History Facts

Henry VIII carried his own portable toilet with him wherever he went. The “royal stool” was a large box with a feather-padded seat on the lid and a potty inside.

In Saxon England, men were allowed to sell children under 7 years old to be slaves “if they needed to”.

Alcmaeon of Croton, Greece, is the first person known to have studied the human body by cutting up corpses, around 520 BC.

The last ice age ended around 10,000 years ago.

The first successful helicopter flight was by the Argentinian engineer Raul Pateras Pescara de Castelluccio in January 1924. He flew for 10 minutes.

A cholera epidemic in London (1853–4) killed nearly 11,000 people. It resulted in the discovery that cholera comes from dirty water – after that London was given proper sewers.

In the early 1700s, England fell victim to the “gin craze”. There were more than 7,500 gin shops in London.

In Tudor England, many women wore a lead-based white make-up that literally ate away their skin. They also put poisonous juices from the deadly nightshade plant into their eyes to make their pupils bigger. They must have looked lovely…

Every silk-producing caterpillar in Europe is descended from two silkworm moth eggs stolen from China and smuggled back to Byzantium (modern-day Istanbul, Turkey).

Roman doctors didn’t use anaesthetics when they fixed broken bones or cut off rancid arms and legs. Instead, they were trained not to take any notice of the screams!

In South America around 12,000 years ago, there were beavers the size of donkeys and sloths the size of elephants. Freaky!

In 1924, the State of Nevada, USA, introduced the gas chamber as a more humane form of execution. Its first victim was convicted murderer Gee Jong.

The 10th English Duke of Hamilton was so interested in Egyptian mummies, he got a doctor to mummify him and put him into a stone tomb when he died in 1852 – just like an ancient Egyptian pharaoh!

The machine gun was invented in 1718 by Englishman James Puckle. The Puckle gun could fire nine shots per minute while a standard musket could fire only three.

To help babies with the pain of teething, a Tudor mum might rub a dead hare on the baby’s gums.

The plague of Justinian spread all over the world between 541 AD and 542 AD. At its worst it killed between 5,000 and 10,000 people every day. Often, there wasn’t enough room to bury the dead, so bodies were left rotting in the streets.

Despite his harsh laws, Draco of Athens was very popular. Attending a reception one day, he was showered with hats, shirts and cloaks by admiring citizens. By the time they dug him out from under the clothing he had been smothered to death.

14,000 years ago, Native Americans in Florida impaled tortoises on sticks and roasted them, like kebabs, over a fire.

The last of the true Barbary lions, famed for their appearances in the Roman Colosseum, was killed in the Atlas Mountains in 1922.

In 1852, the height of Mount Everest was calculated at exactly 29,000 feet (8,839 metres). The figure looked like an estimate, so an extra two feet were added on!