Misconceptions Throughout History

Many times we believe things simply because we are told they are true.  Here are few misconceptions, from inventions to beliefs, that have fooled people through history.

Did you know the Samuel F. B. Morse didn’t really invent the telegraph?  What actually happened was that he was working with an American physicist named Joseph Henry.  It was actually Henry that designed the telegraph.  Morse denied that Henry ever worked with him.  However, after a lengthy court battle, Henry was able to prove that Morse obtained the design from Henry.  Morse did however, invent the Morse Code.

The famous painting by Emanuel Leutze titled “Washington Crossing the Delaware” is inaccurate in two historical details. One misrepresentation is the appearance of the American flag.  In reality the American flag was not adopted until after the event.  The other inaccuracy is the size of the boat.  The boat that Washington crossed in was actually many times larger.

Albert Eintstein was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1921.  Most people believe he was honored for his famous theory of relativity, which had been published sixteen years earlier.  Einstein actually won the Nobel Prize for his work in a much lesser known work….the photoelectric effect.

St. Patrick was not Irish.  He was actually British, most likely Welsh and never even saw Ireland until he was kidnapped by Irish raiders.  After he escaped, he became a priest and the then a bishop.  He returned to Ireland many years later as a missionary.  His work during that time is what made him the patron saint of Ireland.

It is not easy to kiss the “Blarney Stone.”  The stone, which is triangle shaped, sits about twenty feet from te top of a castle wall in the Irish village of Blarney.  In order to be able to get close enough to the stone to kiss it, you would have to hang upside down in a very dangerous position.

When the colonists fist arrived in America, many of them believed that American Indians were actually the descendents of the ten lost tribes of Isreal and therefore, of Jewish descent.  In 1650, Reverend Thomas Thorowgood publish a book entitled “Jews In America” in which he pointed out what he believed to be similarties between the two cultures.

Darwin was not the first to contemplate the concept of evolution.  In fact, a French naturalist names George de Buffon wrote of evolution.  His manuscripts, however, focused on the idea that evolution was actually a degredation process rather than an adaptive one.  For example, he believed that apes evolved from humans and that donkeys came from horses.

After World War II, England was actually offered the Volkswagen Business by the Germans as part of post-war reparations.  England declined the offer because they believed that the small cars with an engine in the back simply had no future.   At the same time the refusal was given, about 20,000 British occupation authorities ordered the cars to help get the company back on it’s feet.  By 1959, Volkswagen was producing about 4,000 cars every day.

Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Knorday deserved the praise they recieved for being the first to climb Mount Everest.  However, this praise should have also been extended to the entire forster of twelve climbers ablon with the forty Sherpa guides and the 700 porters that made the climb with them.