The Archive of Fake Facts

Napoleon was about 1.69 m (roughly 5 ft 6½ in), which was average or slightly above for a Frenchman of his time. The “tiny Napoleon” myth comes from British cartoons and from confusion between French and English inches.

The pyramids of Giza were built from the bottom up around 2600–2500 BC. The workers were organised, paid labourers, not slaves. They were housed, fed and buried with honour near the site.

There is no evidence that Vikings wore horned helmets in battle. The image mostly comes from 19th-century costume designs for Wagner’s operas. Bluetooth technology, however, really is named after the Viking king Harald Bluetooth.

She did not. But Cleopatra (69–30 BC) did live closer in time to the Moon landing in 1969 than to the building of the Great Pyramid around 2560 BC. That one is real.

Einstein never failed maths; he had mastered calculus by the age of 15. The myth probably comes from his Swiss school reports, where 6 was the best mark, not the worst.

Columbus really did believe he had reached Asia. People had been living in the Americas for many thousands of years, and Norse sailors had already reached Newfoundland around the year 1000.

It lasted 116 years, from 1337 to 1453, with long truces in between. France won.

Caesar was stabbed in 44 BC (23 times, according to ancient accounts), for political reasons. The salad was invented in 1924 by the restaurateur Caesar Cardini in Tijuana, Mexico.

There is no evidence she said “Let them eat cake” either. The line appears in Rousseau’s Confessions, written when Marie Antoinette was still a child living in Austria.

Educated people in the Middle Ages knew the Earth was a sphere. The ancient Greeks had worked it out, and Eratosthenes measured its circumference remarkably well around 240 BC.

The wooden horse comes from Greek myth and is told most fully in Virgil’s Aeneid. There is no archaeological evidence that it existed, as a horse or as a duck.

Stonehenge was built in stages between about 3000 and 2000 BC. Some of its smaller “bluestones” were brought roughly 240 km from Wales, without a single Allen key.

The tower started leaning during construction, which began in 1173, because the ground beneath it is soft. Engineering work between 1990 and 2001 reduced the tilt by about 45 cm and made it safe again.

Newton himself said that watching an apple fall got him thinking about gravity. There is no evidence that it hit him on the head.

An asteroid roughly 10 km wide struck what is now Mexico about 66 million years ago. Not all dinosaurs died out, though: birds are living dinosaurs.

On 20 July 1969 Armstrong said, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” He always maintained that he said “for a man” and that the “a” got lost in transmission.

In 218 BC Hannibal really did march an army over the Alps with 37 war elephants to attack Rome. Most of the elephants died within the following year.

Washington did wear dentures, but they were never wooden. They were made of ivory, metal and real teeth.

The wall was built and rebuilt over about 2,000 years to defend the northern border. Despite the legend, you cannot see it from the Moon, and it is very hard to spot with the naked eye even from low orbit.

Johannes Gutenberg developed his movable-type press in Mainz in the 1440s and printed his famous Bible around 1455. Movable type had been invented centuries earlier in China and Korea.

The Western Roman Empire is usually said to have ended in 476, when the general Odoacer deposed the young emperor Romulus Augustulus. The eastern half carried on until 1453.

The wheel appeared around 3500 BC in Mesopotamia. It was first used for making pottery and only later for transport.