Treasures with a history

Did Romans invent army knives? These things are way older than you think

Jell-O, Swiss Army Knives, roller skates, lighters… It’s hard to picture these items existing hundreds of years ago, isn’t it? And yet, some of the treasures that make modern life easier have indeed been around, in some cases, for millennia. Read on to learn when these 11 items were actually first invented!

Gelatin desserts existed centuries before Jell-O! Medieval cooks used boiled animal collagen to make shimmering molds for banquets. The brand Jell-O came in 1897, when Pearl B. Wait in New York flavored powdered gelatin with fruit syrups.

It’s hard to imagine the video game giant existing before electricity. But Nintendo was founded in 1889 in Kyoto as a playing card company. For decades, it produced hanafuda cards, then toys, and only entered electronics in the 1970s.

Long before disco rinks or inline blades, a Belgian inventor named John Joseph Merlin assembled the first roller skates in 1760, skating into a London ballroom (and famously crashing). Early versions had fixed metal wheels and very poor steerability.

Famously, lighters predate matches. But do you know exactly how long lighters have existed? The first usable one appeared in 1823, invented by a German chemist. The first friction match only appeared 3 years later.

That’s what we call the famous red multi-tool standardized by Victorinox in 1891. But archaeologists discovered a Roman folding tool from around 200 AD made of silver and iron, with knife, spoon, fork, spike, and spatula. It might not have been mass-produced or standardized, but it certainly was there first.

We may associate dishwashers with mid-20th-century suburban kitchens, but the first one dates to 1886, when Josephine Cochrane built a hand-cranked model to save her fine china from clumsy servants.

The 20th century was still far away when the first working escalator was patented. The year was 1859, yet it was introduced at Coney Island only 30 years later—as an amusement ride!

It’s not a thing of the 90s! Its roots go back to 1969, when ARPANET connected four U.S. universities for military-funded research. The web’s 1991 debut by Tim Berners-Lee made it public and visual, hence the illusion that the "Internet" appeared overnight.

Do you associate concrete blocks with modernity in your mind? Think again! The Romans used advanced volcanic-ash mixes to build huge, durable structures (like the Pantheon dome or aqueducts). The Ancient Roman techniques even give clues on how to make longer-lasting concrete today.

We are not talking about electronic printers. Think about the movable type technology: It goes back in history way, way farther than Gutenberg’s system.

Printing with woodblocks and even early movable type existed in China long before the 15th-century European printing that Gutenberg perfected and popularized.

The great ancestor of GPS was probably the magnetic compass used for navigation. The discovery that magnetic force could be used to calculate the position of the poles occurred over 2000 years ago during the Han dynasty, in China.

The creators behind timeless verses

Who said Humpty Dumpty was an egg? Stories of 10 ageless nursery rhymes

Image: Sven Brandsma

We have been singing the same nursery rhymes to little kids for years and years, often without considering the words we are repeating. Some of these songs, narrating the adventures of farm animals, stars, and itsy bitsy spiders, have very cryptic lyrics that we learned as infants and never again questioned. Who wrote these rhymes? How long have humans been singing them to one another? In this article, we unveil the stories behind 10 timeless verses.

Image: akhmad jazuli

Do you know the five stanzas of "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star?" Very few people do. The ultimate lullaby belongs to the opening verses of "The Star", a poem written in 1806 by English author Jane Taylor. The poem was originally published in Rhymes for the Nursery, a collection by her and her sister Ann.

The couplets are set to the very famous French melody officially called "Ah! vous dirai-je, maman" ("Ah, will I tell you, mom"). It’s a universal classic from 1761; Mozart himself had composed a set of variations based on the melody. However, it wasn’t until thirty years after the Taylor sisters’ publication that another book proposed singing their poem to the catchy music. The nursery rhyme "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep" uses a variant of the same tune.

Image: nikles5

Nowhere in the poem is it mentioned that Humpty Dumpty is an anthropomorphic egg. The lyrics are enigmatic and many attempts have been made to link them to historical figures, like kings or battle heroes. The first version of the rhyme appeared in writing in 1797 in Juvenile Amusements, a music collection by English composer Samuel Arnold. It is believed that "Humpty Dumpty" was 18th-century slang for a clumsy person.

Why an egg, then? Some believed the poem was a riddle to which the answer was that Humpty Dumpty was not a human, but some fragile thing. It was none other than Lewis Carrol, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, who first depicted Humpty Dumpty explicitly as looking like an egg. The character appears on a wall in the popular book’s 1871 sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, where Alice meets him and points out how much like an egg he looks.

Image: Rod Long

"Mary Had a Little Lamb" is based on a true story. It was first published in 1830 by American writer Sarah Josepha Hale. She was a teacher who schooled girls and boys in her hometown, Newport, New Hampshire. One day, a student named Mary showed up accompanied by her pet lamb. This incident, the children’s reactions, and the obvious affection between Mary and her lamb —who "followed her everywhere she went"—, eventually inspired Hale to write a three-stanza poem called Mary’s Lamb.

In the same year, a composer from Boston, Lowell Mason, rearranged the poem and set it to music to have a singable version. We still use the words Mason wrote, but the melody we sing today is not the one he composed. We usually sing it to an 1867 tune known as "Merrily We Roll Along."

Image: Patrick Baum

For context about how old this song is, Mozart wouldn’t be born until 50 years after its earliest known version. "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" appears in a 1706 opera by English writer and composer Thomas d'Urfey. The play, The Kingdom of the Birds, included a song called "In the Fields in Frost and Snow", which was a very near version of the song we know today, down to the iconic "Here a Boo, there a Boo, every-where a Boo".

It is unknown whether this was already a popular song that d’Urfey quoted in his play. What we know, though, is that after his opera the song became very widespread, and eventually became a folk song with varying versions in Britain, Ireland, and North America.

Image: Nils Söderman

This one was conceived from the start as a song. The rhyme has only four lines. The first printing of the song is dated 1852 and attributed to author and teacher Eliphalet Oram Lyte. The melody, however, was very different from the one that was later popularized. It wasn’t until 1881 that the tune as we know it today was attached to the words.

The current version of Row, Row, Row Your Boat is intended to be sung as a four-part round canon. That means that the melody of each line can be combined to harmonize with any of the others. That’s why it’s usually taught to children and popularly used to teach choir singing.

Image: Mert Toker

Children from as far back as the Late Middle Ages might have already been singing this song. The earliest printed version of nursery rhymes about the London Bridge falling appeared in England in 1744 in Tommy Thumb's Pretty Song Book, though the rhyme may have been sung long before this.

There are many myths behind the lyrics of this song, from claiming that the bridge falls because of Viking attacks, to stating that the "fair Lady" mentioned is Virgin Mary.

Image: lil artsy

This beloved nursery folk song was only born in 1938 when it was published as "The Bus" in the American Childhood magazine. Verna Hills, born in 1898 in Boston, conceived this tune to distract the little ones during long bus rides. That’s why the repetitive yet catchy lyrics enlist parts of the moving bus while adding some mimic or sound to go with it. "The Bus" eventually became a folk song also popular in Canada, the UK, and Australia.

The song is believed to be based on "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush", an old English nursery rhyme about a group of young ones going about everyday chores. This one had been set to music from an opera published in mid-1700s London. Its melody and rhythm are very similar to the one we know today.

Image: ErikSmit

Also known as the "Spider Song," this rhyme has received different names throughout English-speaking countries. Its earliest appearance seems to have been in Arthur Walbridge North’s 1910 book Camp and Camino in Lower California, except that it mentions a "blooming, bloody spider" instead.

In varying versions and regions, the spider has also been called "eency weency" and "teeny weeny." Other countries added further variations to one of the most famous nursery rhymes ever. In France, it’s a gypsy spider; in the Netherlands, it’s a beetle; and in Norway, the spider is called Peter.

Image: Juan Pablo Serrano

The timeless finger-counting nursery rhyme was designed to teach children coordination and dexterity. Famously, the words match the narration of the fates of 5 pigs while folding the fingers on a child’s hand one by one.

The first time the poem appeared in writing was in 1728, in a medley called The Nurses Song. Since then, over the decades, varying versions have been written. Some say it may have been inspired by "To Market, To Market," also known as "To Market, To Market, to Buy a Fat Pig," another folk nursery rhyme with a first version that dates back as far as 1598.

Image: Element5 Digital

You probably have noticed that the iconic ABC song uses the same melody as the aforementioned "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star"; Ah! vous dirai-je, maman. However, the lyrics were not applied to the melody until 1835, when Boston publisher Charles Bradlee decided to borrow the familiar tune to sing the alphabet to it, as a strategy to help children learn letters through a catchy and well-known melody. It became a preschool classic, and it has been adapted to be used in many languages other than English.