The Roman-Persian wars are the longest in history, lasting over 680 years. They began in 54 BC and ended in 628 AD.
100 Mind-Blowing Years Facts
An Italian banker, Gilberto Baschiera, is considered a modern-day Robin Hood. Over 7 years, he secretly diverted 1 million euros to poorer clients from the wealthy ones so they could qualify for loans. He made no profit and avoided jail in 2018 due to a plea bargain.
Apple paid a couple of 1.7 million dollars for their plot of land, which was only worth $181,700. While Apple was building a huge data centre in the middle of North Carolina, they wanted to occupy the area of a couple that had lived there for 34 years. When the couple refused to leave, Apple paid them 1.7 million dollars for their land.
The youngest Pope in history was Pope Benedict IX, who was either 11 or 20 years old when he was elected in 1032. He is also the only person to have been the Pope more than once.
When mice live in the wild, they typically only live for about six months. This is mostly because they’re a good source of food for other animals. However, in a controlled environment, like being kept as a pet, they can live up to two years.
For nearly 60 years, Texas didn’t have an official state flag between 1879 & 1933. During that time, the Lone Star flag was active, but the unofficial flag.
The Ethiopian calendar is 7.5 years behind the Gregorian calendar because it has 13 months.
I Will Always Love You was originally written and recorded in 1973 by Dolly Parton. It was written as a farewell to her mentor of seven years.
Since 1955, 50% of the population of Niger is consistently under 16 years old. The total current population is 21,600,000.
The oldest unopened bottle of wine was found in a Roman tomb that is over 1,650 years old.
By the time they have been retired for 2 years, 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress because of joblessness or divorce.
Norway has a 25-year statute of limitation on murder. This means if the murder happened more than 25 years ago, they cannot be charged.
There is a village in Russia called Tsovkra where every resident can tightrope walk. It is a tradition that dates back over 100 years, but no one knows how it started.
The Guinness World Record for the longest time spent searching for the Loch Ness Monster is held by Steve Feltham, who camped at Loch Ness for 25 years.
Pope Francis has been given many extravagant gifts over the years, and one of them was a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. However, rather than keeping it for his pleasure and adventures, he sold it off and used the money to benefit homeless people.
Mount Rushmore cost less than one million dollars to construct. It took 14 years to build – from 1927 to 1941 and took 400 workers.
An 18-year-old with dwarfism played the 8-year-old Grinch in The Grinch (2000). He passed away two years after the film was released.
Webster’s Dictionary accidentally had a word that didn’t exist in it for five years – “Dord.”
The British Pound is the world’s oldest currency still in use at 1,200 years old. The pound has been an identity as a symbol of British sovereignty.
All the paint on the Eiffel Tower weighs the same as ten elephants. It gets repainted every seven years without closing to the public.
In 1992, a shipping crate containing 28,000 rubber duckies fell overboard. They washed up around the world for the next 20 years.
It took Uranus 84 years to orbit the Sun once.
Ant queens can live for up to 30 years.
A woman was elected to the House of Representatives four years before women even won the right to vote.
The Vatican had music that was forbidden to be copied and was only played twice per year. It was secret for almost 150 years until a 14-year-old Mozart heard it and transcribed it from memory.
Every 10 years, the human skeleton repairs and renews itself. Essentially, you have different bones now than you did 10 years ago!
For almost 15 years, Vermont was technically its own country before joining the United States in 1791. It had its own coins and postal service.
There exists a plankton, Dinoflagellates, which, if consumed, reverses your feeling of hot and cold – as well as hallucinations. Symptoms can last from weeks to years.
There was a snail glued to a specimen card in the British Museum mid-1800s. It spent four years glued there before scientists realized it was still alive.
A snail can sleep for 3 years.
The average life expectancy of a toucan is a very impressive 20 years.
Jupiter completes a rotation of the Sun every 11.86 years.
Alexander Hamilton was shot and mortally wounded by Aaron Burr on the same spot where his son had been killed 3 years before and by the same set of pistols.
Because of its unique tilt, a single night on Uranus lasts for 21 years.
There is such an expansive collection of books in the British Library in their archive that if a person could read 5 books per day, it would take 80,000 years to complete.
Einstein’s brain went missing when he died in 1955 and was lost for 23 years. The doctor who worked on his autopsy stole it and kept it in a hidden cider box.
Arizona driver’s licenses don’t expire until you’re 65. You then have to renew in person every five years.
The age of the Universe is estimated to be 13.7 billion years. The oldest stars in the Milky Way, found in globular clusters, are 13.6 billion years old.
The costume designers for The Lord of the Rings worked for two straight years making custom armour. Just one Orc suit had 13,000 rings and took 3 days to make.
Intentionally farting on a California prison guard can get you an additional 11 years in prison.
The radio took 38 years to reach a market audience of 50 million. The television took 13 years, and the iPod only took 3 years to reach a market audience of 50 million.
The Green Lantern debuted in 1940, making the Lantern’s first debut only two years after Superman’s.
The television was invented only two years after the invention of sliced bread.
In 1911, Bobby Leach was the 2nd person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. He died 15 years later from slipping on an orange peel and getting gangrene.
The Triangle took nearly 100 years to become a popular orchestral instrument.
Earth’s rotation is changing speed. It’s slowing. This means that, on average, the length of a day increases by around 1.8 seconds per century. 600 million years ago a day lasted just 21 hours.
All the world’s bacteria stacked on top of each other would stretch for 10 billion light-years. Together, Earth’s 0.001mm-long microbes could wrap around the Milky Way over 20,000 times.
The world’s oldest dog lived to 29.5 years old. While the median age a dog reaches tends to be about 10-15 years, one Australian cattle dog, ‘Bluey’, survived to the ripe old age of 29.5.
The world’s oldest cat lived to 38 years and three days old. Creme Puff was the oldest cat to ever live.
Earth’s poles are moving. This magnetic reversal of the North and South Pole has happened 171 times in the past 71 million years. We’re overdue a flip. It could come soon, as the North Pole is moving at around 55 kilometres per year, an increase over the 15km per year up until 1990.
Football teams wearing red kits play better. The colour of your clothes can affect how you’re perceived by others and change how you feel. A review of football matches in the last 55 years, for example, showed that teams wearing a red kit consistently played better in home matches than teams in any other colour.
Finland is the happiest country on Earth. According to the World Happiness Report, it has been for six years in a row. It’s not surprising, given that Finland is the home of Santa Claus, reindeer and one sauna for every 1.59 people.
There’s a planet mostly made from diamonds. Called 55 Cancrie, it’s around twice the size of Earth and some 40 light-years away from us within the Cancer constellation.
The Moon is shrinking. But only very slightly – by about 50m (164ft) in radius over the last several hundred million years. Mysterious seismic activity, known as moonquakes, could be to blame.
Earth is 4.54 billion years old. Using radiometric dating, scientists have discovered that the Earth is 4.54 billion years old (give or take 50 million years). This makes our planet half the age of the Milky Way Galaxy (11-13 billion years old) and around a third of the age of the Universe (10-15 billion years old).
Electrons might live forever. Scientists have estimated the minimum lifetime of the electron is about 6.6 × 1028 years – this is 66,000 ‘yottayears’. Since this is about 5 quintillion times the age of the Universe, even if electrons don’t live forever, they may as well do!
The average dinosaur lifespan was surprisingly small. The Tyrannosaurus rex, for example, reached full size between 16-22 years old and lived up until 27-33. The largest dinosaurs such as the Brontosaurus and Diplodocus tended to live up to between 39-53 years old, maybe reaching the height of 70.
Glass sponges can live for 15,000 years. This makes them one of the longest-living organisms on Earth. The immortal jellyfish, however, could theoretically live forever (but scientists aren’t sure)
You can see stars as they were 4,000 years ago with the naked eye. Without a telescope, all the stars we can see lie within about 4,000 light-years of us. That means at most you’re seeing stars as they were 4,000 years ago, around when the pyramids were being built in Egypt.
Plants came before seeds. According to the fossil record, early plants resembled moss and reproduced with single-celled spores. Multicellular seeds didn’t evolve for another 150 million years.
Laughing came before language. How do we know? Some researchers tickled baby apes, which, beyond being adorable, showed that they share the same structure as ours and likely arose in our common ancestors millions of years ago. Language came about much later.
Pineapples take two years to grow.
In 2019, scientists discovered the world’s oldest known work of art on an Indonesian Island called Sulawesi. It was created 44,000 years ago.
The longest-reigning monarch ever was Louis XIV of France. He ruled for 72 years, 110 days. Exhausting.
The median age of the world’s population is around 30 years, as of 2019.
The Earth is 147.2 million kilometres away from the Sun, and it’s about 4.5 billion years old. That’s some serious heritage.
Finland has been ranked as the happiest country in the world for 7 years straight.
According to Pollstar’s 40th-anniversary edition in 2022, the top three touring acts by number of tickets sold in those 40 years of charting the live entertainment industry are U2, the Dave Matthews Band and The Rolling Stones, in that order.
National Puzzle Day, which takes place on January 29, was started by puzzle enthusiast Jodi Jill over 25 years ago. In 2023, over seven million people around the world shared their love of puzzles online.
2024 marks 25 years of the Pokémon trading card game. Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) said it’s seen a spike in demand across sports cards and all categories of collectables, so it might be a timely moment to sell your Pokémon collection.
The earliest evidence of humans eating oatmeal dates to more than 30,000 years ago, according to Britannica.
Merriam-Webster named “authentic” the word of the year for 2023, which saw a notable uptick in lookups compared to previous years.
The world’s oldest wooden wheel has been around for more than 5,000 years. It was found in 2002, approximately 12 miles south of Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, and is now housed in the city’s museum. Radiocarbon dating was used to determine the wheel’s age, which is somewhere between 5,100 and 5,350 years old.
The world’s first animated feature film was made in Argentina. Even if you know a lot of Disney trivia, you might assume that the honour of the first animated feature film belongs to Walt Disney’s 1937 movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. But 20 years earlier, a full-length animated feature film was made in Argentina. It was a political satire called El Apóstol made up of 58,000 drawings and had a running time of 70 minutes, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.
Marla Gibbs continued to work as a flight attendant for two years after being cast on a hit TV show. Before taking her place on the stoop of 227, Marla Gibbs played the housekeeper Florence on The Jeffersons (a spin-off of All in the Family). In a 2015 interview, Gibbs told the Washington Post that despite it appearing as though she had gotten her big break, she kept her job as a flight attendant for American Airlines for two more years—just to be safe.
Thanks to 3D printing, NASA can email tools to astronauts. Getting new equipment to the Space Station used to take months or years, but the new technology means the tools are ready within hours.
There were active volcanoes on the moon when dinosaurs were alive. Most of the volcanoes probably stopped erupting about a billion years ago, but NASA findings have suggested there might still have been active lava flow 100 million years ago when dinosaurs were still roaming.
Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ron Wayne started Apple Inc. on April Fools’ Day. The three technology innovators signed the documents to form the Apple Computer Company on April 1, 1976. However, the company was not fully incorporated until January 3, 1977. Thirty years later, the company was renamed Apple Inc. and is no joke. In 2018, Apple became the country’s first trillion-dollar company. Of course, computers have come a long way over the years—here’s what computers looked like the decade you were born.
The French-language Scrabble World Champion doesn’t speak French. New Zealand native Nigel Richards memorized the entire French Scrabble dictionary, which has 386,000 words, in nine weeks to earn his title. He has also won the English World Scrabble Championship three times, the U.S. national championships five times, and the U.K. Open Scrabble tournament six times. This comes 20 years after 28-year-old Richards first played the game.
Adult cats are lactose intolerant. Like some humans, adult cats don’t have enough the lactase enzyme to digest lactose from milk, causing them to vomit, have diarrhea, or get gassy. Cats only have enough of that enzyme when they’re born and during the early years of their lives.
Ice pops were invented by an 11-year-old by accident. In 1905, an 11-year-old boy named Frank Epperson left soda powder and water outside overnight with its wooden stirrer still in the cup. The mixture had frozen in the chilly nighttime weather, and so the Epsicle was born. He sold the treat around his neighbourhood and a nearby amusement park and even patented the recipe. Years later, he changed the name to Popsicle because that’s what his kids called their pop’s concoction.
People used to say “prunes” instead of “cheese” when having their pictures taken. In the 1840s, a big—dare we say, cheesy—grin was seen as childish, so one London photographer told people to say “prunes” to keep their mouths taut. And that look predated today’s “fish face” selfie by, oh, about 180 years.
Adolf Hitler was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Don’t worry, the Swedish politician who sent the letter of nomination in 1939 meant it ironically and withdrew his nomination. In an even more ironic twist, Hitler had banned Germans from accepting the awards four years before his name was thrown in the ring.
The Statue of Liberty used to be a lighthouse. About a month after the statue’s 1886 dedication, it became a working lighthouse for 16 years, with its torch visible from 24 miles away.
The Eiffel Tower took exactly 2 years, 2 months, and 5 days to create. There are many stunning places in France. The Eiffel Tower, one of the most recognizable structures in the world, took a long time to make. Over two years!
Amy Poehler was only seven years older than Rachel McAdams when she took on the role of “cool mom” in Mean Girls. Rachel was 25 as Regina George – and Amy was 32 as her mum.
KFC is the meal of choice on Christmas Day in Japan. This happened following a successful marketing campaign over 40 years ago.
The Caesar salad recently turned 100 years old. It was invented in July 1924 by Caesar Cardini, an Italian chef who owned a restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico.
The oldest verified man ever is Jiroemon Kimura (1897–2013) of Japan, who lived to the age of 116 years and 54 days.
Tomato ketchup was used as medicine for 16 years. Whether you love it or hate it, this condiment once had a place in the world beyond hotdogs. However, you’d be surprised to know that ketchup only had tomatoes in it starting in 1834. Before, ketchup was made with a mix of fish and mushrooms. When Dr John Cooke Bennet added tomatoes to the mix, he claimed that the antioxidants gave it a medicinal property. He had a pill salesman turn his tomato ketchup into pills and claimed it could treat diarrhoea, indigestion, jaundice, and rheumatism.
A snail can sleep for three years. Aside from their shocking number of teeth, these small critters have some more astonishing tricks up their sleeve. Nap time for a snail can last from a few hours up to 3 years.
A musician named Jim Sullivan mysteriously disappeared 6 years after recording an album called “U.F.O.“ The 1969 album featured strange lyrics about leaving his family and being abducted by aliens. Sullivan disappeared six years later with only his abandoned car found on a desert road in New Mexico as evidence.
If you make $1 every second, it will take you 2,921 years to be richer than Bill Gates. At a net worth of US$110 million, Microsoft founder Bill Gates consistently topped the world’s richest billionaires for 18 years. He was dethroned only recently by the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos.
The Big Ben in London is leaning so much that the incline is visible to the naked eye. Weathering has not been kind to the Big Ben. Experts estimate that it will have the same incline as the Leaning Tower of Pisa in 4,000 years.
Australia has the most beaches in the world. A fun fact for beach lovers: at 10,000 beaches, you can visit one new beach in Australia every day for more than 27 years.
The national animal of Scotland is the Unicorn. One of the fun facts that’ll make you feel like we’re pulling your leg: the unicorn is officially Scotland’s national animal. The unicorn is the Celtic symbol of purity, innocence, masculinity, and power. Because people believed they were real for around 2,500 years, there’s no wonder why the official coat of arms of the United Kingdom features a unicorn.
Alaska had a cat mayor. Another interesting fun fact: The Alaskan town of Talkeetna had a cat as mayor for 20 years. You read that right – this feline was affectionately called Stubbs (for his lack of a tail) and served as the town mayor from 1997 to 2017. Stubbs didn’t have to do much official business, since the little town was merely a historic district and tourist spot.
A seaman once set a ship on fire to get out of work early. One of the “don’t-try-this-at-home” fun facts: A civil employee once started a fire that ravaged the nuclear submarine USS Miami which was docked at a Naval Shipyard. Though the cause of the fire was unclear at first, civilian employee Casey J. Fury soon admitted to starting the fire for an early dismissal from work. Fury was sentenced to 17 years in federal prison and ordered to pay $400 million in damages.
78% of NFL players undergo a financial crisis by 2 years of retirement. Upon retiring for 2 years, a majority of former NFL players undergo bankruptcy or financial crisis. The main culprits? Unemployment and divorce.
There’s a plankton that reverses your feeling of hot and cold. Dinoflagellates are marine plankton that can alter as well as hallucinations. These trippy symptoms can last from weeks up to years.