15 Facts That Will Warp Your Perception of Time

The 10th president of the United States …

… had a living grandchild until earlier this year. John Tyler was born in 1790 and was inaugurated as president in 1841. He had children with his second wife pretty late in life, including a son, Lyon Gardiner Tyler, who was born in 1853.

Lyon also had children in his later years: Lyon Tyler Jr. was born in 1924, and Harrison Tyler was born in 1928. Lyon died in 2020, and Harrison passed away on May 25, 2025.

The last American Civil War widow …

… passed away only five years ago. Helen Viola Jackson was born in 1919, long after the end of the Civil War, but in 1936 she married a man 76 years her senior. His name was James Bolin, and he had fought for the Union in the 14th Missouri Cavalry. He died in 1939, but Jackson lived to be 101 and passed away in 2020.

Jackson didn’t tell anyone about her marriage to Bolin until very late in life, in 2017, and she never remarried.

When the printing press was invented …

… the Roman Empire still existed. Johannes Gutenberg began work on the device that would revolutionize publishing, and civilization itself, in the late 1430s. The first printing press was completed in 1440, while the Roman Empire was not dissolved until 1453.

That was the year the Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman (aka Byzantine) Empire, and only two years before the mass production of the Gutenberg Bible began.

The last criminal execution by guillotine in France …

… occurred the year the first Star Wars movie was released. The execution of Hamida Djandoubi, who was convicted of killing his girlfriend, on Sept. 10, 1977, marked the final time a criminal was officially executed by guillotine in France. Three and a half months previously, Star Wars: Episode IV (then just called Star Wars) had hit theaters.

During her reign, Queen Elizabeth II …

… met 13 different U.S. presidents, starting with the 33rd, Harry S. Truman, who was president when she was crowned in 1952. Before her death in 2022, she met every subsequent U.S. leader except Lyndon Johnson. She lived through the span of 17 presidents, beginning with Calvin Coolidge, who was president when she was born in 1926.

The New York Times predicted it would take a million years for humans to fly …

… in the same year the Wright brothers would later fly their plane. In October 1903, in an editorial called “Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly,” the esteemed paper commented on a disastrous failed flight attempt by a man named Samuel Pierpont Langley, declaring: “… the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million to ten million years.”

More like one to 10 weeks. In December of 1903, the Wright brothers launched their first successful flights in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

Before their win in 2016, the last time the Chicago Cubs won the World Series …

… the Ottoman Empire still existed. But before their historic 2016 win, they actually set a pretty impressive record, becoming the first team to win back-to-back World Series in 1907 and 1908. Of course, it would then be 108 years until they would win again.

The Ottoman Empire, meanwhile, lasted until 1922, when it was replaced by the Turkish Republic.

Oxford University has been around …

… longer than the Aztecs. Much longer, in fact. Oxford is the oldest university in the English-speaking world. (People were teaching at Oxford as long ago as 1096.) The Aztecs founded the city of Tenochtitlán, which would become the heart of their empire, in 1325. The ancient Aztecs don’t seem so ancient anymore!

Harvard University has been around …

… since before Sir Isaac Newton published his Laws of Motion. That’s right, professors at this prestigious university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have been teaching science since before scientists knew that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

The university was founded in 1636, making it the oldest higher learning institution in the United States. Newton, meanwhile, published his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, containing his Laws of Motion, in 1687.

The Eiffel Tower was opened to the public …

… the same year Nintendo was founded. (Yes, that Nintendo.) Construction of the Eiffel Tower took place from 1887 to 1889. In March 1889, the monument opened to the public as part of a celebration honoring 100 years since the French Revolution. The year Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Nintendo (albeit as a playing card company) in Kyoto, Japan? 1889.

When the Great Pyramids of Giza were being built …

… woolly mammoths were still living. You might lump woolly mammoths together with dinosaurs as extinct animals that were around ages ago. But the tusked pachyderm ancestor actually shared the globe with humans.

The last population of mammoths lived on Wrangel Island, located off the coast of Russia in the Arctic Ocean, and didn’t go completely extinct until around 2000 BC. Construction of the Great Pyramids took place hundreds of years before that, from 2580 to 2560 BC.

When the first fax machine was invented …

… people were still traveling the Oregon Trail. Today, when people joke about the fax machine being old tech, they probably don’t realize just how true that is.

Covered wagons were heading out west in the mid-nineteenth century, with the first major wagon train hitting the trail in 1843. That same year, a Scottish inventor named Alexander Bain received a patent for a machine he’d developed called an “Electric Printing Telegraph.” This machine was the direct predecessor of the 1980-invented fax machines that were a staple of office buildings everywhere in the late twentieth century.

Humans are closer in time to Tyrannosaurus Rexes …

… than T. Rexes are to their dino brethren Stegosauruses. If you thought dinosaurs all roamed the earth together, boy are you in for a surprise!

The spiky-backed, herbivorous Stegosaurus thrived in the land that would become North America around 150 million years ago, in the late Jurassic period. But according to Smithsonian Magazine, the bipedal predator T. Rex didn’t rear its toothy head until about 80 million years later, in the Cretaceous period, approximately 67 million years before today.

The Cretaceous period is the period that also saw the heyday of the velociraptor and the triceratops. So it seems Jurassic Park, a film featuring mostly Cretaceous dinos, is something of a misnomer.

There are most likely whales alive today …

… that have been alive since before Moby-Dick was published. Bowhead whales can live for over 200 years, one of the longest lifespans for any species of mammal. Moby-Dick was published in 1851, which was 174 years ago. So, some whales born before Melville’s novel was released could have decades of life left.

From the time Pluto was discovered until the time Pluto lost its planet status …

… it didn’t even complete one orbit around the sun. Poor, poor Pluto. The tiny demoted planet was discovered, and named an official planet, in 1930. Its status was downgraded to that of “dwarf planet” in 2006, 76 years later.

The amount of time it takes Pluto to revolve fully around the sun? That’s 248 Earth-years. So not only did Pluto not complete an orbit around the sun during its time of planethood, it won’t complete one until well into the next century. The year 2178, to be exact.

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At Reader’s Digest, we’re committed to producing high-quality content by writers with expertise and experience in their field in consultation with relevant, qualified experts. We rely on reputable primary sources, including government and professional organizations and academic institutions as well as our writers’ personal experiences where appropriate. For this piece on facts that mess with your perception of time, Meghan Jones tapped her experience as a journalist to ensure that all information is up to date. Then, we went the extra step and had Robin Honig Willens, a longtime fact-checker and research chief for TV Guide, Cosmopolitan and other outlets, make sure the information is factually accurate and has credible sourcing. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.

Sources:

• NPR: “Harrison Ruffin Tyler, grandson of the 10th U.S. president, dies at 96”
• Guardian: “Woman believed to be last remaining widow of US civil war soldier dies”
• History: “The guillotine falls silent”
• CBS News: “Queen Elizabeth’s storied history of meeting U.S. presidents”
• Times Machine: “Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly”
• Major League Baseball: “Chicago Cubs Franchise Timeline”
• Harvard University: “History”
• Nintendo: “Nintendo History”
• Natural History Museum: “Dinosaurs”
• National Ocean Service: “What is the longest-lived marine mammal?”
• Live Science: “When will Pluto complete its first orbit since its discovery?”