50 Fun Facts About Historical Trivia Facts

The shortest recorded war, between Britain and Zanzibar in 1896, lasted roughly how long?

British ships opened fire at 9:02 in the morning and the sultan's palace had surrendered by about 9:40.

Teaching at which university is documented as early as 1096?

That makes it the oldest university in the English-speaking world. Tenochtitlan's traditional founding date is 1325.

The Great Fire of London in 1666 started in a bakery on which street?

It destroyed more than 13,000 houses and St Paul's Cathedral, yet only a handful of deaths were officially recorded.

Which agency, approved by Lincoln the day he was shot, was founded in 1865 to fight counterfeit money?

It only took on presidential protection after William McKinley was assassinated in 1901.

By legend, Caligula planned to give which office to his favourite horse, Incitatus?

Ancient sources say it never actually happened. The story may have been a joke at the Senate's expense.

How many years did the Hundred Years' War between England and France actually last?

It ran, with long truces, from 1337 to 1453 and ended with England holding almost nothing in France but Calais.

L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland is the only confirmed North American settlement of which people?

Roughly five centuries before Columbus. Tree-ring evidence pins Norse activity there to the year 1021.

Woolly mammoths survived where in the Arctic until about 2000 BC, centuries after the Great Pyramid was finished?

The island's isolated herd, off the coast of Siberia, outlived every mainland mammoth by thousands of years.

Nintendo was founded in Kyoto in 1889 to make what?

Its hanafuda 'flower cards' are still sold today. It did not release a video game until the 1970s.

Alexander Bain's 1843 'electric printing telegraph' patent was an early version of which device?

A commercial fax service ran between Paris and Lyon in 1865, eleven years before the telephone was invented.

What saved the Eiffel Tower from being dismantled 20 years after the 1889 World's Fair?

It stayed the tallest structure on Earth for 41 years, until New York's Chrysler Building topped it in 1930.

As a young man, Julius Caesar was kidnapped and held for ransom by whom?

Plutarch says he joked with his captors that he would come back and crucify them, and then did. Later historians think the pirates were more likely sold into slavery.

In 1698 Tsar Peter the Great of Russia introduced a tax on what?

Men who paid carried a copper or silver 'beard token' as proof. The tax was meant to push Russians toward clean-shaven Western fashions.

John Tyler, the tenth US president, was born in 1790. His last surviving grandson died in which year?

Harrison Ruffin Tyler was born in 1928, when his grandfather had been dead for 66 years. Both the president and his son had children very late in life.

In what year did France carry out its last execution by guillotine?

Hamida Djandoubi was executed in Marseille that September, a few months after Star Wars opened in cinemas. France abolished the death penalty in 1981.

Which country's parliament, the Althing, was established in 930 and claims to be the oldest in the world?

It first met at Þingvellir, an open-air site on a rift valley where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates pull apart.

When Coca-Cola launched in 1886, its two key ingredients were caffeine and what?

It was sold as a patent medicine and temperance drink. Fresh coca leaves were dropped from the recipe in 1903.

In which year did women in Switzerland gain the right to vote in federal elections?

One canton, Appenzell Innerrhoden, held out on local votes until the federal supreme court forced it in 1990.

Which country was the first to give all women the vote in national elections, in 1893?

Women voted for the first time that November, ten weeks after the law passed.

What did China's first astronaut, Yang Liwei, say about the Great Wall after his 2003 spaceflight?

NASA says the wall is barely visible from low orbit even in perfect conditions and no more conspicuous than a highway. The Moon claim is a myth.

For most of their history, athletes at the ancient Olympic Games competed how?

The Games were held every four years at Olympia from 776 BC, and the prize was an olive wreath.

In January 1943, US officials briefly banned the sale of what as a wartime conservation measure?

The idea was to save the wax paper and steel used by slicing machines. The public outcry was so loud the ban was lifted after about seven weeks.

How were the nineteen people executed for witchcraft at Salem in 1692 put to death?

One more man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death with stones for refusing to enter a plea. Nobody at Salem was burned.

After President Chaim Weizmann died in 1952, which scientist was offered the presidency of Israel and declined?

He said he had neither the natural ability nor the experience to deal with human beings.

Construction of the Leaning Tower of Pisa took place in three stages over roughly how many years?

It began to sink while the second floor was going up in 1178. The long pauses for war may have let the soil settle enough to stop it falling over.

Mansa Musa gave away so much gold on his 1324 pilgrimage that gold prices fell for years in which city?

A gold mithqal dropped from 25 silver dirhams to under 22 and stayed there for at least twelve years.

Liechtenstein reportedly sent 80 soldiers to the 1866 Austro-Prussian War. How many came back?

The extra man was probably an Austrian liaison officer, or an Italian who tagged along. Liechtenstein disbanded its army entirely two years later.

George Washington's false teeth included ivory, brass, gold and human teeth. What were they not made of?

The wooden-teeth story appeared in school textbooks well into the twentieth century.

According to the historian Tacitus, where was Nero when the Great Fire of Rome broke out in AD 64?

Tacitus says he hurried back to organise relief. The instrument he supposedly played would have been a lyre; the fiddle did not exist yet.

More than a century after her death, Marie Curie's papers are still kept how?

Readers must wear protective clothing. Even her cookbook is contaminated. She remains the only person with Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.

What kind of entertainment was a Roman 'naumachia'?

Titus put on two of them for the opening of the Colosseum in AD 80, one of them inside the new amphitheatre.

In 356 BC a man named Herostratus burned down the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Why?

The city responded by banning anyone from ever mentioning his name, which obviously did not work.

Which novel was written by a holidaymaker kept indoors by the 1816 'Year Without a Summer'?

Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and John Polidori were rained in beside Lake Geneva, and Byron proposed a ghost-story contest.

Cleopatra, who died in 30 BC, lived closer in time to which event than to the building of the Great Pyramid?

The Great Pyramid was built around 2600 BC, roughly 2,500 years before her; the Moon landing came about 2,000 years after.

How long did the Great Pyramid of Giza remain the tallest human-made structure on Earth?

It stood 146.6 metres tall when finished around 2600 BC and was finally topped by Lincoln Cathedral's spire in England around 1311.

Kongō Gumi, the world's oldest documented company until 2006, was in which business?

It was founded in AD 578 to build a Buddhist temple in Osaka and was run by the same family for some 40 generations.

On 9 November 1989, what did Günter Schabowski say when asked when new travel rules would take effect?

He had misread his notes. Crowds rushed the checkpoints that night and the Berlin Wall was effectively open by midnight.

At the peak of Dutch tulip mania in February 1637, a single bulb could sell for more than ten times what?

It is generally considered the first recorded speculative bubble. Prices collapsed within weeks.

How many different men ruled as Roman emperor during the single year AD 69?

Galba, Otho, Vitellius and finally Vespasian, whose Flavian dynasty then built the Colosseum.

In Britain from the 1600s, ketchup was usually made from which main ingredient rather than tomatoes?

Other early recipes used oysters, walnuts or grapes. Tomato ketchup only became standard in the nineteenth century.

The Rosetta Stone, which unlocked Egyptian hieroglyphs, was found in 1799 by soldiers of which army?

They uncovered it while demolishing a wall in a fort. The British took it as a spoil of war and it has been in the British Museum since 1802.

Contrary to the Disney version, whom did Pocahontas actually marry in 1614?

She travelled to England with him and died at Gravesend in 1617, aged about 21.

Abraham Lincoln is the only US president to hold a patent. What was his 1849 invention meant to do?

Patent 6,469 came from his days working on Mississippi flatboats. It was never manufactured, and curators doubt it would have worked.

In which city did Frau Troffea start a 'dancing plague' in July 1518?

Within a month somewhere between 50 and 400 people were dancing. Explanations range from ergot poisoning to mass hysteria.

When Pope Gregory XIII's new calendar took effect in October 1582, what date followed Thursday 4 October?

Ten days were deleted to fix the drift the Julian calendar had built up since the Council of Nicaea. Britain did not switch until 1752.

Which university, the oldest in the United States, was founded in 1636, before Isaac Newton was born?

It was named in 1639 for John Harvard, a clergyman who left it his library and half his estate.

In late 1932, the Australian Army fought a losing 'war' with Lewis machine guns against which animal?

The birds split into small, mobile groups and the commander compared individual emus to tanks.

How fast did the wave of molasses travel through Boston's North End in the 1919 Great Molasses Flood?

A tank holding 2.3 million gallons burst, killing 21 people and injuring 150.

In January 897, Pope Stephen VI put which dead predecessor's corpse on trial in the 'Cadaver Synod'?

Formosus had been dead about nine months; he was found guilty and his papacy declared null.

Which foreign monarch's arbitration settled the 1859 'Pig War' border dispute between the US and Britain?

His commission ruled for the US in 1872, choosing the Haro Strait boundary; the war's only casualty was a pig.