20 Historical Events That You Don’t Expect To Have Transpired Simultaneously Within The Same Timeline
Einstein said that time is relative, and if you look back at history it might surprise you to realise that certain events took place at the same time. For example, the last execution by guillotine during the French Revolution took place in 1977, at the same time when George Lucas’ much-acclaimed Star Wars movies first came out.
It’s mind-boggling when you try to put things in perspective according to the different events that have occurred in different parts of the world yet at the same time. However, u/Cuish , inspired a slew of answers to roll in on AskReddit when they asked the community, “What other things oddly existed at the same time?” Scroll below for some of the most interesting answers received in response.
#1 Frozen came out the same year Mississippi officially abolished slavery.
#2 My favourite that I’ve seen: When Harvard opened, they didn’t have calculus classes because calculus hadn’t been invented yet.
#3 Oxford University celebrated its 200th graduating class by the time the Aztec Empire started in Central America.
#4 The last execution by guillotine occurred on September 10th, 1977.
The Atari 2600, the first successful home video game console, released the very next day. In a sense, the boundary separating the “era of guillotines” and the “era of video games” is less than 24 hours. It’s basically a fine line with no overlap.
#5
People walked on the moon before we put wheels on a suitcase
#6 In 1922, Betty White and the Ottoman Empire both existed.
#7 The last mammoths lived at the time the pyramids were under construction.
#8 I watched the first moon landing with a woman who’d been in Paris for Lindbergh’s first transcontinental flight landing.
Edit: wow this blew up! And my first award!! Trippy, thanks—and I owe it all to Mrs. B.
#9 Nintendo was founded when Jack the Ripper was roaming the streets of London.
#10
Women in Switzerland got right to vote in 1971 when India was already having a woman prime minister !
#11 The Qing Dynasty of China collapsed in 1912, the same year as the Titanic disaster.
#12 William Shakespeare and Pocahontas were alive at the same time.
#13 Pablo Picasso died the same year Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side Of The Moon” was released.
#14 The Titanic maiden voyage happened the same year as MDMA was created.
#15 The last surviving witness to the Lincoln assassination appeared on the TV game show I’ve Got a Secret several weeks before his death in 1954.
#16
Dmitri Shostakovich (major Russian composer who became huge in the 1920s) attended a performance of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Jesus Christ Superstar” in London, 1975. He actually loved it and watched it again the next day, claiming he wished he could’ve written something for a rock band.
#17 Samurai, the fax machine, and Abraham Lincoln all existed at the same time
#18 I always found it strange that Victorian England and the Wild West happened at the same time.
#19 Dali designed the Chupa Chups lollipop logo.
#20 Harriet Tubman was alive at the same time as both Thomas Jefferson and Ronald Reagan.
#21 Orville Wright of the Wright brothers lived long enough to see Chuck Yaeger break the sound barrier and travel on an airliner that had a wingspan equal to the distance he covered in his first flight (37m)
Shanilou Perera
Shanilou has always loved reading and learning about the world we live in. While she enjoys fictional books and stories just as much, since childhood she was especially fascinated by encyclopaedias and strangely enough, self-help books. As a kid, she spent most of her time consuming as much knowledge as she could get her hands on and could always be found at the library. Now, she still enjoys finding out about all the amazing things that surround us in our day-to-day lives and is blessed to be able to write about them to share with the whole world as a profession.
