20 Historical Facts That Seem Untrue, But Aren’t

Just a few weeks after signing the Treaty of Tilsit in 1807, Napoleon organized a rabbit hunt to celebrate the occasion with his officers. His chief of staff, Alexandre Berthier, was tasked with rounding up the rabbits, but instead of obtaining wild rabbits, he gathered hundreds of domestic rabbits from local farmers. The tame animals, conditioned to associate humans with mealtime, rushed toward Napoleon and his men instead of fleeing, and no amount of shouting or waving could stop them.

One might think that universities are relatively modern institutions, but Oxford has existed since 1096, and its educational activities expanded considerably between 1167 and 1168. The university was already well established long before the founding of Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec Empire, in 1325. This means that Oxford had been in existence for nearly 300 years by the time the Aztecs consolidated their empire in central Mexico.

This statement tends to surprise people when they hear it for the first time. Cleopatra died in 30 B.C., which places her about 2,500 years after the completion of the Great Pyramid of Giza, around 2560 B.C. The 1969 moon landing, by contrast, took place only about 2,000 years after her death; the ancient world stretches back much further than most people intuitively imagine.

The concept of the coin-operated machine does not date back to the Industrial Revolution; it actually has its origins in ancient Alexandria. In the 1st century A.D., the mathematician and engineer Heron of Alexandria designed a device that dispensed a fixed amount of holy water when a coin was inserted into a slot. His invention was used in Egyptian temples, and the basic principle behind it is not very different from that found in modern machines today.

Marie Curie’s decades of work with radioactive materials left an indelible mark on everything she touched, including her personal belongings. Her notebooks are so contaminated that they are still kept today in lead-lined boxes at the National Library of France in Paris. Anyone wishing to view them must sign a liability waiver and wear protective gear; it is estimated that these notebooks will remain radioactive for another 1,500 years.

Before entering politics, Abraham Lincoln was a co-owner of a general store called Berry & Lincoln in New Salem, Illinois, in the early 1830s. The store held a liquor license, which technically makes Lincoln one of the few U.S. presidents to have worked in the liquor business. This is a detail that often surprises people, given the image we generally have of Lincoln in American history.

On January 24, 1961, a B-52 bomber broke apart in mid-air over Goldsboro, North Carolina, releasing two Mark 39 nuclear warheads. One of the bombs nearly exploded; three of its four safety mechanisms had failed, and a single switch was the difference between a training accident and a nuclear explosion on American soil. The true scale of this narrowly averted incident was confirmed by declassified government documents released decades later.

Prohibition in the 1920s is well known, but the government’s decision to add toxic chemicals to industrial alcohol represents a much darker and less-discussed chapter of that era. Federal authorities ordered that industrial alcohol be denatured with methanol, arsenic, and other poisons in order to deter the public from consuming it; this policy was intended as a deterrent, not to protect public health. The plan backfired catastrophically, and historians estimate that thousands of Americans died after consuming these contaminated beverages before Prohibition ended in 1933.

In the 1830s, tomato-based ketchup was sold in pharmacies as a remedy for various ailments, including indigestion, liver disease, and diarrhea. Dr. John Cook Bennett was among the most ardent advocates of the tomato as a remedy, and he helped popularize tomato-based products throughout that decade. It would be many more years before ketchup finally established itself as a condiment rather than a remedy.

Long before anyone had heard of Mario or the Game Boy, Nintendo was a very different kind of company. Fusajiro Yamauchi founded the company in Kyoto, Japan, in 1889, where it handcrafted hanafuda playing cards for the Japanese market. It wasn’t until the 1960s that Nintendo began to branch out into toys and electronics, meaning the company had already been in business for nearly a century before producing its very first video game.

The surrealist artist Salvador Dalí is best known for his dreamlike paintings, but he also left his mark on the world of candy brands. In 1969, Enric Bernat, founder of Chupa Chups, asked Dalí to redesign the lollipop’s logo, and Dalí reportedly completed the task in less than an hour. The resulting design—a daisy-like flower with the brand name in its center—has remained virtually unchanged ever since.

When the Great Fire ravaged London in September 1666, it destroyed approximately 13,200 homes, 87 churches, and St. Paul’s Cathedral throughout the city. Despite the catastrophic scale of the damage, the official death toll recorded at the time was surprisingly low; historical records mention only a handful of confirmed deaths. Historians acknowledge that the actual number was likely higher, particularly among the poorest residents whose deaths were not recorded, but the discrepancy between the physical devastation and the reported death toll remains striking.

In 1738, a British naval captain named Robert Jenkins claimed that Spanish sailors had boarded his ship, cut off his ear, and ordered him to deliver it to his king. He presented the preserved ear to the British Parliament, and the ensuing public outrage helped draw Great Britain into a conflict with Spain that lasted from 1739 to 1748. This conflict is officially known as the “War of Jenkins’ Ear”; it is as real and as officially documented as any war fought for more conventional causes.

When Israel’s first president, Chaim Weizmann, died in 1952, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion officially offered the presidency to Albert Einstein. Einstein declined the offer, stating that he lacked both the natural aptitude and the personal experience (not to mention his advanced age) necessary to fulfill the role. This proposal is thoroughly documented in both the Israeli government archives and Einstein’s own correspondence; there is therefore no ambiguity regarding its authenticity, as incredible as it may seem.

When Antoine-Augustin Parmentier set out to convince skeptical French people to eat potatoes in the late 18th century, he took an unorthodox approach. He planted a field of potatoes just outside Paris and stationed armed guards there during the day to give the impression that this crop was too valuable to be accessible to ordinary people. He then withdrew the guards at night, knowing that residents would sneak in to steal the plants; the strategy worked, and potatoes gradually became a staple of French cuisine.

The original Coca-Cola recipe, developed by pharmacist John Pemberton in 1886, included coca leaf extracts containing cocaine. The cocaine content was gradually reduced over the following years and then eliminated entirely around 1903, primarily in response to growing public concern. The drink’s name still refers to its two original key ingredients: coca and kola.

Abraham Lincoln signed the law establishing the U.S. Secret Service on April 14, 1865, just a few hours before he was shot at Ford’s Theatre that evening. Originally, the agency was created to combat rampant currency counterfeiting, not to provide protection for the president; that responsibility was not added to its official mandate until years later. The coincidence of the signing of the bill and the assassination, both occurring on the same day, remains one of the most unsettling episodes in American political history.

The image of George Washington with wooden teeth is one of the most persistent myths in American history, but it has no basis in reality. His dentures were actually made from a mixture of human teeth, animal teeth, and ivory from elephants and hippopotamuses. They were reputed to be uncomfortable and ill-fitting, which is often cited as one of the reasons for the tense, frozen expression seen in many of his official portraits.

When electric lighting was installed at the White House in 1891, President Benjamin Harrison became the first U.S. president to live there permanently. Harrison and his wife were so afraid of being electrocuted that they refused to flip the light switches themselves. White House staff would turn on the lights before the family retired for the night; if no one was available to help them, the Harrisons would, according to some sources, have preferred to sleep with all the lights on rather than risk touching the light switches themselves.

Of all the documented historical facts about Caligula, his declaration of war against Neptune, the Roman god of the sea, seems particularly hard to believe. According to the Roman historian Suetonius, Caligula is said to have led his legions to the shores of the English Channel, ordered them to pierce the waves with their weapons, and then instructed them to collect seashells as spoils of their victory over the ocean. Historians continue to debate what actually motivated this episode, but the account comes from primary sources and has been subjected to sufficiently rigorous analysis that it has never been dismissed out of hand.