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This perspective-warping episode of The List Show will make you reassess time. You'll learn about how Cleopatra is more modern than you may think, how relatively recent the guillotine is, and that your favorite dinosaur species probably weren't friends.
Join host Erin McCarthy as she shares facts that will warp your sense of time and perhaps make you feel a little old. Sorry.
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0:00
The fax machine, in my mind, is a product of the 1980s. But Scottish inventor Alexander
0:05
Bain actually patented the first electric printing telegraph in 1843. Meanwhile, not
0:10
too far away, Charles Dickens was busy publishing A Christmas Carol. Who knew Ebenezer Scrooge
0:15
would prove to have more staying power than the fax? And both are older than Italy, at
0:19
least as a modern state. Italian unification dates back to 1861. Hi, I'm Erin McCarthy, editor-in-chief of Mental Floss. Welcome to The List Show. Thanks
0:27
Thanks to YouTube commenter Erica B., who pointed out that Abraham Lincoln could have
0:31
temporally speaking, received what's basically a fax from a samurai. Today's episode is all about facts that will warp your perception of time
0:39
That's F-A-C-T-S. We'll talk about how some prehistoric animals lived much closer to us than you might realize
0:46
and how the guillotine lasted way beyond the French Revolution. Sneak preview—it was still in use when the world fell in love with Chewbacca
0:53
Let's get started. It would be hard to teach an art history class without mentioning Salvador Dali's The Persistence
1:03
of Memory. The same could be said for Willem de Kooning's Woman series. At this point
1:07
the pioneering painters seem more like historical figures than contemporary celebrities. So it
1:12
might surprise you to learn that Dali only died in 1989, the same year Weekend at Bernie's
1:17
premiered. De Kooning lived until 1997. Now, I know you're all dying to know if the abstract
1:22
expressionist thought Jack could have fit on the door in Titanic, but unless James Cameron sent him
1:27
an early cut, the painter never saw the film. He passed away in March, and Titanic didn't
1:31
hit theaters until the end of the year. If you thought Nintendo sprung up in the 80s to take the video game industry by storm, think
1:38
again. Well, it did spring up in the 80s, just not the 1980s. Fusajiro Yemochi founded
1:43
the company in Kyoto way back in 1889. He sold Japanese playing cards called Hanafuda
1:48
So Nintendo was technically as old as the Eiffel Tower, which opened at the World's
1:52
Fair that same year. So we've covered a couple things that started earlier than you might have thought. Now
1:57
Now let's do two that lasted a lot longer than you may realize. Exhibit A
2:01
The Ottoman Empire. Though Osman I established the empire circa 1299, its real heyday didn't happen until
2:07
Suleiman the Magnificent held the reigns in the mid-16th century. The Ottoman Empire is also often associated with 1453, the year Ottoman forces captured
2:15
the city of Constantinople, effectively terminating the Byzantine Empire. But the Ottoman Empire didn't dissolve in the 1600s, 1700s, or even the 1800s
2:24
It was still around when Walt Disney released his first animated cartoons in 1920
2:28
The Ottoman army fought with the Central Powers during World War I suffered catastrophic losses and surrendered most of its land holdings to Allied powers in the aftermath The precise end date of the empire is typically cited as 1922 when Turkish leaders did away with the title of sultan for good
2:43
France's last state-sanctioned guillotine execution wasn't during the late 18th century's Reign of Terror. It was in 1977, the same year sci-fi fans were turning out in droves to see a
2:52
little film called Star Wars. In fact, the cranium-removing contraption remained to the
2:56
country's official method of execution from the French Revolution until the death penalty was
3:01
abolished altogether there in 1981. Hat tip to another YouTube commenter, Viking Teddy
3:05
who took off our heads with that fact about the guillotine and a movie from not such a long time
3:09
ago. We've got an upcoming video covering some of the more obscure phobias on record
3:14
If you know of a word to describe an unconventional fear, drop it in the comments
3:17
below for a chance to be featured in that episode. You'd have to be a vampire to have outlived the
3:22
the guillotine's entire rise and fall. Or a Greenland shark. In a 2016 study, scientists
3:27
radiocarbon-dated tissue from the eyes of Greenland sharks to determine their ages. The
3:31
oldest one, a nearly 16.5 foot long female, was estimated to be 392, give or take 120 years
3:38
Let's assume the shark fell on the conservative side of the spectrum, a sprightly 272 years young
3:44
That meant she would have been born around 1744, making her older than some of the founding fathers
3:48
The opposite end of the spectrum would put her at 512 years old, with a birthday in 1504
3:54
That's a good five years before Henry VIII was crowned King of England. There are very possibly sharks still swimming in the ocean right now that predate the United States
4:02
Every modern-day country in the Americas, in fact. Bowhead whales can't quite compete with that, but dating of their eye tissue revealed that one had died at 211
4:10
So bowheads who managed to live through the mid-19th century golden age of American whaling could still be swimming in oceans today
4:16
They probably haven't gotten around to reading Moby Dick either. If most of your knowledge about woolly mammoths comes from the Ice Age movies, you might assume
4:23
they existed in a world where humans hadn't yet found their footing. Surely elephants' long-tusked kin were long gone by the time civilizations were big and
4:30
organized enough to build, like, the pyramids. Prepare to adjust your mental picture
4:35
Egypt's three main pyramids of Giza were constructed somewhere between 2550 and 2490 BCE
4:41
Granted, most woolly mammoths had already died out around 10,000 years ago. The bones found on Siberia's Wrangel Island were estimated to be only about 3,700 years old
4:50
So some woolly mammoths were still kicking it in the 1600s BCE, 9 centuries after the
4:55
Egyptians broke ground on the pyramids. And if there was some sort of groundbreaking ceremony for that construction project in 2550
5:01
Cleopatra definitely didn't attend it. Egypt most iconic queen wouldn be born for another 2 years in 69 or 70 BCE In other words she about 400 years closer to our era than she was to watching the pyramids go up Here are a couple of different ways to put that
5:17
in perspective. One, the pyramids felt roughly as old to Cleopatra as Socrates does to us
5:22
Two, she technically came closer to owning an iPhone than she did to seeing the Giza pyramids
5:26
under construction. Our tendency to lump large chunks of history together is never more apparent
5:31
than it is with dinosaurs. It's easy to assume that all of our favorite prehistoric species of
5:36
land, air, and sea coexisted until that infamous meteor wiped them out in one fell swoop. But
5:41
that's not how it went down. The Stegosaurus, for example, lived during the late Jurassic period
5:46
roughly between 159 and 144 million years ago. The T. rex didn't appear until the last leg of the
5:52
Cretaceous period, some 68 million years ago. In the span between the two dinos, you could fit the
5:57
entire course of human history, including the millions of years occupied by our early ancestors
6:02
approximately 12 times over. So an illustration of a T-Rex chasing down a Stegosaurus should
6:07
strike you as very anachronistic—technically more than one in which a T-Rex clutches a Tamagotchi
6:12
in its tiny talons. In his 1977 book The Dragons of Eden, Carl Sagan came up with a way for us mere
6:18
mortals to conceptualize our place in such a long timeline—the cosmic calendar, which condenses the
6:23
the whole history of the universe into one calendar year. If the Big Bang happened first
6:28
thing on January 1st—in reality, roughly 13.8 billion years ago—humans didn't appear
6:33
until December 31st, and not even in the morning. According to astrophysicist Ethan Siegel
6:39
the first life on Earth came into existence on the cosmic calendar in late September
6:43
The first sexually-producing organism—just a single-celled eukaryote—materialized on December 2nd. The last non-avian dinosaurs didn't die out until December 17th. Homo
6:53
sapiens finally showed up at around 11.48pm on December 31st. We didn't invent the wheel or
6:58
writing until some 12 seconds before the new year. On the cosmic calendar, something like the American
7:04
Civil War doesn't exactly qualify as having happened a long time ago, and Helen Viola Jackson
7:09
may have felt its recency more than most. Jackson, the last known living widow of a Civil War veteran
7:13
died in 2020. To be fair, she was 101 years old, and she'd married her late husband when he was
7:19
was already in his 90s. When Jackson was a teenager in 1930s Missouri, her father asked
7:23
her to do some housework for James Boland on her way home from school every day. Boland
7:27
was an elderly widower who served on the Union side as a private in the Missouri Cavalry's
7:31
14th Regiment. Though he accepted the help, he didn't like being a charity case. So he
7:35
eventually presented Jackson with what was basically a business proposition—marry me, and you get my military pension when I die Jackson later told historian Hamilton C Clarke that It was during the depression and times were hard He said that it might be my only way of leaving the farm The two tied the knot on September 4th 1936 when Bolin was 93 and Jackson was 17 She kept her last name
7:57
kept living at home, and kept her husband a secret. This was mainly due to the scandalous
8:01
nature of their age difference. As she explained in 2018, I had great respect for Mr. Bolin and I
8:06
did not want him to be hurt by the scorn of wagging tongues. The potential for tongue wagging
8:10
also prevented Jackson from claiming her husband's pension after he died in 1939
8:15
According to her, one of Bolin's daughters had threatened to drag her name through the mud
8:19
And she didn't want to be known as some sort of gold digger. You've heard the joke about how sliced bread was the best thing since Betty White. The facts hold
8:25
up. Sliced bread first hit shelves in 1928, and the Golden Girl was born in 1922. But what about
8:31
the one about how canned beer was the best thing since Dianne Feinstein? Okay, nobody's ever said
8:35
that. But it is true that the parents of the newborn future Democratic senator from California
8:39
couldn't buy a can of beer to celebrate. In part, that's because the country was still under
8:43
prohibition. She was born in June 1933, and the 21st Amendment ending prohibition wasn't ratified
8:49
until December. But also, though there had been earlier experiments, what's considered the first
8:53
commercially available canned beer went on sale to the public in January 1935, just in time for
8:58
the future senator's terrible twos. That's not the only Senate seat currently occupied by someone who
9:03
came along before canned beer. As of filming, there are four senators who fit the bill
9:07
We've known about Pluto the Planet for about as long as we've known about Pluto the cartoon dog
9:11
The planet was discovered in February 1930. The dog debuted in Disney's animated short The Chain
9:16
Gang just months later. He wasn't named in the film, and when he appeared in another short
9:20
The Picnic, that same year, he was actually called Rover. Rover was rechristened Pluto in 1931's
9:25
The Moose Hunt. While it's long been speculated that the planet inspired the moniker, nobody can
9:30
say for sure that that was the case. As Disney director Ben Sharpstein explained in Walter Brash's
9:35
book Cartoon Monikers, an insight into the animation industry. We thought Rover was too
9:39
common, so we had to look for something else. We changed it to Pluto the pup, but I honestly don't
9:44
remember why. This next and last revelation might not make you feel so young, even if it's not
9:49
exactly new information. 1982 was 40 years ago. Let's say, for the purpose of this thought
9:54
experiment, that you were born in 1972. It's now 2022, and you're talking to a 10-year-old
10:00
about your formative memories from 1982 seeing et in theaters hearing eye of the tiger whenever you
10:05
turn on the radio etc that's roughly the equivalent of a 50 year old in 1982 telling you at age 10
10:12
all about the year 1942 casablanca glenn miller world war ii feel old yet thanks for watching
10:19
mental floss on youtube we'll see you next time
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