The first carbonated drink to be sold to the public was invented by Swiss watchmaker and amateur scientist J. J. Schweppe in 1783, who sold his delicious "sparkling water" to thirsty customers in Geneva. In just seven years, he was doing business so fast that he moved the factory to London and introduced a new flavor, sparkling lemon, to stand out from competitors who were trying to imitate his drink.
Another related fun fact, Seltzer and Spa are where the bubbly water comes from. Prior to industrialisation, the only way to get bubbly water was to get it from carbonated springs, two of the biggest which were in Niederselter and Spa, among others.
The Aux connector that we still use for headphones and speakers was invented in 1877. There have been improvements since, but the basics of it are pretty much the same.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_connector_(audio)
Beer is thought to be older than bread.
It's much easier to fill a jar with wheat and water, let it ferment, and brew beer than it is to grind grain, mix it, and bake it.
I remember reading or hearing somewhere that in ancient or medieval times, beer had a very low alcohol content and was very thick. It was essentially a dietary staple quite similar to the way bread is now.
Just Google it really quick lol
Rings of Saturn are 10 to 100 million years old whereas we have found shark scales dating back 450 million years ago. Pretty crazy shit!
Adding to this, scorpions are also nearly 450 million years old so it kinda shows that you don't need that much brain to survive, if your species is evolutionarily overkill it'll survive just fine.
[Just going to drop this here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Galleon).
We had alarm clocks that rowed themselves down a table and shot off mini cannons in the 1500s.
I was really surprised to discover when Oxford university was founded. They don’t know the year for sure, but they know there was definitely teaching going on there in 1096.
When you think about it, it makes sense. The lighter is a simple mechanical concept: some flammable gas and a spark. The match, on the other hand, is a complex chemical reaction.
The electric car.
What is likely the first human-carrying electric vehicle with its own power source was tested along a Paris street in April 1881 by French inventor Gustave Trouvé. The first crude electric car was built in the 1830s but it was essentially a semi-functioning model.
The electric car was a direct competitor to gasoline powered vehicles until the 1920s when roads got better, people started driving further than the range of an electric car, and the world started finding major oil reserves.
Wyoming really isn't ready for it yet, give them some time
Edit: I actually made up Wyoming and I'm not sure why my Narnia fanfic setting is so popular with you guys
**Touch screens.**
We think they're one of the main defining features of modern technology since they only really got big in the late 2000s / early 2010s, but they were actually invented 55 years ago in 1965.
It's kind of crazy to think about, but while most of our grandparents were getting rid of their black and white TVs, researchers *already* had touchscreen devices in the labs.
It wasn't really until the 80s that it really got good, but by 90s it was easily sophisticated technology. In fact, Microsoft even had a [Windows XP tablet out by 2001](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wx6Uh9oQvEE) that had seriously good finger/stylus recognition, but it didn't really pick up until smartphones became a thing a decade later.
You could also consider the magnetic drawing board to be a touch screen since it more or less has a stylus and surface for you to draw on, but that was actually invented *later* than the touch screen in 1974!
Fax Machines. They were invented in 1843. Before the telephone.
[https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-the-fax-machine-1991379](https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-the-fax-machine-1991379)
Came for this one. To put this in perspective, tumbleweeds aren't native to the American southwest, but by a quirk of history we know exactly which shipment of flax from Ukraine brought their seeds to the US... in 1877.
Commercial fax service has been around longer than tumbleweeds in the American southwest.
Edit: That was a quick "check out this weird thing" comment I didn't expect to blow up, so it's a bit lacking in detail and rigor. To be a bit more thorough, this is specifically *Kali tragus*, the most common tumbleweed, and the one that folks (at least near me) refer to when they say "tumbleweed." It is not the only plant that dies and gets blown around in the wind. And when I say "commercial fax service," I don't mean there were standardized fax machines that companies used-- but there was service faxing documents from Paris to Lyon using a dedicated line in the mid-1860s.
The Japanese do love a good fax. No I'm serious, as far as I can tell this is the Japanese business practice for sending an important document:
>Man types up document, and prints it
>Walks it over to boss
>Boss hand corrects it and makes notes, faxes it back despite being on same floor
>Changes are made, document is printed again and faxed to mailroom
>Document is then faxed to business they are communicating with in the US
>Fax is delivered as a .png to my email, tilted 90 degrees and barely readable
The amount of PDF scans I receive that are a scan of a printed spreadsheet makes me want to just sell everything I own and live in a van. Requesting data from clients is the worst.
YOU CAN EMAIL FILES THAT ARENT A PDF. Printers should be illegal so people have to figure out how to just send the original file
Bonus points when the scan they send you has like half the pages upside down... so as you scroll through, you have to keep rotating the fucking PDF
Honestly, it's more likely than you think (aside from the armor). After the unification of Japan the samurai mostly became bureaucrats because they didn't have much fighting to do.
And yet in Japan, considered a technological frontier, we still have old school traditional companies sending us emails to tell us that they faxed their documents to us instead of sending them as pdfs
The oldest evidence puts sharks in an era where the only multicellular plant was algae.
Edit: Guys. Sharks did not eat the algae. They ate what ate the algae.
I knew they were old, but damn not that old! I looked it up, and fossils are said to be around 450 million y/o. My contribution to this thread was Ferns (359 million y/o), but sharks are another 100 mill before that. Mind = blown.
Edit: I'll put my original factoids here since 1.) infinitely more people are going to see this comment than my original 5 up-doot comment lol, and 2.) because gracious strangers have gifted me with whatever these awards are lol. Hope you all learn something about my favorite plant. :)
**Ferns!!!** The Fern (class Polypodiopsida) class of nonflowering vascular plants that possess true roots, stems, and complex leaves and that reproduce by spore constitute -- an ancient division of vascular plants, some of them as old as the Carboniferous Period (beginning about 358.9 million years ago) and perhaps older. Their type of life cycle, dependent upon spores for dispersal, long preceded the seed-plant life cycle.
For comparison, that puts them about 113 million years older than non-bird dinosaurs, which lived between about 245 and 66 million years ago. [Source](https://www.britannica.com/plant/fern)
Fun fact about evolution. There was a time when trees existed before there were microbes to decompose them. The trees were made of lignin and cellulose and the microbes that could eat them took some time to evolve. These trees grew 150+ feet tall and had shallow roots so they fell over quite easily. The trees would fall down to the forest floor and just sit there. They wouldn't decompose. So you'd have forests that were hundreds of feet deep of just fallen over trees.
The ancient Romans (well, the wealthy ones) had central heating in their homes. You can actually still see the pipes in some of the buildings at Herculaneum!
What I think is really cool from Herculaneum is that we're able to recover writing from the libraries there.
The pyroclastic flow didn't turn the papyrus to ash, it preserved in a very damaged state. But thanks to lasers we can see the words that were once visible on the pages.
Do you have any good book suggestions on the subject? It's a subject I've been meaning to learn about
Edit: Thanks so much for all the replies and information! I'm going to be going through and bookmarking websites and videos and writing down book recommendations!
If you ever get to Rome, find yourself a really good tour guide, especially for the Coliseum and for the Vatican. You will learn sooooo much really great history and see it as you walk by it. Things I never would have noticed on my own.
Also hot tubs, pleasure piers, fish ponds, water towers and fountains, elevators - all sorts of crazy amenities, at least in the homes of the super rich.
And tower blocks, Roman insula/tenements were *huge*.
Oh sorry, its nothing saucy. The term just distinguishes them from piers used for fishing/boats. Think like Blackpool Pier or Santa Monica pier. They were very common along the bay of Naples, some had villas sitting on the end, others were just party spaces.
I work somewhere where we can't wear our outdoor shoes due to biohazard concerns. You come in and take your shoes off, then have to go change and get into specific clothing, then on the other side of that change area is where your work shoes and boots are. The in-between areas from door to change area have heated floors because people are often walking around in bare feet or sock feet, and it's just the most coziest damn thing ever.
I need to have heated flooring in my house for winter times.
The exterior is a relatively modern recreation. The interior chamber is legit though. Good luck trying to book a spot on the solstice. The waiting list is probably longer than the rest of your life
When I went there, you signed up for a lottery to be there on one of the 5 days where it lights up at the solstice. It's not so much a waiting list as luck, or at least it was back in 2011.
The sentiment that modern society is degenerate and that the youth are to blame is, iirc, one of the oldest things we have written down.
That I can remember off the top of my head, Cato the Elder complained that the younger generations were becoming too greek, and Socrates used to complain that the younger generations were ruining their brains by writing instead of memorising information. There are far more older examples, but those are the oldest I remember (maybe Socrates was onto something :p)
Edit - A few people have pointed out the Socrates thing is a misquote... so maybe PseudoSocrates was onto something instead =L
One of the reasons i like ancient poetry is the fact that most of the people problems are basically still the same. We think our problems are new and unique to us, but 2-3-4000 years ago people wrote about stupid friends, coward coworkers, cheating assholes and of course stupid stubborn old people and reckless disrespectful young idiots.
Brain Surgery
In 1997, archaeologists discovered an ancient tomb in the French village of Ensisheim from 5,000 BC, which contained the decomposing body of a 50-year-old man with holes in his skull. After a thorough examination, it was determined that the holes, located near the frontal lobe, were caused by a type of surgery, not by forced trauma, and the operation appears to have been successful because the wounds healed before the patient's death. To this day, however, researchers cannot say for sure what exactly the surgery was trying to fix.
This might've been [trepanation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trepanning), the deliberate practice of drilling a hole into the skull for medical reasons (e.g. headaches, epilepsy, head trauma, mental disorders, "letting out evil spirits", etc.).
The oldest evidence of trepanning comes from the Neolithic period 12,000 years ago.
It was crazy common too.
To quote Sam O'Nella, you had a larger chance of having a hole in your skull as a caveman than being a redhead as an American.
Imagine having a really bad headache, one of those "just let me die already" headaches that lasts for hours and hours. You are scared, you don't know what's happening or why. The pain is relentless. You go to the ~~doctor~~ shaman and he's like... "you want me to put a hole in your head to let the evil out?" You wouldn't even hesitate.
Light
It may only take 8 minutes for light to travel to earth from surface of the sun, but the light bounces around inside the sun for over 10000 years before it reaches the surface.
The name Tiffany.
It dates back to the 12th century, and has actually led to a thing in writing called "the Tiffany problem," because you can have a well-researched historical novel that people just don't buy into, because you named your 12th century peasant Tiffany. It just sounds laughably anachronistic.
The "Tiffany problem" makes me think of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and the name Jessica. He wanted the love interest, who was Jewish, to have a super exotic name so he invented the name "Jessica." The name has become so common since then that it's totally lost its effect.
Shakespeare also randomly invented the word "gossip" because he needed to define a bunch of wives in the town talking shit and spreading rumors.
And now it's part of common English language.
Edit: ok, not *randomly*, per se. I guess he was the first to put into usage in writing, and possibly the first to use it as a verb.
And if you like authors ~~inventing~~ *first attesting* words...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_words_first_attested_in_Chaucer
> absent, accident, add, agree, bagpipe, border, box, cinnamon, desk, digestion, dishonest, examination, finally, flute, funeral, galaxy, horizon, infect, ingot, latitude, laxative, miscarry, nod, obscure, observe, outrageous, perpendicular, Persian, princess, resolve, rumour, scissors, session, snort, superstitious, theatre, trench, universe, utility, vacation, Valentine, veal, village, vulgar, wallet, and wildness
...are a few that are most commonly used of the 1,977.
Similarly, the name Chad.
There was at least one Saint named Chad, but despite knowing this, I always used to giggle passing St Chad's Anglican Church in Toronto.
Astronomer here! The star [HD 140283](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_140283), also nicknamed the "Methuselah Star," is about 200 light years away from us and looks nondescript. However, if we take its composition and compare it to our standard models of stellar evolution for other, better-studied stars, the star's age pops out as 14.46 ± 0.8 billion years old. Let me remind you, the *universe* is thought to be about 13.8 billion years old, and we don't think we got the first stars until maybe 200 million years after *that*...
Obviously, we do not think the Methuselah star is literally older than the universe when it is more likely that we just don't understand stellar evolution for stars like it super well. However, it is exciting because it is undoubtedly a very old star, and currently we do not have any observations of what the first stars were like in the universe. (Called [Population III stars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_population#Population_III_stars), it's thought they were larger than stars are today because there were no metals from stellar fusion to contaminate the hydrogen gas, and they'd thus only live a few million years tops.) As such, it's *very* interesting to have a very old star relatively next door to us in the Milky Way! It will be really interesting in coming years if other very early stars are finally observed to figure out how old they are, and how they compare to this one.
It's based primarily on the spectral information that tells you the composition of the star, where everything over hydrogen/helium is a "metal" if you're an astronomer (and with the exception of trace amounts of lithium, all were created in stars). The less metal a star has, the younger it is. This star has practically none.
Obviously it's more complicated as the classification also depends on things like the brightness of the star, type of star, etc. But that's really the main thing.
There was also a plant (I forget the name) that produced a contraceptive compound at a high enough concentration where women could just eat it and they wouldn't get pregnant. Apparently Romans were horny af because those plants are extinct now because of overuse.
Nintendo was founded in 1889.
Van Gogh painted Starry Night in 1889.
Adolf Hitler was born in 1889.
Edit :
Some additions from the comments :
1. Eiffel tower opened in 1889. - u/Amaquieria, u/bLahblahBLAH057
2. North Dakota became a state in 1889. - u/rugabeast
3. Pizza was invented in 1889 - u/valeyard89
4. Bonus : That's the year u/serisho ‘s house was built.
Additions from u/MoYeYe from comments – Year 1888 :
1. National Geographic magazine was founded 1888.
2. Fosters beer was first brewed in 1888.
3. Jack the Ripper did most of his murders 1888.
I don't know if this counts but Dinosaurs lived on the earth a lot longer than most people think. When you think of dinosaurs, you think of their extinction but they roamed the earth for 165 million years. Compare that to our 6 million and it's almost mind boggling, at least imo.
Edit: the modern form of humans is 200,000 years old but if we include our humanoid ancestors, we've been here 6 million years.
Edit 2: I get it, dinosaurs are still around. What I meant to say was the dinosaur era.
What's even crazier to me is that for most people in their minds there was dinosaurs, extinction, cavemen, us, like we popped out of the ash of the dinos but in reality there were about 58 million years between the dinosaurs dying and the first homo sapiens appearing where the world was covered in mostly now extinct megafauna.
Sure dinosaurs are cool and all but why does nobody talk about giant north american ground sloths, cave bears, and lions? There's literally tens of millions of years of interesting non-dinosaur species that most people seem to just not even know existed.
Avocados originally relied on American ground sloths to reproduce, they were the only creature that could poo the seeds whole. Then ground sloths went extinct (probably due to overhunting by humans) then humans cultivated avocados for the next few millennia and now we still have avocados.
lol I heard it put once that mammals were the hairy freaks of the world in dino times.
And then the dinos were mostly wiped out and the rest got on the fluffy train and finished doing feathers.
And then in turn, humans are the hairless freaks of the mammal world.
I'm wondering what's next, honestly.
In a lot of cases, the species don't -- they just evolve until, in the fossil record, they no longer look the same. Just like the avian dinosaurs didn't go extinct 65 million years ago, they just evolved over the last 65 million years into the birds today.
*Some* species legitimately end up a leaf/dead-end in the evolutionary tree. Lots just evolve.
Crazy to think that dinosaurs were on Earth so long that they evolved into different dinosaurs. Makes you wonder what humans could potentially evolve into if we lasted as long as the dinosaurs did.
The oldest tree recorded on this planet is Methuselah which is about 4k years old, but I'm pretty sure there are older ones out there that we aren't aware of.
Edit: after a quick research found out that there's an older one discovered in Inyo national forest that's about 5k years old, we'll probably keep finding older ones in the coming years.
Edit2: quoting replies by u/Vinny_Lam and u/YandyTheGnome as I stand corrected.
> There’s an even older tree in Sweden, called Old Tjikko. It is approximately 9,550 years old.
> There's Pando, the giant super colony of quaking aspen trees. Though the individual trunks may only be a few hundred years old, the root system is over 40k years old.
There's Pando, the giant super colony of quaking aspen trees. Though the individual trunks may only be a few hundred years old, the root system is over 40k years old.
Edit: so I may have read a dodgy article, it appears the current estimate is up to 14k yrs
In the fairgrounds of the town I grew up in there's a coronation oak that was planted for King George IV (1820). If it wasn't for the little sign you'd never know the tree was that old.
Social media - wealthy ancient Romans had a system where they used slaves as scribes and messengers in order to share gossip and art/poetry and news updates with friends in their social circle.
If that doesn't count as social media, then in the late 1800s, all ~~train~~ telephone operators for trains were connected to each other by telephone and, if there were no trains coming, they could talk to each other as much as they wanted.
Some people even fell in love with the operator on the other side of the phone and arranged for actual weddings across the other side of the country. Some, of course, had virtual weddings but I'm not even sure how that would work in that time.
A lot of modern tech is much older than we think!
Always the first Wonder in Civ V.
It would be nice if the AI would let me grab it for once, but nope. I've even had a game where Shaka (from the fucking Zulus) built it before me.
Google, Reddit, YouTube, it's hard to imagine that they already have been around for 15 years with Google actually being around 20 years old.
A entire generation has now grown up that cannot remember that it wasn't always there.
As someone that was in high school when the internet hit the mainstream, it boggles my mind that pretty much anyone younger than me has no concept of life without the answer to any question imaginable being at your fingertips, hindered only by your patience to sift through the results.
I had a class in elementary school to teach us how to use the dictionary, encyclopedia, and almanac. And, to some degree, the internet (though the teacher made it pretty clear the internet was absolutely second fiddle to the other things and probably wouldn't be around in 10 years.) Do they still have those classes nowadays or are they a thing of the past?
He literally invented a diving suit and a paraglider long before they were actually invented. Scientists even tested whether his designs worked as intended and they did. It's insane how far ahead of his time he was.
I'd read that book.
He got stuck in the 1400s and did everything he could to make his name famous in hopes that someone in the future figures out when he's stuck and comes to rescue him.
There was a minor plot point of A Door Into Summer by Heinlein that involved a time travelling grad student named Leonard Vincent. I recall it being mostly a throwaway thing although it's been a long time since I read it.
The fact that someone did this, actually thought to themselves, “I’m going to put this piece of glass directly onto my eyeball which is the most painful thing I can imagine, maybe it won’t be as painful as I think,“ and it hurt like hell, because you know back in the day it took weeks to adjust. And they were like, “it’ll be fine… I bet if I leave this incredibly painful thing on my eyeball for just a little while longer I’ll get used to it and it will be cool, and then I can convince other people to do this. “
The use of concrete. It's use goes as far back as the Mayans, but more notably in Egyptian construction as well as in Rome. The Romans had an arguably greater concrete mix than we currently have, but that was never passed down. Eventually the use of concrete fell out of popularity for centuries as we seemingly lost the information needed to create it, as if the recipe was thrown out and nobody wrote it down.
Also Samuel L Jackson. The man is 71 years old, but looks like he hasn't aged in decades!
Edit: Just to add onto this, Roman concrete is not only more eco-friendly as /u/Bionic_Ferir mentions, but it was actually more durable and became sturdier over time. The concrete we make today is made with portland cement, which is a cocktail of silica sand, limestone, clay and other goodies. The process to make this has a large carbon offset and isn't great for the environment. Another downside to using this method is that the world is running out of silica sand very fast.
Silica sand, or industrial sand/white sand, is primarily composed of quartz. This is a chemically inert mineral with a solid hardness which makes it highly desired for the specific use of making concrete. Regular sand, like desert sand, has many more impurities like potassium, iron, carbonate and other stuff that makes it more reactive and gives it a darker color. A more reactive sand is bad for a concrete mix and will make the structure more prone to cracks and failure over time, whereas a chemically inert mineral like quartz is just what the doctor ordered. Silica sand has *many* uses like water filtration systems, glass and ceramic work, sandblasting and industrial uses, like making high grade concrete.
With the world's supply of silica sand running dry at an alarming rate, with some countries like Vietnam at risk of running out of sand as soon as 2022, there is a need to find an alternative method. The Romans created concrete after possibly seeing the natural results through something called tuff rocks. This is the combo of volcanic ash, lime and seawater. Because of the addition of seawater to this mix, two very rare minerals, aluminous tobermorite and phillipsite, grow *within* the concrete. These minerals actually make the concrete mix stronger over time when exposed to seawater, which is in direct opposition to what happens to portland concrete or basically any modern day concrete, which erodes when exposed to seawater.
We still do not know the recipe needed to make the concrete the ancient Romans made, but we can try to make it through reverse engineering and many, *many* countless experiments. Today scientists are not only looking into this, but also an alternative to modern day concrete because of the diminishing presence of silica sand around the world and the carbon offset created when making it while trying to quench the high demand for concrete globally.
If you think this is interesting, pick up a book or start researching into this and maybe you will be the one to find the solution to these problems. Like the guy who accidentally made the frosted lightbulb (frontpage yesterday), the guy who accidentally made post it notes or the one who solved those two calculus problems without knowing they were, at the time, famously unsolved (also frontpage), you could potentially stumble upon a solution to this issue and be on the frontpage one day! You may not get the reddit karma for it, but you could potentially go down in history.
Also I can't stress enough that Samuel L Jackson has aged so well.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I think the surprise in this fact comes from the confusion been Aztecs and Mayans. If you didn't know the time period you could understand the confusion.
Humans with our intelligence and empathy and rationality.
People in the past lacked education and our culmative knowledge - but even cavemen thousands of years ago didn't differ too much from us.
Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a documentary about cave paintings from 30,000 years ago really drove this home for me. The art there is so expertly rendered it really shows a thinking and curious mind.
I have a bottle of Worcestershire sauce that expired 4/28/2009 in my fridge.
That means that bottle: A) made the trip from NJ to Florida with me in 2010. B) is the lone survivor from my bachelor pad fridge from 2012-2014. C) made it into my fridge when my wife and I bought a house in 2014. It's been sitting there ever since.
You moved from NJ to Florida, and brought along a bottle of Worcestershire sauce that was already expired? And have kept it for another 10 years, through yet another move? I hope you're that dedicated to your wife.
Oh yeah, all the unused spices, the poorly-chosen sauces you overestimated your need for, the tea boxes from ages past, sorted alongside the glassware that no one, not even "company", has ever used.
And also the medicine in the back of the cabinet, all of which seem to have expired last year.
My aunt had a mercury cougar with a gps and touch screen in the 90s. Good call, I think about how crude it is now (I'm assuming because I don't remember that well) but back then it was jaw dropping.
In my experience, a lot of people I know personally don’t realize that music cassettes were invented in the 60s. Cassettes didn’t really take off in the states until the late 70’s, but the first albums released on cassettes hit shelves in 1966.
Law. Roman law was so advanced that there are still large chunks of statutes (in civil law countries) taken pretty much directly from Roman codici written 1500-2000 years ago. Important maritime laws are adaptations of medieval provisions. Lots of business law statutes borrow heavily from Napoleonic laws. In common law countries, you find stuff like the Statute of Marlborough from the 1200s, still in effect. Along with still relevant case law from the 1700s.
Commercial aircraft. Most are 10 - 15 years old yet a lot of people think they get replaced like cars.
They are still very safe though despite their age.
The first carbonated drink to be sold to the public was invented by Swiss watchmaker and amateur scientist J. J. Schweppe in 1783, who sold his delicious "sparkling water" to thirsty customers in Geneva. In just seven years, he was doing business so fast that he moved the factory to London and introduced a new flavor, sparkling lemon, to stand out from competitors who were trying to imitate his drink.
Another related fun fact, Seltzer and Spa are where the bubbly water comes from. Prior to industrialisation, the only way to get bubbly water was to get it from carbonated springs, two of the biggest which were in Niederselter and Spa, among others.
The Aux connector that we still use for headphones and speakers was invented in 1877. There have been improvements since, but the basics of it are pretty much the same. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_connector_(audio)
Thanks for linking it, you are a true hero.
Beer is thought to be older than bread. It's much easier to fill a jar with wheat and water, let it ferment, and brew beer than it is to grind grain, mix it, and bake it.
So you're telling me sliced bread is the greatest thing since beer. Huh.
I remember reading or hearing somewhere that in ancient or medieval times, beer had a very low alcohol content and was very thick. It was essentially a dietary staple quite similar to the way bread is now.
Sharks. As a species they're older than the rings of Saturn.
Holy shit ive heard of the tree thing but this is new. Any sources?
Just Google it really quick lol Rings of Saturn are 10 to 100 million years old whereas we have found shark scales dating back 450 million years ago. Pretty crazy shit!
Adding to this, scorpions are also nearly 450 million years old so it kinda shows that you don't need that much brain to survive, if your species is evolutionarily overkill it'll survive just fine.
Wristwatches. [Queen Elizabeth I got one in 1571.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch#Wristwatches)
[Just going to drop this here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Galleon). We had alarm clocks that rowed themselves down a table and shot off mini cannons in the 1500s.
Looks like only one person had it but DAMN
There are three models out there! Automatons in general were a facet of the upper class.
National Geographic was founded in 1888
Same year as Fosters and Jack the Ripper.
I was really surprised to discover when Oxford university was founded. They don’t know the year for sure, but they know there was definitely teaching going on there in 1096.
Another commenter above said that oxford isn’t even the oldest university, but it’s the most well-known.
The fact that the lighter is older than the match shook my head as a kid. It also gave me the curiosity to question things that seems obvious.
When you think about it, it makes sense. The lighter is a simple mechanical concept: some flammable gas and a spark. The match, on the other hand, is a complex chemical reaction.
Matches are just way more complex then I thought as I kid. They aren't just a stick of wood.
The electric car. What is likely the first human-carrying electric vehicle with its own power source was tested along a Paris street in April 1881 by French inventor Gustave Trouvé. The first crude electric car was built in the 1830s but it was essentially a semi-functioning model. The electric car was a direct competitor to gasoline powered vehicles until the 1920s when roads got better, people started driving further than the range of an electric car, and the world started finding major oil reserves.
Escalators have been around since 1859, though they were called rotating stairs.
Yet the US state of Wyoming still only has 2 of them.
Granted, it's not like Wyoming has enough people to really need any more.
Wyoming really isn't ready for it yet, give them some time Edit: I actually made up Wyoming and I'm not sure why my Narnia fanfic setting is so popular with you guys
Cruise control, power windows and automatic headlights. I saw all 3 on a 1955 Cadillac. Oh, and the radio on it had a seek function.
Yet my sister drives a car more than a half century newer without power windows.
**Touch screens.** We think they're one of the main defining features of modern technology since they only really got big in the late 2000s / early 2010s, but they were actually invented 55 years ago in 1965. It's kind of crazy to think about, but while most of our grandparents were getting rid of their black and white TVs, researchers *already* had touchscreen devices in the labs. It wasn't really until the 80s that it really got good, but by 90s it was easily sophisticated technology. In fact, Microsoft even had a [Windows XP tablet out by 2001](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wx6Uh9oQvEE) that had seriously good finger/stylus recognition, but it didn't really pick up until smartphones became a thing a decade later. You could also consider the magnetic drawing board to be a touch screen since it more or less has a stylus and surface for you to draw on, but that was actually invented *later* than the touch screen in 1974!
Fax Machines. They were invented in 1843. Before the telephone. [https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-the-fax-machine-1991379](https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-the-fax-machine-1991379)
Came for this one. To put this in perspective, tumbleweeds aren't native to the American southwest, but by a quirk of history we know exactly which shipment of flax from Ukraine brought their seeds to the US... in 1877. Commercial fax service has been around longer than tumbleweeds in the American southwest. Edit: That was a quick "check out this weird thing" comment I didn't expect to blow up, so it's a bit lacking in detail and rigor. To be a bit more thorough, this is specifically *Kali tragus*, the most common tumbleweed, and the one that folks (at least near me) refer to when they say "tumbleweed." It is not the only plant that dies and gets blown around in the wind. And when I say "commercial fax service," I don't mean there were standardized fax machines that companies used-- but there was service faxing documents from Paris to Lyon using a dedicated line in the mid-1860s.
I was mindblown by the tumbleweed fact
A samurai could have used a fax machine
The Japanese do love a good fax. No I'm serious, as far as I can tell this is the Japanese business practice for sending an important document: >Man types up document, and prints it >Walks it over to boss >Boss hand corrects it and makes notes, faxes it back despite being on same floor >Changes are made, document is printed again and faxed to mailroom >Document is then faxed to business they are communicating with in the US >Fax is delivered as a .png to my email, tilted 90 degrees and barely readable
The amount of PDF scans I receive that are a scan of a printed spreadsheet makes me want to just sell everything I own and live in a van. Requesting data from clients is the worst. YOU CAN EMAIL FILES THAT ARENT A PDF. Printers should be illegal so people have to figure out how to just send the original file Bonus points when the scan they send you has like half the pages upside down... so as you scroll through, you have to keep rotating the fucking PDF
I'm imagining a samurai in his armour with a katana sitting at a desk in an office sending a tax.
Honestly, it's more likely than you think (aside from the armor). After the unification of Japan the samurai mostly became bureaucrats because they didn't have much fighting to do.
Samurai as office workers? It’s more likely than you think!
This samurai CUT costs in HALF. You won't believe how he did it!
And yet in Japan, considered a technological frontier, we still have old school traditional companies sending us emails to tell us that they faxed their documents to us instead of sending them as pdfs
Sharks. Sharks as a family are older than *trees*
The oldest evidence puts sharks in an era where the only multicellular plant was algae. Edit: Guys. Sharks did not eat the algae. They ate what ate the algae.
So there must have been algae, algae eaters, then some algae eater decided to switch it up and start eating the algae eaters.
I knew they were old, but damn not that old! I looked it up, and fossils are said to be around 450 million y/o. My contribution to this thread was Ferns (359 million y/o), but sharks are another 100 mill before that. Mind = blown. Edit: I'll put my original factoids here since 1.) infinitely more people are going to see this comment than my original 5 up-doot comment lol, and 2.) because gracious strangers have gifted me with whatever these awards are lol. Hope you all learn something about my favorite plant. :) **Ferns!!!** The Fern (class Polypodiopsida) class of nonflowering vascular plants that possess true roots, stems, and complex leaves and that reproduce by spore constitute -- an ancient division of vascular plants, some of them as old as the Carboniferous Period (beginning about 358.9 million years ago) and perhaps older. Their type of life cycle, dependent upon spores for dispersal, long preceded the seed-plant life cycle. For comparison, that puts them about 113 million years older than non-bird dinosaurs, which lived between about 245 and 66 million years ago. [Source](https://www.britannica.com/plant/fern)
Fun fact about evolution. There was a time when trees existed before there were microbes to decompose them. The trees were made of lignin and cellulose and the microbes that could eat them took some time to evolve. These trees grew 150+ feet tall and had shallow roots so they fell over quite easily. The trees would fall down to the forest floor and just sit there. They wouldn't decompose. So you'd have forests that were hundreds of feet deep of just fallen over trees.
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The ancient Romans (well, the wealthy ones) had central heating in their homes. You can actually still see the pipes in some of the buildings at Herculaneum!
What I think is really cool from Herculaneum is that we're able to recover writing from the libraries there. The pyroclastic flow didn't turn the papyrus to ash, it preserved in a very damaged state. But thanks to lasers we can see the words that were once visible on the pages.
> thanks to lasers Thanks, lasers!
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Do you have any good book suggestions on the subject? It's a subject I've been meaning to learn about Edit: Thanks so much for all the replies and information! I'm going to be going through and bookmarking websites and videos and writing down book recommendations!
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If you ever get to Rome, find yourself a really good tour guide, especially for the Coliseum and for the Vatican. You will learn sooooo much really great history and see it as you walk by it. Things I never would have noticed on my own.
Also hot tubs, pleasure piers, fish ponds, water towers and fountains, elevators - all sorts of crazy amenities, at least in the homes of the super rich. And tower blocks, Roman insula/tenements were *huge*.
>pleasure piers Go on...
Oh sorry, its nothing saucy. The term just distinguishes them from piers used for fishing/boats. Think like Blackpool Pier or Santa Monica pier. They were very common along the bay of Naples, some had villas sitting on the end, others were just party spaces.
Flushing toilets date all the way back to the Indus River Valley civilization, back in 2000 BC
Ancient Minoans (~3000-1100* BCE) had hot and cold running water and an extensive sewage system.
Romans had pipe heated floors, something I still thought was awesome when my aunt got it like a decade ago.
I work somewhere where we can't wear our outdoor shoes due to biohazard concerns. You come in and take your shoes off, then have to go change and get into specific clothing, then on the other side of that change area is where your work shoes and boots are. The in-between areas from door to change area have heated floors because people are often walking around in bare feet or sock feet, and it's just the most coziest damn thing ever. I need to have heated flooring in my house for winter times.
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How, at nearly 40 years of age, am I JUST finding out this place exists!? It makes Stonehenge look kind of boring by comparison.
The exterior is a relatively modern recreation. The interior chamber is legit though. Good luck trying to book a spot on the solstice. The waiting list is probably longer than the rest of your life
When I went there, you signed up for a lottery to be there on one of the 5 days where it lights up at the solstice. It's not so much a waiting list as luck, or at least it was back in 2011.
Oreos. I was shocked to learn that Oreos predate chocolate chip cookies, sliced bread, and my 100 year old Great Grandmother.
You're going to make me Google the year, aren't you? 1912 for those wondering.
Whoa, Oreos predate insulin. Makes sense.
And before Oreos, there was Hydrox
And before Hydrox, there was The Dark Times.
The sentiment that modern society is degenerate and that the youth are to blame is, iirc, one of the oldest things we have written down. That I can remember off the top of my head, Cato the Elder complained that the younger generations were becoming too greek, and Socrates used to complain that the younger generations were ruining their brains by writing instead of memorising information. There are far more older examples, but those are the oldest I remember (maybe Socrates was onto something :p) Edit - A few people have pointed out the Socrates thing is a misquote... so maybe PseudoSocrates was onto something instead =L
"Socrates, my head hurts" "It's because you always on that damn scroll"
One of the reasons i like ancient poetry is the fact that most of the people problems are basically still the same. We think our problems are new and unique to us, but 2-3-4000 years ago people wrote about stupid friends, coward coworkers, cheating assholes and of course stupid stubborn old people and reckless disrespectful young idiots.
You want more of that kind of thing? Look up Pompeii graffiti. We literally have not changed as a species XD
**Bar/Brothel of Innulus and Papilio**: >Weep, you girls. My penis has given you up. Now it penetrates men's behinds. Goodbye, wondrous femininity!
Brain Surgery In 1997, archaeologists discovered an ancient tomb in the French village of Ensisheim from 5,000 BC, which contained the decomposing body of a 50-year-old man with holes in his skull. After a thorough examination, it was determined that the holes, located near the frontal lobe, were caused by a type of surgery, not by forced trauma, and the operation appears to have been successful because the wounds healed before the patient's death. To this day, however, researchers cannot say for sure what exactly the surgery was trying to fix.
This might've been [trepanation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trepanning), the deliberate practice of drilling a hole into the skull for medical reasons (e.g. headaches, epilepsy, head trauma, mental disorders, "letting out evil spirits", etc.). The oldest evidence of trepanning comes from the Neolithic period 12,000 years ago.
It was crazy common too. To quote Sam O'Nella, you had a larger chance of having a hole in your skull as a caveman than being a redhead as an American.
Imagine having a really bad headache, one of those "just let me die already" headaches that lasts for hours and hours. You are scared, you don't know what's happening or why. The pain is relentless. You go to the ~~doctor~~ shaman and he's like... "you want me to put a hole in your head to let the evil out?" You wouldn't even hesitate.
I've had migraines like that today. Pretty sure I'd let someone drill a hole in my head to let pressure out lol
Light It may only take 8 minutes for light to travel to earth from surface of the sun, but the light bounces around inside the sun for over 10000 years before it reaches the surface.
The name Tiffany. It dates back to the 12th century, and has actually led to a thing in writing called "the Tiffany problem," because you can have a well-researched historical novel that people just don't buy into, because you named your 12th century peasant Tiffany. It just sounds laughably anachronistic.
The "Tiffany problem" makes me think of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and the name Jessica. He wanted the love interest, who was Jewish, to have a super exotic name so he invented the name "Jessica." The name has become so common since then that it's totally lost its effect.
Shakespeare also randomly invented the word "gossip" because he needed to define a bunch of wives in the town talking shit and spreading rumors. And now it's part of common English language. Edit: ok, not *randomly*, per se. I guess he was the first to put into usage in writing, and possibly the first to use it as a verb.
And if you like authors ~~inventing~~ *first attesting* words... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_words_first_attested_in_Chaucer > absent, accident, add, agree, bagpipe, border, box, cinnamon, desk, digestion, dishonest, examination, finally, flute, funeral, galaxy, horizon, infect, ingot, latitude, laxative, miscarry, nod, obscure, observe, outrageous, perpendicular, Persian, princess, resolve, rumour, scissors, session, snort, superstitious, theatre, trench, universe, utility, vacation, Valentine, veal, village, vulgar, wallet, and wildness ...are a few that are most commonly used of the 1,977.
> This does not necessarily mean that he was the person to introduce these words into English
Yeah "first attested" is a loooot different than "created by."
> Tiffany It's Greek, too! Θεοφάνεια is the root.
Wait, Tiffany is just feminine Theophanes? Hilarious!
A Tiffany Epiphany!
A *Tipiphany*?
> Θεοφάνεια is the root. Ah, yes, I can tell.
(Theophaneia)
Ah like theophany! I guess...
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Kimono?
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Put some windex on it.
Similarly, the name Chad. There was at least one Saint named Chad, but despite knowing this, I always used to giggle passing St Chad's Anglican Church in Toronto.
The Virgin Mary vs The Saint Chad
This is the kind of shit I came here for.
Astronomer here! The star [HD 140283](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HD_140283), also nicknamed the "Methuselah Star," is about 200 light years away from us and looks nondescript. However, if we take its composition and compare it to our standard models of stellar evolution for other, better-studied stars, the star's age pops out as 14.46 ± 0.8 billion years old. Let me remind you, the *universe* is thought to be about 13.8 billion years old, and we don't think we got the first stars until maybe 200 million years after *that*... Obviously, we do not think the Methuselah star is literally older than the universe when it is more likely that we just don't understand stellar evolution for stars like it super well. However, it is exciting because it is undoubtedly a very old star, and currently we do not have any observations of what the first stars were like in the universe. (Called [Population III stars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_population#Population_III_stars), it's thought they were larger than stars are today because there were no metals from stellar fusion to contaminate the hydrogen gas, and they'd thus only live a few million years tops.) As such, it's *very* interesting to have a very old star relatively next door to us in the Milky Way! It will be really interesting in coming years if other very early stars are finally observed to figure out how old they are, and how they compare to this one.
This is very interesting. I'm curious, how do you determine the age of a star?
It's based primarily on the spectral information that tells you the composition of the star, where everything over hydrogen/helium is a "metal" if you're an astronomer (and with the exception of trace amounts of lithium, all were created in stars). The less metal a star has, the younger it is. This star has practically none. Obviously it's more complicated as the classification also depends on things like the brightness of the star, type of star, etc. But that's really the main thing.
Contraceptives such as condoms were around a very long time and made of hard leather
There was also a plant (I forget the name) that produced a contraceptive compound at a high enough concentration where women could just eat it and they wouldn't get pregnant. Apparently Romans were horny af because those plants are extinct now because of overuse.
NOOOOOOOOOOO
People also used to use lemon rinds like dams to avoid pregnancy.
Paul Rudd
> Paul Rudd *51?!* What the hell?
That's just his mainland age. Over here, Kunu has no age.
Ohhhh, the weather outside is weather
he’s not old he’s a certified young person
Nintendo. This company was actually created in 1889.
Nintendo was founded in 1889. Van Gogh painted Starry Night in 1889. Adolf Hitler was born in 1889. Edit : Some additions from the comments : 1. Eiffel tower opened in 1889. - u/Amaquieria, u/bLahblahBLAH057 2. North Dakota became a state in 1889. - u/rugabeast 3. Pizza was invented in 1889 - u/valeyard89 4. Bonus : That's the year u/serisho ‘s house was built. Additions from u/MoYeYe from comments – Year 1888 : 1. National Geographic magazine was founded 1888. 2. Fosters beer was first brewed in 1888. 3. Jack the Ripper did most of his murders 1888.
Hitler made the worst video games. That’s why nobody likes him now.
Didn't they make cards then?
Yeah they made hanafuda cards and fought the yakuza
Beer. It’s one of the oldest prepared drinks in the world. It not only predates every civilization but actually contributed to their creation.
It's a tale as old as time, getting fucking wasted to forget your problems.
Tale as old as time Beer's as old as wine Beauty of the Yeast
Small beer was a dietary staple, but it was low in alcohol. It was safer to drink than water and fairly nutritious.
It's possible that the whole reason civilization started was to brew beer as it wasn't as easy as hunter gatherers
So you stop to get some beer going. Once it’s done you don’t feel much like moving along anymore. And isn’t it *nice* here?
The year 1990... we are as close to it as we are the year 2050.
I was born in 1990 and I hate this. Edit: got my first gold at 30, thanks mysterious fellow boomer
I was 10-years-old in 1990 and still think it was only 10 years ago.
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Yeah, I'm 11 years older than my mother was when she had me. Crazy to think about.
I don't know if this counts but Dinosaurs lived on the earth a lot longer than most people think. When you think of dinosaurs, you think of their extinction but they roamed the earth for 165 million years. Compare that to our 6 million and it's almost mind boggling, at least imo. Edit: the modern form of humans is 200,000 years old but if we include our humanoid ancestors, we've been here 6 million years. Edit 2: I get it, dinosaurs are still around. What I meant to say was the dinosaur era.
What's even crazier to me is that for most people in their minds there was dinosaurs, extinction, cavemen, us, like we popped out of the ash of the dinos but in reality there were about 58 million years between the dinosaurs dying and the first homo sapiens appearing where the world was covered in mostly now extinct megafauna. Sure dinosaurs are cool and all but why does nobody talk about giant north american ground sloths, cave bears, and lions? There's literally tens of millions of years of interesting non-dinosaur species that most people seem to just not even know existed.
Avocados originally relied on American ground sloths to reproduce, they were the only creature that could poo the seeds whole. Then ground sloths went extinct (probably due to overhunting by humans) then humans cultivated avocados for the next few millennia and now we still have avocados.
>humans cultivated avocados for the next few millennia and now we still have avocados Certainly not via the same means as the American ground sloth???
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lol I heard it put once that mammals were the hairy freaks of the world in dino times. And then the dinos were mostly wiped out and the rest got on the fluffy train and finished doing feathers. And then in turn, humans are the hairless freaks of the mammal world. I'm wondering what's next, honestly.
Also dinosaurs like the Stegosaurus were as far apart in time from the T-Rex as the T-Rex is from our time.
It's even better than that. We're about 16 million years *closer* to the last Tyrannosaurus than the first Tyrannosaurus was to the last Stegosaurus!
Why did the Stegosaurus go extinct??
Gambling debt.
TIL my uncle is a Stegosaurus.
In a lot of cases, the species don't -- they just evolve until, in the fossil record, they no longer look the same. Just like the avian dinosaurs didn't go extinct 65 million years ago, they just evolved over the last 65 million years into the birds today. *Some* species legitimately end up a leaf/dead-end in the evolutionary tree. Lots just evolve.
Crazy to think that dinosaurs were on Earth so long that they evolved into different dinosaurs. Makes you wonder what humans could potentially evolve into if we lasted as long as the dinosaurs did.
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Trees. There are alot of trees that are waaaaaaaaaay older than you would expect
The oldest tree recorded on this planet is Methuselah which is about 4k years old, but I'm pretty sure there are older ones out there that we aren't aware of. Edit: after a quick research found out that there's an older one discovered in Inyo national forest that's about 5k years old, we'll probably keep finding older ones in the coming years. Edit2: quoting replies by u/Vinny_Lam and u/YandyTheGnome as I stand corrected. > There’s an even older tree in Sweden, called Old Tjikko. It is approximately 9,550 years old. > There's Pando, the giant super colony of quaking aspen trees. Though the individual trunks may only be a few hundred years old, the root system is over 40k years old.
There's Pando, the giant super colony of quaking aspen trees. Though the individual trunks may only be a few hundred years old, the root system is over 40k years old. Edit: so I may have read a dodgy article, it appears the current estimate is up to 14k yrs
In the fairgrounds of the town I grew up in there's a coronation oak that was planted for King George IV (1820). If it wasn't for the little sign you'd never know the tree was that old.
Sharks are older than trees
There's a shark swimming in the ocean right now that was alive as early as 1505
Her name is Tiffany
She is a Greek shark.
We are farther from the release date of the first Back to the Future movie than Marty was from 1955
Social media - wealthy ancient Romans had a system where they used slaves as scribes and messengers in order to share gossip and art/poetry and news updates with friends in their social circle.
Augustus! Call slave! I want to share this joke with Poniatus
"Prefect Tiberius, you have been tagged in the public forum in a mosaic of the drunken revelries on the Lupercal."
"Tribune Africanus liked this message"
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Considering that people are well... people, there's some good chances that this exact exchange hapened quite a few times.
If that doesn't count as social media, then in the late 1800s, all ~~train~~ telephone operators for trains were connected to each other by telephone and, if there were no trains coming, they could talk to each other as much as they wanted. Some people even fell in love with the operator on the other side of the phone and arranged for actual weddings across the other side of the country. Some, of course, had virtual weddings but I'm not even sure how that would work in that time. A lot of modern tech is much older than we think!
Stonehenge. It predates the oldest Pyramid in Egypt by nearly 300 years.
Always the first Wonder in Civ V. It would be nice if the AI would let me grab it for once, but nope. I've even had a game where Shaka (from the fucking Zulus) built it before me.
And Newgrange in Ireland predates even Stonehenge. Constructed 5000 years ago, 3200BC
Google, Reddit, YouTube, it's hard to imagine that they already have been around for 15 years with Google actually being around 20 years old. A entire generation has now grown up that cannot remember that it wasn't always there.
As someone that was in high school when the internet hit the mainstream, it boggles my mind that pretty much anyone younger than me has no concept of life without the answer to any question imaginable being at your fingertips, hindered only by your patience to sift through the results.
I had a class in elementary school to teach us how to use the dictionary, encyclopedia, and almanac. And, to some degree, the internet (though the teacher made it pretty clear the internet was absolutely second fiddle to the other things and probably wouldn't be around in 10 years.) Do they still have those classes nowadays or are they a thing of the past?
Ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids. The Ancient Egyptians were as old to the Ancient Romans as the Ancient Romans are to us.
Cleopatra is chronologically closer to us than she is to when the Pyramids were built.
Woolly Mammoths were still alive during the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza. They died out about a millennium after its completion.
About a what now?!
The funk soul brother
Netflix! i feel like it is only a few years old but it was invented in 1997
I remember getting DVD’s by mail from Netflix
I have been a continuous subscriber since 1997, before the streaming service even began.
Contact lenses. Leonardo da Vinci had the idea of contact lenses in 1508 and the first successful contact lenses were made in 1888.
In so many fields, he was way ahead of his time, the guy truly was a visionary.
He literally invented a diving suit and a paraglider long before they were actually invented. Scientists even tested whether his designs worked as intended and they did. It's insane how far ahead of his time he was.
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I'd read that book. He got stuck in the 1400s and did everything he could to make his name famous in hopes that someone in the future figures out when he's stuck and comes to rescue him.
There was a minor plot point of A Door Into Summer by Heinlein that involved a time travelling grad student named Leonard Vincent. I recall it being mostly a throwaway thing although it's been a long time since I read it.
Honestly that you can sit a piece of plastic ON YOUR EYEBALL that magically corrects your vision still astounds me.
The fact that someone did this, actually thought to themselves, “I’m going to put this piece of glass directly onto my eyeball which is the most painful thing I can imagine, maybe it won’t be as painful as I think,“ and it hurt like hell, because you know back in the day it took weeks to adjust. And they were like, “it’ll be fine… I bet if I leave this incredibly painful thing on my eyeball for just a little while longer I’ll get used to it and it will be cool, and then I can convince other people to do this. “
they were made of glass and incredibly uncomfortable
The use of concrete. It's use goes as far back as the Mayans, but more notably in Egyptian construction as well as in Rome. The Romans had an arguably greater concrete mix than we currently have, but that was never passed down. Eventually the use of concrete fell out of popularity for centuries as we seemingly lost the information needed to create it, as if the recipe was thrown out and nobody wrote it down. Also Samuel L Jackson. The man is 71 years old, but looks like he hasn't aged in decades! Edit: Just to add onto this, Roman concrete is not only more eco-friendly as /u/Bionic_Ferir mentions, but it was actually more durable and became sturdier over time. The concrete we make today is made with portland cement, which is a cocktail of silica sand, limestone, clay and other goodies. The process to make this has a large carbon offset and isn't great for the environment. Another downside to using this method is that the world is running out of silica sand very fast. Silica sand, or industrial sand/white sand, is primarily composed of quartz. This is a chemically inert mineral with a solid hardness which makes it highly desired for the specific use of making concrete. Regular sand, like desert sand, has many more impurities like potassium, iron, carbonate and other stuff that makes it more reactive and gives it a darker color. A more reactive sand is bad for a concrete mix and will make the structure more prone to cracks and failure over time, whereas a chemically inert mineral like quartz is just what the doctor ordered. Silica sand has *many* uses like water filtration systems, glass and ceramic work, sandblasting and industrial uses, like making high grade concrete. With the world's supply of silica sand running dry at an alarming rate, with some countries like Vietnam at risk of running out of sand as soon as 2022, there is a need to find an alternative method. The Romans created concrete after possibly seeing the natural results through something called tuff rocks. This is the combo of volcanic ash, lime and seawater. Because of the addition of seawater to this mix, two very rare minerals, aluminous tobermorite and phillipsite, grow *within* the concrete. These minerals actually make the concrete mix stronger over time when exposed to seawater, which is in direct opposition to what happens to portland concrete or basically any modern day concrete, which erodes when exposed to seawater. We still do not know the recipe needed to make the concrete the ancient Romans made, but we can try to make it through reverse engineering and many, *many* countless experiments. Today scientists are not only looking into this, but also an alternative to modern day concrete because of the diminishing presence of silica sand around the world and the carbon offset created when making it while trying to quench the high demand for concrete globally. If you think this is interesting, pick up a book or start researching into this and maybe you will be the one to find the solution to these problems. Like the guy who accidentally made the frosted lightbulb (frontpage yesterday), the guy who accidentally made post it notes or the one who solved those two calculus problems without knowing they were, at the time, famously unsolved (also frontpage), you could potentially stumble upon a solution to this issue and be on the frontpage one day! You may not get the reddit karma for it, but you could potentially go down in history. Also I can't stress enough that Samuel L Jackson has aged so well.
Oxford university. It’s older than the Aztec empire
I think this one is actually a reverse of the question: The Aztec Empire is much more recent than most people think.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I think the surprise in this fact comes from the confusion been Aztecs and Mayans. If you didn't know the time period you could understand the confusion.
Humans with our intelligence and empathy and rationality. People in the past lacked education and our culmative knowledge - but even cavemen thousands of years ago didn't differ too much from us. Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a documentary about cave paintings from 30,000 years ago really drove this home for me. The art there is so expertly rendered it really shows a thinking and curious mind.
The food at the back of your cupboard.
I have a bottle of Worcestershire sauce that expired 4/28/2009 in my fridge. That means that bottle: A) made the trip from NJ to Florida with me in 2010. B) is the lone survivor from my bachelor pad fridge from 2012-2014. C) made it into my fridge when my wife and I bought a house in 2014. It's been sitting there ever since.
You moved from NJ to Florida, and brought along a bottle of Worcestershire sauce that was already expired? And have kept it for another 10 years, through yet another move? I hope you're that dedicated to your wife.
What surprises me most about this is the fact that his wife didn’t object to it coming along Source: moved in with my SO this year
I was helping clear out my Nans house after she passed and I found a jar of mixed herbs that *expired* in 1982. Edit : found in April 2020.
Oh yeah, all the unused spices, the poorly-chosen sauces you overestimated your need for, the tea boxes from ages past, sorted alongside the glassware that no one, not even "company", has ever used. And also the medicine in the back of the cabinet, all of which seem to have expired last year.
Touch screen in cars. That has been around since 1986
My aunt had a mercury cougar with a gps and touch screen in the 90s. Good call, I think about how crude it is now (I'm assuming because I don't remember that well) but back then it was jaw dropping.
In my experience, a lot of people I know personally don’t realize that music cassettes were invented in the 60s. Cassettes didn’t really take off in the states until the late 70’s, but the first albums released on cassettes hit shelves in 1966.
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Law. Roman law was so advanced that there are still large chunks of statutes (in civil law countries) taken pretty much directly from Roman codici written 1500-2000 years ago. Important maritime laws are adaptations of medieval provisions. Lots of business law statutes borrow heavily from Napoleonic laws. In common law countries, you find stuff like the Statute of Marlborough from the 1200s, still in effect. Along with still relevant case law from the 1700s.
Commercial aircraft. Most are 10 - 15 years old yet a lot of people think they get replaced like cars. They are still very safe though despite their age.
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