A Brief History Of The World

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In keeping with our policy of making valuable knowlege available to our subcribers, we offer this short course in history.

A Brief History of the World

Part 1

3050 BC - A Sumerian invents the wheel. Within a week, the idea is stolen and duplicated by other Sumerians, thereby establishing the ethics of business for all time.

2900 BC - Wondering why the Egyptians call that new thing a Sphinx becomes the first of the world’s Seven Great Wonders.

1850 BC - Britons proclaim Operation Stonehenge a success. They’ve finally gotten those boulders arranged in a sufficiently meaningless pattern to confuse the Hell out of scientists for centuries.

1785 BC - The first calendar, composed of a year with 354 days, is introduced by Babylonian scientists.

1786 BC - Babylonians realize something is wrong with their new calendar when winter begins in June.

776 BC - The world’s first known currency appears in Persia, immediately causing the world’s first known counterfeiter to appear in Persia the next day.

525 BC - The first Olympic Games are held, and prove similar to the modern games, except that the Russians don’t try to enter a six-footer with a mustache in the woman’s shot put. However, the Egyptians do!

410 BC - Rome ends the practice of throwing debtors into slavery, thus removing the biggest single obstacle to the development of the credit card.

404 BC - The Peloponnesian war has been going on for 27 years now because neither side can find a peace treaty writer who knows how to spell Peloponnesian.

214 BC - Tens of thousands of Chinese peasants labour for a generation to build the 1,500 mile long Great Wall of China. And after all that, it still doesn’t keep the neighbour’s dog out.

1 BC - Calendar manufacturers find themselves in complete disagreement over what to call next year.


Part 2

79 AD - Buying property in Pompeii turns out to have been a really lousy real estate investment.

432 AD - St. Patrick introduces Christianity to Ireland, thereby giving the natives something interesting to fight about for the rest of their recorded history.

1000 AD - Leif Ericsson discovers America, but decides it’s not worth mentioning.

1043 AD - Lady Godiva finds a means of demonstrating against high taxes that immediately makes everyone forget what she is demonstrating against.

1125 AD - Arabic numerals are introduced to Europe, enabling peasants to solve the most baffling problem that confronts them: How much tax do you pay on MMMDCCCLX Lira income when you’re in the XXXVI percent bracket?

1233 AD - The Spanish Inquisition is established to torture and kill anyone who disagrees with the Law of the Church. However, the practice is so un-Christian and barbaric that it is allowed to continue for only 600 years.

1297 AD - The world’s first stock exchange opens, but no one has the foresight to buy IBM, Xerox, or Microsoft.

1433 AD - Portugal launches the African slave trade, which just proves what a small, ambitious country can do with a little bit of imagination and ingenuity.

1456 AD - An English judge reviews Joan of Arc’s case and reverses her death sentence. Unfortunately for Joan, she had been burned at the stake in 1431.

1492 AD - Columbus proves how lost he really is by landing in the Bahamas, naming the place San Salvador, and calling the people who live there Indians.

1497 AD - Amerigo Vespucci becomes the seventh or eighth explorer to come to the new world, but the first to think of naming it in honour of himself...the United States of Vespuccia.

1508 AD - Michelangelo finally agrees to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but he still refuses to wash the windows.

1513 AD - Ponce de Leon claims to have found the Fountain of Youth, but dies of old age while trying to remember where he found it.

1522 AD - Scientists, who know the world to be flat, conclude that Magellan made it all the way around by crawling across the bottom.

1568 AD - Saddened over the malicious slander of his good name, Ivan the Terrible kills another 100,000 peasants in hopes of stopping them from calling him Ivan the Terrible.

1607 AD - The Indians laugh themselves silly as the first European tourist to visit Virginia tries to register as “John Smith.”

1618 AD - Future generations are doomed as the English execute Sir Walter Raleigh, but allow his tobacco plants to live.

1642 AD - Nine students receive the first Bachelor of Arts degrees conferred in America, and immediately discover there are no jobs open for a kid with a liberal arts education and no experience.

1670 AD - The pilgrims are too busy burning false witches to properly observe the golden anniversary of having attained their religious freedom.

1755 AD - Samuel Johnson issues the first English language dictionary, at last providing young children with a book in which they can look up dirty words.

1758 AD - New Jersey is chosen as the sight of America’s first Indian reservation, which should have given the natives an idea of the kind of shabby living conditions they could expect from here on out.

1763 AD - The French and Indian War ends. The French and Indians both lost.

1770 AD - The shooting of three people in the Boston Massacre touches off the American Revolution. 200 years later, three fatal shootings in Boston will be considered about average for a slow Saturday night.

1773 AD - Colonists dump tea into Boston Harbour. The British call the act “barbaric”, pointing out that no one had added milk or sugar.

1776 AD - Napoleon decides to maintain a position of neutrality in the American Revolution, primarily because he is only seven years old.

1779 AD - John Paul Jones notifies the British, “I have not yet begun to fight!” and then feels pretty darned foolish when he discovers his ship is sinking.

1793 AD - “Let them eat cake!” becomes the most famous thing Marie Antoinette ever said. Also, the least diplomatic thing she ever said. Also, the last thing she ever said.

1799 AD - Translation of the Rosetta Stone finally enables scholars to learn that Egyptian hieroglyphics don’t say anything important. “Dear Ramses, how are you? I am fine.”

1805 AD - Robert Fulton invents the torpedo.

1807 AD - Robert Fulton invents the steamship so he has something to blow up with his torpedo.

1815 AD - Post Office policy is established as Andrew Jackson wins the Battle of New Orleans a month after he should have received the letter telling him the War of 1812 is over.

1840 AD - William Henry Harrison is elected president in a landslide, proving that the campaign motto, “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” is so meaningless that very few can disagree with it.

1850 AD - Henry Clay announces, “I’d rather be right than president,” which gets quite a laugh, coming from a guy who has run for president five times without winning.

1859 AD - Charles Darwin writes “Origin of the Species.” It has the same general plot as “Planet of the Apes”, but fails to gross as much money.

1865 AD - Union soldiers face their greatest challenge of the Civil War: getting General Grant sobered up long enough to accept Lee’s surrender.

1894 AD - Thomas Edison displays the first motion picture, and everybody likes it except the movie critics.

1903 AD - The opening of the Trans-Siberian railway enables passengers from Moscow to reach Vladivostok in eight days, which is a lot sooner than anyone would ever want to get to Vladivostok.

1910 AD - The founding of the Boy Scouts of America comes as bad news to old ladies who would much rather cross the street by themselves.

1911 AD - Roald Amundsen discovers the South Pole and confirms what he’s expected all along; It looks a helluva lot like the North Pole!

1912 AD - People with reservations for the voyage of the Titanic get their money back.

1920 AD - The 18th Amendment to the American Constitution makes drinking illegal in the U.S. so everybody stops. (Except for the 40 million people who don’t stop)

1924 AD - Adolph Hitler is released from prison four years early, after convincing the parole board that he is a changed man who won’t cause any more trouble.

1928 AD - U.S. President Herbert Hoover promises “A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage,” but neglects to add that most Americans will soon be without either pots or garages.

1930 AD - Pluto is discovered. Not the dog, stupid, the planet. The dog won’t be discovered until 1938.

1932 AD - German housewives begin to realize why that crazy wallpaper hanger with the mustache never came back to finish the job.

1933 AD - Hitler establishes the Third Reich, and announces it will last 1,000 years. As it turns out, he is only off by 988 years.

1934 AD - John Dillinger is gunned down by police as he leaves a Chicago theatre. And just to show what a really bad day he was having, he hadn’t enjoyed the movie either.

1935 AD - As if the Great Depression wasn’t giving businessman enough headaches, Ralph Nader is born.

1938 AD - Great Britain and Germany sign a peace treaty, thereby averting any possibility of World War II.

1944 AD - Adolph Hitler’s promise of Volkswagens for all Germans, as soon as they’ve won the war, doesn’t prove to be as strong an incentive as he had anticipated.

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Love it Bumper.......this is history 101 in a nutshell