Late 1800s facts
While investigating facts about Late 1800s, I found out little known, but curios details like:
The company that makes Listerine marketed it as a cure for gonorrhea in the late 1800s; however, no one scientifically tested this claim until now. Lab studies show Listerine inhibits bacterial growth and that infected men are less likely to test positive for gonorrhea after gargling with it.
In the late 1700s and 1800s, there was widespread panic about the evils of book-reading, which was described as “an outrage on decency and common sense”. People were concerned that avid novel-readers were ‘addicted’ and were becoming anti-social.
In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across. Here are 50 of the best facts about Late 1800s I managed to collect.
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The word "dude" first appeared in the late 1800s as a term of mockery for young men who were overly concerned with keeping up with the latest fashions.
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Tumbleweeds, an iconic symbol of the old West, are actually an invasive species and didn't arrive until the late 1800s.
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In the late 1800s, a baboon was officially employed as a railroad signalman. He was paid in money and beer and never made a mistake.
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The word "dude" was first used in the late 1800s as an insult towards young men who were overly concerned with keeping up with the latest fashions
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Andrew Carnegie, starting in the late 1800s, funded the construction of almost 1700 public libraries across the country, and over 800 abroad, for any town that would agree to set aside the land, and 10% of the construction cost annually to maintain it.
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A California couple found over 1,400 Double Eagle gold coins from the late 1800s stowed in tin cans on their property. The value of the coins is estimated at $10 million.
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In the late 1800s Australian surveyors had realised the two tallest mountains, Mt. Kosciuszko and Mt. Townsend, were mismeasured, and in fact Mt. Townsend was taller. Instead of rewriting many textbooks the NSW government decided to switch the two names, leaving us with what we have today.
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Doctors didn’t wear white coats till the late 1800s. Due to swift advancement in medicine, the public thought discoveries of new antiseptics & the spreading of disease were just mysticism & deceit. In response, doctors adopted the white lab coats to represent a fresh start for the medical field
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People in the medieval ages never actually believed the Earth was flat. It was a myth created during the evolution debate in the late 1800s.
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The popularity biking in the late 1800s prompted women to be more mobile, pushed women's clothing to be less restrictive and more comfortable, and eventually became an emblem of women's rights.
What is true about late 1800s?
You can easily fact check it by examining the linked well-known sources.
Separate bathrooms for women emerged only in the late 1800s, under the assumption that women were inherently weaker and therefore needed protective, home-like havens in their workplace.
Reindeer aren't native to Alaska. Sheldon Jackson purchased them from Siberia to help with the food shortages in the late 1800s. He brought in 16 and by the late 1930s there were 640,000. - source
Waiterless' restaurants were pioneered in the late 1800s and were a hit in the early 20th century with the arrival of the Automat; the walls inside each store were lined with a series of small windows containing food. For a fee the window unlocked, allowing customers to pull out a meal. - source
The British were not always heavy tea drinkers. They only switched to tea after an introduced plant rust wiped out most of the world's coffee crops in the late 1800s.
The "slipping on a banana peel" trope originated in the late 1800s, when discarded banana peels were considered a serious public hazard - source
Prescriptivism, which prescribes rigid grammatical rules to written English, only came into favour in the late 1800s. Prior to this most writers were comfortable using multiple spellings and grammatical conventions within a single text.
There was a newspaper written solely by the patients of an Alabama insane asylum during the late 1800s.
The papal states had laws which required Jews to listen to sermons four times a year aimed at conversion. This was later rescinded by Pope Pius IX in the late 1800s.
Ukuleles weren't introduced to Hawaii until the late 1800s. They were quickly popularized because the king at the time thought they were really neat.
.. The home security company ADT has been around for over 140 years. Starting as a telegraph-based alert system in the late 1800s
The tallest people in the late 1800s were the Native American tribes living in the Great Plains, averaging at 172.6cm (~5' 8").