Science Myths
The Great Wall was declared visible from the Moon before anyone went there
The claim is older than spaceflight, which is the first clue. The geometry is hopeless, and what astronauts can actually pick out…
Farah Dastur
Contributing writer, Virgin Myth
Farah writes about historical myths and how a good anecdote outruns the record.
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13 articles
Science Myths
Your bathroom drain is far too small to notice the Earth turning
The Coriolis effect is entirely real and shapes every hurricane on the planet. It is also thousands of times too weak to beat the…
Science Myths
Split-brain surgery was real, the creative-versus-logical personality was not
A genuinely extraordinary set of experiments on a small group of patients became a personality test sold in airports. The distance…
History Myths
Viking helmets got their horns from a costume department in 1876
No horned helmet has ever been recovered from a Viking-age grave. The design was created for an opera and adopted by the entire…
History Myths
Ring a Ring o' Roses has nothing to do with the plague
The plague reading appears only in the twentieth century, long after the rhyme was first written down. The early versions do not…
History Myths
Nobody was burned at Salem, and the method mattered
The executions were hangings, with one death by pressing. The burning image comes from continental European practice and from a…
History Myths
The iron maiden was assembled by showmen, not by medieval torturers
No medieval source describes the device, and the famous example seems to have been put together from unrelated pieces in the…
Science Myths
Brontosaurus was struck off for a century and then partly reinstated
Two skeletons named in haste during a bone rush looked like one animal, so the second name was retired. A large re-examination a…
History Myths
The Sphinx lost its nose long before Napoleon's army arrived
European drawings made decades before the French expedition already show the face damaged. An Egyptian chronicler had described a…
History Myths
A vomitorium was a doorway, and the banqueting room never existed
The Latin word names the passages that spill a crowd out of an amphitheatre. The dining-room version was invented by English…
History Myths
The cow did not kick the lantern, and the reporter admitted inventing it
The 1871 fire that destroyed much of Chicago began near a family barn, which is roughly all anyone ever established. The animal and…
History Myths
The Dark Ages were named by a poet complaining about Latin style
The label began as a literary judgement about the centuries between Rome and the writer's own lifetime. It hardened into a claim…
History Myths
Cleopatra was Greek by dynasty, and the beauty was mostly Roman propaganda
The family that ruled Egypt for three centuries came from Macedonia. Contemporaries wrote about her voice and her wit, and the…