Facts and overlaps
How come Cleopatra is closer to the iPhone than the pyramids?
Time plays funny tricks on people’s minds. For example, Cleopatra is closer to the iPhone than to the Great Pyramid of Giza. George Washington didn’t make it to the discovery of dinosaurs. Betty White was born before sliced bread even existed. These overlaps sound impossible, but they are real and there are many more. You’ll read about 10 mind-boggling facts that mess with your time perception and that will put history into perspective, one surprise at a time.
1 Cleopatra lived closer in time to the release of the iPhone than to the construction of the Great Pyramid
History textbooks tend to lump Cleopatra in with ancient Egypt as if she and the pyramid builders were practically neighbors sharing the same sandy landscape. The real timeline tells a very different story.
The Great Pyramid of Giza was completed around 2560 BCE, built for the pharaoh Khufu over roughly two decades. Cleopatra VII ruled and died in 30 BCE, roughly 2,530 years after the pyramid was finished. Now here’s the real mind-boggling fact: The first iPhone launched in June 2007, about 2,037 years after Cleopatra's death. Do the math, and Cleopatra actually sits nearly five centuries closer in time to your iPhone than to the ancient monument most people automatically associate her with. She rode camels and sailed the Nile, and she never once laid eyes on a pyramid actually under construction.
2 George Washington never knew dinosaurs existed
It’s easy to think people have learned about dinosaurs and the meteorite that extinguished them, forever. But the discovery of dinosaur fossils is so recent that George Washington didn’t get to hear about them before dying.
Washington died at Mount Vernon on December 14, 1799, after a lifetime spent building a brand-new nation. It was not until 1824 that British geologist William Buckland formally described Megalosaurus, the first dinosaur ever scientifically named, based on fossilized jawbones found in an English quarry. That means the man whose face appears on the dollar bill missed the entire concept of dinosaurs by a full 25 years. Every founding father lived and died in a world that had no idea such creatures ever roamed the earth.
3 The last Civil War pensioner died in 2020
The Civil War seems to belong to a completely different generation, to black and white photographs and dusty textbooks. Yet a direct link to that war lasted long enough to overlap with smartphones and streaming television.
Irene Triplett, born on January 9, 1930, in Wilkes County, North Carolina, received a monthly pension check of $73.13 from the Department of Veterans Affairs right up until she passed away on May 31, 2020, at the age of 90. Her father, Mose Triplett, had enlisted with the Confederacy before deserting to fight for the Union, and he was 83 years old when Irene was born to his much younger second wife. Her death finally closed a chapter of American history that had somehow reached quietly into the modern era.
4 Betty White was older than sliced bread
Ask anyone what Betty White represented, and they will probably say she felt like she had always been around, cheerful and constant through decades of television, from radio in the 1940s to The Golden Girls to Saturday Night Live in her 80s.
Betty White was born on January 17, 1922, in Oak Park, Illinois. Sliced bread did not exist anywhere yet. The first automatic bread-slicing machine debuted at a bakery in Chillicothe, Missouri, on July 7, 1928, built by inventor Otto Frederick Rohwedder after years of setbacks. For the first six years of her life, every single loaf sold in America came whole, and home cooks sliced their own bread by hand with a kitchen knife.
5 Marilyn Monroe and Queen Elizabeth II Were the Same Age
Marilyn Monroe was a symbol of glamorous eternal youth, while Queen Elizabeth II was the picture of steady aging royalty. They seem to belong entirely to different eras of history. In reality, they were the same age.
Elizabeth was born on April 21, 1926, at her grandparents’ home in London, and Marilyn, born Norma Jeane Mortenson in Los Angeles, arrived just weeks later on June 1, 1926. The two women even crossed paths in person in October 1956, at a royal film premiere in London for The Battle of the River Plate , both turning 30 that very same year. One would go on to sit on a throne for seven remarkable decades, while the other became a Hollywood legend who died far too young at just 36.
6 Humans landed on the Moon only 66 years after the Wright brothers' first controlled flight
Think about how far technology has come in just the last few decades of your own life, then consider that this particular leap happened even faster than that.
On December 17, 1903, Orville Wright flew the first powered, controlled aircraft for a mere 12 seconds over the windswept dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, while his brother Wilbur watched. Just 66 years later, on July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 touched down on the surface of the Moon, and Neil Armstrong stepped onto its dusty ground as the world watched on television. Someone born in the very year of that first fragile flight could have lived long enough to watch astronauts walk on another world, all within one single human lifetime spanning wood and canvas to rockets.
7 Trains were invented before bicycles
It seems completely backwards that something as complicated as a steam engine existed before something as simple as a bicycle, yet that is exactly what happened.
Richard Trevithick, a Cornish engineer, built and demonstrated the first high-pressure steam locomotive between 1802 and 1804, hauling iron and curious passengers along tramway rails in Wales. The bicycle as we would recognize it today did not appear until 1885, when English inventor John Kemp Starley introduced his safety bicycle design, featuring two same-sized wheels, a chain drive, and rear-wheel steering that finally made cycling practical. For more than eight decades, a person could ride a train across the countryside long before anyone could safely pedal a proper bike down the street.
8 The Great Pyramid was older to the Romans than the Romans are to us
Ancient Rome feels impossibly distant, the kind of history reserved for museum plaques, old movies, and half-remembered lessons from high school. Yet when Roman soldiers marched past the pyramids of Egypt, those monuments were already unthinkably old to them too.
The Great Pyramid of Giza was completed around 2560 BCE, during Egypt's Old Kingdom. Octavian became Emperor Augustus in 27 BCE, marking the formal start of the Roman Empire, which was roughly 2,530 years after the pyramid had already been standing. From that founding moment to today is only about 2,050 years. In other words, the pyramid was older news to an average Roman citizen than the entire Roman Empire is to us sitting here right now.
9 The guillotine was still France's official execution method when Star Wars was released
Star Wars conjures images of the future, of laser blasters and galaxies far, far away, so it feels strange to link it with something as medieval-sounding as the guillotine. But the timing lines up almost exactly.
Star Wars: Episode IV, A New Hope , premiered in United States theaters on May 25, 1977, becoming an instant cultural phenomenon. Just over three months later, on September 10, 1977, a Tunisian man named Hamida Djandoubi became the last person executed by guillotine in France, put to death at a Marseille prison for murder. France did not formally abolish capital punishment until 1981. That same year, Star Wars hit theaters; moviegoers across America were imagining hyperspace travel while an execution method from the French Revolution was still legally on the books overseas.
10 When the Chicago Cubs won the 1908 World Series, the Ottoman Empire still existed
Any lifelong Cubs fan knows the pain of waiting decades between championships, but think back to their last title before 2016, and the whole world looks almost unrecognizable.
On October 14, 1908, the Cubs beat the Detroit Tigers to win their second straight World Series. That same autumn, Sultan Abdul Hamid II still ruled the Ottoman Empire from Constantinople, the Austro-Hungarian Empire controlled much of Central Europe, and Tsar Nicholas II sat firmly on the Russian throne. Back home, Arizona and New Mexico were still years away from becoming states. The Cubs would not win another championship until 2016, and by the time they finally did, every single one of those old empires had already crumbled off the map entirely, along with the world that produced them.
