Facts that you thought were true, but were found to be false, but ended up being true again.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Fast! Lucky Lindy was the first Man to fly across the Atlantic! America wins!

False! Our British friends always point out that actually eight years earlier, in June 1919, the British aviators Alcock and Brown made the first transatlantic flight. England Wins!

BUT The US Navy did it first, two months before in the Curtiss seaplane NC-4.:stuck_out_tongue:

Now yes, Alcock and Brown did theirs non-stop. But Lindberg did his NY to Paris, while British did theirs Newfoundland to Ireland.

Fact! Cleopatra was a famous Egyptian Queen.

False! She was actually Greek! (a member of the Ptolemaic dynasty, she was a descendant of its founder Ptolemy I Soter, a Macedonian Greek general and companion of Alexander the Great.)

**BUT- She was born in Egypt, her mother & father were born in Egypt. Her grandfather and his father and so forth were born in Egypt. ** For about 250 years. If Cleo was Greek, then unless you belong to a tribe, you’re not American. :stuck_out_tongue:

Fact! The Emancipation proclamation freed the slaves!

*False! It didn’t free any slaves as of course it only applied to the North, and it didn’t free the few slaves still in the North, just those in the Confederacy. *

**BUT, a certain part of the South was already under Northern control, thus up to 50000 slaves were immediately freed.
**

Fact! General George Custer died at the battle of Little Big Horn!

False- At that time, Custer was only a Lieutenant Colonel.

**BUT- it was common then to allow once Generals, etc to be addressed with the honorific of the highest brevet or volunteer rank they had achieved. So, Most people would have called Custer “General”. **

Got any more?

2

How 'bout Pluto? It changes status so often I lost track! :smiley:

3

I’m sure one could find plenty of foods that scientists have waffled on whether or not they are “good for you”.

4

Einstein’s “Cosmological Constant” in relativity to prevent the universe from collapsing due to gravity. When it was found the galaxies are actually receding, he scrapped it and called it his biggest mistake as there was no reason to believe it exists other than it needing to exist to have his theory fit in with the then-known physical facts.

Now we know that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, and so the “force” that Einstein needed to add to prevent gravity from smushing everything together actually may exist in some sort of form, just not doing what he originally thought it was doing.

5

Whole milk is back in favour

6

You might want a cite that isn’t Mercola.

7

First, there was a mountain
Then, there was no mountain
Then, there was.

8

As a kid, I thought giant pandas were bears. Then I learned in school that they’re not bears but more closely related to raccoons. Now DNA testing proves they’re bears after all.

As a kid, I simply assumed the Statue of Liberty was in New York. When I was a little older, I looked at an atlas and saw it was on the New Jersey side of the line, so I assumed it was in New Jersey. A few years later I learned that the statue is in New York after all. Due to the complexities of the colonial charters creating New York and New Jersey, the natural part of Liberty Island (including the part the statue is on) is part of New York, and the few acres of filled land on the island and all the water immediately surrounding the island are part of New Jersey.

9

Pandas are bears!
Actually, pandas are probably more closely related to raccoons than bears.
No, scratch that–giant pandas really are bears. (Red pandas probably really are cousins to raccoons–and are not particularly closely related to giant pandas.)

Chimpanzees and gorillas are big monkeys!
Ha ha, you silly goose! Apes aren’t monkeys!
Actually, apes are monkeys. (These guys are more closely related to orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees than they are to these guys. Of course, that means that we are also monkeys*.)
*“You look like a monkey, and you smell like one too!”
:confused: “Well, of course I look and smell like a monkey. How else would I look or smell?”

10

The panda points are exactly what I was looking for!

11

Leeches were used for medical purposes.

However, medicine decided they were of no use, and their use was discontinued as superstition.

Now, doctors have gone back to using them to remove blood clots and treat circulatory diseases.

12

This is one that probably has to do as much with the sophistication of the audience and ulterior motives rather than the facts, or even their interpretation, changing:

Elementary school: The US civil war was about slavery.
High school: The US civil war was the blow up of a long simmering conflict over agrarian vs industrialized areas and states rights, which touch on slavery, but that was not the main conflict.
College and beyond: The US civil war was about slavery.

13

Fact: King Richard III was a hunchback with a withered arm.

False! Shakespeare just wrote in the physical deformities as a metaphor for his dark and twisted personality.

But…his skeleton proves that he really did have scoliosis, with a twisted spine and one shoulder higher than the other.

14

Both good ones.

15

I was going to mention pandas, but, since I’ve been beaten to that… On a related note…

Every kid knows that Brontosaurus is a dinosaur.

Except, nope, that was a mistake. The ‘Brontosaurus’ was just a different species of Apatosaurus. (A correction made in the 1930s, not that this actually filtered down to the books that the kids got until at least the late 80s.)

Except, as it turns out, Brontosaurus excelsus really is different enough from Apatosaurus ajax that it really should be considered a different genus, not just a different species.

16

I did not know that! (as they say)

I actually read it in the dead tree press first. Mercola was just the first thing that popped up in a google search (possibly a depressing thing in itself…)

How about news.com?

17

Abe Vigoda’s dead !
No you pinhead, that was a hoax - in fact it was multiple hoaxes to the point it became a running gag.
Abe Vigoda’s dead.

Eeeh, not sure that counts. The reasons leeches were used back then was because doctors thought “too much blood” was a problem, that’s not exactly why modern doctors use them !