An Encyclopaedia of Error
Ye Olde Wrong Facts
Most of human history happened before germ theory, before evolution, before anyone knew what a star was made of. Here are 151 things people believed before 1900, and were absolutely certain about.
Every era thinks it has the facts straight. Every era is partly wrong, and never knows which part. The myths below look obvious now: that bloodletting cured disease, that the heart was the seat of thought, that drilling a hole in the skull let the evil spirits out. People believed them for centuries, taught them to their children, staked their health on them. Browse by age, or jump to the beliefs that lasted the longest.
Ancient World
Beliefs from before 500 CE, when the best available science was a confident guess.
11 wrong factsMedieval
A thousand years of things people were sure about, from 500 to 1499.
13 wrong factsRenaissance & Enlightenment
The age of reason got plenty wrong too, from 1500 to 1799.
66 wrong factsVictorian Era
The confident, corseted, frequently poisonous 19th century.
61 wrong factsFeatured
Wrong for Centuries
Some beliefs survived for thousands of years before anyone disproved them. We ranked them by how long humanity held on. Trepanning topped the list at roughly 11,840 years.
See the longest-running wrong factsMany of these errors were catalogued, in all seriousness, by the great reference works of their day. See The Britannica Files for wrong facts pulled straight from historical editions of Encyclopaedia Britannica.