History Facts for Kids
Incredible facts from the past
The calendar we use today is based on the Julian calendar created by Julius Caesar in 46 BC. Before this reform, the Roman calendar had only 355 days and kept falling out of sync with the seasons. Caesar added days to the months and introduced the concept of the leap year.
Black American inventor Garrett Morgan invented the modern traffic signal and the gas mask in the early 20th century. Lewis Howard Latimer improved the lightbulb's carbon filament, making it last much longer. These inventors made enormous contributions despite facing severe racial discrimination.
Ancient Romans used urine as a mouthwash and teeth-whitener because of the ammonia it contains. Urine was collected in large pots on street corners and sold to laundries and tooth-cleaners. It was such a profitable trade that the Emperor Vespasian actually taxed it.
During the Cold War, American spy satellites photographed Soviet territory by taking physical film and dropping the canisters from space in heat-shielded capsules. Aircraft would catch the falling canisters with long hooks mid-air. This remarkable program, called CORONA, operated from 1959 to 1972.
Marie Curie was the first person ever to win two Nobel Prizes, winning in Physics in 1903 and Chemistry in 1911. She was also the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. Her pioneering research on radioactivity ultimately cost her her life, as the radiation exposure she experienced caused her to develop a blood disease.
The ancient Maya civilization built remarkable astronomical observatories and had a sophisticated understanding of the movements of the planets, stars, and the Sun. Their calendar was so accurate it could predict solar eclipses centuries in advance. They tracked the cycles of Venus with extraordinary precision.
Vikings may have used a crystal called a sunstone to navigate on cloudy days when they could not see the Sun directly. Iceland spar, a type of calcite crystal, can reveal the position of the Sun even through thick clouds. Modern scientists have confirmed this technique actually works.
Queen Victoria of Britain was so devastated by the death of her husband Prince Albert in 1861 that she wore black mourning clothes every day for the remaining 40 years of her life. She had his clothes laid out each morning and kept a cast of his hand beside her bed. She was buried holding a plaster cast of his hand.
The oldest surviving photograph was taken by French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 or 1827. The image shows a view from his upstairs window and required an 8-hour exposure in bright sunlight. The world's first-ever photograph is now preserved in a museum at the University of Texas.
Beer was a staple food in ancient Mesopotamia and was consumed by workers, priests, and even children, often in diluted form. The world's oldest recipe is actually a Sumerian beer-making hymn inscribed on a clay tablet around 1800 BC. Workers building temples and palaces were often paid partly in beer.