Ask Lemmy

The fax machine was invented almost 2 decades before the outbreak of the American Civil War.

Also an eyewitness to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln talked about it on a TV game show.

Nintendo was founded the same year that hitler was born.

The Brooklyn bridge was being built when Custer’s last stand took place.

Galileo, the homeboy who discovered Jupiter’s moons and Saturn’s rings, was 43 years old when the first British settlers landed at Jamestown.

Abraham Lincoln could have received a fax from an actual samurai.

All three coexisted at one point in time.

There were wooly mammoths living in Russia when the Great Pyramids at Giza were being built

The last execution by guillotine in France happened while Star Wars A New Hope was already in theaters.

Sharks are about 450-400 million years old. They were around 200 million years before the dinosaurs, and have outlasted them by 65 million years. They're older than the North Star, the rings of Saturn, the Atlantic Ocean, and trees.

And it took 60 million years for the trees to start rotting when they died, because the bacteria to break them down didn't exist. Those trees died, fell over, became peat, and then eventually coal. The trees that were dead and buried trapped carbon dioxide that had been in the atmosphere. 90% of the coal we burn today comes from the period when trees didn't rot, and we're re-releasing all that CO2 back into the atmosphere, from where it's been safely sequestered for 250 million years.

"Consider: Victorian England: 1837-1901 American Old West: 1803-1912 Meiji Restoration: 1868-1912 French privateering in the Gulf of Mexico: ended circa 1830

Conclusion: an adventuring party consisting of a Victorian gentleman thief, an Old West gunslinger, a disgraced former samurai, and an elderly French pirate is actually 100% historically plausible."

Although they are both stories based on historical events that have been embellished, the Trojan war and the Hebrews leaving Egypt very well could have been happening at the same time (around 1180 BCE)

Picasso passed away in the 2 years time between when Soviet Union and US launched their first space station into space.

This feels surprising mainly because I thought Picasso lived in 1400s. But no he just lived a long life in early 20th century.

There were humans who lived through both the final fall of the (eastern half of) the Roman Empire (May 29, 1453) and the European discovery of the Americas (October 12, 1492). The time between these two critical milestones in European history seems like it should have been much longer than 39 years, 4 months, and 13 days.

I feel like this is bait for one specific answer... okay, fine, I'll be the one.

MLK Jr, Anne Frank, and Yasser Arafat were all born in the same year (1929). They were all born after Tom Lehrer, who died yesterday, 97 years old.

Edit: Math is hard

Rosa Parks and Harriet Tubman were alive at the same time (for about a month).

Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Jr were born in the same year, which made them 3 years younger than Queen Elizabeth II and Marilyn Monroe

Julius Caesar and Cleopatra died 40-30 years before the birth of Jesus Christ

Laura Ingalls Wilder nearly lived long enough to see a satellite launched into space. She lived through a time when the fastest means of transport went from a steam train to it being a rocket.

There was a whole generation like that.

Apollo 14 and Women's suffrage in Switzerland (1971)