1) Ben Franklin invented electricity
Ok, first with one of the earliest and most persevering falsehoods, Ben Franklin invented electricity. Although he was the undisputed inventor of many things, glove-pads for faster swimming, bifocals, etc.. Electricity was not one of them. Electricity was a known phenomenon in Franklin's day, although not completely understood. Franklin believed that electric current was a "fluid" that went from one body to another and that lightning was simply a more dramatic form of static electricity.
Did Franklin actually test his theories by flying a kite in a thunderstorm? No one is sure. We know that he published his groundbreaking diagrams for a lightning rod in May 1752, a month before his alleged kite escapade [source: Avril]. The main source for the kite story is Franklin's friend, scientist Joseph Priestley, who wrote about it 15 years later.
From there, the tale took on its own life, depicted in paintings and sealed in American lore. In no version of the story, however, was Franklin's kite actually struck by lightning. Instead, when a storm approached, Franklin noticed the hairs on the kite string standing up, indicating the presence of electricity in the air. When he touched the key tied to the string, it released a nice spark, sealing the deal.
2) Van Gogh Cut Off his Ear for the Love of his Life
Part of the allure of Vincent van Gogh's priceless impressionist paintings is the widely accepted belief that the 19th-century artist was stark raving bananas. Exhibit A: In a fit of madness, he lopped off his left ear with a razor blade and gifted the bloody auditory organ to a local French prostitute. Need proof? How about the famous van Gogh self-portrait with a bandaged ear?
But in 2009, a pair of German art historians busted the madman myth in a book titled "Pact of Silence," which claims that van Gogh's close friend and rival Paul Gauguin sliced off van Gogh's ear lobe with a fencing rapier. The book asserts that Gauguin and van Gogh had a violent falling out in 1888, resulting in the ear-chopping incident. Both men vowed to keep the matter quiet, although Gauguin invented the prostitute story to make van Gogh look even crazier.
3) July Fourth is the day we declared independence
July 2, 1776 is actually the day that the Continental Congress voted for independence from Britain. And though the Declaration of Independence is dated July 4, the signing ceremony wasn’t until August 2, making July 4 a sadly insignificant date. John Adams believed July 2 would be the date that would be remembered and celebrated throughout American history, even writing this to his wife: "The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more."
4) Columbus Discovered America
He ended up running into the Bahamas archipelago and the island that is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Leif Ericson, a Norse explorer, actually landed in modern-day Canada almost 500 years before Columbus’ voyage, and John Cabot "discovered" Newfoundland for England, an exploration that led directly to England’s colonization of North America, just five years after Columbus hit land.
Another factoid: As we all know, everyone in 15th-century Europe thought the world was flat except for one brave and brilliant Italian-born explorer with the inexplicably English name of Christopher Columbus. And as usual, we are all completely wrong.
Not only was a round Earth an accepted fact in Columbus' day, but the ancient Greeks were calculating the size of the spherical Earth back in the 3rd century B.C.E. [source: Stern]. Even better, every ancient sailor who navigated outside of his own bath tub knew that the constellations rose in the sky as you sailed south. And then there's the whole lunar eclipse phenomenon that shows Earth's unmistakably curved shadow.
Columbus wasn't trying to prove Earth was round when he set sail in 1492. He was trying to prove that sailing due west was the quickest way to get to the Far East and the treasured spice ports of India. Not only were his calculations fabulously wrong, but he and his crew would have surely died if they had not accidentally bumped into a cluster of Caribbean islands that Columbus believed to be coastal India. In fact, in all his voyages to the New World, he continued to think he had hit on some part of Asia.
5) Paul Revere's Midnight Ride: Pssssst, the British are Coming...
Paul Revere’s famous ride did happen, but not the way most of us think. Our vision of it comes from the poem, "Paul Revere’s Ride," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, which was highly exaggerated and published almost 90 years after the fact. In the poem, Revere is the lone hero who rides through Middlesex County, Mass., to warn the people that the British are coming by sea. In reality, he didn’t ride alone and never spoke the legendary phrase. The mission was to warn John Hancock and Sam Adams that the British were coming, as they were thought to be coming for these notable rebels. William Dawes and Samuel Prescott also rode with Revere and dozens of others joined in as the ride progressed. The three main riders were split up, and Revere was actually detained in Lexington and unable to spread the word to Concord himself. "The British are coming!" is also very unlikely to have been shouted because the rebels wanted to be discreet with their warning and they would’ve referred to the "British" as "regulars," since the rebels still considered themselves to be British at the time.
6) Napoleon - Not So Complex…
Most of us know next to nothing about the French general and "emperor for life" Napoleon
For years, the history books listed Napoleon's official height as 5 feet, 2 inches (1.6 meters), indisputably in "shorty" territory. But that's because they mistakenly believed that a French "foot" was the same as an English foot.
When the measurements are properly converted, Napoleon stretches to a respectable 5 feet, 7 inches (1.7 meters). That's not going to get him an NBA contract, but it's 2 inches (5 centimeters) taller than former French President Nicolas Sarkozy and nearly a head above Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev [source: BBC News]. Somehow, "Medvedev complex" isn't as catchy.
7) Einstein Got a “D” in Algebra
This is a classic inspiration story for every kid who ever got a “D” on a third-grade multiplication test. "You know who also struggled with numbers, Johnny? Albert Einstein!" Sure, and Michael Jordan was also cut from his high school basketball team. Wrong and wronger.
Yes, Albert Einstein was a late bloomer — he was slow to talk and socially awkward — and he didn't get the best grades in school. He even flunked the entrance exam to the Zurich polytechnic school. But that's not because he couldn't do math. He passed the math section, but failed the botany, zoology and language requirements. By all accounts, little Al was an ingenious problem-solver who was simply bored to death by most subjects other than math.
The source of the "Einstein flunked math" myth is not clear. However, when shown the allegation in a 1935 "Ripley's Believe It or Not" column, Einstein replied, "I never failed in mathematics. Before I was 15 I had mastered differential and integral calculus".
8) Newton Discovered Gravity When an Apple Fell on His Head
Sir Isaac Newton is arguably the most influential and insanely original mathematician and physicist of all time. (Somewhere, he and Einstein are arm wrestling for the title.) It turns out that the inventor of calculus and the fundamental laws of motion was also an inventive storyteller.
In 1666, the University of Cambridge was shut down due to a little thing called the plague, so Newton took a break from his studies and returned to his childhood home in Lincolnshire. Newton's first biographer, William Stukeley, related that in 1726 when the two of them were having a spot of tea under the shade of an apple tree, Newton reminisced that it was in a similar place 60 years earlier that "the notion of gravitation came into his mind."
Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself; occasion'd by the fall of an apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. Why should it not go sideways, or upwards? But constantly to the Earth's center? Assuredly the reason is, that the Earth draws it. There must be a drawing power in matter.
That's a bushel load of mind-blowing insight from one apple, but that's the story that Newton told and retold over the course of his life to friends and colleagues. As with most good stories (and good storytellers), the tale grew more colorful with each retelling, but never did it say anything about an apple literally plunking Newton on the head. For all know, it could have been a fig.
9) Abner Doubleday Invented Baseball
Civil War general Abner Doubleday has long been touted as the inventor of baseball, our nation’s pastime. Legend has it that he thought up the game in 1839 in Elihu Phinney’s pasture in Cooperstown, N.Y., where the National Baseball Museum and Hall of Fame now reside. This fact was published by the Mills Commission in 1905, which had been organized to determine the origins of baseball and had taken submissions from all over the country. But of the 67 diaries left by Doubleday and the multiple articles Doubleday wrote before his death, none mentioned baseball. Even Abraham Mills, the president of the National League and chair of the commission, had known Doubleday personally and hadn’t heard of his role in baseball’s origins. Most historians now consider it a myth that Doubleday invented baseball, believing it to be cooked up by certain citizens of Cooperstown.
Source(s):
- http://www.ushistory.org/franklin/info/kite.htm
- http://articles.philly.com/2006-06-16/news/25403348_1_kite-flight-kite-experiment-static-electricity
- http://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/arts/artwork/vincent-van-gogh.htm
- http://abcnews.go.com/International/story?id=7506786&page=1
- http://www.rmg.co.uk/explore/sea-and-ships/facts/explorers-and-leaders/christopher-columbus
- http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1936731_1936743_1936758,00.html
- http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-core-of-truth-behind--sir-isaac-newtons-apple-1870915.html
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About Rick Ricker
An IT professional with over 22 years experience in Information Security, wireless broadband, network and Infrastructure design, development, and support.
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