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True or False - Weird History Tidbits

History is weird. So are these made up false stories from history. Can you tell the difference between weird history and my weird imagination?
Quiz by Dimby
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Last updated: April 4, 2023
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First submittedDecember 18, 2022
Times taken12
Average score56.3%
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1. Walter Knott got rich off of, and popularized, the boysenberry. So many tourists visited his farm that it would be converted into a theme park—Knott's Berry Farm.
True ✓
False ✓
The berry farm initially offered chicken dinners to the berry farm guests. That was so popular, they started a ghost town, followed by a festival, followed amusement park rides.
2. At a patron's soirée, Mozart requested cheese and meat between slices of bread so his fingers would not get oily. The upper-class dinner guests copied the trendy musician, leading to the "sandwich" becoming a common food item.
True ✓
False ✓
This fib is mildly inspired by the story about the Earl of Sandwich having a sandwich made while he played poker.
3. Famed pop artist Andy Warhol managed and produced the band Velvet Underground. Their song "Waiting for the Man" ranked 81 on Rolling Stone Magazine's top 500 songs of all time.
True ✓
False ✓
4. German chancellor Otto von Bismarck was a billiards prodigy. In fact, he invited other enthusiasts, including Charles Dickens and French President Jules Grévy, to his estate just to play. Official German records suggest that he rarely lost.
True ✓
False ✓
I have found no mention of Bismarck ever playing billiards.
5. Many passengers survived the Hindenburg airship disaster. In fact, the last survivor died in 2019.
True ✓
False ✓
The footage we have all seen certainly looks like people could not have survived, but more than half the passengers survived.
6. Speaking of the Hindenburg, a vaudeville acrobat called Ben Dova smashed a window to escape the crashing blimp. He plunged 20 feet and did an acrobatic roll to avoid serious injury.
True ✓
False ✓
His real name was Joseph Anthony Spah. His image is the thumbnail for the quiz!
7. Long after the United States and Russia had sent animals into space, France sent a cat named Félicette. It even survived the 1963 journey, lived a long life, and became a "celebrity": Felix the Cat is an homage to the feline astronaut.
True ✓
False ✓
Felix the Cat was first published in 1919. Félicette was named after Felix. Sadly, Félicette got little respect for its accomplishment, as French scientists killed it to necropsy its brain.
8. President Herbert Hoover was eccentric throughout his life. In Stanford's "Pioneer Program", Hoover tried to cure a stomach ache with pioneer ingenuity; he consumed writing chalk with meals for several weeks. He was hospitalized with an impacted bowel and failed all his classes except mathematics.
True ✓
False ✓
This is just wildly untrue. He did fail his entrance exams to the Pioneer Program, except for mathematics, of course.
9. Future Australian prime minister Terry Digham married a woman named Terri Digham in 1929. No genealogical connection has been found between the two.
True ✓
False ✓
None of this is true.
10. Thinking himself King Richard III, a painter with dissociative disorder tried to assassinate President Andrew Jackson. Fortunately, his pistols misfired and Davy Crockett wrestled the would-be assassin to the ground.
True ✓
False ✓
The poor man's name was Richard Lawrence. He tried to shoot Jackson at a funeral, but his guns misfired from moisture in the air. Davy Crockett and another man subdued Lawrence. A firearms expert later said the chances of both pistols misfiring was 125,000 to 1. They both fired normally when tested afterwards.
11. Following the Titanic disaster, White Star Lines collected a large amount of insurance money, barely any of which went to survivors or the families of victims. Instead, it built the Olympic in 1913. Just like its predecessor, it struck an ice berg and sank.
True ✓
False ✓
While some of this is true, the Olympic did not sink, and it was not built with insurance money from the Titanic. It was the largest ship in the world before and after the Titanic. It was dismantled in 1935. The Britannic, on the other hand, sank during WWI because of a mine.
12. The 1904 St. Louis Olympics saw few international athletes attend, so 76 of 97 gold medals went to Americans. It was so lopsided, that Canadian athletes began a "discus fight" against the Americans, which ended in a dozen broken bones and one dead Canadian.
True ✓
False ✓
The medal count was quite lopsided, but there was no discus fight, unfortunately.
13. During the French Revolution, the Cult of Reason was created to replace Catholicism as a state religion. It was a hodge-podge of philosophical ideas and was replaced by Robespierre's Cult of the Supreme Being. Robespierre's cult was also terribly received, and he would be ousted from power in the month of Thermidor (the leaders of the French Revolution had changed the calendar).
True ✓
False ✓
Extremist philosophers lack the practical skills to run a country.
14. In university, Benito Mussolini was an extremely proficient calcio balilla player (foosball). The game was extremely popular at the turn of the 20th century, and the young Mussolini gained the nickname "Il Duce" by dominating a university tournament.
True ✓
False ✓
I have no reason to believe that Mussolini ever played calcio balilla, but even if he did, he did not get his title "Il Duce" from being good at foosball.
15. Mackenzie King, Canada's 22-year prime minister who led the country during World War II, believed in the occult. He regularly held séances to communicate with his deceased parents, Leonardo da Vinci, and even some of his past pet dogs.
True ✓
False ✓
Apparently, his deceased father told him that a great war would break out because of the Treaty of Versailles.
16. The Vitruvian Man is a famous diagram of the ideal human form by Leonardo da Vinci. When the circle that da Vinci drew around the man was analyzed by a computer in 1982, the circle's radius to circumference ratio was accurate to 17 digits of pi. This is more accurate than any other circle known to be drawn by a human hand.
True ✓
False ✓
Leonardo da Vinci drawing a perfect circle is a myth.
FreeStater
+3
Level 67
Dec 18, 2022
Really good quiz, and the false ones are quite creative. I do think we could use a sequel.
Dollyfroggy
+1
Level 60
Dec 18, 2022
I only got 31%! Nicely done.
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