You might not realize it, but quite a few parts of history sit a lot closer together than they should have any right to, and it’s enough to seriously mess with your mind.
Woolly mammoths outlived the Great Pyramid
The Great Pyramid in Egypt was finished by around 2560 B.C., and at the same time, there were woolly mammoths living on the planet. Yes, really. Woolly mammoths survived on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean up until around 2000 B.C.
It sounds kind of strange because we imagine woolly mammoths as just being a caveman thing, but no. They were around when the pharaohs and pyramids were. They actually overlapped by several centuries, funnily enough.
Ancient Egyptians had their own ancient history
That’s not all for the ancient Egyptians. Everyone knows them, but most people don’t realize how long these people were around for. The ancient Egyptians were around for so long that they actually had ancient ruins from their own distant past.Â
You could even work as an ancient Egyptologist in ancient Egypt because, well, there was so much history. Prince Khaemwaset, a son of Ramesses II, lived in the 1200s B.C., and he worked on restoring monuments that were over 1,000 years old. Now that’s old.
Nintendo began shortly after the Jack the Ripper murders
You might think that Nintendo began with Mario and consoles. But they actually began way before any of those with traditional hanafuda playing cards in 1889. That’s right, 1889, a year after the Jack the Ripper murders terrified London.
The case was still fresh in the newspapers across the world. Nintendo was founded at the same time that Victorian detectives were trying to work out who had committed those atrocious crimes.
The fax machine arrived during the age of the samurai
How old are fax machines? Probably a lot older than you realize, as a version of one existed in 1843, thanks to Scottish inventor Alexander Bain. He patented a device that scanned images and sent them through telegraph wires to be reproduced at the other end.
It wasn’t exactly advanced, but still, it was clearly fax technology. That was around the same time that Japan had samurai warriors, meaning there was a time when someone could send an image electronically while samurai were carrying swords. How mind-blowing.
Harvard opened before calculus had been developed
In 1636, Harvard University was founded. But the idea of calculus didn’t arrive until later, decades later, in fact. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz developed it independently during the late 1600s, so early Harvard students never heard about derivatives or integrals.
It feels strange because Harvard feels modern, but calculus feels ancient. Yet the university came first, and had already been teaching students for years before calculus was even ‘created.’
London’s first subway trains ran during the American Civil War
1863 was a special year for London. That’s mostly because it was when the Metropolitan Railway, the original London Underground, opened, and steam trains carried passengers between Paddington and Farringdon.Â
That’s the same time that the American Civil War was still happening. People were commuting on London’s famous train system while armies fought across the United States with cavalry and field cannons.Â
Harriet Tubman and Ronald Reagan were alive at the same time
The next one’s close, but it’s still real. Ronald Reagan was born in February 1911, and Harriet Tubman died in March 1913, so their lives overlapped by a little over two years. It’s kind of incredible, really. Tubman escaped slavery and helped slaves on the Underground Railroad.
Reagan started as a movie actor and governor before becoming U.S. president during the 1980s. Most of us imagine them as belonging to completely different historical chapters, yet they were both alive in America at the same time. Only briefly, but still, the point stands.
A Civil War veteran survived well into the nuclear age
Albert Woolson was a drummer for the Union Army toward the end of the Civil War, and that’s one of the reasons why he lived for so long. He didn’t die until August 2, 1956. By that time, nuclear weapons were a serious problem, and televisions had begun appearing in living rooms.
Elvis Presley was becoming famous around then, too. To put that in perspective, it means that Woolson lived from the time of Lincoln’s armies into the early rock-and-roll years. We even have photographs, not portraits, of him.
The final Civil War widow died in 2020
Here’s another odd Civil War detail. Helen Viola Jackson was a woman who married Civil War veteran James Bolin in Missouri in 1936. She was 17, and he was 93. Bolin was hoping she’d collect his military pension after he died, though she never did.
Jackson died in December 2020 at the age of 101, being the final Civil War widow to pass away. She lived long enough to know a world of smartphones, streaming, and, of course, pandemic lockdowns. 2020 was a weird year.
Charlie Chaplin lived to see Apple become a company
The tech company Apple was founded on April 1, 1976, and that was actually when Charlie Chaplin was still alive. The company itself wasn’t famous at that point, of course, but the fact is that Chaplin was around during the same time.
He became famous in the silent-film era and died in December 1977. It’s not like he would’ve been shopping for an Apple I or anything, though.
We went from airplanes to the Moon in 66 years
66 years might seem like a long time, but think of it this way. The Wright brothers made the first controlled, powered airplane flight on December 17, 1903. 66 years later, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to land on the Moon.
The gap between those two events was less than a lifetime. So, a person who saw the first airplane flight as a child could’ve easily watched the Moon landing as an adult. We went from a wooden machine clearing the ground to crossing 240,000 miles of space in just over 60 years.
Someone born in the 1800s lived until 2017
Emma Morano was born in Italy on November 29, 1899, when Queen Victoria was still on the throne. Powered flight was still a distant dream. She lived all the way until April 15, 2017, when she passed away at the age of 117.
She’d lived through radio, television, two world wars, Moon landings, computers, smartphones, and so much more. The last known person born in the 1800s died the same year that the iPhone X came out. History sure is weird.
Real covered-wagon pioneers lived into the movie era
Ezra Meeker traveled across the American West by ox-drawn wagon in 1852. He had to deal with all kinds of issues, including river crossings and bad roads. Interestingly enough, he lived until 1928, right in the middle of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
He lived long enough to see Hollywood turn journeys like his into entertainment. Yes, he traveled in a covered wagon and actually lived to see the film The Covered Wagon in 1923. He also flew above parts of the same trail in an airplane.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
10 historical figures who took secrets to the grave
Unanswered questions are the worst, and it’s even more terrible when they continue to be unanswered because the people with the answers took them to their graves.
10 historical figures who took secrets to the grave
