Marco Polo never made it to Asia, according to a team of Italian archaeologists. Rather, his stories of his travels to China were tall tales lifted from fellow traders he met around the Black Sea, the Daily Mail is reporting.
Marco Polo, the legendary explorer famous for his epic journey into Asia, was just a "conman," according to the report.
As years turn into centuries and history becomes more disconnected from its source, facts can become twisted, lost or discarded. In Marco Polo's case, the story seems to be of his own creation. But sometimes, even the most careful historians can lose sight of the truth.
Some legends are apocryphal tales that merely add color to a famous figure. We've all heard that George Washington had wooden teeth. He didn't, but he did wear dentures.
Other myths, however, are so central to the story of a historical figure that fact is not commonly separated from fiction. For example, Isaac Newton didn't discover gravity after an apple hit him on the head. However, since Newton often used apples as an analogy to explain gravity, the story became an often misrepresented part of his history.
If you have a Napoleonic complex, then your ambition is likely much greater than your stature. Named after the legendary general and emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, the condition describes men of small build who have an inferiority complex and overcompensate for it.
There's just one problem with that name: Napoleon wasn't short.
In fact, his commonly attributed height, five feet and two inches, only holds true under an old French system of measurement. The equivalent using the modern standard is about five feet, six inches -- not particularly diminutive for a man of his era.
Benjamin Franklin deserves a lot of credit. He was one of the founding father of the United States, a major figure of the Enlightenment, a diplomat and much more.
One achievement often falsely attributed to Franklin, however, is that he discovered electricity. Although an accomplished scientist who experimented with electricity, Franklin was not the first to describe or explore the properties of electricity and magnetism.
The first description of magnetism traces back to nearly 2,600 years ago to Thales of Miletus who witnessed iron attracted to a loadstone but attributed it to the metal having a soul. The earliest attempts to explain this force with scientific explanations occurred several hundred years later.
William Gilbert, an English scientist who lived during the 16th century and was praised by Galileo, established some of the basic principles of electricity and magnetism, including that the Earth itself produced a magnetic field.
The voyages of Christopher Columbus launched a new era of European expansion into the American continent. They brought a collision of worlds unprecedented in human history.
Although story of Columbus's first voyage is fraught with embellishment, few myths have endured quite like the claim that his sailors believed the Earth was flat. According to the myth, the sailors believed after sailing for weeks without spotting land, they would fall off the face of the Earth.
That, however, was not the case. In fact, Columbus's crew likely held onto the widely accepted belief that navigators grasped since ancient times -- that the Earth is in fact a sphere.
Did Albert Einstein, a pioneer of modern physics, the father of the theory of relativity, and one of the greatest minds in all of history, really fail math as a child?
Not even close. In fact, by Einstein's own admission, he considered being a mathematician instead of a physicist.
So where does this legend come from? According to Karl S. Kruszelnicki with ABC Science Online, it's a simple misunderstanding of the grading system when Einstein was a schoolboy. When Einstein was in school, the grading system ranked students on a scale from one to six, with one being the highest score and six being the lowest. Shortly after Einstein left, the system was reversed, with six being the highest score a student could receive.
As a result, anyone looking at Einstein's grades after the switch would have been under the impression that Einstein was a poor student under the more contemporary grading system.
More at Discovery News
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