25 Historical facts That Will Haunt You?

1. An entire factory crew happily worked with radium in the '20s – and most of them died horrifically of radiation poisoning not very long after.

When radium was first discovered, people didn’t realize how dangerous it was for a tragically long time. Its impressive glow-in-the-dark properties made it popular for use in paints, and many female factory workers were hired by the United States Radium Corporation to use it to paint watch dials (a coveted and well-paid job for women at the time). They were obviously unaware of the lethal properties of radium, and part of their job was to sharpen the point of their paintbrush with their teeth – ingesting the poisonous paint as they went. They would even sometimes mess around and paint their skin, teeth, and nails for fun. Years later most of the workers suffered terrible radiation-related ailments like decaying teeth, crumbling bones, and spines that crushed under their own weight.

2. In the 18th century, a woman actually convinced doctors that she was giving birth to rabbits.

Mary Toft reportedly ‘gave birth’ to up to nine of the fluffy creatures at a time! Doctors were convinced that she was telling the truth until they found pieces of corn inside the stomach of one of the rabbits, proving that it hadn’t developed inside Toft’s womb. It turned out that she had been manually inserting the rabbits to make the ‘delivery’ look as realistic as possible. Ew.

3. Until very recently it was believed that babies couldn’t feel pain, so often had operations done on them without any anaesthesia.

Doctors would instead use muscle relaxers that had a paralytic effect to stop the baby from moving. This meant that while they couldn’t move or cry while they were being operated on they could still see, hear, and feel everything that was done to them. The belief that infants under the age of 15 months couldn’t feel pain was largely accepted until the late 1980s.

4. In the 13th century, Genghis Khan killed so many peasants that the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were significantly reduced as a result.

During his 21-year reign, Genghis Khan’s destructive armies were responsible for the deaths of up to 40 million people. While his intentions for the massacres were anything but pure, with nobody left to farm the lands owned by the peasants they were eventually allowed to grow back into carbon-absorbing forests. It’s estimated that 700m tons of carbon were wiped from the atmosphere – around the same amount of carbon dioxide generated in a year through global petrol consumption!