Cleopatra Lived Closer to the Computer Age than to the Pyramids, and Other Atypical History Facts

39. President Tyler, Born in 1790, Has Grandsons Living in 2019

As American presidents go, John Tyler (1790 – 1862) was nothing special. Elected as vice president on the 1840 Whig ticket, he became head honcho when the head of the ticket, William Henry Harrison, caught pneumonia while giving his inaugural speech, and died after a mere 31 days in office.

As president, Tyler turned out to be a mediocrity. Infuriating both his own Whig Party and the opposition Democrats, he muddled through to the end of a forgettable single term, failing to get re-nominated by his party. To the extent he is known to many today, it might be as one of the names in The Simpsons song, Mediocre Presidents. However, there is one extraordinary thing about Tyler: although he was born in the eighteenth century, in 1790, he has grandsons still living at the time of this writing (2019) in the twenty-first century. How did that come about?

38. The Old Goat Tylers

In popular culture, Billy goats are known for virility and remaining sexually active well into old age. An ancient Billy goat at death’s door often still has the libido to totter over to, get it on with, and impregnate a Nanny goat. The Tyler males might be the Billy goats of mankind. Not only do they remain sexually active well into old age, but they also possess potent and seemingly ageless sperm that retains its virility and ability to impregnate, despite the owner’s decrepitude.

President Tyler’s fifteenth kid, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, was born in 1853, when his father was 63. In 1925, when Lyon was 71, he fathered Gardiner Tyler, Jr. About four years later, a 75-year-old Lyon fathered Harrison Ruffin Tyler. At 95 and 91, respectively, both Gardiner and Harrison are still going strong and doing well for their age. So President Tyler’s crowning achievement is that he still has living grandsons, 229 years after he was born.

37. Albert Einstein Was at Max Genius In His Mid Twenties

The popular image most of us have of Albert Einstein is of an aging man, with disheveled and wild white hair. So it stands to reason that most people would assume that Einstein’s most important work must have occurred at the tail end of a long life, spent doing complex physics and math stuff.

In reality, Einstein’s greatest contributions to science, such as his theory of relativity, had taken place by the time he was 26. In 1905, after graduating from the University of Zurich, Einstein was working as a patent office examiner, and dabbling into some physics stuff in his free time. During a span of a few brief months, he came up with four theories that revolutionized science.

36. Young Einstein’s Miracle Year

In January and February of 1905, Albert Einstein came up with the theory of relativity, demonstrating that Isaac Newton was wrong in positing that space and time were absolute. In March, he again revolutionized science with his work on quantum theory. Then in April and May, he published a pair of papers that proved the assumed but hitherto unverified existence of the atom.

Einstein did all of that by the time he was 26, and for the remainder of his life – he lived another half-century, before dying in 1955 – no scientific contribution of his matched what he had done in 1905. Which is not to say that he coasted for the rest of his life on the accomplishments of his youth, but if he had done, it would have been OK: the man’s accomplishments in that single year exceeded the contributions of the entire lifetimes of multiple geniuses.

35. Brexit Is Not the First Time Britain Quit Europe

Brexit, the seemingly never-ending saga of a divorce from the European Union, is neither the first nor most chaotic time that Britain has quit Europe. An even messier separation occurred a few thousand years ago, when Britain was physically torn away from Europe.

Britain was not always an island. Until quite recently in geologic terms, what is now the British Isles were just the northwestern corner of the European mainland. Jutting out a bit, kind of like how Alaska juts out of North America, that European protrusion is known today as Doggerland. Then, about 8,000 years ago, that all changed in a most dramatic way.

34. The Original Brexit

Until the last Ice Age, Britain was part of Doggerland, Europe’s northwest corner. However, when the Ice Age ended and temperatures began to warm, the ice cap began to melt, and the sea levels began to rise. That was bad news for much of Doggerland, because much of it was lowlands. As the waters rose, the Atlantic and the expanding North Sea gradually chipped away at the region. Then, about 7500 BC, a landslide off Norway created a tsunami that rolled over much of Doggerland.

By 6000 BC, most inhabitants of the remaining lowlands, by now mostly marshes, had moved to the higher ground of today’s Britain and the Netherlands. Finally, about 5000 BC, the prehistoric Brexit was completed when the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea finally met, forming the English Channel that separates Britain from Europe. Traces of Doggerland still come up today, as fishermen over the region still occasionally pull up spearheads and mammoth bones.

33. Were the Pyramids Built by Slaves?

Building the Great Pyramid of Giza was a massive undertaking, that involved moving and piling up six and a half million tons of stone, in blocks weighing as much as nine tons. All of that was done with manual labor, using little more than ropes and wood. Was it slave labor?

The Old Testament’s portrayal of the Hebrews’ forced labor for Pharaoh popularized the notion that slave labor was widespread in Ancient Egypt. Ancient Greek writers such as Herodotus and subsequent historians, fiction, as well as film in the modern era, further cemented the perception that Ancient Egyptians used slave labor for their great building projects. Despite graffiti inside the Great Pyramids suggesting paid laborers, made by the workers who built the monuments, the notion that slaves built the pyramids became entrenched in the popular imagination. That notion is wrong.

32. The Pyramids Were Built by Paid Workers

The idea that the pyramids were built by slaves remained widespread until Egyptologists discovered the city of the Great Pyramids’ builders in 1977, and excavations demonstrated that the builders were not slaves. In 2010, archaeologists unearthed the tombs of the Great Pyramids’ builders, and their contents conclusively debunked the notion that the edifices had been built by slave labor. The modest tombs, which held the perfectly preserved skeletons of about a dozen pyramid workers, showed that their occupants were paid laborers, not slaves.

The builders hailed from poor families from all over Egypt, and were not only paid for their work, but were so respected for that work that those who died during construction were honored by burial near the tombs of the sacred Pharaohs. The proximity to the sacred sites, and the care taken in preparing their bodies for their journeys to the afterlife, disprove the notion that the builders were slaves. Slaves would never have been extended such honors.

31. Middle Ages Europe Had Significant Non-Christian and Non-White Populations

Most Europeans during the medieval era were Christian and white, but not all. Various parts of Middle Ages Europe had significant populations of Jews, Muslims, and even Pagans, with the numbers of the followers of each religion varying from region to region, depending on its history and culture.

Throughout most of the Middle Ages, Jews could be found in all parts of Europe. Muslims were common – at times even a majority – in the Iberian Peninsula, had a significant presence in Sicily, and could be found in many ports and trading centers. Up north, in Prussia, Scandinavia, and the Baltics, Pagans predominated.

30. Religion Trumped Race

The greatest dividing line in medieval Europe was religion, not race. Indeed, race back then was not defined the way it is now, so “white” or “black” mattered less in the Middle Ages than did one’s religion.

For example, a swarthy or dark-skinned bishop from Egypt, North Africa, or Nubia, was deemed to be more civilized, and possessed of a higher rank, than a white slave from the Pagan parts of Europe. Discrimination was more likely to be based on religion than skin color, so Jews or Cathars and other European heretics were likely to have a worse time than non-white Christians.

29. France Was Still Guillotining People When Star Wars Was Released

Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities saw the guillotine transformed into a semi-independent character, whose ominous shadow dominated the tale. Today, mention of the guillotine usually brings to mind images of the French Revolution, its blade chopping through and thinning the ranks of the Ancien Regime’s aristocracy. Its most notable victims during its 1790s heyday included King Louis XVI, and his wife Marie Antoinette.

An equal opportunity killer, the guillotine also chopped off the heads of radical republicans who had executed France’s king and queen. Falling between those political extremes, tens of thousands lost their lives to the guillotine in its busiest stretch of usage, during the Reign of Terror. So ubiquitous was the instrument during this period, that it became a quasi symbol of Revolutionary France. And it stayed busy, severing heads, throughout the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth. By the time it chopped its last neck, Star Wars was in theaters.

28. The Guillotine Continued in Use Well Past the French Revolution

The guillotine is so associated with the French Revolution, that it is easy to forget that its use in France continued long after the 1789 upheaval came to an end. Indeed, the instrument, sometimes referred to by the French as “The National Razor”, would continue doing its work well into the modern age.

It serviced its last customer during the Age of Disco, and after Star Wars was released on May 25^th, 1977. Later that year, on September 10th, Hamida Djandoubi won the distinction of becoming the correct answer to the question: “who was the last person executed by guillotine in France?”

27. The National Razor’s Last Shave

Hamida Djandoubi was born in Tunis in 1949, and moved to Marseilles in 1968. There, after a series of menial jobs, including a stint as a landscaper that ended when a workplace accident led to the amputation of one of his legs, he settled on pimping as a career. He earned a date with “The National Razor” by kidnapping, torturing, and strangling to death a former girlfriend in 1974, after she filed a complaint accusing him of trying to force her into prostitution.

He was tried for torture, murder, rape, and assorted acts of violence, in February of 1974, and was duly convicted and sentenced to death. After exhausting his appeals, and failing to win a reprieve from the French president, Djandoubi went under the guillotine in a Marseilles prison at 4:40 AM, September 10^th, 1977. France did not abolish the guillotine and capital punishment until 1981 – the same year MS-DOS 1.0 was released, and Indiana Jones premiered in theaters.

26. Eel Money

There are not that many things that are more slippery than an eel – hence, the term. Perhaps that difficulty in getting a hold of them explains why eels were sometimes used as currency during the Middle Ages. Eels may not be a popular dish in the West these days, but they were once such a common staple in medieval England that they were used as currency.

For example, the Domesday Book lists hundreds of English watermills whose rent was paid in eels, bundled in “sticks” of 25. One proprietor who received his rent in eels was “Giles brother of Ansculf”, who got 1000 sticks from his watermill in Bottisham, Cambridgeshire, and 2000 sticks from his watermill in Datchet, Buckinghamshire.

25. The Eel Exchange Rate

The use of eels as currency raises a question: just how much were eels worth? In 1273, King Edward I issued price controls for the sale of certain foods in London, and a stick of 25 eels was listed as 2 pence, or the equivalent of $8.25 in 2017 US dollars. Edward’s price controls were issued almost two centuries after the Domesday Book, but inflation was nowhere near as great in those days as it is day.

Thus, if we assume that 2 pence had roughly the same purchasing value in both the days of the Domesday Book and those of Edward I, Giles brother of Ansculf would have gotten about $8250 in rent for his Bottisham watermill and $16,500 for the one in Bottisham.

24. Which is Older: Nintendo, or Jack the Ripper’s Murder Spree?

Japanese multinational Nintendo Co. Ltd., the giant video game company, is best known as the creator of top-selling franchises such as Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Pokemon. The company is associated with electronics and is known as a pioneer of one of the world’s most modern technologies: video game entertainment. However, it was founded over a century ago during the steam power era, in 1889 – contemporaneous with Jack the Ripper.

Nintendo came along long before video games were even a theoretical concept. When the company was founded in the nineteenth century, it produced handmade hanafuda playing cards. In 1956, the company began trying its hand at new ventures to supplement its playing cards business, upon realizing that playing cards had limited growth potential. So Nintendo set up a taxi company, before establishing other divisions such as a TV network, a love motel chain, toys, and a food company specializing in instant rice.

23. The Growth of an Entertainment Giant

Most of Nintendo’s ventures were unsuccessful, except for toys. So by the 1960s, Nintendo was mainly a toy company. In 1974, the company got involved in video games for the first time, when it secured the rights to distribute Magnavox’s video game console in Japan. A year later, they moved into arcade games, with some limited success, until 1981, when they released the smash arcade hit Donkey Kong. The rest was video game history.

Long before all of that, when Nintendo had been founded in Kyoto by Japanese entrepreneur Fusajiro Yamauchi in 1889, the world was still in the steam power era, and electricity and electronics were considered newfangled inventions. When Yamauchi founded Nintendo, London, half a world away, was still trembling in fear from the depredations of the gruesome serial killer, Jack the Ripper, believed to have between active from 1888 until 1891. Perhaps in a nod to that historic overlap, in 2013 Nintendo 3DS launched Mystery Murders: Jack the Ripper, a game rated M for Mature.

22. Mob Football

In Middle Ages England, Lent season often featured a rough ball game known as mob football. There were regional variations, but the basics were similar. Teams from different villages and towns, with anywhere from a few dozen to hundreds of players, met in a fairly central location. Then a ball was thrown, and the competing teams vied with each other to capture a ball and take it back home – usually to their church’s front porch.

There were few restrictions as to team sizes or ball handling. The massive matches usually lasted for an entire day, with many players dropping out because of injury or fatigue. Bruises, scratches, cuts, and lacerations were common occurrences, with the occasional death thrown into the mix. Despite those risks, medieval mob football remained popular for centuries. Because of its destructive nature, however, it was eventually banned in England by King Edward II in 1314. In what might or might not be a coincidence, Edward II went down in history as one of England’s most unpopular and despised kings.

21. The Chicago Cubs’ Curse

During Game Four of the 1945 World Series between the Chicago Cubs and Detroit Tigers, tavern owner William “Billy Goat” Sianis, and his actual Billy goat, Murphy, were enjoying the game in Wrigley Field. Their joy was interrupted, however, when they were pulled aside by Chicago Cubs officials, who informed the duo that Murphy would have to leave.

When Sianis showed them a ticket proving that Murphy had actually paid for his seat, and complained that they were discriminating against his friend because he was a goat, he was informed that nothing could be further from the truth. Murphy was not being kicked out because he was a goat, but because some fans had complained that he stank and that his odor offended them. So Sianis turned around and issued modern sports’ greatest curse.

20. The Curse of the Billy Goat Begins

An indignant “Billy Goat” Sianis, offended that the Chicago Cubs had kicked his Billy goat buddy out of the ballpark, fired off a telegram to Cubs’ team owner Philip K. Wrigley. In relevant part, it stated: “You are going to lose this World Series and you are never going to win another World Series again. You are never going to win a World Series again because you insulted my goat“.

The Chicago Cubs, who until then had been leading the World Series 2 to 1, dropped game 4, to even it at 2-2. They then proceeded to lose the best-of-seven series, 4 to 3. It was just the start or considering that the team was already in the midst of prolonged title drought, an extension, of the misery and heartbreak that marked Cubs’ fandom for over a century.

19. Until 2016, the Cubs Had Not Won a World Series Since The Days of the Ottoman Empire

By 1945, the Cubs were already in the midst of a long title drought, having last won a World Series in 1908. In 1908, Babe Ruth had still not made his MLB debut. Teddy Roosevelt was still in the White House. Mark Twain was still alive. Russia was ruled by a Tsar. Kaiser Wilhelm II still ran Germany. A sultan still headed the Ottoman Empire. A Hapsburg emperor still ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

In Vienna, a young weirdo named Adolf Hitler was chasing his dreams of becoming an artist. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was still alive, and nobody had dreamt of WWI, let alone its sequel, which had concluded only a month before Murphy was kicked out of Wrigley Field. By 1945, things had already changed drastically since the Chicago Cubs’ last World Series victory. Sianis’ dire warning became known as the “Curse of the Billy Goat”, and it took the Cubs’ already long World Series drought, and extended it another 71 years, until 2016.

18. “Town vs Gown” Beefs Were Around For Centuries

Town and Gown, the distinct populations of university towns with the former being the locals and the latter the academic community, have often been at odds. One of the earliest examples of the two communities beefing occurred on February 10^th, 1355, St. Scholastica Day. Two Oxford University students, Roger de Chesterfield and Walter Spryngheuse were having drinks at the Swindlestock Tavern in Oxford. At some point, they complained to the taverner, John Croidon, about the quality of the drinks, and he did not take kindly to their complaints.

One thing led to another, heated words were exchanged, and the students ended up throwing the drinks in the taverner’s face, as a prelude to beating the daylights out of him. Oxford’s mayor asked the university to arrest the thuggish students, but his request was ignored. Instead, 200 students sided with Springheuse and Chesterfield, and went on a rampage during which they assaulted the mayor and other Townies. Then it got ugly.

17. The Town Beats the Stuffing Out of the Gown

The Oxford students’ rampage was too much for the locals, who mounted a counter-riot of their own. Hundreds poured in from the countryside to hunt down the students, crying: “Havoc! Havoc! Smyte [smite] fast! Give gode knocks!” The students were routed, with 63 of them killed, while 30 locals also lost their lives.

In the aftermath, the authorities sided with the university, and every year thereafter, on February 10^th, Oxford’s mayor and councilors were made to atone by marching bareheaded through the streets. They then had to attend mass, and pay a penny for each student killed. That tradition lasted for nearly four centuries, until 1825 when an Oxford mayor finally put his foot down and refused to participate.

16. A Civil War Widow Was Still Alive When Obama Was Elected President

The US Civil War, driven primarily by the issue of black chattel slavery, ended in 1865 with a Union victory that put a de facto seal on the demise of slavery. In 2008, 143 years later, America elected its first black president, Barrack Obama. Incredible as it may sound, A Civil War widow, who had been married to a Confederate soldier, was still alive in 2008.

Maudie White Hopkins (1914 – 2008), born Maudie Cecilia Acklin in Arkansas, grew up in an impoverished family of 10 children during the Great Depression in the hardscrabble Ozarks. To help put food on the table and make ends meet, a teenaged Maudie cleaned house and did laundry for an elderly Civil War veteran, William Cantrell, who had been widowed years earlier.

15. Marrying a Civil War Veteran

William Cantrell enlisted in the Confederate army at age sixteen, and served in the Army of Tennessee in the Western Theater. He was captured in 1863, held in a prison camp in Ohio, and eventually released in a prisoner exchange. He returned to civilian life after the war, moved to Arkansas to stay with relatives, eventually started a family, and after a long married life, was widowed in 1929. In 1934, when Cantrell was 86 and Maudie Cecilia Acklin was 19, he offered to leave her his house and land, if she would marry him and take care of him in his final years.

It was not too uncommon for young women in Arkansas at the time to marry Civil War pensioners, so Maudie accepted. For much of her life, she generally kept that marriage a secret, to avoid gossip about her having once married a much older man, and fearing that people would think less of her as a result. In her later years, however, she openly acknowledged the marriage.

14. Living on a Confederate Pension

As Maudie Acklin put it in a 2004 Associated Press interview: “After Mr. Cantrell died I took a little old mule he had and plowed me a vegetable garden and had plenty of vegetables to eat. It was hard times; you had to work to eat. … I didn’t do anything wrong. I’ve worked hard my whole life and did what I had to, what I could, to survive. I didn’t want to talk about it for a while because I didn’t want people to gossip about it. I didn’t want people to make it out to be worse than it was“.

Cantrell supported her with his Confederate pension of $25 every two or three months. The pension benefits ended upon his death in 1937, but true to Cantrell’s promise, he left her his house and land upon his death. Maudie Hopinks remarried three more times, and had three children – two daughters and a son. She died in a nursing home on August 7th, 2008, a few months before Obama was elected president.

13. Were the Middle Ages Full of Witch Hunts?

Were witches getting burned left, right, and center, during the Middle Ages? Compared to the present, medieval people were extremely superstitious. However, their superstitions were not expressed in witch hunts. While there were some witch trials in medieval Europe, they were relatively rare, and were usually done by the secular authorities, not directed by the church.

Indeed, throughout most of the Middle Ages, the standard message disseminated by churchmen regarding magic was that it was silly nonsense that did not work. The European witch craze was more of a sixteenth and seventeenth-century phenomenon. It took off after Heinrich Kramer wrote the infamous Malleus Mallificarum in the late fifteenth century, in an attempt to convince a then-disbelieving public that witches were real. When it first came out, the church actually condemned the book and warned inquisitors not to believe what it says.

12. Which is Older: The Oregon Trail, or the Fax Machine?

The roughly 2200 mile long Oregon Trail connected the Missouri River to Oregon. It began as rough tracks and trails blazed and cleared through the wilderness by fur traders, in progressive stages, between 1811 to 1840. Initially, the segments were only passable to travelers on foot or horseback.

By 1836, the trail section between Independence, Missouri, and Fort Hall, Idaho, had been cleared to accommodate wagons, and the first migrant wagon train made that journey. Thereafter, wagon trails were gradually cleared westward, until, in 1843, they reached the Willamette Valley in Oregon. From then on, the wagon route came to be known as the Oregon Trail. Is it older than the fax machine?

11. Nineteenth-Century Pioneer Symbol

The Oregon Trail became one of nineteenth-century America’s iconic symbols, as it pumped a seemingly inexhaustible torrent of land-hungry migrants from the settled east to the open spaces of the west. Wagon trains of pioneers inexorably pushed the new country’s frontier ever westward, displacing Native Americans from their ancestral lands, and exploiting the newly seized territories for agricultural and mining usages.

Between the 1830s and 1860s, the Oregon Trail was used by about 400,000 farmers, ranchers, miners, and other settlers and their families, who loaded their goods and hopes upon wagon, and trekked west in pursuit of their dreams. The trail’s use finally went into decline when the first transcontinental railway was completed in 1869, as trains made for a faster, cheaper, and safer journey.

10. The Fax Machine is As Old as the Oregon Trail

It sounds unbelievable, but the fax machine is as old as the Oregon Trail. In 1843, the Oregon Trail was finally completed by an enterprising wagon train of about 1000 migrants. After a difficult trek, they cleared a final segment to make the trail passable by wagon all the way from the Missouri River to Oregon. That same year, a Scottish inventor named Alexander Bains secured a British patent for what he termed the “Electric Printing Telegraph“.

The invention relied on a clock to sync the movement of two pendulums to scan a message line by line. Using a metal pin arrangement in a cylinder, Bain devised a system whereby on-off electric pulses would scan the pins, send a message across wires, and reproduce it at a receiving station far away. That device became the forerunner of the modern fax machine. It eventually led to the first commercially practical telefax service between Paris and Lyon in 1861 – 11 years before the invention of the telephone.

9. Did They Have Elections in the Middle Ages?

Medieval Europe had elections. They were not as common as they are today, and there was no universal suffrage, but there were elections. People back then routinely elected aldermen, members of parliament, bishops, abbots, popes, and sometimes even kings. There were important differences between then and now, not least among them just how narrow was the slice of the population that got vote. However, there were also striking parallels, chief among them the belief that elections conferred legitimacy.

Views on elections were ambivalent in the Middle Ages. On the one hand, the medieval belief in elections was based on biblical examples, such as the Old Testament accounts of the Israelites electing Judges and Kings. Also, kings sometimes died without issue, the papacy was not hereditary, and town burghers needed to select people to fill local government positions. On the other hand, elections were also seen as occasions for strife, and potential starting points for riots, rebellions, or civil war.

8. Which Happened First: the Building of the Great Pyramids, or the Extinction of Woolly Mammoths?

Woolly mammoths flourished during the Pleistocene epoch. The extinct pachyderms were roughly the size of modern African elephants, with males reaching shoulder heights greater than 11 feet, and weighing in at around 6 tons. Females reached nearly 10 feet at the shoulder, weighed around 4 tons, and calved newborns that weighed around 200 pounds at birth.

The furry pachyderms are most commonly associated with the Ice Age. Their shaggy coats, comprised of outer layers of long guard hairs atop a shorter undercoat, made them well adapted to the harsh winter environment. Other evolutionary adaptations included short ears and tail, to minimize frostbite and heat loss. That enabled them to thrive in the Mammoth Steppe – the earth’s most extensive biome during the ice age, extending from Canada and across Eurasia to Spain, and from the Arctic Circle to China. Were they still around when the Great Pyramid was built?

7. When Did Woolly Mammoths Go Extinct?

When, exactly, did woolly mammoths go extinct? The Ice Age ended about twelve thousand years ago, circa 9700 BC. It is widely assumed that woolly mammoth must have vanished into extinction sometime around then, if not sooner. However, contrary to popular perceptions, woolly mammoths did not vanish that far back.

While no man ever saw a live dinosaur, mankind and its hominid ancestors did share the planet with woolly mammoths for hundreds of thousands of years. Woolly mammoths, in fact, were still around while the Ancient Egyptians were busy building the Great Pyramids.

6. The Last Surviving Woolly Mammoths

Most woolly mammoths were hunted by humans into extinction, and disappeared from the continental mainland of Eurasia and North America between 14,000 and 10,000 years ago. The last mainland population, in the Kyttyk Peninsula in Siberia, vanished about 9650 years ago. However, small populations survived in offshore islands, such as Saint Paul Island in Alaska, where woolly mammoths existed until 5600 years ago.

The last known population survived in Wrangel Island, in the Arctic Ocean, until 4000 years ago, or roughly 2000 BC. That was well into the era of human civilization and recorded human history, and centuries after the Great Pyramid of Giza, whose construction concluded around 2560 BC, had been built.

5. Did People in the Middle Ages Really Drink Booze Instead of Water?

A common trope accepted by many as fact has it that people in the Middle Ages only drank beer and wine instead of water, because water was too contaminated with deadly pathogens. That is not true. Just like it has been throughout all of humanity’s existence, water was the most popular drink during the Middle Ages – for the simple reason that it was free.

It is true that people in the Middle Ages did not have the kinds of water purification treatments that the water coming out of our faucets nowadays usually goes through. While contamination was a problem, medieval people – like all humans since our species first walked upright – knew enough to spot and avoid obviously contaminated water. For example, people had enough common sense and common knowledge to know that swampy, muddy, and cloudy water was not good for drinking.

4. Water Was Actually Recommended In the Middle Ages

Medical texts and health manuals in the Middle Ages actually praised water as being good for you – so long as it came from good sources. Indeed, authorities in the Middle Ages went to great lengths to supply people with drinking water. For example, London constructed ‘The Conduit‘ in the 1200s, using lead pipes to bring fresh water from a nearby spring to the middle of the city, where people had free access to it.

Those who could afford it drank wine, but they usually mixed it with water to dilute its power. For those who could not afford wine on a regular basis, beer and ale were plentiful and cheap. However, beer and ale back then were far weaker than they are today. Also, considering the long days and hard labor medieval workers put in, whether in the fields or shops or other employment, beer and ale did more than just quench thirst. They also provided a significant intake of calories throughout the day to keep people going.

3. Betty White and Sliced Bread

Actress and comedian Betty White is an entertainment dynamo or Energizer Bunny, who has been performing for over 70 years. She was a television pioneer, and her accomplishments include being the first woman to produce a sitcom. She is perhaps best known for her Emmy-winning roles as Sue Ann Nivens in the popular and groundbreaking sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and as Rose Nylund in the even more popular and groundbreaking sitcom, The Golden Girls.

As of 2019, Betty White’s career has spanned 76 years, during which she won a Grammy, 8 Emmy Awards in various categories, 3 Screen Actors Guild Awards, and 3 American Comedy Awards. She is in the Television Hall of Fame, and has her own star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Today, Betty White holds the record for the longest television career of any female entertainer. But is Betty White the greatest thing sliced bread?

2. “The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread”

“The greatest thing since sliced bread” dates to 1928, when loaves of bread that had been sliced with a machine, then packaged for convenience, made their first appearance. It began when Otto Frederick Rohwedder (1880 – 1960), an inventor and engineer, created the first automatic bread slicing machine for commercial use. He sold his first machine to the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri, which became the first bakery to sell pre-sliced bread loaves.

The new-fangled sliced bread was advertised as “the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped” – a bold assertion that contrasted greatly with the experience of actual consumers. Among other things, in the days before preservatives, sliced bread went stale faster than its intact counterpart. It had an aesthetic problem as well: customers simply thought the sliced loaves were sloppy-looking. A stop gap solution was to use pins to hold the sliced loaves together, and make them appear intact inside the packaging.

1. Betty White Is Actually Not the Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread

Improvements to the slicing machine made the loaves appear less sloppy, and sliced bread eventually gained in popularity until it became an American staple. By then, the early and over-the-top advertising puffery had caught on with the public, and made the introduction of sliced bread a marker and frame of reference in the popular lexicon for subsequent claims of greatness.

So, could Betty White possibly be the greatest thing since sliced bread? Well, America’s sweetheart and a most beloved grandmotherly icon was born on January 17^th, 1922. That was about six and a half years before the Chillicothe Baking Company sold its first loaf of sliced bread, on July 7^th, 1928. Since her birth predates sliced bread, it follows that Betty White could not be the best thing sliced bread. Thus, as a matter of straightforward historic fact, the answer must be in the negative: Betty White is not the best thing since sliced bread. However, sliced bread can make the argument that it is the best thing since Betty White.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

BBC – Trial by Ordeal: When Fire and Water Determined Guilt

Buzzfeed – 16 Strange and Surprising Facts About Medieval England

Cracked – 44 Important Parts of History You’re Picturing Wrong

Encyclopedia Britannica – Albert Einstein

Harvard Magazine, July-August 2003 – Who Built the Pyramids?

Historia Cartarum – What Does a Stick of Eels Get You?

History Extra – 8 Things You (Probably) Didn’t Know About Medieval Elections

Houston Chronicle – Historical Events You Had No Idea Happened at Around the Same Time

Huffington Post – 8 Surprising Historical Facts That Will Change Your Concept of Time Forever

Live Science – Albert Einstein: The Life of a Brilliant Physicist

Mental Floss – France Stopped Using the Guillotine as Star Wars Premiered

National Geographic – Doggerland, The Europe That Was

National Geographic, November 1^st, 2016 – Here’s What Happened the Last Time the Cubs Won a World Series

Ranker – Were Medieval People Really Drunk on Beer and Wine All the Time?

Time Magazine, July 7^th, 2015 – How Sliced Bread Became ‘The Greatest Thing’

Times of London, January 13^th, 2018 – Our Grandfather John Tyler, the US President Born in 1790

National Geographic Channel – Woolly Mammoths Wiped Out by Grass Invasion?

Wikipedia – Maudie Hopkins

Wikipedia – St Scholastica Day Riot

World Atlas – Did Woolly Mammoths Still Roam Parts of the Earth When the Great Pyramids Were Built?