Wow Wall

Did you know...?


In 1932 there was a War between World War One veterans and Emus. Oddly enough, the Emus won.


Bluetooth is named after a King of Denmark called Harald Gormsson who had rotting teeth which were blue, so he was known as Blue Tooth. The symbol for bluetooth are the nordic runes which make the King’s initials.


Up until 1948, you could get Olympic medals in Art and Literature.


Cleopatra is closer in time to the invention of the iPhone than she is the building of the pyramids.


The last execution by guillotine in France happened the same year Star Wars came out.


The gap in time between Stegosaurus and the Tyrannosaurus Rex is bigger than between the Tyrannosaurus Rex and us.


Wooly Mammoths and the Pyramids existed at the same time.


Anne Boleyn had 11 fingers!


In the medieval era there was a fashion for very long shoes. The longer your shoes, the richer you were (as you clearly did not need to walk very far). At one point, the shoes got so long they could be curled back and attached to the leg with a small chain.


The jewellery company Tiffany and Co is older than Italy.


In the early 90s, Pepsi owned 17 submarines, a cruiser, a frigate, and a destroyer, all because of a deal with the Soviet Union (now Russia) in which they exchanged soda for military equipment.


Abraham Lincoln was a skilled wrestler and was honoured with an award from the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 1992.


In 1968 a pig named Pigasus ran for President of the US.


Hitler had a nephew named William who fought against him after he moved to America and signed up to the navy there.


The last woman convicted and imprisoned for witchcraft in the UK was Helen Duncan. This was in 1944.


Thomas Edison did NOT invent the lightbulb! The real inventor was actually Warren de la Rue in 1880 who actually created the very first light bulb forty years before Edison.


In the 1930’s, ketchup was sold as medicine.


Napoleon was once attacked by a horde of rabbits - he had asked for a rabbit hunt to be organised but they’d rounded up so many, the rabbits attacked Napoleon and his men!


Henry VIII used to have people called Grooms of Stool who were hired to literally wipe his bottom - 4 people did the job over his life and all of them were knighted.


Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin were all nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.


Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima when the first atom bomb was dropped there. He then traveled home to Nagasaki the day before the second atom bomb was dropped there. He survived both and lived to be 93.