Some of the innovations that we still depend on today first appeared centuries ago, and
some things that seem really ancient still existed pretty recently.
Here are some weird historical events that shared the same time period, despite feeling
like they should have happened in different centuries.
Jack the Ripper was the first serial killer to morbidly fascinate entire generations,
leading countless people on a wild goose chase through 19th century London to try to discover
his identity.
Even in spite of his taunting letters to Scotland Yard, he was never apprehended.
More than a century later, it's tempting to think that modern forensics could have led
to the Ripper's capture.
We imagine early Scotland Yard being run by dudes in funny hats with giant magnifying
glasses, which makes it rather shocking to hear that not only did they have some reasonably
sophisticated investigative techniques at their disposal, but that the Ripper investigation
was still ongoing when Fusajiro Yamauchi founded the Nintendo company in Japan.
To be fair, Nintendo wasn't exactly ready to launch Super Mario Bros. that year, and
its first product line was playing cards.
Super Mario Bros. came much later, in 1985.
Public executions ended a long time ago, because today's humans are nothing like those crazed,
bloodthirsty creatures who mobbed the gallows, hungry for the sight of death and blood.
That sort of entertainment ended at least a few centuries ago… didn't it?
Shockingly, America's last public execution happened in 1936, and to put that in perspective,
that's the same year that the Hoover Dam was completed.
While the Hoover Dam is still widely considered to be one of the greatest engineering marvels
in human history, the practice of public executions seems at complete odds with how advanced we
were.
So, who was he?
The last person unfortunate enough to be hanged in public was Rainey Bethea.
His execution attracted hundreds of reporters and a crowd of thousands.
Public execution was banned only after that.
Even outside of the U.K., Oxford is a household name.
It's both a dictionary and a shoe, and before that, it was one of the world's most prestigious
universities.
It's also incredibly old, and we're not just talking Middle Ages old.
Nope, keep going back.
University of Oxford historians say there is evidence that teaching at Oxford began
as early as 1096 A.D., which was also the same year that the crusaders answered Pope
Urban II's call to arms.
That was the beginning stage in the first of nine violent attempts to reclaim the Holy
Land for Christianity, wars that would shape a few centuries of history.
The Oregon Trail is a daring chapter in American history, that time when pioneers traveled
across the untamed west in covered wagons, forging roads instead of following them.
Computer-literate school children first set off down the Oregon Trail in 1974, but the
real Oregon Trail pioneers left home in 1843, beginning a seemingly endless trek across
prairies that would kill one in 17 people who attempted it.
Incidentally, 1843 was also the year the fax machine was patented, when inventor Alexander
Bain figured out how to send an image by synchronizing two pendulums through a clock.
It probably won't surprise you to hear that Bain's invention didn't really catch on right
away.
It was improved upon over the years, and a standard for the transmission of images over
distances didn't emerge until the 1980s.
The woolly mammoth is a massive creature that once roamed ancient America and today, they
can be seen only in museums and movies.
Mammoths are prehistory, and the pyramids are ancient history, so those two things couldn't
have happened at the same time, could they?
They did, barely.
Most mammoths were actually extinct by the time the Egyptians were laying down those
first stones, but there was still a small population living on an island in the Arctic
Ocean, somewhere between Alaska and Siberia.
Mammoths occupied Wrangel Island up until about 4,000 years ago.
The pyramids at Giza were built roughly 4,500 years ago, so mammoths were around long after
those pyramids were old news.
The Wrangel Island mammoths outlived the rest of the mammoth population by about 6,000 years,
but when their island home broke away from the mainland, they were already doomed.
That's because the population was small and isolated, and Hollywood can't even write a
story more heartbreaking than the idea of those last few, lonely mammoths.
Eventually, human beings realized that walking up stairs is for suckers, and the escalator
was invented.
What's weird about that, though, is that it happened at the time Hawaii was ruled by a
monarch.
The escalator was invented by Jesse W. Reno in 1891, and three years after he patented
it, he built one as a Coney Island novelty ride.
A few years after that, it finally dawned on the world that Reno's invention could be
used to address the problem of stairs, and the escalator as we know it was born.
At the same time Reno was dreaming up his Coney Island attraction, Liliuokalani was
proclaimed queen of Hawaii.
Even as she assumed the crown, the islands were inundated with American settlers hoping
to get rich from the sugar industry.
Her reign only lasted for two years.