9 Weird Historical Facts That Are Surprisingly True

History is a wide-ranging subject. There's absolutely no way you can cover it all, especially not in great detail, in just a few hour sittings. But sometimes some random details are the most interesting things of all, the little fun facts that you can use to wow your friends. Here's a shortlist of random historical facts that can boost your interest in history:-

1. This small book from the National Library of Sweden, printed in the late 16th century, is an example of sixfold dos-à-dos binding, where six books are combined into a single publication but can be read individually with the help of six perfectly placed clasps.

2. The Wright brothers just once flew together. Orville and Wilbur had promised their father that they would never fly together because they feared losing both sons in an aircraft accident. However, on May 25, 1910,  father allowed the brothers to share a six-minute flight near Dayton with the piloting Orville and the passenger Wilbur.

3. Thomas Andrews was born in 1873 and died in 1912, when the ship he had designed sank, after encouraging Titanic passengers to get off the ship if they could. He was on board when it went down. His original design included features such as a double hull, more water-tight compartments, and twice as many lifeboats, but they were overruled. he spent his last moment trying to evacuate passengers on board.

4. Photographs of loved ones taken after their death may seem morbid to modern sensibilities. But in Victorian England, they became a way to commemorate the dead and blunt the sharpness of their grief.

5. Early in the Second World War, Polish soldiers adopted Wojtek the bear. He stuck with his unit through the end of the war, carrying supplies during combat in Italy. The bear died in 1963, partly because of damage to his esophagus. In November 2015, a bronze statue of the bear has been unveiled in central Edinburgh.

6. Most of the television laugh tracks were recorded in the early 1950s. Most of the people that you hear laughing these days are dead.

7. During World War 2 Lyudmila Pavlichenko was a Soviet Army sniper. During the war, she is credited with 309 killings and is considered to be the most successful female sniper in military history. 

8. Mithridates 6th was so paradoxical of being poisoned that he took a small dosage of poison all over his life to build up his immunity. When the Romans finally captured him, he tried to kill himself with poison, but he failed because he was already immune to it.

9. The dancing plague (or dance epidemic) of 1518 was a case of dancing mania that occurred in Strasbourg when a woman known as Frau Troffea walked into the street and began to whirl, twist, and shake silently. She had kept her solo dance-a-thon up for almost a week, and some three-dozen other Strasbourgeois had joined her. By August the epidemic of dancing had claimed as many as 400 victims. Many of them collapsed from exhaustion and Some even died from strokes and heart attacks. The dancing plague lasted more than a month, from mid-July to late August or early September.

Hope you liked it.