High school was hard enough, what with all the video games and boobies to distract us from our homework. What makes it even harder is having to unlearn all of the stuff they taught us in elementary school that turned out to be utter bullshit.
To this day you can even hear some adults repeating these "amazing" historical tales that, years ago, somebody just pulled out of their ass:
#5.Columbus Discovered the Earth is Round
The story we heard:
In 1492, a Spanish ponce by the name of Christopher Columbus won his long-standing feud with the monarchy and the Catholic church to get funding for a voyage to East Asia. They were afraid that he would fail spectacularly, because everybody knew that the Earth was a flat disc, and the direction Columbus was sailing in would cause him to fall off the edge and into the mouth of the giant turtle that supported it.
Columbus, as we were told, did fail to reach his destination, but not because the world was flat--it was because he crashed into the future greatest nation on Earth, baby! Thus, Columbus proved the world was round, discovered America, and a national holiday was born.
The truth:
In the 1400s, the flat-earth theory was taken about as seriously as the Time Cube theory is today, if not less so. The shape of the world has been pretty much settled since the orb theory was first proposed by the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, around 2,000 years before the existence of Spain.
In fact, the navigational techniques of Columbus' time were actually based on the fact that the Earth was a sphere. Trying to navigate the globe as if it was a flat plane would have fucked up the trip even more than it was.
The Spanish government's reluctance to pay for Columbus' expeditions didn't have anything to do with their misconceptions about the shape of the world. Ironically, it was because Columbus himself severely underestimated the size of the Earth and everybody knew it. The distance he planned to travel wouldn't have taken him anywhere near Asia. Nevertheless, he eventually scraped together enough funds to embark on his ridiculous adventure, and the clusterfuck that was the Columbus voyage has been celebrated annually in the Americas and in Spain ever since.
So where did the myth come from? It began with author and historical charlatan Washington Irving, who wrote a novel about Columbus in 1838. The novel was fiction, but some elements managed to creep into our history textbooks anyway, probably by some editors who wanted to spice it up a bit. Who's going to read a history book that's just filled with a bunch of boring shit anyway?
See the rest here
3 comments:
Ha! I swear, these Cracked.com lists are getting better and better. Here's my favorite line:
"Another great American hero to whom many seem to attribute mutant superpowers is Ben Franklin, the scientist and statesman whose inventions included bifocal spectacles, the urinary catheter and freedom."
Oh yeah! I should also mention that Amos the mouse from that Disney short Ben and Me was the basis for one of my many imaginary friends. Eventually I was so determined to imaginarily befriend every cartoon character I liked I actually imagined them being squished against the walls of my house due to their sheer numbers. Not kidding!
Wow, didn't think there was too much I didn't know about Octo.
Yet somehow all the cartoon characters squished against our walls remained a mystery.
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