overlooks. If you find yourself driving through that southern region of WV, it is worth a detour!
https://www.nps.gov/neri/planyourvisit/nrgbridge.htm
It’s a national park now too!
Funfact regarding the New River:
The Cartographers charting the river had it marked by the direction it flows, NE-W, eventually this just stuck as the name.
before any bacteria or enzymes could break down trees (which eventually compacted and became all the coal in the mountains that formed alongside them).
Building off of this, the difference between coal and oil is that coal comes from carbon that was buried before the bacteria existed to break it down, and oil after. There will eventually be more oil, but there will never be more coal
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Have you heard of the truly ancient - Stone Age, in fact - ruins of what is now called Gobekli Tepe (Potbelly Hill) in Anatolia, Turkey, near the Taurus Mountains, between rivers that converge further downstream to create the Euphrates River.
These long-gone people, hunter/gatherers and slightly later hunter/harvesters (a primitive phase of agriculture), now called Tash Tepeler (in modern Turkic), build stone urban centers on a large scale, were completely unknown before 1992, and let me put it this way, how long ago they were:
Ancient Sumeria, cradle of civilization, where writing was invented, is closer to us than it is to the time when Gobekli Tele was thriving.Gobekli Tepe is near halfway between the Lascaux and Chauvet cave paintings and us.
The basis for the human era calendar, more or less, right? We’d be on year 12025.
When archaeologists express that very same concept, they widely use 12025 BP (Before Present).
In 1913, Stalin, Hitler and Sigmund Freud all lived in the central part of Vienna.
That could make for a very interesting sitcom.
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Coca-Cola: Founded 1888
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Nintendo: Founded 1889
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Dracula, by Bram Stoker: Published 1897
It would have been historically accurate for the vampire hunters who killed Dracula to celebrate by having a Coke and playing Nintendo.
Were they still a playing card company then?
Right until 1970 when they took a hard pivot into the new-fangled tech called “Computers”
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Aye, and just before that to toys
Yup!
Weren’t they involved with brothels at some point?
I’m sorry, I don’t know their history well though to answer that.
having a Coke and playing Nintendo
So playing a card game and drinking literal cocaine?
As one does
Probably something Bram Stoker did.
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Scotland’s first railway, the Cockenzie and Tranent waggonway, played a role in the Battle of Prestonpans (1745). The final piece of the line went out of use in the 1960s.
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The Last Stand by Sabaton was describing an event that happened in 1527, the year Henry VIII was trying to get an annulment. The events of The last stand played a role in the founding of the church of England.
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San Marino is so old it was founded before The Council of Nicea.
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The oldest Evidence in the archeological record we have of transgender individuals is older than the oldest archaeological evidence for gay couples.
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The first use of “OMG” was on a memo sent to Winston Churchill in 1917.
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India and Sri Lanka were connected by a land bridge until the 1500s. The remains of which are still a tourist attraction.
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The first scientific study into transgender people was published in 1896 and studies about transgender people were burnt by the Nazis. Don’t ever let people say transgender people are a recent thing.
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The Romance languages have been written down for so long that we can basically watch the evolution of multiple languages in real time through texts.
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Oxford university was founded before what would become the Maori settled in New Zealand.
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One of the last people born into (legal) Slavery in the USA died after being hit by a car in the 1970s.
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It’s possible that former Samurai lived to see the 20th century.
studies about transgender people were burnt by the Nazis.
This is still happening tbf
One of the last people born into (legal) Slavery in the USA died after being hit by a car in the 1970s.
The last ship to (illegally) bring Africans as slaves to the United States landed in Mobile Bay in 1860. There are photographs of it.
110 human cargo on an 86 foot boat.
The last known survivor from that trip died in 1940.
- The oldest Evidence in the archeological record we have of transgender individuals is older than the oldest archaeological evidence for gay couples.
Can you expand more on this, I’d love to know more.
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The Appalachian Mountains are older than trees, dinosaurs, the Atlantic Ocean, and Pangea
Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, growin’ like a breeze
country road… … take me home…
Pretty sure sharks are older than trees too
And almost certainly the oldest mountains in the solar system
There are older mountain ranges on earth than the Appalachians. The oldest on earth are likely the Barberton Mountains coming in at a whopping 3.4 billion years old.
Older than bones…
Columbus’ contact resulted in a 92% loss of population in North, Central, and South America. Mexico City area only just re-reached its pre-contact population estimate in the 1960s.
“1491” is a good read.
The sheer amount of people, knowledge, and culture lost in the Americas due to European invasion and their treatment of the native peoples makes me so sad.
The weird part about that is that Columbus was the third expedition to the American continent from the European continent.
First was a single Irish/Celtic(?) monk in the 800s. Second was Leif Erikson and his crew of “Vikings” in the 1100-1200s. Neither one of those caused widespread disease in the Americas, despite the fact that the monk made it as far as The Great Lakes, and Leif Erickson’s expedition was cut quite short with them engaging in battle with the first natives they saw, resulting in the death of Leif Erikson as well as a few of his companions.
Who was the monk?
Brendan the navigator, 6th c., but the story about “Saint Brendan’s island” is not proven to be about America AFAIK. Or true. It’s a legend about a blessed island that may be a religious myth.
There’s a ton of legends of sailors finding a vanishing island, an island of plenty, the island of apples, that various theories have attached to the Canaries or Azores and such IINM. Saint Brendan is just one among those, so it’s hard to assume it’s fact.
Also, Leif Erikson was in year 1000. And there is a strong suspicion that diseases did play a big role and made it a shitshow.
follow it up with “Guns, Germs, and Steel”
That is historically not accurate.
Then Cortez finished the job when he explored from Florida to Texas. He also introduced wild hogs to the continent, which introduced trichinella parasites to native fauna. Truly one of the most ecologically destructive events in the past thousand years.
Humans got to Tasmania, Australia 20 000 years before they got to Scotland despite it being 3x the distance and featured the first time humans journeyed over the ocean.
Bananas were domesticated in New Guinea
The Maori beat Europeans to new Zealand by roughly 500 years
Considering the yellow weather warning and snow this morning in Scotland, I think I’d choose walking to Tasmania as well.
I’m scared to ask what a yellow weather warning in Scotland is, must mean it’s pishing down?
Pishing down, with snow!
It wasn’t much, but enough to make traveling stressful and idiots slide all over the place.
Yellow warning is our lowest level warning.
As someone who’s seen snow up close once, it seems kind of cool. Like turning your commute into a rally stage
It’s fun until you realize most people don’t have the driving skills necessary for that.
We get about 3 months a year of snow where I live (and 5 months of below freezing. Used to be a proper 5 months of snow not 25 short years ago but climate change has shifted that noticeably) the snow is absolutely magical and I can’t imagine living somewhere that doesn’t get it. Yes it makes a mess of commutes and drivers who don’t know how to drive in snow (literally just drive like a grandma, and of course make sure you have “all season” tires not those touring tires that are the default) and yeah whatever snow accumulates on the sidewalk and driveways you need to clear off, but you just do what you gotta do and appreciate the wonderland the snow turns the world into
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In the early 15th century (before the “discovery” of the Americas and the age of colonization), China had assembled a heavily militarized fleet that was likely bigger than all European powers’ fleets combined. They used it to become the dominant maritime power of their time, bringing India, South Asia and Eastern Africa into their sphere of influence.
Then internal struggle and threats on their northern borders lead to a shift in policy and the fleet was recalled from further exploration to the west and dismantled - making Europe’s naval expansion possible.To provide some context and a good book to read more on this:
Historian Louise Levathes, in When China Ruled the Seas (2008), argues that “the Ming voyages were primarily a diplomatic mission to incorporate Indian coastal states into the Chinese tributary system; the Sultan of Calicut and the ruler of Cochin accepted Chinese titles and protection in exchange for regular tribute and trade privileges (tax exemptions)”.
I wouldn’t take this to mean that all or even the majority of India came under China’s sphere of influence. The kingdoms of the Malabar coast acted as the gateway into India for over a millennia and were plutocratic hubs where foreign influence (Arab, European, African) was not uncommon.
In fact it was common for the kingdoms of the Malabar coast to pay tribute to multiple domestic and foreign polities to secure tax exemptions.
This was also the port through which significant trade occurred between India and the Roman Empire which led a prominent Roman (Pliny the Elder, writer of Naturalis Historia) to remark
‘It is quite surprising that the use of pepper has come so much into fashion,’ Pliny wrote, ‘especially when you consider that in other substances which we use, it is sometimes their sweetness, and sometimes their appearance that has attracted our notice; whereas, pepper has nothing in it that can plead as a recommendation to either fruit or berry, its only desirable quality being a certain pungency; and yet it is for this that we import it all the way from India! Who, I wonder, was the first to make trial of it as an article of food?’
In confirmation of such grumbles, two south Indian dynasties, the Pandyas and the Cheras, went as far as sending embassies to Rome to discuss the balance-of-payments problem and the inability of the Romans to pay their various Indian debts.
Eighty per cent of the 478 recipes included in the Roman cookbook of Apicius included pepper, and it appears regularly even in the pudding section. It was still, however, an expensive treat. The Tamil and Sanskrit words for sugar, ginger, pepper, sandalwood, beryl, cotton and indigo all made their way into Latin, and hence to modern English: ‘pepper’ and ‘ginger’ are both loan words from Tamil – pipali and singabera respectively.
According to some recent calculations, customs taxes on trade with India may have generated as much as one-third of the entire income of the Roman exchequer.
(Source: The Golden Road by William Dalrymple)
The history of the Ming Treasure Fleet and Zhang He is absolutely fascinating and I will be reading more on it! If I may get on my soapbox, it is important for everyone to expose themselves to non Eurocentric historical narratives to arrive at a more complete and balanced worldview.
Prior to their win in 2016, the Chicago Cubs hadn’t won a world series since before the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
That’s a good one. I should really learn more about the Ottoman Empire.
Isaac Newton was the Master of the Mint. Back then, issues with counterfeiting or diluting the coinage was an issue. He personally went in disguise to bars to track down these counterfeiters. Who were then executed.
He is also the inventor of all the ridges around the edge of coins, because at the time it made coins almost impossible to forge.
They added ridges so that the circumference couldn’t be shaved off and melted into more coins
Back then, the point of the coins was to represent that they contained a certain weight of metal, without forcing people to weigh them out all the time.
From what I’ve heard, the position was given to him as a sinecure — but Newton, being Newton, took it seriously.
Land of the free lol
Britain’s Royal Mint of course. The US didn’t exist in the 17ᵗʰ century and the US Mint got created 90 years after this.
Shit, you’re right. I was conflating Isaac Newton with the kite-zappy guy with the fart fetish. I’ll leave the original post unedited as a testament to my biggotry.
yes. Isaac Newton, the famous American
