10 strange historical facts that sound fake

You could take the London Underground to watch England’s last public hanging

On 26 May 1868, Irish republican activist Michael Barrett, convicted for his role in a bombing, was hanged outside Newgate Prison in what proved to be England’s last public
execution.

Many of the thousands who gathered to watch the grisly event may have travelled there by
Tube, on the Metropolitan Line that had opened five years earlier. Newgate was just a 10-minute
stroll from Farringdon Station.

Jack the Ripper was still making headlines when Nintendo was founded

Most people know Nintendo as a leading light of late 20th-century video game culture, producing hits ranging from Super Mario Bros to The Legend of Zelda. But the company was actually founded in Kyoto, Japan, in 1889 to produce handmade hanafuda playing cards.

In England that same year, the notorious serial killer dubbed Jack the Ripper was still making newspaper headlines, the fifth murder attributed to ‘Jack’ having been committed the previous November.

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Cleopatra lived nearer in time to the first moon landing than the building of the pyramids of Giza

Incredible as it might sound, Cleopatra (c69–30 BC), the last active ruler of ancient Egypt, was born more than 2,400 years after the completion of Giza’s three main pyramids
(constructed c2550–2490 BC).

In 1969, ‘only’ two millennia after her death, US astronaut Neil Armstrong took his first momentous steps on the Moon.

The Great Wall of China was finally completed two years after the world’s first telephone call

The Great Wall of China, one of the planet’s most famous artificial structures, was largely built over a long period extending from the third century BC to the 17th century AD, and eventually stretched 13,171 miles (21,196km).

Despite its ancient origins, though, construction work on the Wall wasn’t actually completed until 1878, during the late Qing dynasty. Two years earlier, Alexander Graham Bell had catapulted the world into a new era of modernity with his groundbreaking invention: the telephone. On 10 March 1876, he made the world’s first phone call, to his assistant: “Mr Watson. Come here. I want to see you.”

Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire

The culture now known as Aztec may seem like ancient history, but the origin of this Mesoamerican empire is usually dated to 1325, with the founding of the capital city, Tenochtitlan (the site of modern-day Mexico City).

By contrast, teaching at Oxford University – which still welcomes hundreds of students every year – began in one form or another as early as 1096. University, Balliol and Merton Colleges were all founded between 1249 and 1264.

Machu Picchu and the Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes were finished within a century of each other

The Italian Renaissance and the Inca empire aren’t often associated with each other, yet both were phenomena of the same era. The Peruvian mountaintop citadel of Machu Picchu was completed around 1450, at the height of the empire’s power, and was probably occupied until c1530. More than 6,500 miles away, as Inca emperors continued to enjoy their mountaintop retreat, in 1512 Italian artist Michelangelo was putting the finishing touches to his frescoes on the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel ceiling.

A samurai could have sent a fax to Abraham Lincoln

Perhaps the most bizarre of all the facts gathered here is that there was a 22-year window during which a Japanese samurai could, in theory, have sent a fax to US president Abraham Lincoln.

Japan’s samurai class existed until the end of the feudal system in 1868; the electric printing telegraph (a forerunner of the digital fax machine) was patented in 1843; and Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.

Coca-Cola is older than the Eiffel Tower

On 8 May 1886, Dr John Pemberton sold the first glass of Coca-Cola at Jacobs’ Pharmacy in Atlanta,
charging five cents a glass. Nearly three years later, on 31 March 1889, construction of the 300-metre-high Eiffel Tower in Paris, France,
was completed.

Star Wars was released in the same year that France carried out its last execution by guillotine

Although a punishment most widely associated with the bloody Reign of Terror period of the French Revolution in the late 18th century, the guillotine was still used as a method of execution well into the 20th century. In fact, the last person to be executed by guillotine in France was Tunisian immigrant Hamida Djandoubi, in September 1977 - the same year that George Lucas’s epic blockbuster film Star Wars was first shown on the big screen.

This content first appeared in the June 2023 issue of BBC History Revealed