If history has
taught us anything, it's that no matter where
you are on the timeline, there are about a
million different ways you can meet a sudden,
gruesome, and often bizarre end. Today, we're exploring how
long would you last living in a different era. Even if you hopped
in a time machine with a stash of
supplies based on months of meticulous research, there's
still a pretty good chance you'd be a corpsified
within days after arriving at your destination
completely unprepared for that era's death
blow of choice. Let's take a trip around
the historical block to some of the most prominent
places and times in history and see how long you think you'd
last against the era's most lethal dangers and see
what you could survive. Before we get going,
make sure you subscribe to the Weird History Channel-- do it. All right, great--
let's get going. You're at 14th century
Florence, Italy, the birthplace of the Renaissance. It's so lovely here. Dante Alegre has already
been thrown out of the city and was busy writing his
enemies into the Divine Comedy, and the famous dome of the
Santa Maria de Flore cathedral is still a few decades
from being built. The famed Medici family are also
just beginning to rise to power and will eventually
sponsor great minds like Leonardo, Michelangelo,
Machiavelli, and even Galileo, even though he wasn't endorsed
by Tupac or the Ninja Turtles. But you're also in the
birthplace of the Black Death. Hot on the heels of the Great
Famine during which roughly a quarter of Europe's
population starved to death, the rat-borne plague
rolled through Florence, killing nearly 60% of the
great city's population. That means you have worse odds
than a coin toss of contracting the Black Death and succumbing
to it in three days, then being rolled
into a mass grave, before being exhumed
and eaten by wild dogs. Yes, all of those things
actually happened. The time train just let
you off in Istanbul. No, it's Constantinople. And the 500s, the capital of
the Eastern Roman Empire and was the wealthiest city
in the entire world. Emperor Justinian
the great is busy trying to restore the empire
to its former greatness, which includes creating civil
law, as we know it today, and launching a building
program that will create the famous hockey Sofia Church. Unfortunately,
you're going to have to deal with another thing
bearing Justinian's name. The Justinian plague--
one of the worst outbreaks in recorded history. The Justinian plague wiped
out half the population of Constantinople and went on to
kill almost 50 million people. Worse yet, the disease kept
returning to wreak havoc for the next 250 years. Man, oh, man, that
is one nasty bug. Not a chance you have any
hand sanitizer, do you? London in the 1660s is fresh
out of two decades of civil war and is now in the restoration
with the monarchy back in charge under Charles
II, during a time of relative peace. So take in the sights and
maybe go visit Isaac Newton at Cambridge while he's working
on his undergraduate degree and see if you can get
him to quit the books for a few rounds of alcohol. This is nice-- just make
sure you don't share his cup. By now, you should
have seen this coming. It's the summer of
1665, and London is about to be absolutely
crushed by the great plague, losing a staggering 15% of
its population over just a few months. If you manage to make
it through that somehow, you've got the
Great Fire of London to look forward to
the very next year during which 80% of the city
will be burned to ashes. Not a great decade to
be in foggy London town. Skipping through the time stream
to North America in the 1600s will have you rubbing elbows
with the pilgrims and Captain John Smith, as they settle
in Massachusetts Bay and Jamestown, respectively. Despite what Thanksgiving
at Disney's Pocahontas will have you think, you're
in store for some particularly brutal winters and the start
of a centuries-long, bloody conflict between the
European settlers and the Native Americans. The settlers didn't only
bring guns and buckled hats to the new world. They also brought smallpox--
a disease completely unknown to the continent,
burning through its victims in as little as 12 days with
painful, contagious blisters. Smallpox eradicated as much as
95% of the native population, killing 70% of indigenous
people in New England in a single outbreak
between 1633 and 1634. Let's get out of here. Ireland in the 1840s has its
share of breathtaking views, so be sure to visit
the cliffs of Moher, the newly built Muckross
House while you're here. Just tried to ignore
the fact that you're under the thumb of Great Britain
as a colony of lesser-thans and that there isn't much
prosperity to go around, and you might have an OK time. That lack of prosperity
is about to get much worse when the Irish potato
famine strikes in 1845. Thanks to one of the worst
food shortages in history, one million people are
going to starve to death or die of typhus over the
next few years, and 2 million more are going to flee
Ireland permanently. The famine was so bad, it took
Ireland's population until well into the next
century to recover. That's not quite the luck of
the Irish we were hoping for. Rome in the first century
BCE is the golden age of the empire, which means
it's a pretty good time to be a Roman, as long as you
don't miss the republic too much. Augustus is in charge
now, and his reign as Rome's first emperor
ushers in the Pax Romana, a period of relative
peace in the Roman world that lasts almost 200 years. So kick back and
eat some grapes-- as long as you're not kicking
back during the summer that is. Summertime in Rome is also
called the sickly months during which outbreaks
of malaria, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and
gastroenteritis kill about 30,000 every year. Even if you did remember to
bring a bunch of antibiotics with you in the
time machine, you might get cracked in the head
with a flying chamber pod or mugged by a gang
of thugs if you wander the streets at night. The absence of street lights and
abundance of narrow alleyways made Rome citizens less
cautious about casually dumping their excrement or
assaulting a lone traveler. When in Rome, in the
first century, get out. China in the 200s
BC has just come out of a long period of war
between multiple kingdoms, so it's a good thing you stopped
at Wendy's before firing up the old time machine. The Qin dynasty
is now in control and China's first
emperor, Qin Shi Huang, promises to bring peace and
social reforms to the nation. Unfortunately, the emperor's
version of social reforms means enslaving approximately
one million people to build a great wall, a
grueling task that killed almost all of its workers. If you managed to
avoid Great Wall detail by getting a job
as an intellectual, you still might end up as one
of the nearly 500 scholars the emperor buried
alive to avoid dealing with any criticism
of his government. If your flux capacitor
happens to run out of plutonium in
1860s Virginia, you'd find yourself in the capital
state of the Confederacy right in the middle of the
American Civil War. It's a pretty deadly place to
stage a historical vacation but maybe not for the
reasons you think. Sure, the fighting killed
as many as 850,000 people during its relatively
brief span of four years, but the war also spread
malaria-like endemic jam on toast. The diseases carried
by mosquitoes, which enjoy extensive
breeding grounds in the swamps and
rivers of the south, conveniently where much
of the war was fought. Over one million
cases of malaria were reported during
the Civil War, and the disease has killed an
estimated 50 billion people throughout recorded history. Hopefully, it brought
plenty of OFF bug spray and a really big
Citronella candle. France's Belle Epoque has
been going strong for decades by the time 1910 rolls around,
and the Industrial Revolution is in full swing. You could take a
ride on a street car, make a call on a fancy
new telephone device, or even go see a movie
at the cinematheque. Just try not to think
too hard about what's going to happen to Europe
in the next few years. The Great War--
or a World War I, as it would later be renamed-- is waiting just
around the corner. From 1914 to 1918, France
will suffer 1.4 million dead and over four million
casualties out of 45 million. If you're French
and you're going off to fight in the
trenches, you have a 75% chance of returning home
or never coming home at all. And if you manage
to survive the war, you have an outbreak of Spanish
influenza to look forward to, which 300,000 people would
succumb to in France alone. The 20th century-- hey,
TripAdvisor, not a great time for traveling to Europe. Welcome to the capital of
the newly liberated United States of America. Philadelphia is serving
as the proxy capital city while Washington DC
is under construction and is steadily growing
into a major city under the leadership of
President George Washington. You can catch a
glimpse of him and see if that old wooden
teeth thing is real. While you're looking
for the president, be careful where you
step because you might step on a stack of bodies. Trade with the West Indies
has brought mosquitoes laden with yellow
fever to Philadelphia, and the tropical
disease would leave 5,000 dead from violent
hemorrhaging in 1793. Flare-ups are common
in the summer months throughout the
rest of the 1790s, so it might be best
to stay out of Philly until the Eagles are playing. Even then, you might get a
beer bottle thrown at you. India in the 1770s is
firmly under British rule. More specifically, under the
rule of the British East India Company, an international
trade joint stock company whose shareholders were allowed
to vote on public policy over most of the subcontinent. There's no way to sugarcoat it. This is a very bad
time to be in India. And if you've been
paying attention, you know things are about to
get even worse thanks in part to a massive drought that
went ignored by the company. Famine spread throughout
the Bengali region, resulting in the deaths
of 10 million people-- one third of Bengals population. The famine gave way to a
smallpox epidemic, which further devastated the area. The British East
India Company promptly responded by raising taxes
and doubling their profits over the next decade
because it's a bad idea to let businesses
run governments. Britain in the 1850s is
drunk with wealth courtesy of the Industrial Revolution
with steam and coal fueling aggressive expansion
and dazzling new machinery and factories
dotting the landscape that will one day influence
JRR Tolkien's vision of Mordor. It's the beginning
of the Victorian era, and the Great Exhibition
of 1851 showcases all the exciting new
products and inventions that rich people
will get to enjoy over the next few decades. Aside from the fact
that putting children to work in those factories
was totally acceptable at this time, gruesome accidents
with an incredibly high price of all this amazing
new technology. 40% of all accidents recorded
at the Manchester infirmary were factory related,
but the Victorian era brought a much heavier hitter
in the form of tuberculosis-- a withering disease that could
draw its victims' suffering out over several months
before it would ultimately take their lives. In 1851, the same year as the
Great Exhibition, one fourth of every death in both Europe
and America was caused by TB. Progress looks a lot like
Doc Holiday in Tombstone I'm your Huckleberry. No matter where you park your
DeLorean, every era of history has a deadly plague, war,
fire or ruler to deal with. Which one do you think
he could have beaten and which do you think
would have put you down for the count? Let us know in the
comments below. And while you're at it,
check out more videos of our weird history.
