Read an Excerpt

Useless Knowledge

Answers to Questions You'd Never Think to Ask

St. Martin's Press

The USELESS School of World History

It's true. No matter how many important names or dates you've memorized, Useless History Replacement Therapy works wonders at eliminating all of them.

You've heard about the lost continent of Atlantis, but how about the lost state of Franklin? It was formed just after the American Revolution in 1784. It elected a governor, levied taxes, and enacted laws, but now it's been forgotten. Which is good — because this chapter is full of stuff that should be forgotten! Sure, everybody remembers that Thomas Edison invented the modern lightbulb — but hey, what about the inventor of the modern flush toilet? It was none other than Thomas Crapper.

War buffs will appreciate the fact that Hitler had a square mustache — because his favorite comedian, Charlie Chaplin, had a square mustache. Even Colin Powell may not know that the shortest conflict on record was not the Gulf War, but the war between Britain and Zanzibar in 1896, which lasted just 38 minutes.

Oh, yes, if you've got snotty friends who attended Harvard or Yale, now tell them what cheap schools they actually went to. When Elihu Yale donated $2,500 to the Collegiate School, its name suddenly became Yale University. And when John Harvard contributed $3,500 and a little library to Cambridge College, it immediately mutated into Harvard University. That's right: history is filled with important lessons and dates. Hopefully, we've avoided all of them!

A survey disclosed that 12 percent of Americans believe that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. Hopefully, you're not one of them!

Course 101: Rome and the Caesar Salad

• The word trivia derives from the Latin tri + via, which translates as "three streets." As a major public service in Roman times, at the intersection of three streets, there was a kind of kiosk where further info was posted for travelers. Apparently these data were so useless that citizens often ignored them entirely: thus, they were truly bits of "trivia."

• In Rome, the world's first paved streets were laid out in 170 B.C. The new streets were popular, as they were functional in all types of weather and were easy to keep clean, but they amplified the city's noise level.

• Julius Caesar banned all wheeled vehicles from Rome during daylight hours because of heavy traffic congestion.

Roman gladiators, as a result of their immense public appeal, gave commercial product endorsements.

• The Roman emperor Nero married his male slave Sporus in a public ceremony, while Emperor Caligula was so proud of his horse that he gave the animal a place as a senate consul before he died!

• Thousands of years before the WWF, the emperor Commodus gathered all the dwarfs, cripples, and freaks his guards could locate around Rome and had them dragged over to the Colosseum. There they were all given meat cleavers and commanded to hack each other to death.

Roman statues were made with detachable heads, so that one head could be removed and replaced by another.

• The word decimate came into being from motivational techniques employed by Roman commanders. Whenever a legion performed dismally during combat, every tenth soldier was killed. The Latin for this process is decimare, stemming from decimus, or "tenth."

• In the Roman Republic of 500 B.C., the senate could appoint a supreme national commander for a limited time during periods of emergency. While in charge, his word was law. His title in Latin meant "I have spoken." The title was "dictator."

From the early Roman Empire until eighteenth-century Europe and America, urine was a main ingredient in toothpaste, because the ammonia in it is an excellent cleaner. Ammonia is still a main ingredient in many types of toothpaste.

• The word testimony came from men in Roman times taking an oath before the court that they were telling the truth. To insure their statements were accurate, they swore on their testicles.

While Rome ruled the world, Jesus Christ, son of Mary, was born in a cave, not in a wooden stable. Caves were used to house animals because they retained heat. A large church is now built over the cave, and people can go inside. The carpenters of Jesus' day were really stonecutters as wood was not used as widely as it is today. So whenever you see a Christmas nativity scene with a wooden stable, that's the "American" version, not the Biblical one.

GETTING THE LEAD OUT

Lead poisoning has been blamed for contributing to the fall of the Roman Empire. Women became infertile by drinking wine from vessels whose lead had dissolved in the wine, and the Roman upper classes died out within a couple centuries. The Romans used lead as a sweetening agent and as a cure for diarrhea. It added up to massive self-inflicted poisoning.

Course 107: Mummy Dearest

• The exalted pharaoh Ramses II fathered over 160 kids. To immortalize this achievement, the Ramses brand of condoms bears his name.

• Cleopatra was part Macedonian, part Greek, and part Iranian. She was not Egyptian.

• In ancient Egypt, when a woman's husband was convicted of a crime, she and her children were punished as well. They were usually enslaved.

The bandaging of a mummy took from 6 to 8 months. It required a collection of special tools, including a long metal hook that was used to draw the dead person's brains out through his nose.

• One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World was a lighthouse, the famous Pharos of Alexandria in Egypt. Pharos was the first lighthouse in history, and is still the tallest on record. (It was 450 feet high — about the size of a 45-story skyscraper.)

• Ancient robbers of Egyptian tombs were convinced that whacking off the noses of stone effigies would thwart any nasty curses.

• Better than Minoxydil? According to Greek historian Herodotus, Egyptian men never became bald. The reason was that, as children, males had their heads shaved, and their scalps were continually exposed to the health-giving rays of the sun.

The ancient Egyptians worshiped a sky goddess called Nut.

• In 1500 B.C. in Egypt, a shaved head was considered the ultimate in feminine beauty. Egyptian women removed every hair from their heads with special gold tweezers and polished their scalps to a high sheen with buffing cloths.

• In ancient Egypt, when merchants left the country on business trips, they carried small stone models of themselves. If they died while abroad, these figures were sent back to Egypt for proxy burial. Considering the cost of present-day funerals, this seems like a pretty good idea!

Birth-control campaigns in Egypt in the late 1970s failed because village women ended up wearing the pills in lockets, as talismans.

IT'S A WRAP!

Although the early Egyptians were the most famous mummy makers, they were not exactly the first to practice this now-long-dead art. An extremely advanced fishing tribe known as the Chinchoros, who inhabited the north coast of what is present-day Chile, were wrapping up their ex-tribesmen from head to toe as early as 5000 B.C. — way before the pharoahs!

Course 118: It's Greek to Me

• In ancient Greece, prostitutes wore sandals with nails studded into the soles so that their footprints would leave the message "Follow me."

• Florida officials should take note: officials of ancient Greece decreed that mollusk shells be used as ballots, because once a vote was scratched on the shell, it couldn't be erased or altered.

• A temple of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, was discovered coincidentally by American archaeologist Iris C. Love.

Groundhog Day owes its true origins to the ancient Greeks, who believed that an animal's shadow was its soul, blackened by the past year's sins. While the animal hibernates, its soul is cleansed by nature, and if it wakes up before winter is over, it will see the dirty shadow and be horrified and then return to its den for more purification.

• In ancient Greece, women counted their age from the date on which they were married, not from the date of their birth — a tradition many women appear to follow today.

• Oddly, in ancient Greece no term existed for homosexuality — there were only some expressions referring to specific homosexual roles. Experts find this baffling, as the old Greek culture held love between males in the highest regard. According to several linguists, the word homosexual was not coined until 1869 by the Hungarian physician Karoly Maria Benkert.

Greek conqueror Alexander the Great ordered his entire army to shave their faces and heads. He believed beards and long hair were too easy for an enemy to grab in order to decapitate his victim.

THE TALIBAN WOULD HAVE APPROVED

Married women were forbidden by law to watch, let alone compete, in the ancient Olympics. The Greeks believed that the presence of wives in Olympia would defile Greece's oldest religious shrine, which was located there. However, young maidens were allowed to attend. Any married woman who dared break the rule was thrown from a nearby cliff to her death.

Ironically, the shrine that was off-limits to married women was dedicated to a woman, the fertility goddess Rhea, who was mother of the supreme god, Zeus.

Course 192: Medieval (or Just Evil) Times

• After his death in 896, the body of Pope Formosus was dug up and tried for various crimes.

• During the Renaissance artists could not depict woman's toes or bare feet in their paintings. This way, they were spared any "callous" remarks from critics.

Renaissance artist Michelangelo's last name was Buonarroti, which he obviously never used.

• The men who served as guards along the Great Wall of China in the Middle Ages often were born on the wall, grew up there, married there, died there, and were buried within it. Many of these guards never left the wall in their entire lives.

• Much like today, in the Middle Ages, no one really trusted anyone else. As someone approached, to alleviate paranoia, he would hold out his open palm to show that he was not going to whack your head off with a sword. This gesture put everybody at ease, and eventually evolved into the modern custom known as the handshake.

• Back in the 1600s, thermometers were filled with brandy instead of mercury.

• The dread Black Plague in Europe was partially due to the belief that people thought cats were witches. Therefore, all the felines were hauled away and incinerated, which left the rats (who hosted the true culprits: plague-breeding fleas) to run around towns and villages and multiply. Ironically, cat lovers giving felines safe haven were a large part of those who survived.

• It is thought that the saying "pulling your leg" originated from the custom in the Middle Ages of hanging people in such a creative way that the victims often choked slowly and in agony. To put an end to their sufferings, pals or relatives of the suffocating victims would pull down hard on their legs in order to snap their necks.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, some people thought comets were the eggs or sperm of planetary systems.

• In Peking, during the Middle Ages, one took revenge against one's enemies by placing finely chopped tiger whiskers in their food. The whisker barbs would get caught in the victim's digestive tract and cause sores and infections. Not even the earliest forms of Pepto Bismal helped!

• When medieval clans wanted to downsize and dispose of unwanted folks without murdering them, they just burned their houses to the ground as a small hint. Thus the phrase "to get fired."

Public sanitation was at an all-time low during the Middle Ages. Garbage was piled up so high outside the city of Paris during the 1400s that it interfered with the city's defenses.

• In feudal Japan, the Imperial army had special soldiers whose only duty was to count the number of severed enemy heads after each battle. And if they came up with the wrong amount, heads would definitely roll!

During the Middle Ages, murdering a traveling musician was not considered a serious crime.

WOULD JERRY FALWELL APPROVE?

During the fifteenth century, Venice ordained that local Italian prostitutes should bare their breasts while soliciting at open windows overlooking the city's famous canals and walkways. The ruling was intended to separate the city's "professional" women from the general citizens, and also to encourage young men to purchase the prostitutes' wares and avoid the unspeakable sins of masturbation and homosexuality.

Course 158: Chris and Friends Set Sail

• Everybody knows that the first Spanish vessels to reach the New World were commanded by the Italian Christoforo Colombo (no relation to Peter Falk). But what about other nations? The first English vessels to reach the New World were commanded by the Italian Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot), and the first French vessels were commanded by the Italian Giovanni da Verrazano.

• The first gold brought back by Christopher Columbus from the Americas was used to gild the ceiling of the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. The ceiling and the gold are still there today.

• Christopher Columbus had blond hair.

• The Caribbean island of Nevis once issued a postage stamp depicting Christopher Columbus peering into a telescope. However, Columbus sailed to the Americas in 1492; the telescope wasn't invented until 1608.

Course 162: Ooh-La-La!

• In 1418, women's headgear was so tall that, on the orders of the queen, the doorways of the royal castle of Vincennes, France, were raised to allow the ladies of the court to pass through without ducking.

• In the court of French King Louis XI, the fine ladies lived mainly on soup because they believed that excessive chewing would cause them to develop premature facial wrinkles.

• Toward the latter part of the fifteenth century, men's footwear had a square tip resembling a duck's beak, a fashion trend started by Charles VIII to hide the deformity of one of his feet, which had an extra toe.

The shallow champagne glass originated with Marie Antoinette, from wax molds made of her breasts.

• Not that he was immature, but Napoleon concocted his battle strategies in a sandbox.

• In France, Napoleon instituted a scale of fines for sex offenses that included 35 francs for a man guilty of lifting a woman's skirt to the knee and 75 francs if he lifted it to the thigh.

• Napoleon Bonaparte was always depicted with his hand inside his jacket because he suffered from "chronic nervous itching" and often scratched his stomach sores until they bled.

One of Napoleon's drinking cups was made from the skull of the famous Italian adventurer Cagliostro.

Where's the Can Opener?

Napoleon appointed three scientists to create a device that would preserve rations for his troops as they attacked Russia. Their brainchild: canned food. In the French team was Louis Pasteur, the inventor of the pasteurization method. The technique they developed for canning is virtually the same process used today. Unfortunately, the scientists didn't also invent a can opener. So by relying on knives and bayonets to pierce the thick metal cans, many soldiers severely wounded themselves, some even cutting off a finger or two!

• Dentistry in eighteenth-century Paris was horribly barbaric. Louis XIV had teeth pulled so roughly by an overzealous dentist that when he tried to drink his soup, it cascaded out of his nose.

Sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi of France originally named his most famous work Liberty Enlightening the World. Bartholdi used his mother as the model for the statue's face — and his girlfriend as the model for her body. Smart!

Course 150: Those Crazy Colonials!

• Contrary to popular belief, Daniel Boone reportedly did not like coonskin caps.

• Do you think that the Vietnam War had a lot of draft dodgers? Only 16 percent of the able-bodied males in the thirteen original American colonies participated in the Revolutionary War.

• The name of the Pilgrims' second ship was the Speedwell. However, unlike the Mayflower, it had to turn back because it wasn't seaworthy.

• The typical woman living in seventeenth-century America gave birth to 13 youngsters. Benjamin Franklin, born in 1706, was his mom's 16th kid.

Benjamin Franklin was the proud owner of the very first bathtub in the colonies.

• Ben Franklin wanted the turkey, not the eagle, to be the U.S. national symbol. He considered the eagle a "bird of bad moral character" because it lives "by sharping and robbing."

• Benjamin Franklin slept in four beds every night. He had a theory that a warm bed sapped a man's vitality. So when one bed became too warm, Ben jumped into another.

John Hanson — not George Washington — was legally the first president of the United States. When Congress met in 1781, the country was governed by the Articles of Confederation, which were adopted in 1777 and ratified by the states in 1781. At that meeting, Congress elected John Hanson its "President of the U.S. in Congress assembled." After that, George Washington became the first president of the country under the U.S. Constitution in 1789.

• When delivering his famous "Farewell Address," Washington spoke through false teeth that were fashioned from whalebone.

• Speaking of choppers, Betsy Ross, the woman who designed and sewed the first American flag, had a completely developed set of teeth at birth.

• Betsy Ross also ran a munitions factory from her basement. Yet her biggest claim to fame may be that she is one of the only real people along with Daniel Boone, ever to be immortalized as a Pez head.

---

Excerpted from Useless Knowledge by Joe Edelman, David Samson. Copyright © 2002 Joe Edelman and David Samson. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---