Ooh, here’s one I just remembered: Shakespeare could have used a graphite pencil, which was a Tudor-era invention.
From the Interesting Facts thread a while back:
Those ‘surprising timeline’ facts are a pretty interesting thing themselves, and I’ve heard a few good ones. A couple more that come to mind that have surprised me are - the last state-sanctioned French execution by Guillotine happened a little bit after the premier of Star Wars. The reign of Cleopatra was further removed in time from the building of the pyramids than from the creation of the iPhone.
President John Tyler’s last surviving grandson died in 2025.
Contact lenses were a thing starting in the late 1930s. In 1937, 3,000 Americans wore them. LBJ wore them in 1964.
That’s a good false anachronism! I like it.
…and somehow, coming from you, seems not unexpected 
We (The Residents) do not need, nor want, artificial appendages over our eyeballs to see things more clearly.
Glad to hear it. But, does that sound like Heaven?
No, more like Hell!
Hell, I wore them in 1966.
Did you see that they’re touring again?
Wow, I had no idea!
Yeah, people tend to underestimate the astonishing duration of the civilization of ancient Egypt. If you divide world history into “ancient Egypt” and “everything that came after ancient Egypt”, the latter is only about 2/3 as long as the former.
One of the advantages of being one of earliest cultures to use a writing system is that you get to start writing history before everyone else.
Theirs, like his, hers, yours, ours, does not need a possessive apostrophe because those words are all possessives already.
Joe Haldeman has a short story, “Manifest Destiny” in the collection Dealing In Futures. It’s told in the first person, and in his author’s notes about the story he writes about how he wanted to get the viewpoint character’s diction correct for the story. He hunted through several dictionaries of slang, noting dates of use and the like. He also writes:
I came across dozens of expressions I couldn’t use because, although they were contemporary with the story, they sounded too modern. He could call a policeman a pig, for example, or use the expression ‘take a back seat to.’
More language focused than tech focused, but I thought it relevant.
Mesopotamian civilization is as old, but its history is more fragmented because Egypt was only rarely invaded whereas Mesopotamia was repeatedly ravaged by war.
One impetus for the invention of radar was the rumor that the Germans had invented a death ray during WW I. The radio engineers in the British Army who looked at it quickly figured out it was impossible for the technogy at the time, but it did start the idea of radar.
The Romans had a multi-use knife, kind of a pocket knife except pockets were not invented yet.
Glass contact lenses date back to the 1880s. They didn’t become commercially available until later, but I read a not-by-Doyle Sherlock Holmes story in which he wore contact lenses to change his eye color. An unlikely but possible scenario.
The 1930s marks when PMMA plastic contact lenses became available
No, that’s a good one. Exactly what the thread is about. The term ‘Tiffany Effect’ was created by a novelist who encountered the same thing.
Emile Zola’s novel Au bonheur des dames was written in 1882 and took place in the late 1860s. There’s a scene with the grand opening of a department store and I was surprised by the mention of giving away latex balloons with the name of the store written on them.
What a stroke of genius this balloon bonus was, distributed to each shopper, red balloons, with thin rubber skin, bearing in large letters the name of the store, and which, held at the end of a thread, traveling in the air, carried a living advertisement through the streets!