Look back through our history, and you'll find that the idea of "fake news" definitely
isn't new.
In fact, there are a ton of theories, stories, and scientific "facts" that we now know were
just hot garbage.
Making matters worse, some of those facts weren't simply accepted as truth, but were
used as the very building blocks of the world we know today…for better or worse.
Usually worse.
To infinity and beyond
A few short centuries ago, the United States was populated by vast herds of buffalo, flocks
of thousands of birds, and dense forests.
It was a paradise on earth... until foreign settlers came along and ruined the heck out
of it.
What New World settlers found was so incredible that they developed what the British Association
for American Studies calls the "myth of superabundance": a belief that this unsettled world was limitless.
There were so many resources available that there was no reason to think we'd ever use
them all up… so we decimated beaver, elk, lynx, and bear populations, and completely
wiped out the passenger pigeon.
Obviously, the myth of superabundance couldn't be less true.
As the promise of wealth and limitless natural resources drove people west, loggers destroyed
entire forests, and millions of bison were hunted down to about a thousand.
Preservationists fought uphill against those practices and continue to fight today, and
fortunately, they persevered — a little.
It's why we have national parks and protected areas.
But that wasn't the end of our decimation.
Just plain stupid
By the turn of the 20th century, settlers moving west had created a whole lot of dry,
dusty land where nature once thrived, and there's a weird, very stupid reason that happened.
Wired explains that, between 1865 and 1875, people started believing that more farming
would give them more rain.
"The rain follows the plow" became the mantra of the Great Plains, and it was spread by
everyone from journalists and scientists to politicians and railway barons who stood to
make a fortune off of people heading west.
Even the Smithsonian Institution produced publications in 1870 on how planting trees
and building railroads could make the rains come.
Which just isn't how things work.
"That's not how it works.
That's not how any of this works."
Farmers kept farming through drought conditions, which stripped away ground cover and turned
the Midwest into the exact opposite of a rainy, farm-friendly paradise, forming the useless
Dust Bowl.
Smell ya later
America wasn't the only place humans ruined by being dummies.
Take 19th century London, for example.
In the 1830s, epidemics of typhoid, influenza, and particularly cholera decimated the city.
It was so bad that even the upper class started to sit up and take notice of the squalor.
Behind it all was the miasma theory of disease transmission, which basically
meant that it was the bad-smelling air that was making people sick and dead.
That was completely wrong, of course, since there are very few smells that can actually
kill you.
"S…"
"B..."
"...D!"
Amazingly, the miasma theory actually led to London making improvements in sanitation
and ventilation — but there was still a problem.
After the cleanup, and a marginal improvement in overall health due to generally cleaner
conditions, people wouldn't accept that bad smells didn't make you sick.
In the 1850s, an anaesthetist named John Snow (not that one) theorized that cholera was
actually a water-borne contagion, but the miasma theory was so widely accepted that
no one believed him.
It wasn't until an 1892 cholera outbreak in Hamburg, Germany that people started thinking
that maybe Snow had been onto something after all.
Full of phlegm
Ancient Greek physicians wrote that human body was governed by the interaction between
four disgusting-sounding elements, or "humors": yellow bile, black bile, phlegm, and blood.
If your body had too much of any of these juices, it could become choleric, melancholic,
phlegmatic, or sanguine.
When those humors were in balance, all was well.
But if you had too much blood or were too calm, you were officially sick.
Even by the 19th century, this was still the go-to theory.
Many medical treatments were still being employed to restore the humors' balance, including
the dangerous practice of bloodletting.
It was definitely a case of the treatment being worse than the illness, and countless
people died from what was being done, theoretically, to make them better.
According to PBS NewsHour, one of those people was George Washington.
While we don't know precisely what killed him, the fact that doctors removed about 40
percent of his blood in an attempt to alleviate his sore throat probably didn't help matters.
The North Pole shortcut
In this age of Google Earth, it's hard to imagine not knowing what's lurking at every
corner of the globe, but it wasn't really that long ago that we didn't have a clue about
what was at the North or South Poles.
In the 16th century, explorers believed that the North Pole's endless days would be enough
to melt any ice that might have been there, so the region would be a warm, open sea.
And according to theory, massive ice floes could only happen in freshwater anyway, so
there wouldn't be any in the Arctic.
Sailing straight across the pole would be a shortcut, so intrepid explorers spent the
next few hundred years trying to do just that.
It wasn't until 1879 that the ill-fated expedition of George Washington de Long proved that the
polar sea was pretty much just ice after all… when his ship was crushed.
By ice.
In an ironic twist, however, we might just be making the legend come true after all.
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