Friday Thread- Historical facts that are hard to fathom now

I recently watched a YouTube of a restored 1929! film interviewing two Civil War veterans

The last person receiving a American civil war pension died in 2020.

Something which is also weird is how stereotypes of countries change eg back in medieval times the English were seen as touchy feely and the Italians not so much.

More up-to date one: CPR technique (mouth to mouth and chest compressions) was invented in the 1960’s. before that, it was pump the arms back and forth, or y’now, do nothing.

CPR technique (mouth to mouth and chest compressions) was invented in the 1960’s

And on that note

The distinctive face of Resusci Anne (the dummy used for practice) was based on L’Inconnue de la Seine (English: The unknown woman of Seine), the death mask of an unidentified young woman reputedly drowned in the River Seine around the late 1880s.[2][4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resusci_Anne

My mum used to tell me (so it must be true), that when her granny was young she knew an old man who’s dad had watched Bonnie Prince Charlie march his army through Falkirk on his way to victory at the battle of Falkirk Muir in the 1740’s.

I always though it a bit crazy, that something historical like that can be brought to within so few generations.

I see your Bison

and raise you 50million+ Native Americans.

Wars of the Roses between the houses of York and Lancaster, 105000 dead.
After Henry VII (Lancaster) triumphed at Bosworth, he married Elizabeth of York and united the two houses. Did nobody think of doing this earlier?

Can’t we get Bozza to boff Ursula von der Leyen and perhaps all this Brexit stuff could be consigned to history……or Truss and Sefcovic

Once in the dark ages, the UK was a key member of the European Union helping to draft much of the policy for the single market and customs union

Can’t we get Bozza to boff Ursula von der Leyen and perhaps all this Brexit stuff could be consigned to history

Go on Ursula, take one for the team!

🤢

Belgium was the first country to achieve a life expectancy of 40. That was achieved in 1800.

Glad someone mentioned smoking. I’m 45 and when I was at Uni you could smoke most places. Not shops or cinemas but pretty much everywhere else.
You pretty much knew you’d have to wash your clothes after going into a pub for anything more than a brief visit. Most workplaces had smoking rooms.
It seems like a completely different age now, i don’t think I would have started smoking if I was a teen now compared to the 80’s and early 90’s. It’s even slightly unusual to pass someone on the street smoking too.

Not all the Catholic population of Northern Ireland had the right to vote until the early 1970’s.

My teenage libido.

My teenage lido

My teenage Ludo

@nickc

Another; at some point in the early 18thC nearly everybody in the UK went from living “Down there, past the tree, next to the beehive and if you go past the bridge you’ve gone too far”, to 11B Walpole Avenue, and almost no-one commentated on it at all.

I think the forum was down for maintenance that day….

The 10th US president, John Tyler, (born 1790, when George Washington was the OG POTUS), still has a living grandchild.

After Henry VII (Lancaster) triumphed at Bosworth, he married Elizabeth of York and united the two houses. Did nobody think of doing this earlier?

I’m envisaging someone trying to fix this in a time machine in a Blackadder style and it all kicking off again because someone’s slept with someone’s sister.

Not all the Catholic population of Northern Ireland had the right to vote until the early 1970’s.

This is slightly misleading. In general elections they had the same rights as everyone else, but for council elections voting was limited to one vote per household. By restricting the housing available to the catholic population, the Unionist authorities were, in effect, able to reduce the number of Catholic votes, to allow them to stay in power. It’s called gerrymandering.

The T-Rex was closer in history to the iPod than it was to the Triceratops

This one isn’t actually true.

That the world population has doubled since I was born in 1973.

Incredible, and scary.

It’s called gerrymandering.

Call it what they like, not everyone could vote for their elected official’s.

Wars of the Roses between the houses of York and Lancaster,

…… had nothing to do with any fancied traditional rivalry between the counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire, which have a red rose and a white rose respectively as their emblem.

Henry fought under a dragon banner and richard under a boar banner, the roses malarkey came along afterwards

EDIT: wrong thread

on the Tube(!)

When I first moved to that there London you could smoke on the tube but only in the 2nd and 2nd last carriage…if it was really busy you sometimes ended up in one of those cos they were the only ones with space.

The “Groom of the Stool” was the most sought after political appointment to the king as whilst wiping his arse you could chat business with no-one else interfering. This was an active office until 1901!

The T-Rex was closer in history to the iPod than it was to the Triceratops

This one isn’t actually true

Stegosaurus, rather than triceratops is the correct mind blower innit

Henry fought under a dragon banner and richard under a boar banner, the roses malarkey came along afterwards

Street view of the road names shows the front line.
This might not be a fact

The F-14 Tomcat is older today, than Spitfires were when the 1st Top Gun was released.

I work in a hospital microbiology lab. When I started in 2001, there were a couple of guys worked there who had been there since it opened in the sixties. They could smoke in the lab, had ash trays on the bench! This would be next to open cultures of, amongst other things, salmonella and TB 🤣

They also used to culture TB in eggs and have live animals (mice and gerbils) for virology.

Stegosaurus, rather than triceratops is the correct mind blower innit

Yeah, fair enough, I couldn’t quite remember and took a bit of a punt 😉

Life expectancy in England between the 1500’s and 1700’s was between 30-40. So basically i would likely be dead now

Perhaps the expertise on this site might help me with a random question that popped into my head a while ago related to this. ^

What is/was the average mortality age for everyone that has ever lived? And how much older am I than it at 53?

(I’m not going to get an answer on this but am assuming that the average age is less than mine, and quite like the idea that I might be regarded as ancient already by historical standards with all the wisdom that represents. 😀 )

The gap between the Wright brothers first flight, and man walking on the moon was 66 years!

Patrick Moore thought he was the only person to meet both, iirc.

I recently watched a YouTube of a restored 1929! film interviewing two Civil War veterans on a July 4th celebration day. they were in their 90’s by then but otherwise seemed as sharp as tacks

The last ACW veteran died in 1956. And as mentioned above, the last widow of a ACW veteran died in 2020!

The bands I listened to at university (Pixies, Nirvana, Jesus & Mary Chain, Orb, Aphex Twin etc) were closer to the Beatles than to current day music.

Most workplaces had smoking rooms.

My second workplace was a polytechnic, there was no specific smoking rooms or areas. I used to have to go in my bosses office for 1-to-1 meetings while he puffed away, smoke filling the room.

Funny how they still have the ‘no smoking’ lights on aeroplanes. Think they could use the space for something more useful.

Stegosaurus, rather than triceratops is the correct mind blower innit

Either that or it was a reference to Mark Bolan.

99% of gargoyles look like Bob Todd.

The bands I listened to at university (Pixies, Nirvana, Jesus & Mary Chain, Orb, Aphex Twin etc) were closer to the Beatles than to current day music.

There was only 25 years between the first ever rock n roll song and the Sex Pistols (if you agree that Rocket 88 was the first rock n roll song).

The orbital spaceflight of Yuri Gagarin on the 12th April 1961 technically did not qualify for the Guinness Record because the rules stipulated that the spacecraft must safely launch and land with the occupant inside.

We now know that after re-entry, Gagarin’s Vostok capsule ejected it’s occupant at an altitude of 7,000m and that Gagarin landed via parachute some distance away from his spacecraft.

Nearly everyone was pretty much on the edge of starvation nearly all the time.

Not sure this is true for medieval times. I have read lots of people debunking this. They had means to store food over the winter. The big problem was (as it is now in much of the developing world) that if the harvest were to fail, there wasn’t enough and there’d be famines. This was every 30-40 years or something. But when there wasn’t famine, there was enough.

During the industrial revolution it got worse because people were dependent on working and being able to pay cash for things that had to be transported into the city, rather than being part of a community that fed itself. And that work depended on external factors like markets. No market = no money = no food. Or, a greedy boss = not enough money = not enough food. In medieval times in the countryside, you were part of the harvest, most likely, so you’d be given your share before any surplus was sold.

potatoes
https://patient.info/news-and-features/nightshade-allergy-aubergine-potatoes-peppers-tomatoes

The geological age of the earth compressed to a timescale we can understand – one year

The Earth and the rest of the solar system is formed on New Year’s Day.

It wouldn’t be until late November that we saw the first animals with hard parts (fnarr!)

The first tetrapods appeared on land on the first day of December

The dinosaurs died out in a mass extinction that occurred on Boxing Day

Human beings appeared at about 11.35pm on New Year’s Eve

Stonehenge was built about thirty seconds before midnight

The industrial revolution was a second ago

…..and in that second, we’ve managed to **** it all up to the point of no return.