99 Fun Facts About Common Misconceptions

What did Yang Liwei, China's first astronaut, report about seeing the Great Wall of China from orbit?

He could not see it, and NASA agrees: the wall is barely visible from low orbit even in perfect conditions and no more conspicuous than many other man-made objects. From the Moon, none of it can be seen.

Napoleon stood roughly 1.67 metres; how did that compare with Frenchmen of his era, despite the cartoons?

About average is right: his recorded 5 feet 2 was in old French units, nearer 5 feet 6 or 7 in English ones, and British cartoonist James Gillray's tiny, tantrum-prone 'Little Boney' did the rest.

Bulls cannot pick out red as a bright colour, so what actually draws the charge in a bullfight?

The cape's movement is the trigger: when MythBusters stood a motionless man in red in the ring in 2007, the bull ignored him and went after the cowboys who were moving.

Goldfish, said to forget everything within seconds, actually have a memory span of at least how long?

Three months is the floor for a goldfish's memory, and they can tell shapes, colours and sounds apart; on MythBusters, trained fish still ran an underwater obstacle course more than a month later.

Albert Einstein, far from failing maths, taught himself algebra and which subject at age twelve?

Calculus was mastered 'before I was fifteen', as Einstein put it in 1935 when shown a Ripley's column claiming he had failed maths; he had found his own proof of the Pythagorean theorem at twelve.

Which two of the usual seven continents does the six-continent model used in Russia merge into one?

Europe and Asia become Eurasia in that model, while Greece and many Romance-speaking countries, including Latin America, also count six by merging the Americas instead.

In Mary Shelley's novel, Frankenstein is the name of which figure, rather than of the creature?

The scientist is Victor Frankenstein; his nameless creation was already being called 'Frankenstein' by 1908, and James Whale's 1931 film fixed the mix-up for good.

Which New York landmark is hit by lightning about 23 times a year, refuting 'it never strikes twice'?

The Empire State Building averages 23 strikes a year because lightning favours the most prominent, conductive object in reach, so tall towers are hit again and again.

How much of the human brain is in use over a day, contrary to the famous ten percent claim?

Nearly all of it: neurologist Barry Gordon puts it as using virtually every part of the brain, most of it active almost all the time. The myth is often pinned on Albert Einstein, who never said it.

Viewed from space, above the atmosphere, what colour does the Sun actually appear to an astronaut?

White is the true colour: the Sun emits across the whole visible spectrum and that mix reads as white outside the atmosphere, with scattering painting it yellow, orange or red near the horizon.

Horned helmets, never found in a Viking dig, entered popular culture through whose Norse operas?

Richard Wagner's Ring cycle was staged in the 1870s with horned helmets by costume designer Carl Emil Doepler, and the image stuck.

Chameleons, which rarely match their backdrop, change colour to regulate heat and, most often, for what purpose?

Social signalling is the main job: a chameleon's colour tracks its mood and its messages to other chameleons, not the leaf behind it.

Sugar is blamed for hyperactive children, yet a 2019 review of trials tied it to which effect within an hour?

Greater fatigue and lower alertness followed sugar in a pooled analysis of 31 studies, which found no lift in mood at any point; double-blind trials likewise find children behave no differently.

Donald Unger cracked only his left-hand knuckles for decades to test for which feared ailment?

Arthritis never appeared in either hand, a result Unger published in Arthritis & Rheumatism in 1998 and for which he won the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Which sense beyond the classic five lets you touch your nose with eyes closed, as in a sobriety test?

Proprioception is the sense of where your limbs are without looking, fed by stretch sensors in the muscles, tendons and joints, which is how a finger finds your nose in the dark.

The discredited 'tongue map' wrongly confined which taste to the tip of the tongue?

Sweet, like every taste, registers all over the tongue; the map grew from Edwin Boring's 1942 graph of a 1901 German study, which made small differences in sensitivity look like separate zones.

Britain's wartime claim that carrots gave its pilots night vision was cover for which new technology?

Radar was the real secret behind the RAF's night victories, and the carrot tale also suited the 'Dig for Victory' drive, which urged a rationed public to eat more of the home-grown vegetable.

What actually happens to swallowed chewing gum, rumoured to sit in the stomach for seven years?

It passes out intact: the gum base resists digestion, but the gut's normal housekeeping waves push it through all the same, and it emerges, as one doctor put it, 'pretty unmolested'.

The Coriolis force is too weak to steer a draining sink, so what mostly decides the spin direction?

The shape of the basin, the drain geometry and whatever motion the water already had are orders of magnitude stronger than Coriolis; identical toilets flushed in both hemispheres drain the same way.

Owing to the equatorial bulge, which Ecuadorian summit is the point on Earth's surface farthest from its centre?

Chimborazo's summit sits about 2.1 km farther from the centre of the planet than Everest's, because Earth bulges at the equator and Chimborazo stands almost on it, barely a degree or so to the south.

Scholars in 1492 knew the world was round; what did they say Christopher Columbus had misjudged?

The distance to the Indies was the sticking point: his critics feared the East Indies lay far farther west than he presumed, and they were right; only the unexpected Americas saved his crews.

The apple of Eden is often traced to Latin 'malum', which meant apple and, with a different vowel length, what else?

Evil and apple were near-twins in Latin, a pun open to anyone reading Genesis in the Vulgate, although the Hebrew text names no species and says only 'fruit'.

Which philosopher's memoirs, written while Marie Antoinette was a child, already contained 'let them eat cake'?

Rousseau's Confessions gives the line to 'a great princess' and says brioche, not cake; Marie Antoinette was then a child in Austria, so she is unlikely to be the princess he meant.

Whose Gateshead home was the world's first with working light bulbs, before he merged firms with Edison?

Joseph Swan's house at Low Fell was the first anywhere with working bulbs, and his strong British patents pushed the rival firms into the 1883 Edison & Swan United Electric Light Company, 'Ediswan'.

Twinkies, rumoured to last for decades, actually carry an official shelf life of roughly how long?

45 days is the limit today, and before stronger preservatives arrived in 2012 it was just 26 days; the legend of a snack lasting ten, fifty or a hundred years is pure urban myth.

Why can harvestmen, the 'daddy longlegs' of legend, not be the most venomous animal alive?

They have no venom glands at all: a harvestman's chelicerae are grasping claws, not hollow fangs, and usually too weak to break human skin, which makes the creature harmless.

A camel's humps, widely believed to be water tanks, actually hold a reserve of what?

Fat is what fills the humps, a food reserve for lean times; a camel goes many days without drinking, helped instead by oval red blood cells that keep flowing as its body dries out.

Which French tune of 1761, now 'Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star', did Mozart merely write variations on?

'Ah! vous dirai-je, maman' first appeared in print in 1761, when Mozart was five; he wrote his Twelve Variations on the tune some twenty years later, in his mid-twenties.

Deoxygenated blood in human veins, whatever the textbook diagrams show, is actually what colour?

Deep red is the true shade, thanks to haemoglobin; blood in the arteries is a brighter red, and veins only look blue because of the way the skin above them filters and scatters light.

Old windows thicker at the bottom are cited as proof that glass flows; what actually explains the sag?

Imperfect manufacturing left those sags and ripples in the pane the day it was made; once solidified, glass stops flowing, and medieval panes at Westminster Abbey creep at most a nanometre per billion years.

Earth is nearest the Sun in January, so what actually gives the Northern Hemisphere its winter then?

The axial tilt of 23.4 degrees does it; in January the northern half leans away from the Sun, and the slight closeness of perihelion actually works against the season's cold.

Which Sherlock Holmes catchphrase was coined by later hands, not by Conan Doyle?

'Elementary, my dear Watson' is in none of Doyle's sixty stories; the nearest is 'The Crooked Man', where Holmes says 'my dear Watson' and, a few lines later, answers Watson's praise with a lone 'Elementary'.

Which famous 'medieval' torture device do historians say was never used in the Middle Ages, only shown to later tourists?

The iron maiden appears in no medieval record: some historians think a German writer invented its history centuries later, and the famous cabinet put on show in Nuremberg was destroyed in the Second World War.

Napoleon's gunners are wrongly blamed for shooting which feature off the Great Sphinx of Giza?

Its nose was already missing in drawings Frederic Louis Norden made in 1737, decades before Napoleon was born; the medieval historian al-Maqrizi blamed a Sufi iconoclast for hacking it off in 1378.

Which of these fruits is a true berry in botany, a club that excludes strawberries and raspberries?

Banana makes the botanical cut, alongside grapes, tomatoes, cucumbers and aubergines, because a true berry forms from a single ovary; a strawberry's real 'fruits' are the seed-like achenes on its skin.

Fortune cookies, served in Chinese restaurants across America, actually originated in which country?

Japan's bakers near Kyoto were tucking paper fortunes into a similar, larger cracker in the 19th century, and Japanese immigrants took the idea to America; in China the cookies are seen as American.

The pot-bellied 'Laughing Buddha' depicts not Siddhartha Gautama but which Chinese Buddhist folk hero?

Budai, whose name means 'cloth sack' after the bag he carries, was a wandering Chinese monk later revered as a future Buddha; Siddhartha Gautama is usually shown slim and deep in meditation.

The 'Ye' in 'Ye Olde Shoppe' was never said 'yee'; its Y stands in for which vanished English letter?

Thorn (þ) represented the 'th' sound in Middle English, and when printers lacked the character they set a Y in its place, so 'ye' was always just 'the'.

Which Hawaiian volcano, measured from its seafloor base, is often called the tallest mountain on Earth?

Mauna Kea rises more than 9,000 metres from its base on the Pacific floor, over half of it hidden under water, so although its summit is only 4,207 metres above the sea it out-measures Everest's 8,849.

What disproves the legend that Julius Caesar was born by Caesarean section?

His mother lived for decades after he was born, still alive when he was 45; at the time the operation was fatal to the mother, so no survivor's son could have carried its name.

So that searchers can spot it in wreckage, what colour is an aircraft's 'black box' actually painted?

Bright orange is the rule, an outdated nickname having stuck to a box that is deliberately conspicuous; the regulations demand orange or yellow with reflective surfaces to aid recovery.

Fingernails and hair seem to keep growing on a corpse; what is actually happening to the body?

The skin dries and tightens, pulling back from the bases of nails and hairs so they look longer; nothing grows after death, since growth needs living cells.

How much sunlight does the Moon's so-called dark side receive compared with the face we always see?

About the same: the far side sees just as much of the Sun over a lunar month as the near side; it is 'dark' only in the sense of being unseen from Earth until spacecraft photographed it.

A Roman vomitorium, popularly imagined as a room for purging between courses, was actually what?

A passageway is all it was: the route beneath or behind a tier of amphitheatre seats that let a crowd pour out fast at the end of a show; nobody was being sick in it.

Strictly, 'Big Ben' at Westminster is the nickname of what, rather than of the tower itself?

The great bell is Big Ben proper, the Great Bell of the Great Clock of Westminster; the tower everyone photographs was renamed Elizabeth Tower in 2012.

Cinco de Mayo, often taken for Mexican independence day, marks an 1862 victory at Puebla over whom?

France, or rather the Second French Empire, lost the Battle of Puebla on 5 May 1862; Mexico's actual independence day falls on 16 September.

The 'koala bear' is no bear at all but belongs to which group of mammals, like its wombat cousins?

Marsupials give birth to barely formed young: a koala joey, under a gram and likened to a pink jellybean, crawls unaided into the pouch and stays there for its first six months or so.

Why did the US Supreme Court rule in 1893 that the tomato, botanically a fruit, is a vegetable?

For import tariffs: the 1893 case Nix v. Hedden turned on the Tariff Act of 1883, and the court ruled that the 'common meaning' of the words, not botany, decided what a vegetable was.

Which fifth basic taste, identified in 1908 by Kikunae Ikeda, joins sweet, sour, salty and bitter?

Umami was traced by Ikeda to the glutamate in kombu seaweed stock, and by 1909 he had patented a way to mass-produce it as the seasoning MSG, sold under the name Ajinomoto.

George Washington's dentures, built from ivory and human teeth, are wrongly said to be made of what?

Wood never went into George Washington's dentures, which used hippopotamus ivory, brass, gold and human teeth. Stained ivory may have looked like timber to observers.

Cleopatra was Egypt's last active pharaoh, but her Ptolemaic dynasty was of which origin?

Macedonian by descent, Cleopatra came from the line of Ptolemy I, a general of Alexander the Great. Her family ruled in Greek and mostly refused to learn Egyptian.

The Sahara is only the largest hot desert; which whole continent counts as an even bigger desert?

Antarctica is a polar desert of some 14 million square kilometres, since deserts are defined by scant precipitation, not heat. The Sahara ranks only third, behind the Arctic too.

Why was the 1918 influenza pandemic nicknamed the Spanish flu, although it did not begin in Spain?

Its press was uncensored: Spain stayed neutral in the First World War, so its papers reported the outbreak freely while the warring nations suppressed the news.

As his biographer Vasari recorded, Michelangelo frescoed the Sistine Chapel ceiling in which position?

Upright on his feet, on freestanding scaffolding, is how Michelangelo worked from 1508 to 1512. The reclining image came from another biographer, Paolo Giovio, who only imagined it.

Ancient Greek marble statues survive as bare stone, but how did they look when they were new?

Brightly painted in many colours is how Greek sculptors finished their statues. The pigments have simply worn away over the centuries, leaving the bare marble that later ages admired.

The nursery rhyme never calls Humpty Dumpty an egg, probably because the verse began as what?

A riddle is how the rhyme probably began, with the egg as the answer listeners had to guess. Lewis Carroll fixed the image in Through the Looking-Glass.

Hawaiian pizza, named after a brand of tinned pineapple, was invented in which country?

Canada gave the world Hawaiian pizza: Sam Panopoulos first put pineapple on one at his Ontario restaurant in 1962, taking the name from the label on the can.

The killer whale, despite its name, is the largest living member of which family of sea mammals?

Dolphins claim the orca as the largest member of their oceanic family. Pilot whales and false killer whales are dolphins too, whatever their common names say.

Lizzie Borden, blamed for two axe murders in a skipping rhyme, received which verdict at her trial?

Not guilty was the jury's verdict on Lizzie Borden, reached in under two hours. Fall River society shunned her all the same.

The peanut, which ripens in pods underground, is no true nut but a member of which plant group?

Legumes such as peas and beans are the peanut's real relatives. After flowering, the plant pushes a peg into the soil so that its pods can develop below ground.

The 'lead' in a pencil has never contained lead; the core is clay mixed with which form of carbon?

Graphite was once called plumbago, Latin for lead ore, after a huge deposit turned up in Cumbria in the 1500s, and the wrong name has clung to pencil cores ever since.

The 'Arabic' numeral system, zero included, was actually invented by mathematicians of which land?

India is where the system was invented, between the 1st and 4th centuries. Arab merchants probably carried it west, and their name stuck to the digits.

Which dictator is wrongly credited with making the trains run on time, largely thanks to his own propaganda?

Benito Mussolini took the credit, but much of the repair work on Italy's railways was done before he took office in 1922. The punctuality itself was more boast than fact.

Which animal was blamed for starting the Great Chicago Fire, in a story its reporter later retracted?

A cow owned by Catherine O'Leary was said to have kicked over a lantern. Reporter Michael Ahern retracted the tale in 1893, and the city council formally cleared her in 1997.

Which composer, cast as a jealous rival in the film Amadeus, is wrongly rumoured to have poisoned Mozart?

Antonio Salieri and Mozart were more likely respectful peers, and Mozart's symptoms did not point to poison. Salieri even helped to teach Mozart's younger son.

The distress call SOS, popularly read as 'Save Our Souls', originally got its letters from what?

A simple Morse pattern of three dots, three dashes and three dots came first, with no meaning attached. The letters, and the phrases they supposedly abbreviate, followed later.

Catgut, long used for violin strings and stitches, never came from cats but usually from which animals?

Sheep and goat intestines supply most catgut, and no record shows a cat's ever being used. The name may be a muddle of kit, an old dialect word for a fiddle.

Fireflies, which flash at dusk to attract mates, are not flies but which kind of insect?

Beetles of the family Lampyridae are what fireflies really are, with more than 2,400 described species. Their glow is thought to have begun as a warning that the larvae taste foul.

Saint Patrick is said to have banished which animals from Ireland, an island that had none after the Ice Age?

Snakes never reached Ireland once the glaciers retreated, so Patrick had none to banish. The tale first appears in the late twelfth century, some 700 years after his lifetime.

The Canary Islands are not named after songbirds; their Latin name means the isles of which animals?

Dogs are what the Latin name Canariae Insulae literally refers to, though why is debated; Pliny wrote of huge ones living there. The songbirds were named after the islands, not the reverse.

Sushi is defined not by raw fish but by which ingredient, found in every style of the dish?

Vinegared rice is the one element every style of sushi shares. Raw fish served on its own, without the rice, is a different dish called sashimi.

Which Christmas plant with scarlet bracts is wrongly feared as deadly to children and pets?

Poinsettia owes its bad name to a 1919 tale of a child dying after eating a leaf. Researchers could not find a toxic dose for rats even at the equivalent of 500 leaves.

Pocahontas never married Captain Smith of Jamestown; which Virginia tobacco planter became her husband instead?

John Rolfe married Pocahontas in April 1614, and their son Thomas was born the next January. Smith himself described her as a child when the two met.

Which Orson Welles radio play is wrongly remembered for causing nationwide panic, a story newspapers inflated?

The War of the Worlds alarmed far fewer listeners than legend claims. Newspapers played up rare cases of fright into a national panic, partly to discredit radio as a rival.

Which medieval traveller, home after 24 years abroad, is wrongly said to have brought pasta from China?

Marco Polo came home to a country that already ate pasta. The tale was spread by the Macaroni Journal, a trade magazine keen to promote pasta in the United States.

Which Philadelphia upholsterer supposedly sewed the first US flag, a claim first made by her grandson?

Betsy Ross entered the story in 1870, when her grandson William Canby read a paper to a historical society. No archive or earlier tradition backs the family tale.

Danish pastries are said to date from an 1850 strike, when bakers hired from which country brought the recipe?

Austria supplied the bakers, which is why Danes call the pastry wienerbrød, or Viennese bread. Danish bakers later adapted the recipe to their own taste, making it richer.

Chinese checkers, a star-shaped board game with no roots in China, was invented in which country?

Germany produced the game in 1892 as Stern-Halma, a star-shaped take on an older American game. The Chinese label was an American marketing idea of 1928.

US banknotes, unlike ordinary paper, are made from a blend of linen and mostly which other fibre?

Cotton makes up 75% of every US note and linen the rest. A single Massachusetts firm, Crane, supplies the special stock.

Which amino acid in turkey is wrongly blamed for the drowsiness that follows a big Thanksgiving dinner?

Tryptophan is no more plentiful in turkey than in other poultry. The sleepiness more likely comes from the heavy, carbohydrate-rich meal served alongside the bird.

Searing a steak does not seal in its juices; which flavour-making chemistry is the cook's real reward?

Maillard reaction is the name for the meeting of amino acids and sugars that gives a seared steak its savoury crust. Tests since the 1930s show seared roasts lose as much moisture or more.

Which food additive is blamed for 'Chinese restaurant syndrome', though trials show no such link?

Monosodium glutamate got its reputation from a letter to a medical journal that may have been written in jest. Later studies could not reliably reproduce the symptoms.

Warts are not caught from handling toads; which virus, spread between people, actually causes them?

Human papillomavirus causes warts, and toads do not carry it. The folk belief may owe something to the bumps that make a toad look warty itself.

Shaved hair seems to grow back thicker and coarser, but what actually explains the stubbly feel?

The cut end is blunt, whereas a hair that has never been trimmed tapers to a fine tip. Regrowth can also look darker because the sun has not yet lightened it.

Which medical journal fully retracted, in 2010, the fraudulent paper that had linked the MMR vaccine to autism?

The Lancet withdrew Andrew Wakefield's 1998 paper after a newspaper investigation exposed it, and its editor called the work utterly false. Wakefield was struck off the medical register.

Which double Nobel laureate popularised the unproven idea that vitamin C wards off the common cold?

Linus Pauling took three grams a day himself and published Vitamin C and the Common Cold in 1970. The medical establishment came to dismiss his claims as quackery.

Which map projection makes Greenland look as large as Africa, a continent fourteen times its size?

Mercator stretched the high latitudes on purpose: his 1569 design keeps compass courses as straight lines, which made it the standard chart for navigation at sea.

Caesar salad is named not for a Roman but for restaurateur Caesar Cardini, who first made it in which city?

Tijuana is where Cardini, an Italian immigrant, ran a restaurant for Americans dodging Prohibition. He is said to have improvised the salad during a holiday rush in 1924.

Which cartoonist shaped the modern image of Santa Claus in Harper's Weekly, decades before Coca-Cola's adverts?

Thomas Nast first drew Santa in 1863, dressed in an American flag for a Civil War issue. The jolly figure was fixed in popular culture long before Coca-Cola's campaigns of the 1930s.

Magellan died in the Philippines, so which Basque navigator completed the first voyage around the world?

Juan Sebastián Elcano brought the Victoria, the last of five ships, into Seville in September 1522 with a handful of survivors, almost three years after the fleet had set out.

Thomas Crapper did not invent the flush toilet; which godson of Elizabeth I had described one back in 1596?

John Harington built his device, which he called the Ajax, at his Somerset home and wrote a book about it. Crapper, a Victorian plumber, held patents only for improvements such as the ballcock.

Guy Fawkes only guarded the barrels; who actually led the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 against James I?

Robert Catesby devised the plot and recruited Fawkes, a seasoned soldier, to handle the explosives. Catesby died in a shoot-out at Holbeche House three days after the arrest.

Which Strand Magazine illustrator gave Sherlock Holmes the deerstalker cap that the stories never mention?

Sidney Paget, who favoured a deerstalker himself, also added the Inverness cape. In town scenes he drew Holmes in a top hat or a bowler instead.

The guillotine was first nicknamed the louisette after its designer Antoine Louis, a man of which profession?

Surgeon Antoine Louis, secretary of the Academy of Surgery, designed the prototype. Dr Guillotin had only campaigned for a more humane method of execution, yet his name is the one that stuck.

Which carmaker was mass-producing cars on an assembly line from 1901, years before Henry Ford's Model T?

Ransom Olds built the Curved Dash Oldsmobile on his line, the first mass-produced car. Ford's later contribution, from 1913, was to keep the line moving continuously.

Velcro, popularly but wrongly credited to NASA, was inspired by the clinging seed heads of which plant?

Burdock burrs stuck to the clothes of Swiss engineer George de Mestral after a hunting trip in the Alps in 1941. NASA merely made the fastener famous by adopting it.

Eight years before Charles Lindbergh, which British pair made the first non-stop transatlantic flight?

Alcock and Brown flew a converted Vickers Vimy bomber from Newfoundland to Ireland in June 1919, ending in a bog that damaged the aircraft. Lindbergh was the first to cross alone.

Which Civil War general did the Mills Commission wrongly name as baseball's inventor after his death?

Abner Doubleday never made the claim himself and was a cadet at West Point in 1839, when he supposedly devised the game in Cooperstown. The finding rested on one man's letter.

Paul Revere was captured before reaching Concord; which young doctor was the only midnight rider to get there?

Samuel Prescott had joined Revere and William Dawes by chance on the road. When a patrol stopped all three, he escaped and carried the alarm on to Concord.