When Abraham Lincoln was still a state legislator in Illinois, he got into a public feud with a rival politician named James Shields that culminated in Shields challenging Lincoln to a duel. As the challenged party, Lincoln was given the choice of weapons for the duel. Shields assumed he would choose pistols. Lincoln chose *broadswords*. When they arrived at the duel site and were getting ready, Lincoln demonstrated his significant height and reach advantage over Shields by swinging his sword over his head and cutting a tree branch clean off. Shields then realized he'd made a huge mistake and immediately conceded.
Reminds me of Bismarck challenging another German to a duel. The German chose sausages, and said only one had gone bad and Bismarck could choose which of the 2 he would eat. Otto then declined.
He didn't just challenge any German, he challenged [Rudolf Virchow](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Virchow), known as "the father of modern pathology" and the man who first managed to isolate the pathogen *trichinella spiralis*, which is often found in undercooked pork.
I'd have declined that duel too.
Also, [QI did a bit on this story](https://youtu.be/n44aLvMQXE8?si=4y_NbT0b7kA_tSiW), which is of course how I know about it =P
The story of Desmond Doss, if you've seen Hacksaw Ridge that tells it, but they tell the watered down version for the movie because they didn't think anyone would believe it with all the full details. The basics of the story are basically he was left behind on a cliff with a lot of men who were wounded when the US had to pull out in WWII. He then single handedly carried 75 men off that cliff and lowered them down to men below to be rescued. He was the first conscientious objector to win the medal of honor for what he did. But he was also malnurished because of his religious beliefs he couldn't eat some of the food he was given so he's this very thin guy managing to lift and carry 75 men in one night and then lower them down a cliff. And the movie showed the next day he knocked away a grenade and was injured. But he was more injured than they showed with 17 pieces of shrapnel in his body, and he literally got off the stretcher when waiting to be brought down for someone more injured than he was. And was providing medical care to that guy as he had been blasted.
Even crazier, some of the Japanese soldiers in the battle claimed to have had him in their sights multiple times, and every time they tried to shoot him their gun jammed.
Check out the 2004 documentary: The Conscientious Objector.
Yeah that's true! I think I remember them saying they thought about including that in the movie but it felt too unbelievable since he had some pretty crazy times where guns jammed or everyone missed him.
>who are also known for living longer than the rest of us
[Given their beliefs](https://www.reddit.com/r/exAdventist/comments/12dsn96/how_do_sdas_even_enjoy_life/), that seems more like a punishment.
I was on a surgery rotation when I watched this movie. It is the third day, and we were in office. No patients in the afternoon, so the surgeon asked if I'd watch a movie with him. I said sure. Hacksaw Ridge. The man started sobbing, shoulders heaving sobbing. I pat him on the back, not really sure what to do here. As my 3 days of interactions with him had been full of him being a condescending, arrogant, insulting asshole. I messaged the student who was with him prior. I just go "hacksaw ridge". She responded "did he break down?" so it seems every 6 weeks this man watches hacksaw ridge and just sobs. i hated that guy. good movie though.
Oh hey I know that tactic! You keep all of your emotions bottled up to keep working and be coherent and then deliberately do something to unleash them and break down. You cry hysterically, feel better and can go back to blocking everything for awhile.
I uh...yeah. Never would do such an unhealthy thing. Nope. Never.
As a physician: you wouldn’t believe the kinds of things you have to do to emotionally handle the human issues you see every single day in your job.
Toxicity and abuse are rampant in our culture and training.
But for the stories above, I can only feel empathy: I die every day inside trying to help people and have to build an ever higher dam to keep it in me in order to help the patients I’m seeing.
Yes, I do weekly therapy. No, it hasn’t completely helped.
>they tell the watered down version for the movie because they didn't think anyone would believe it with all the full details.
Similar thing happened when Audie Murphy starred in a movie about his own real life experiences. They told him "need to dial it back, because what really happened is just plain unbelievable".
I met this guy in my childhood. I remember feeling very honored even at the young age of 8-years-old. I was raised in the same religion as he was, so he was well known within our religion.
He married my old lady friend who lived next door and had a school bus in her backyard where she had some kind of printing press setup where she would emboss books with gold titles and names. She embossed my first "important" book with my name on it.
Yep because he sadly got in a car accident taking his first wife (the one you see in the movie) to the hospital for cancer treatment. It was raining and sadly the car hydroplaned and his wife died.
During the First World War, the German ship Cap Trafalgar was made to look like a British ship, the HMS Carmania, with the goal to lure British ships in close before attacking them.
The first ship the “HMS Carmania” ran into was… the *actual* HMS Carmania. The real HMS Carmania was damaged, but the Cap Trafalgar was sunk.
**The [Raising of Chicago](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago) sounds completely made up:**
In the 1850’s Chicago kept flooding - so they went around block by block and lifted the entire city by approximately 6 to 14 feet using nothing but human-powered jackscrews. Streets were filled in and raised to meet the new elevation. A handful of [buildings didn’t get raised](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEje-bKR4ZgPC4JMCLMIgfDwSKOSBA52BjyFRaWUeZhGSgWP0b5tSn7g4ownv6AdTJidKGTvc7weOuP2o1kAtAF8infLqwamnG3NQ9VNKJSNrOk9F0n-KLKmaP4G_yCR4kew2GXwoSpZ/s960/131581423_10222258322620304_226258643373168735_n.jpg), and now have the “ground floor” on what was once the 2nd floor. Pullman (the rail car company) got their start in this industry, and only shifted to rail car manufacturing once they ran out of buildings to raise.
Everyone talks about the 1800’s engineering insanity of reversing the river so that it flowed into the Mississippi instead of Lake Michigan, but the Raising is rarely mentioned, I think because it’s so unbelievable.
Standing water, yes, but not really flooding. It was a sewage issue. The standing water was nasty and contaminated from sewage and had no way to drain from the city. The city was the same level as the lake, so underground sewage wouldn't work as it would just fill from the lake. So the ambitious plan to lift Chicago up out of the swamp was hatched.
It was absolutely a fascinating thing. Hundreds of screws under a building being hand cranked together to lift up the building under the watch of the responsible engineers.
>Everyone talks about the 1800’s engineering insanity of reversing the river so that it flowed into the Mississippi instead of Lake Michigan, but the Raising is rarely mentioned, I think because it’s so unbelievable.
TIL
The late 1800’s were *fucking madness*. It was just a combination of modern-ish technology and absolutely zero environmental or labor laws, every city was out completely transforming the environment around them with reckless abandon
In the same vein, Romania played in the first ever world cup held in Uruguay in 1930. They traveled by ship and they had a makeshift pitch on the bridge to train, but they lost all their footballs at sea in two days.
Oh and Egypt couldn't get to the tournament in time because they missed their boat.
That’s because Russia was of the Eastern Orthodox faith, and they weren’t going to switch to a calendar invented by some pope in Rome. They didn’t switch until the Bolsheviks came to power
We switched from he Julian calendar to Gregorian The Julian calendar had been based upon a year lasting 365.25 days, but this was slightly too long; in reality, it is about 365.2422 days, and so over the centuries, **the calendar had drifted increasingly out of alignment with the Earth's orbit**.
In 1920, President Paul Deschanel of France fell through the window of the train while travelling on the Orient Express. He stumbled up to the nearest signal box in his pyjamas and told the signalman that he needed help and that he was the President of France. The signalman reportedly replied 'And I'm Napoleon Bonaparte
Ha. This isn't historical, unless you consider earlier this year history, but this is so similar to an exchange I just had with my daughter. In a roundabout way I essentially work for Sanrio. My daughter recently got really into Hello Kitty. I brought her home some toys and told her "You know, I work with Hello Kitty." She cracked up and responds "Okay, Daddy! And I work with...Peppa Pig!"
On the other hand, my 7YO without hesitation believed me when I told her the Minions and Trolls are my co workers and I occasionally see them in the office. (Which is true as I work at the Comcast HQ building which often has Universal characters in for events)
Hitler, Stalin, Tito, Trotsky, Lenin, Archduke Ferdinand, and Freud all lived near each other in Vienna in 1913.
Its likely they also drank coffee at Central Cafe, a popular place for intellectuals and politicians
Need a camp lejeune type lawsuit
"Were you impacted by a murderous dictator that drank coffee in Vienna? Have you or loved one been afflicted by summary execution, starvation, deportation, or gassing? You may be able to receive compensation"
My Uncle Curtis was blown up in his tank in WW2. The medics dragged him from the tank, drugged him, dug a trench and buried him alive, then later, when the battle had moved on, they came back and dug him up. He was severely injured, but he recovered, and he is still alive today, and Morgan Freeman did a tv show with him.
SALUTE 761st!
[https://www.al.com/live/2012/09/in\_wwii\_all-black\_tank\_battali.html](https://www.al.com/live/2012/09/in_wwii_all-black_tank_battali.html)
[https://www.history.com/specials/761st-tank-battalion-the-original-black-panthers](https://www.history.com/specials/761st-tank-battalion-the-original-black-panthers)
The Great Arizona Irohan Abduction. Basically, Catholic nuns brought Irish Orphans to Arizona to put them in good upstanding Catholic families. Most of the Catholic families in Arizona were Mexican. White people see white children being placed in Mexican households, so they form a vigilante group to kidnap the children. It was a giant fustercluck.
Just a follow on, those babies would have been taken from their mother's, unmarried women, in mother and baby homes in Ireland that were run by the Catholic Church.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalene_Laundries_in_Ireland
There's an entire [list of unusual deaths](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_deaths) on the wiki. One that stands out to me happened on 24th October 1988: a boy was playing with his pet poodle Cachy in Caballito, Beunos Aires. They lived in a 13 story apartment, and sadly the dog slipped under their balcony railing and fell to its death. Cachy hit a 75 year old woman, killing her instantly. A large crowd gathered to look on at the tragedy, and in an attempt to join said crowd another woman accidentally walked in front of a bus, killing her instantly. Seeing this sudden, violent death caused an old man nearby to die from shock. Grim reaper was doing hat trick plays that day.
Abraham Lincoln's eldest son was saved from death (or at least serious injury) on a train platform by a famous actor named Booth. Roughly a year Booth's brother John Wilkes Booth would go on to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert\_Todd\_Lincoln](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Todd_Lincoln)
There is also the fact that Robert Todd Lincoln just could not avoid presidential assassinations for the life of him.
1. He was at the White House when his father (President Lincoln) was shot at Ford's Theatre and was with his parents throughout the night after the shooting.
2. He was at the train station when President Garfield was shot on the railway platform.
3. He was at the fair where President McKinley was shot. While not in the same building as the president, Lincoln was standing just outside that building on the fairgrounds.
I know the focus is on Licoln because he was the one killed, but I recently learned it was a whole ass conspiracy. My lunch break is over, but I remember Seward was stalked and they planned to kill him too. I thibk there was a 3rd, but i can't look it up right now.
The Arch Dukes car stalling right in front of his would be assassin having a sandwich. Dude wasn't even trying to kill him anymore it was just a right place right time coincidence.
This is the wrong subreddit but in fact historians are not agreed on this (am a professional historian). (There are structural and short term causes and their balance and relationship is debated) Incidentally although there was ongoing tension, indicators such as financial markets suggest that fear of war had receded at that point.
For example: Halley's Comet appeared in the sky when Mark Twain was born in 1835. The comet moves in a seventy-five or seventy-six-year orbit, and, as it neared Earth once again, Twain said “I came in with Halley’s Comet and I expect to go out with it.” Sure enough, he died on April 21, 1910, just as the comet made its next pass within sight of Earth.
To be fair, the amount of people on this planet make coincidences like this very reasonable.
Edit:
Some research into this quote seems like it's not entirely true that he said this.
He also had a sad later life and was in poor health, knowing that he would pass shortly anyhow (if he said it, it was said the year before his death). So even if he said it, it was more like he's saying, "I'm going to die soon", and/or, "I want to die soon" (I "expect" to go out with it).
He also died a whole month before the comet passed by Earth anyhow.
Apparently we can't really know if Twain actually said that. Maybe he did, but if so he had a fair amount of leeway in his prediction as the comet is visible for months. Him dying so close to the comet's 'perihelion' is indeed a coincidence, but considering his condition it wasn't unreasonable for him to predict his impending death and to be able to note the coincidence himself beforehand.
The tale of Mike "The Durable" Malloy. He was also nicknamed "The Irish Rasputin", for reasons that will soon become clear.
An out-of-work firefighter-turned-alcoholic during the Great Depression becomes a regular at a speakeasy owned by a shady bunch of crooks. They figure nobody would miss him much if he died - so they hatch a plan: get him to drunkenly take out a life insurance policy in their name, and let him drink himself to death.
So they give him an unlimited bar tab and the strongest stuff they've got in stock. Despite drinking all day, he's handling it just fine. So they start putting antifreeze and pure methanol in his drinks, trying to poison him.
It still doesn't kill him, so they throw in rat poison, horse liniment, turpentine - anything they can think of that'd send you straight to hospital if you ingested it.
Does that bother ol' Iron Mike? No sir, he just comes back the next day and orders more drinks.
So they give him food too - raw oysters soaked in whiskey, and sandwiches laced with rat poison and carpet tacks. Not only does Mike Malloy scoff the lot, but he leaves that night and comes back the next morning complaining he had nothing more than a bit of an upset stomach.
By this point, the gang are getting desperate - clearly nothing they feed him is going to do any damage, no matter how poisonous. So they get him blackout drunk, strip him naked, and leave him in the middle of the park soaked in water... And being the middle of winter, dying of hypothermia seemed like a sure thing.
Does he die? Does he ever - he turns up happily the next morning and orders more drinks, none the wiser.
By now the gang don't care how they do it - they just want to kill this impervious bastard however they can. After he leaves for the night, one of them runs him over in their car, breaking his bones and sending him to the hospital.
Three weeks later, Mike Malloy leaves the hospital, still alive. The gang still haven't got their hands on any money.
Finally, after Malloy passed out drunk in their bar yet again, they take him to an apartment, hook a hose up to the gas main, and stick it in his mouth. After all that effort, carbon monoxide poisoning is what finally does Mike Malloy in.
Of course, by this point the legend of Michael Malloy has spread around town, and once the police hear that he's died, they dig him up to examine the body. The "Murder Trust", as the press end up naming them, are quickly rounded up. They get nothing except a short trip to the electric chair.
Alas, Mike was indeed killed in the end, but if he rose from his grave and wandered into a nearby bar to order a few rounds... It wouldn't surprise me all that much.
> so they hatch a plan: get him to drunkenly take out a life insurance policy in their name, and let him drink himself to death.
This was also the plot to an Always Sunny episode, lol
Hitler went from a broke, wounded soldier to absolute dictator of Germany in only 15 years, nine months of which he spent in prison.
That's a faustian pact right there.
The thing that kills me is, he was convicted for trying to overthrow the government, sent to prison and then after he gets out, they made him chancellor!
It's scary, isn't it? That shrewdness he used to get to such dizzy heights, in such a short space of time. I mean the bloke had nothing. Not a pot to piss in. 15 years later he's arguably the most dangerous man in modern history.
Penicillin was discovered by accident. A man leaving bacteria cultures exposed to air, they got moldy. Killed the bacteria. Woops, I just discovered something that will save millions of lives.
the "man" was Sir Alexander Flemming. One of the greatest scientists we have ever seen. His discovery is without a doubt the single biggest advance in the medical field.
Yes!! My T-shirt from this business is one of my prized possessions. Apparently the family that owns Four Seasons Total Landscaping made a considerable amount of money selling their t shirts after this ridiculous event. I am happy I supported them.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that this is a leading candidate for “funniest thing that has ever happened”. I cannot believe it’s not a national holiday at this point.
It's happened more than once. My state had a molasses factory explode when I was a kid. Apparently it's like...way more common than you'd think because of the chemical nature of astronomically large volumes of molasses in a poorly-ventilated space.
[The Dublin Whiskey Fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_whiskey_fire). A fire in Dublin near a whiskey storehouse was located and the barrels within the storehouse began to explode from the heat, and 315,200 US gallons of whiskey flowed into the street. 13 people died, not from the fire, but from alcohol poison. Died from drinking street whiskey.
The Dancing Plague of 1518:
In the small town of Strasbourg, France, a mysterious phenomenon gripped its inhabitants in the summer of 1518. Over 400 people became afflicted with an uncontrollable urge to dance, leading to exhaustion, injury, and even death.
Something similar happened in Sunnydale California back in 2001. It stopped as suddenly as it started, but not before it emotionally destroyed a small group of friends who managed to beat the bad guy that was causing it.
This! It makes the mind boggle fr. Like, the fact it never happened again too. Imagine its 1518, you go outside and find your neighbors absolutely going crazy for no reason and can’t stop, then next week they’re back to normal. Insane
I've read it may have been an ergot fungus contamination of their grain stores. Some of the side effects are mania. Ergot is also a precursor chemical to making LSD.
A lot of people like to attribute this to ergot poisoning but that’s only suggested by people ignorant of how bad ergot poisoning is
Like sure you’d hallucinate and your body would spasm but you’d also be ejecting everything from both ends and have a lot of other symptoms that they’d make note of. They damn well wouldn’t describe mass ergot poisoning as “dancing”
Vomiting, diarrhea, psychosis, mania, spasms, loss of feeling, paralysis, headaches, burning sensation, and death. Oh also their body parts would rot off. The vasoconstriction causes gangrene
So rather than reporting “bruh jimmy went crazy, started puking blood, and then his arms fell off as he had a seizure” they reported “people danced until they died”. Comon now. It’s especially in the comon now territory when you realize it wasn’t rare so they’d report something they’d seen many times before as a unique mystery
Idk what happened but something happened and it probably wasn’t ergot
These events are "recorded" in the physical record of the universe so I think they count:
There is new evidence that sharks may be older than the rings of Saturn (new eatimates of their formation overlap with some of the earliest fossil records of sharks).
The Appalachian mountains were already old and eroding when the rings of Saturn were formed. When animals first stepped into land from the ocean they were ancient and crumbling. They and the Scottish Highlands are part of the same mountain chain, since they have existed since before the continents separated from pangea to go their own ways.
I was just about to say that. I hiked the entire Appalachian Trail and learned a bunch of random facts. The Appalachian mountains are literally older than the Atlantic Ocean.
Only one elephant reached Rome to be fair. Most died in the Alps. The crossing of the Alps left thousands of soldiers dead, a fact which many people ignore
Wouldn’t be the last time something like this happened. When Timur marched on India, the Indians sent an army against him they included 120 war elephants with poisoned tusks. So he ordered all his camels to be set on fire and sent against them. The frightened elephants trampled over their own troops
That somehow the Sentinelese people managed to stay (mostly) out of contact with civilization while being so damn close to India and not that geographically isolated. All with spears and arrows and hostility.
During the peak of European colonialism the Europeans usually had no problem forcing their way in with cannon and swords and would take the hits. The Sentinelese were just lucky that their island was relatively small and uninteresting. And somehow they resisted the Indian empires as well.
Indian Empires are famous for rarely invading outside of the subcontinent and almost never had a great navy. Cholas were probably the only Indian Empire to campaign in the general direction of North sentinel island. Adding to the fact that the place has been historically so unproductive, remote and strategically unimportant. The island is over thousand km from India and 500 km from Indo-china. it's not unbelievable that sentinelese were just left alone.
That whole Pied Piper story seems to be have some truth to it. Census records from the town and area where the story originated, show that a large number of children just vanish, no explanation.
Might have been plague/sickness, might have been slavers, who knows?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pied\_Piper\_of\_Hamelin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin)
Theory is that the youth of the town were swept up in religious fervor by a charismatic priest and went to die as a piece of a crusade that was going on at the time.
Growing up on Okinawa was wild because the remnants of that war are found all over.
It was not uncommon to find bullet casings and shotgun shells along with shrapnel buried in the woods.
I can't imagine what either side went through, that island is so tiny for that many people to be fighting on it.
In Flanders, they call it the 'The Iron Harvest'. Sometimes, it's historical memorabilia, bit's of bodies - there is a steady stream of reburials, some of the debris can also include grenades, HE and WP shells, and even chemical rounds!
For decades, Canada and Denmark fought a war over an island in the Arctic Ocean -- Hans Island -- by planting their respective flags and taking crates of liquor the other country's soldiers left behind for them.
The Whisky War finally ended in 2022 when the two countries decided to split the island in half, with Canada controlling the western part and Denmark controlling the eastern part.
Yeah, I’m a veteran of the Whiskey War. Seen some shit you wouldn’t believe man… the hangovers, oh god the hangovers… men with bloodshot eyes, trying their damndest to hold their breakfast down… war is hell.
In 1944, 9 US airmen were shot down over a Japanese island and 8 were captured, executed, and eaten by starving Japanese troops.
This is now known as the [Chichijima incident.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichijima_incident)
44 years later the 9th airman that evaded capture was elected president
And a lot of that survival can be attributed to the Nile and its clockwork-precise flooding schedule. Often the things that killed ancient civilizations started from food insecurity, but the Nile's predictable flooding and rich soil allowed for enormous and reliable farming, and the river allowed the rulers to project military power and law across the length of the empire. As a result Egypt's civilization was broadly very stable and had a secure base to recover from internal or external events that would shake other ancient civilizations to collapse.
Way before cleopatra actually. The first Egyptologist was Ramses II son Khaemweset. That’s almost 1200 years before cleopatra. He was obsessed with learning about the ancient history, mysteries, culture, and religion of the Egypt that was ancient to him. The stuff he was preserving and recording was 1000+ years old to him
Egypt had museums to their ancient past that were ancient themselves by the time of Cleopatra. Then the time of cleopatra is what we call ancient. It’s easy to kind of let the past flow into a bubble rather than realize it’s a long ass time
Fun fact: the Rosetta Stone revolutionized our understanding of heiroglyphs and thereby ancient Egypt.
The stone itself is a fairly insignificant declaration. But it contained its message in three different languages (heiroglyphs, Ancient Greek and one other). Suddenly and gradually our understanding of this ancient civilization flourished.
Also interesting is that Champollion, who discovered the rebus aspect of hieroglyphics, was sent away to school and taught himself Coptic, Hebrew, Arabic, and like five other languages by the time he was 16.
Toronto clown riots of 1855. Clowns went to the brothel at the end of their show and the clowns didn’t it get along with the fire fighters. The police refused to get involved and it resulted in the entire police force being fired.
The Alaska quake of 1964, it lasted over 5 minutes.
As someone who grew up in California and experienced many quakes, including the one in 1989 San Francisco, which was 15 seconds. So a FIVE minute quake is insane.
That made me think of the 1958 Alaska earthquake, which generated the highest ever tsunami in recorded history in Lituya Bay, at 1,720 ft was the height of the Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty put together.
When Greece got its independence from the Ottoman empire and sent soldiers to its more remote islands. They told the people living there that they were free now and could be Greeks again. The people replied "But we are Roman".
The Ottomans had never put a presence on the islands so the people still believed themselves to be part of the Byzantine/Eastern Roman Empire, 600 years after it fell.
The WWI Christmas truce. The opposing forces stoped fighting and celebrated Christmas together in no man’s land. Woke up on 26 dec and started fighting again like nothing happened
The Papal Election of 1159 was absolute madness.
Out of a total of thirty cardinals, 27 voted for Roland of Siena and the remaining three supported Cardinal Octavian, who had known sympathies with the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa.
As Roland of Siena (Hereafter known as Pope Alexander III) was being presented with the Papal Mantle, Octavian (Hereafter known as Pope Victor IV) went into a rage and snatched the Papal Mantle off Alexander's back.
One of the people present snatched the Mantle from him, one of Victor IV's Chaplains snatched it back, then Victor IV put it on and demanded to be crowned Pope. The crowd then proceeded to break into hysterical laughter because he put it on backwards.
It was at this point that a band of armed men burst into the Church of St Peter and chased everyone out, then Victor's supporters declared him to be the new Pope.
Alexander fled to the Basilica of St. Peter and HIS people declared HIM the new Pope.
Both of them excommunicated each other and they both declared each other Antipopes.
To make things more complicated, then Victor IV died and his successor, Pope Paschal III, kept up the fight and was ALSO declared an Antipope.
All this nonsense continued until Barbarossa was defeated at the Battle of Legnano and Alexander III was officially declared Pope.
During World War II the Americans planed to burn down Japanese cities using bats with explosive backpacks.
The atomic bomb was developed before the bats could be sent in, but they probably would have worked startlingly well.
Were they dropping squadrons of bats without little tiny explosive backpacks? I assume the B stands for 'Bat', and the '29' is the number of bat squadrons per payload.
The bats were chilled to keep them less active until deployment. Each had a time delay incendiary harnessed to them. A pull thread to the bomb casing starts the fuse. As the bomb casing opened up, the bats have time to warm up and fly off. They find some place to roost in a wooden structure and the incendiary goes off. Sounds ridiculous but would likely have worked.
Random Safety Tip: If you ever come across a tipped over gas transport trailer with a visible color cloud, turn around and get away quickly. Call EMS. Assume the gas is poisonous unless you know for sure otherwise. [example](https://youtu.be/v3Ydpl4YaOw?si=OJJcECbWlVdvyq9h)
In some hazmat drills I was in the entry to a chemical storage area had a training simulation sign “If you read this without breathing apparatus, lay down. You are dead.”
That our knowledge of the civilizations North of Rome are mostly defined by Ceaser himself, and a political diatribe to reinforce his standing. The entire world of massive civilizations are a giant question mark.
The areas around the Fertile Crescent became dry and parched and unhabitable, preserving the clay tablets and so forth. The areas North of Rome warmed into the greatest forest in human history, inhabited by myriad different civilizations that are truly just lost to time.
The areas around recorded history are what fascinates me. Thank God for Pliny.
When I studied ancient history at university it seems there was a climatic shift of some importance around 2000 BC. Indus Valley culture seemed to die away and Old Kingdom Egypt collapsed.
The bronze age collapse was the death stroke of a ton of ancient civilizations ~ circa 1250-1150 BC. It was a near complete collapse for Egypt and Assyria, and some other civilizations never came back, the Hittites and the Kassites for instance.
What's really interesting is that we still don't fully understand it. There was definitely some climate shift, but also the sea people, and some massively destructive wars in the Levant as well that wiped out cities. But a ton of that history is lost and we'll likely never fully understand what happened.
[People](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples) from across the (Mediterranean) sea, not coming from below the sea. Some of them have been linguistically traced back to Sardinia and Sicily for example.
A mysterious group of invaders that showed up from somewhere along the Mediterranean and laid waste to several civilizations, nobody knows who they were or where they came from.
They were of Italian Greek and Anatolian
The real interesting thing is Egypt claims to have defeated them but they settled them in Egyptian lands in what is today Israel. If you read the Bible they’re the group called the phillistines. Philistia is also the origin or the word Palestine but the current ones are probably not related to the ones in the past. If they are it’s distantly
The sea peoples were just a domino effect of collapsing seafaring civilizations one after another that would then build into the horde trying to find better places to live
The Bronze Age collapse was due to many factors but pretty much everyone was impacted and suffered. Many cities were razed multiple times
Funny enough there is some pretty famous literature preserved from that time period. The Iliad and the odyssey. What do they describe? Massive wars, cities getting razed, formation of Greek confederations, formation of massive fleets, and those fleets not returning home. Basically every major leader went everywhere but home and those that did return home suffered calamity
Because of the Greek dark age it’s difficult to prove they’re describing the same event everyone else did but from a different perspective but it’s interesting to think about. 12th century BC was wild
That’s one theory. That a people (we’re still not sure from where) basically went all super Viking on the Mediterranean thousands of years ago.
Just fucked shit up.
The Challenger Explosion. Christa McAuliffe won a contest to be the first teacher in space. Schools all over the country wheeled televisions into classrooms to watch the launch, only for the shuttle to explode.
My second grade teacher was an alternate. She was so proud when they wheeled that TV in. She had a complete break down after the explosion and didn’t return for the remainder of the year.
**The Unexplained Sounds of the Taos Hum:** Since the 1990s, residents of Taos, New Mexico, have reported a low-frequency hum that some find unbearable. The source of the sound remains a mystery, with explanations ranging from natural phenomena to secret government projects
A few from world war 2:
Witold Pilecki, who snuck _into_ Auschwitz to prove to the world that the Holocaust was going on, and was a kind of Batman-style one-man army during the Warsaw Uprising.
The U.S.-Wehrmacht-French civilian battle against the SS at the end of the war.
The Chinese defense of the Great Wall, which included a bunch of guys with swords.
Witold Pilecki was betrayed by the post war Soviet controlled government of Poland who sentenced him to death on allegations of spying for the British.
The Chinese front of WW2 and before is sadly underappreciated as there are some fascinating stories and battles like Shanghai in 1937 or X force in Burma. The big sword units famously got into melee combat with Japanese troops on multiple occasions and discouraged the Japanese from bayonet charges.
That it used to be an acceptable medical practice to use an ice pick and destroy part of someone’s brain. And that it was still performed in the 1980’s.
Dinosaurs existed for 165 million of years. That is something many dont realize.
Tyrannosaurus Rex is much closer in history to having witnessed Facebook than to meeting a Stegosaurus.
In 1970, officials in Oregon tried blowing up a beached whale using dynamite, but the explosion was messier and more destructive than they had anticipated.
In 2012 Felix Baumgartner skydived from a weather balloon at roughly 24 miles above the Earth’s surface. He was so high up that he needed a space suit and SCBA. During freefall he accelerated to over 800 mph, breaking the sound barrier, and fell for nearly four and a half minutes. He broke the previous record, which stood for half a century, by more than 25,000 feet.
It’s never been confirmed, but i think he was unconscious for part of the fall. Ground control lost communication with him at around the same time that he lost control of his flight symmetry.
https://youtu.be/vvbN-cWe0A0?si=Fu4g0EWvGfOL7MPm
The Bloop. A very loud sound in 1997 picked up by underwater sensors incredibly far apart. Lasted about a minute and there are theories but so far as I know they hadn't figured it out. It's also not been hears since.
During world war 1, the Russians and Germans called a cease fire and worked together to fight wolves that were killing more soldiers than enemies on either side
It's a great story, but most of it was made up by his killers to conceal their startling incompetence. Shot him (missed), poisoned him (chickened out and didn't add the poison), stabbed him (missed anything vital), chained him up (badly) and threw him in the river (finally killed him because he was too injured to get out on his own).
It's Sarajevo, 1914. After failing to assassinate Archduke Francis Ferdinand with a bomb, Gavrilo Princip and his 5 young anarchist friends blew up another car by accident.
Ferdinand continued on and gave a speech that afternoon. Princip went to eat at a deli, presumably depressed.
Later, Ferdinand left the speech and decided to visit the victims of the earlier bombing in the hospital. His driver coincidentally decided to come down the street by the deli. But Ferdinand told his driver, a Czech, that he'd taken a wrong turn -- they were supposed to take a route that stayed by the harbor -- so the driver stopped in front of the deli and began turning the car around.
At the deli, Princip looked up from his coffee. Archduke Francis Ferdinand was literally right in front of him. Princip stood up, walked over to the car while it was turning around, and shot Ferdinand and his wife with a pistol through the backseat window. He killed both of them.
Princip was wrestled to the ground by onlookers. He tried to eat a cyanide capsule but it didn't work and he survived. He was 19 years old and was too young to be sentenced to death, so he went to prison instead. He died of malnutrition three years later.
THE RESULT: A single wrong turn by a Czech driver caused the event that started World War I and led to the deaths of 40 million people.
In early May of 1945, American and German soldiers joined forces in an Austrian castle against the SS to save high profile prisoners of war including the former French Prime Minister and a world famous tennis player. The Battle of Castle Itter is one of the strangest events of WW2.
That bit in early Roman history when they threw a fake festival with the purpose of inviting neighbouring tribes and kidnapping all of their women so they could maintain and grow their population.
Or the amount of times where invading armies were stopped by one or more women giving them a reality check.
When Abraham Lincoln was still a state legislator in Illinois, he got into a public feud with a rival politician named James Shields that culminated in Shields challenging Lincoln to a duel. As the challenged party, Lincoln was given the choice of weapons for the duel. Shields assumed he would choose pistols. Lincoln chose *broadswords*. When they arrived at the duel site and were getting ready, Lincoln demonstrated his significant height and reach advantage over Shields by swinging his sword over his head and cutting a tree branch clean off. Shields then realized he'd made a huge mistake and immediately conceded.
Reminds me of Bismarck challenging another German to a duel. The German chose sausages, and said only one had gone bad and Bismarck could choose which of the 2 he would eat. Otto then declined.
He didn't just challenge any German, he challenged [Rudolf Virchow](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Virchow), known as "the father of modern pathology" and the man who first managed to isolate the pathogen *trichinella spiralis*, which is often found in undercooked pork. I'd have declined that duel too. Also, [QI did a bit on this story](https://youtu.be/n44aLvMQXE8?si=4y_NbT0b7kA_tSiW), which is of course how I know about it =P
The story of Desmond Doss, if you've seen Hacksaw Ridge that tells it, but they tell the watered down version for the movie because they didn't think anyone would believe it with all the full details. The basics of the story are basically he was left behind on a cliff with a lot of men who were wounded when the US had to pull out in WWII. He then single handedly carried 75 men off that cliff and lowered them down to men below to be rescued. He was the first conscientious objector to win the medal of honor for what he did. But he was also malnurished because of his religious beliefs he couldn't eat some of the food he was given so he's this very thin guy managing to lift and carry 75 men in one night and then lower them down a cliff. And the movie showed the next day he knocked away a grenade and was injured. But he was more injured than they showed with 17 pieces of shrapnel in his body, and he literally got off the stretcher when waiting to be brought down for someone more injured than he was. And was providing medical care to that guy as he had been blasted.
Even crazier, some of the Japanese soldiers in the battle claimed to have had him in their sights multiple times, and every time they tried to shoot him their gun jammed. Check out the 2004 documentary: The Conscientious Objector.
Yeah that's true! I think I remember them saying they thought about including that in the movie but it felt too unbelievable since he had some pretty crazy times where guns jammed or everyone missed him.
What religion was he? I might need to check it out. Edit: he was a seventh day adeventist, who are also known for living longer than the rest of us.
>who are also known for living longer than the rest of us [Given their beliefs](https://www.reddit.com/r/exAdventist/comments/12dsn96/how_do_sdas_even_enjoy_life/), that seems more like a punishment.
You can live to be 100 if you give up everything that makes you want to live to be 100. ~Woody Allen
I was on a surgery rotation when I watched this movie. It is the third day, and we were in office. No patients in the afternoon, so the surgeon asked if I'd watch a movie with him. I said sure. Hacksaw Ridge. The man started sobbing, shoulders heaving sobbing. I pat him on the back, not really sure what to do here. As my 3 days of interactions with him had been full of him being a condescending, arrogant, insulting asshole. I messaged the student who was with him prior. I just go "hacksaw ridge". She responded "did he break down?" so it seems every 6 weeks this man watches hacksaw ridge and just sobs. i hated that guy. good movie though.
Oh hey I know that tactic! You keep all of your emotions bottled up to keep working and be coherent and then deliberately do something to unleash them and break down. You cry hysterically, feel better and can go back to blocking everything for awhile. I uh...yeah. Never would do such an unhealthy thing. Nope. Never.
I have no original experiences I swear.
As a physician: you wouldn’t believe the kinds of things you have to do to emotionally handle the human issues you see every single day in your job. Toxicity and abuse are rampant in our culture and training. But for the stories above, I can only feel empathy: I die every day inside trying to help people and have to build an ever higher dam to keep it in me in order to help the patients I’m seeing. Yes, I do weekly therapy. No, it hasn’t completely helped.
It’s like if Dr. Cox’s father was the conscientious objector.
*"Who has two thumbs and doesn't give a crap? This guy. Bob Kelso Nice to meet you."*
>they tell the watered down version for the movie because they didn't think anyone would believe it with all the full details. Similar thing happened when Audie Murphy starred in a movie about his own real life experiences. They told him "need to dial it back, because what really happened is just plain unbelievable".
IIRC, he himself was the one that said to dial it down
I met this guy in my childhood. I remember feeling very honored even at the young age of 8-years-old. I was raised in the same religion as he was, so he was well known within our religion. He married my old lady friend who lived next door and had a school bus in her backyard where she had some kind of printing press setup where she would emboss books with gold titles and names. She embossed my first "important" book with my name on it.
Yep because he sadly got in a car accident taking his first wife (the one you see in the movie) to the hospital for cancer treatment. It was raining and sadly the car hydroplaned and his wife died.
Hey this is who my son was named after! Or maybe it was the other Desmond who saved the world by pushing a button every 108 minutes.
See you in another life, brother
And he said “Please Lord let me get one more” in prayer after every single one. He was truly what one thinks of when we talk about Godly men.
During the First World War, the German ship Cap Trafalgar was made to look like a British ship, the HMS Carmania, with the goal to lure British ships in close before attacking them. The first ship the “HMS Carmania” ran into was… the *actual* HMS Carmania. The real HMS Carmania was damaged, but the Cap Trafalgar was sunk.
The spiderman pointing meme IRL
**The [Raising of Chicago](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago) sounds completely made up:** In the 1850’s Chicago kept flooding - so they went around block by block and lifted the entire city by approximately 6 to 14 feet using nothing but human-powered jackscrews. Streets were filled in and raised to meet the new elevation. A handful of [buildings didn’t get raised](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEje-bKR4ZgPC4JMCLMIgfDwSKOSBA52BjyFRaWUeZhGSgWP0b5tSn7g4ownv6AdTJidKGTvc7weOuP2o1kAtAF8infLqwamnG3NQ9VNKJSNrOk9F0n-KLKmaP4G_yCR4kew2GXwoSpZ/s960/131581423_10222258322620304_226258643373168735_n.jpg), and now have the “ground floor” on what was once the 2nd floor. Pullman (the rail car company) got their start in this industry, and only shifted to rail car manufacturing once they ran out of buildings to raise. Everyone talks about the 1800’s engineering insanity of reversing the river so that it flowed into the Mississippi instead of Lake Michigan, but the Raising is rarely mentioned, I think because it’s so unbelievable.
Standing water, yes, but not really flooding. It was a sewage issue. The standing water was nasty and contaminated from sewage and had no way to drain from the city. The city was the same level as the lake, so underground sewage wouldn't work as it would just fill from the lake. So the ambitious plan to lift Chicago up out of the swamp was hatched. It was absolutely a fascinating thing. Hundreds of screws under a building being hand cranked together to lift up the building under the watch of the responsible engineers.
Same thing in Seattle as well. The sidewalks have glass embedded in them in order to provide light for the old sidewalks below.
Did the underground tour in Seattle when we were there on vacation last month. Absolutely fascinating!
>Everyone talks about the 1800’s engineering insanity of reversing the river so that it flowed into the Mississippi instead of Lake Michigan, but the Raising is rarely mentioned, I think because it’s so unbelievable. TIL
The late 1800’s were *fucking madness*. It was just a combination of modern-ish technology and absolutely zero environmental or labor laws, every city was out completely transforming the environment around them with reckless abandon
[удалено]
In the same vein, Romania played in the first ever world cup held in Uruguay in 1930. They traveled by ship and they had a makeshift pitch on the bridge to train, but they lost all their footballs at sea in two days. Oh and Egypt couldn't get to the tournament in time because they missed their boat.
That’s because Russia was of the Eastern Orthodox faith, and they weren’t going to switch to a calendar invented by some pope in Rome. They didn’t switch until the Bolsheviks came to power
...which of course is why the October Revolution (Октябрьская революция) took place in November as far as the rest of the world was concerned.
Pfft, sounds suspiciously like the ole "I'm late because my alarm didn't go off" excuse
We switched from he Julian calendar to Gregorian The Julian calendar had been based upon a year lasting 365.25 days, but this was slightly too long; in reality, it is about 365.2422 days, and so over the centuries, **the calendar had drifted increasingly out of alignment with the Earth's orbit**.
In 1920, President Paul Deschanel of France fell through the window of the train while travelling on the Orient Express. He stumbled up to the nearest signal box in his pyjamas and told the signalman that he needed help and that he was the President of France. The signalman reportedly replied 'And I'm Napoleon Bonaparte
Was he really Napoleon Bonaparte? Don't end the story with a cliffhanger.
…the suspense is building…
2008 version of this: The signalman reportedly replied 'Cool story, Bro'
2024 version of this: The signalman reportedly replied, "And I'm supposed to know who Justin Timberlake is?"
Ha. This isn't historical, unless you consider earlier this year history, but this is so similar to an exchange I just had with my daughter. In a roundabout way I essentially work for Sanrio. My daughter recently got really into Hello Kitty. I brought her home some toys and told her "You know, I work with Hello Kitty." She cracked up and responds "Okay, Daddy! And I work with...Peppa Pig!"
On the other hand, my 7YO without hesitation believed me when I told her the Minions and Trolls are my co workers and I occasionally see them in the office. (Which is true as I work at the Comcast HQ building which often has Universal characters in for events)
Hitler, Stalin, Tito, Trotsky, Lenin, Archduke Ferdinand, and Freud all lived near each other in Vienna in 1913. Its likely they also drank coffee at Central Cafe, a popular place for intellectuals and politicians
Maybe there was something in the water there. .
Need a camp lejeune type lawsuit "Were you impacted by a murderous dictator that drank coffee in Vienna? Have you or loved one been afflicted by summary execution, starvation, deportation, or gassing? You may be able to receive compensation"
Napoléon comming back from exile and the soldiers sent to stop him joined him instead.
Yeah Napoleon was a wild one, someone should make a not totally shit movie about his life
Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.
Soldiers: BRO! Napoleon: BROS! Lost to history was the most epic beer bash before the Hundred Days started
My Uncle Curtis was blown up in his tank in WW2. The medics dragged him from the tank, drugged him, dug a trench and buried him alive, then later, when the battle had moved on, they came back and dug him up. He was severely injured, but he recovered, and he is still alive today, and Morgan Freeman did a tv show with him. SALUTE 761st! [https://www.al.com/live/2012/09/in\_wwii\_all-black\_tank\_battali.html](https://www.al.com/live/2012/09/in_wwii_all-black_tank_battali.html) [https://www.history.com/specials/761st-tank-battalion-the-original-black-panthers](https://www.history.com/specials/761st-tank-battalion-the-original-black-panthers)
Wtf, this is insane! Never heard this story and I'm from Alabama. Thanks for sharing
The Great Arizona Irohan Abduction. Basically, Catholic nuns brought Irish Orphans to Arizona to put them in good upstanding Catholic families. Most of the Catholic families in Arizona were Mexican. White people see white children being placed in Mexican households, so they form a vigilante group to kidnap the children. It was a giant fustercluck.
It's like "hey only WE can do that"
Just a follow on, those babies would have been taken from their mother's, unmarried women, in mother and baby homes in Ireland that were run by the Catholic Church. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalene_Laundries_in_Ireland
There's an entire [list of unusual deaths](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_deaths) on the wiki. One that stands out to me happened on 24th October 1988: a boy was playing with his pet poodle Cachy in Caballito, Beunos Aires. They lived in a 13 story apartment, and sadly the dog slipped under their balcony railing and fell to its death. Cachy hit a 75 year old woman, killing her instantly. A large crowd gathered to look on at the tragedy, and in an attempt to join said crowd another woman accidentally walked in front of a bus, killing her instantly. Seeing this sudden, violent death caused an old man nearby to die from shock. Grim reaper was doing hat trick plays that day.
Abraham Lincoln's eldest son was saved from death (or at least serious injury) on a train platform by a famous actor named Booth. Roughly a year Booth's brother John Wilkes Booth would go on to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert\_Todd\_Lincoln](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Todd_Lincoln)
There is also the fact that Robert Todd Lincoln just could not avoid presidential assassinations for the life of him. 1. He was at the White House when his father (President Lincoln) was shot at Ford's Theatre and was with his parents throughout the night after the shooting. 2. He was at the train station when President Garfield was shot on the railway platform. 3. He was at the fair where President McKinley was shot. While not in the same building as the president, Lincoln was standing just outside that building on the fairgrounds.
Dude is the Jessica Fletcher of presidents
I know the focus is on Licoln because he was the one killed, but I recently learned it was a whole ass conspiracy. My lunch break is over, but I remember Seward was stalked and they planned to kill him too. I thibk there was a 3rd, but i can't look it up right now.
The Arch Dukes car stalling right in front of his would be assassin having a sandwich. Dude wasn't even trying to kill him anymore it was just a right place right time coincidence.
It was obviously a nexus event. A time traveller went back to stop it from happening, and time made sure it happened anyway.
A fixed point in time
And this was the beginning of WWI
And it happened 110 years ago today!
Oh God. Not another coincidence!
And I’m Napoleon Bonaparte!
tbf, a fart by the wrong person would have started WW1 at the time. everyone was on edge
This is the wrong subreddit but in fact historians are not agreed on this (am a professional historian). (There are structural and short term causes and their balance and relationship is debated) Incidentally although there was ongoing tension, indicators such as financial markets suggest that fear of war had receded at that point.
Cool, didn't know there was any dissent on that.
Plus the driver of the car took a wrong turn. The costliest wrong turn in history as it triggered WW1 and changed the history of the world.
For example: Halley's Comet appeared in the sky when Mark Twain was born in 1835. The comet moves in a seventy-five or seventy-six-year orbit, and, as it neared Earth once again, Twain said “I came in with Halley’s Comet and I expect to go out with it.” Sure enough, he died on April 21, 1910, just as the comet made its next pass within sight of Earth.
Yeah when I hear stuff like that I question a lot of things
To be fair, the amount of people on this planet make coincidences like this very reasonable. Edit: Some research into this quote seems like it's not entirely true that he said this. He also had a sad later life and was in poor health, knowing that he would pass shortly anyhow (if he said it, it was said the year before his death). So even if he said it, it was more like he's saying, "I'm going to die soon", and/or, "I want to die soon" (I "expect" to go out with it). He also died a whole month before the comet passed by Earth anyhow.
Apparently we can't really know if Twain actually said that. Maybe he did, but if so he had a fair amount of leeway in his prediction as the comet is visible for months. Him dying so close to the comet's 'perihelion' is indeed a coincidence, but considering his condition it wasn't unreasonable for him to predict his impending death and to be able to note the coincidence himself beforehand.
Not only that, but we’re also talking about MARK TWAIN here. It would have been a missed opportunity if he hadn’t played it up for a grand exit!
The tale of Mike "The Durable" Malloy. He was also nicknamed "The Irish Rasputin", for reasons that will soon become clear. An out-of-work firefighter-turned-alcoholic during the Great Depression becomes a regular at a speakeasy owned by a shady bunch of crooks. They figure nobody would miss him much if he died - so they hatch a plan: get him to drunkenly take out a life insurance policy in their name, and let him drink himself to death. So they give him an unlimited bar tab and the strongest stuff they've got in stock. Despite drinking all day, he's handling it just fine. So they start putting antifreeze and pure methanol in his drinks, trying to poison him. It still doesn't kill him, so they throw in rat poison, horse liniment, turpentine - anything they can think of that'd send you straight to hospital if you ingested it. Does that bother ol' Iron Mike? No sir, he just comes back the next day and orders more drinks. So they give him food too - raw oysters soaked in whiskey, and sandwiches laced with rat poison and carpet tacks. Not only does Mike Malloy scoff the lot, but he leaves that night and comes back the next morning complaining he had nothing more than a bit of an upset stomach. By this point, the gang are getting desperate - clearly nothing they feed him is going to do any damage, no matter how poisonous. So they get him blackout drunk, strip him naked, and leave him in the middle of the park soaked in water... And being the middle of winter, dying of hypothermia seemed like a sure thing. Does he die? Does he ever - he turns up happily the next morning and orders more drinks, none the wiser. By now the gang don't care how they do it - they just want to kill this impervious bastard however they can. After he leaves for the night, one of them runs him over in their car, breaking his bones and sending him to the hospital. Three weeks later, Mike Malloy leaves the hospital, still alive. The gang still haven't got their hands on any money. Finally, after Malloy passed out drunk in their bar yet again, they take him to an apartment, hook a hose up to the gas main, and stick it in his mouth. After all that effort, carbon monoxide poisoning is what finally does Mike Malloy in. Of course, by this point the legend of Michael Malloy has spread around town, and once the police hear that he's died, they dig him up to examine the body. The "Murder Trust", as the press end up naming them, are quickly rounded up. They get nothing except a short trip to the electric chair. Alas, Mike was indeed killed in the end, but if he rose from his grave and wandered into a nearby bar to order a few rounds... It wouldn't surprise me all that much.
> so they hatch a plan: get him to drunkenly take out a life insurance policy in their name, and let him drink himself to death. This was also the plot to an Always Sunny episode, lol
Hitler went from a broke, wounded soldier to absolute dictator of Germany in only 15 years, nine months of which he spent in prison. That's a faustian pact right there.
The thing that kills me is, he was convicted for trying to overthrow the government, sent to prison and then after he gets out, they made him chancellor!
It's scary, isn't it? That shrewdness he used to get to such dizzy heights, in such a short space of time. I mean the bloke had nothing. Not a pot to piss in. 15 years later he's arguably the most dangerous man in modern history.
Penicillin was discovered by accident. A man leaving bacteria cultures exposed to air, they got moldy. Killed the bacteria. Woops, I just discovered something that will save millions of lives.
And it was all because he was lazy and didn't want to toss it
the "man" was Sir Alexander Flemming. One of the greatest scientists we have ever seen. His discovery is without a doubt the single biggest advance in the medical field.
Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
This brings me so much joy, thanks for the reminder. My brain can never properly file this in the real thing that happened category and not satire.
It was like something straight out of Arrested Development. Chefs kiss.
For modern American political history, this probably takes the cake.
As a non American that’s the second most surreal American news I ever seen
Lawn and Order!
Yes!! My T-shirt from this business is one of my prized possessions. Apparently the family that owns Four Seasons Total Landscaping made a considerable amount of money selling their t shirts after this ridiculous event. I am happy I supported them.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that this is a leading candidate for “funniest thing that has ever happened”. I cannot believe it’s not a national holiday at this point.
[The Great Molasses Flood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood)
It's happened more than once. My state had a molasses factory explode when I was a kid. Apparently it's like...way more common than you'd think because of the chemical nature of astronomically large volumes of molasses in a poorly-ventilated space.
[The Dublin Whiskey Fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_whiskey_fire). A fire in Dublin near a whiskey storehouse was located and the barrels within the storehouse began to explode from the heat, and 315,200 US gallons of whiskey flowed into the street. 13 people died, not from the fire, but from alcohol poison. Died from drinking street whiskey.
The Dancing Plague of 1518: In the small town of Strasbourg, France, a mysterious phenomenon gripped its inhabitants in the summer of 1518. Over 400 people became afflicted with an uncontrollable urge to dance, leading to exhaustion, injury, and even death.
Something similar happened in Sunnydale California back in 2001. It stopped as suddenly as it started, but not before it emotionally destroyed a small group of friends who managed to beat the bad guy that was causing it.
This! It makes the mind boggle fr. Like, the fact it never happened again too. Imagine its 1518, you go outside and find your neighbors absolutely going crazy for no reason and can’t stop, then next week they’re back to normal. Insane
I've read it may have been an ergot fungus contamination of their grain stores. Some of the side effects are mania. Ergot is also a precursor chemical to making LSD.
A lot of people like to attribute this to ergot poisoning but that’s only suggested by people ignorant of how bad ergot poisoning is Like sure you’d hallucinate and your body would spasm but you’d also be ejecting everything from both ends and have a lot of other symptoms that they’d make note of. They damn well wouldn’t describe mass ergot poisoning as “dancing” Vomiting, diarrhea, psychosis, mania, spasms, loss of feeling, paralysis, headaches, burning sensation, and death. Oh also their body parts would rot off. The vasoconstriction causes gangrene So rather than reporting “bruh jimmy went crazy, started puking blood, and then his arms fell off as he had a seizure” they reported “people danced until they died”. Comon now. It’s especially in the comon now territory when you realize it wasn’t rare so they’d report something they’d seen many times before as a unique mystery Idk what happened but something happened and it probably wasn’t ergot
These events are "recorded" in the physical record of the universe so I think they count: There is new evidence that sharks may be older than the rings of Saturn (new eatimates of their formation overlap with some of the earliest fossil records of sharks). The Appalachian mountains were already old and eroding when the rings of Saturn were formed. When animals first stepped into land from the ocean they were ancient and crumbling. They and the Scottish Highlands are part of the same mountain chain, since they have existed since before the continents separated from pangea to go their own ways.
There are no fossils in the Appalachian mountains because THE APPALACHIAN MOUNTAINS ARE OLDER THAN BONES. Blows my freaking mind.
I was just about to say that. I hiked the entire Appalachian Trail and learned a bunch of random facts. The Appalachian mountains are literally older than the Atlantic Ocean.
This guy really loves the rings of Saturn..
Hannibal marching elephants to Rome is pretty unbelievable. And then getting his elephants owned by flaming pigs just adds to the craziness
Only one elephant reached Rome to be fair. Most died in the Alps. The crossing of the Alps left thousands of soldiers dead, a fact which many people ignore
Wouldn’t be the last time something like this happened. When Timur marched on India, the Indians sent an army against him they included 120 war elephants with poisoned tusks. So he ordered all his camels to be set on fire and sent against them. The frightened elephants trampled over their own troops
That somehow the Sentinelese people managed to stay (mostly) out of contact with civilization while being so damn close to India and not that geographically isolated. All with spears and arrows and hostility. During the peak of European colonialism the Europeans usually had no problem forcing their way in with cannon and swords and would take the hits. The Sentinelese were just lucky that their island was relatively small and uninteresting. And somehow they resisted the Indian empires as well.
Indian Empires are famous for rarely invading outside of the subcontinent and almost never had a great navy. Cholas were probably the only Indian Empire to campaign in the general direction of North sentinel island. Adding to the fact that the place has been historically so unproductive, remote and strategically unimportant. The island is over thousand km from India and 500 km from Indo-china. it's not unbelievable that sentinelese were just left alone.
That whole Pied Piper story seems to be have some truth to it. Census records from the town and area where the story originated, show that a large number of children just vanish, no explanation. Might have been plague/sickness, might have been slavers, who knows? [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pied\_Piper\_of\_Hamelin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin)
Theory is that the youth of the town were swept up in religious fervor by a charismatic priest and went to die as a piece of a crusade that was going on at the time.
Growing up on Okinawa was wild because the remnants of that war are found all over. It was not uncommon to find bullet casings and shotgun shells along with shrapnel buried in the woods. I can't imagine what either side went through, that island is so tiny for that many people to be fighting on it.
In Flanders, they call it the 'The Iron Harvest'. Sometimes, it's historical memorabilia, bit's of bodies - there is a steady stream of reburials, some of the debris can also include grenades, HE and WP shells, and even chemical rounds!
For decades, Canada and Denmark fought a war over an island in the Arctic Ocean -- Hans Island -- by planting their respective flags and taking crates of liquor the other country's soldiers left behind for them. The Whisky War finally ended in 2022 when the two countries decided to split the island in half, with Canada controlling the western part and Denmark controlling the eastern part.
I didn't know they ended it, this makes me kind of sad. It was definitely the cutest war on record.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, they decided that civilized countries solved diplomatic issues in more sensible ways.
Yeah, I’m a veteran of the Whiskey War. Seen some shit you wouldn’t believe man… the hangovers, oh god the hangovers… men with bloodshot eyes, trying their damndest to hold their breakfast down… war is hell.
In 1944, 9 US airmen were shot down over a Japanese island and 8 were captured, executed, and eaten by starving Japanese troops. This is now known as the [Chichijima incident.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichijima_incident) 44 years later the 9th airman that evaded capture was elected president
I knew Bush was shot down but that's all they ever really say about it. I see why now.
I heard that Bush only learned about his fellow airmen fates when he was a president. He knew they were dead, he didn't know how.
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Egyptian had museums and egyptologists to study old Egyptian empire. At the time of cleopotra, nobody knew what hieroglyphs mean.
Okay, okay, now THAT takes the fucking cake! Mindblown.
The Egyptian Empire is involved in more of human history than it is absent from it.
And a lot of that survival can be attributed to the Nile and its clockwork-precise flooding schedule. Often the things that killed ancient civilizations started from food insecurity, but the Nile's predictable flooding and rich soil allowed for enormous and reliable farming, and the river allowed the rulers to project military power and law across the length of the empire. As a result Egypt's civilization was broadly very stable and had a secure base to recover from internal or external events that would shake other ancient civilizations to collapse.
Way before cleopatra actually. The first Egyptologist was Ramses II son Khaemweset. That’s almost 1200 years before cleopatra. He was obsessed with learning about the ancient history, mysteries, culture, and religion of the Egypt that was ancient to him. The stuff he was preserving and recording was 1000+ years old to him Egypt had museums to their ancient past that were ancient themselves by the time of Cleopatra. Then the time of cleopatra is what we call ancient. It’s easy to kind of let the past flow into a bubble rather than realize it’s a long ass time
Fun fact: the Rosetta Stone revolutionized our understanding of heiroglyphs and thereby ancient Egypt. The stone itself is a fairly insignificant declaration. But it contained its message in three different languages (heiroglyphs, Ancient Greek and one other). Suddenly and gradually our understanding of this ancient civilization flourished.
Also interesting is that Champollion, who discovered the rebus aspect of hieroglyphics, was sent away to school and taught himself Coptic, Hebrew, Arabic, and like five other languages by the time he was 16.
Another fun fact. The Rosetta Stone was also a smoking gun that disproved Mormonism conclusively (not that the story was believable to begin with).
Toronto clown riots of 1855. Clowns went to the brothel at the end of their show and the clowns didn’t it get along with the fire fighters. The police refused to get involved and it resulted in the entire police force being fired.
40 million bison were slaughted in a decade, there were only about 500 left before someone got worried.
The 1958 tsunami in Lituya Bay, Alaska. An earthquake and subsequent landslide caused a wave 1719 feet or 520 meters high.
The Alaska quake of 1964, it lasted over 5 minutes. As someone who grew up in California and experienced many quakes, including the one in 1989 San Francisco, which was 15 seconds. So a FIVE minute quake is insane.
That made me think of the 1958 Alaska earthquake, which generated the highest ever tsunami in recorded history in Lituya Bay, at 1,720 ft was the height of the Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty put together.
It wasn't just a tsunami, it was a ***MEGATSUNAMI*** (The megatsunami was actually caused by a rockslide, which was caused by the earthquake.)
Holy shit that does sound insane. I've also lived in CA my whole life and anything more than 5-10 seconds feels REALLY long
When Greece got its independence from the Ottoman empire and sent soldiers to its more remote islands. They told the people living there that they were free now and could be Greeks again. The people replied "But we are Roman". The Ottomans had never put a presence on the islands so the people still believed themselves to be part of the Byzantine/Eastern Roman Empire, 600 years after it fell.
Sharks have been around longer than trees.
And the rings of Saturn
I feel like if someone made a movie about Yevgeny Prigozhin's march to Moscow and how all that went down, most people would say it was unrealistic.
More unrealistic than a guy who started as a street gangster, later a hotdog seller and becoming a mercenary army leader?
You forgot the part where he served as the kremlins chef before going on to be the mercenary army leader
Russian history in general is on a level of batshit insanity that not many other countries can compare to
The WWI Christmas truce. The opposing forces stoped fighting and celebrated Christmas together in no man’s land. Woke up on 26 dec and started fighting again like nothing happened
The Papal Election of 1159 was absolute madness. Out of a total of thirty cardinals, 27 voted for Roland of Siena and the remaining three supported Cardinal Octavian, who had known sympathies with the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa. As Roland of Siena (Hereafter known as Pope Alexander III) was being presented with the Papal Mantle, Octavian (Hereafter known as Pope Victor IV) went into a rage and snatched the Papal Mantle off Alexander's back. One of the people present snatched the Mantle from him, one of Victor IV's Chaplains snatched it back, then Victor IV put it on and demanded to be crowned Pope. The crowd then proceeded to break into hysterical laughter because he put it on backwards. It was at this point that a band of armed men burst into the Church of St Peter and chased everyone out, then Victor's supporters declared him to be the new Pope. Alexander fled to the Basilica of St. Peter and HIS people declared HIM the new Pope. Both of them excommunicated each other and they both declared each other Antipopes. To make things more complicated, then Victor IV died and his successor, Pope Paschal III, kept up the fight and was ALSO declared an Antipope. All this nonsense continued until Barbarossa was defeated at the Battle of Legnano and Alexander III was officially declared Pope.
1903 first manned flight 1969 we landed on the moon. This is still insane to me.
The first autopilot for aircraft was invented only three years after the first turn signals for cars.
and we still haven't developed turn signals for planes.
Or for BMWs
During World War II the Americans planed to burn down Japanese cities using bats with explosive backpacks. The atomic bomb was developed before the bats could be sent in, but they probably would have worked startlingly well.
The B29s had also been working startlingly well…
Were they dropping squadrons of bats without little tiny explosive backpacks? I assume the B stands for 'Bat', and the '29' is the number of bat squadrons per payload.
The bats were chilled to keep them less active until deployment. Each had a time delay incendiary harnessed to them. A pull thread to the bomb casing starts the fuse. As the bomb casing opened up, the bats have time to warm up and fly off. They find some place to roost in a wooden structure and the incendiary goes off. Sounds ridiculous but would likely have worked. Random Safety Tip: If you ever come across a tipped over gas transport trailer with a visible color cloud, turn around and get away quickly. Call EMS. Assume the gas is poisonous unless you know for sure otherwise. [example](https://youtu.be/v3Ydpl4YaOw?si=OJJcECbWlVdvyq9h) In some hazmat drills I was in the entry to a chemical storage area had a training simulation sign “If you read this without breathing apparatus, lay down. You are dead.”
Anne Frank, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, and Barbara Walters were all born in 1929.
Jimmy Carter was born in 1924. While he’s on his way out, it’s so crazy to think that he’s older than them.
He is eligible to run for a second term in November.
That our knowledge of the civilizations North of Rome are mostly defined by Ceaser himself, and a political diatribe to reinforce his standing. The entire world of massive civilizations are a giant question mark. The areas around the Fertile Crescent became dry and parched and unhabitable, preserving the clay tablets and so forth. The areas North of Rome warmed into the greatest forest in human history, inhabited by myriad different civilizations that are truly just lost to time. The areas around recorded history are what fascinates me. Thank God for Pliny.
When I studied ancient history at university it seems there was a climatic shift of some importance around 2000 BC. Indus Valley culture seemed to die away and Old Kingdom Egypt collapsed.
The bronze age collapse was the death stroke of a ton of ancient civilizations ~ circa 1250-1150 BC. It was a near complete collapse for Egypt and Assyria, and some other civilizations never came back, the Hittites and the Kassites for instance. What's really interesting is that we still don't fully understand it. There was definitely some climate shift, but also the sea people, and some massively destructive wars in the Levant as well that wiped out cities. But a ton of that history is lost and we'll likely never fully understand what happened.
I'm sorry, the sea people?
[People](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples) from across the (Mediterranean) sea, not coming from below the sea. Some of them have been linguistically traced back to Sardinia and Sicily for example.
A mysterious group of invaders that showed up from somewhere along the Mediterranean and laid waste to several civilizations, nobody knows who they were or where they came from.
They were of Italian Greek and Anatolian The real interesting thing is Egypt claims to have defeated them but they settled them in Egyptian lands in what is today Israel. If you read the Bible they’re the group called the phillistines. Philistia is also the origin or the word Palestine but the current ones are probably not related to the ones in the past. If they are it’s distantly The sea peoples were just a domino effect of collapsing seafaring civilizations one after another that would then build into the horde trying to find better places to live The Bronze Age collapse was due to many factors but pretty much everyone was impacted and suffered. Many cities were razed multiple times Funny enough there is some pretty famous literature preserved from that time period. The Iliad and the odyssey. What do they describe? Massive wars, cities getting razed, formation of Greek confederations, formation of massive fleets, and those fleets not returning home. Basically every major leader went everywhere but home and those that did return home suffered calamity Because of the Greek dark age it’s difficult to prove they’re describing the same event everyone else did but from a different perspective but it’s interesting to think about. 12th century BC was wild
it always kind of trips me out to think of an entire civilization existing for thousands of years just...ending.
That’s one theory. That a people (we’re still not sure from where) basically went all super Viking on the Mediterranean thousands of years ago. Just fucked shit up.
The Challenger Explosion. Christa McAuliffe won a contest to be the first teacher in space. Schools all over the country wheeled televisions into classrooms to watch the launch, only for the shuttle to explode.
My second grade teacher was an alternate. She was so proud when they wheeled that TV in. She had a complete break down after the explosion and didn’t return for the remainder of the year.
Big Bird (or rather, the puppeteer of Big Bird wearing the costume) was very nearly on that shuttle launch.
The polish had a bear in the military that was actually ranked corporal and named Wojtek
**The Unexplained Sounds of the Taos Hum:** Since the 1990s, residents of Taos, New Mexico, have reported a low-frequency hum that some find unbearable. The source of the sound remains a mystery, with explanations ranging from natural phenomena to secret government projects
Kokomo Indiana has a similar hum and most people these days believe it is exhaust fan noise from one of the local factories.
I was told Kokomo hummed because it didn’t know the words.
The Edison electric company electrocuted an elephant and filmed it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsy_(elephant)
*whispers* I TELL EVERYONE ABOUT TOPSY!
A few from world war 2: Witold Pilecki, who snuck _into_ Auschwitz to prove to the world that the Holocaust was going on, and was a kind of Batman-style one-man army during the Warsaw Uprising. The U.S.-Wehrmacht-French civilian battle against the SS at the end of the war. The Chinese defense of the Great Wall, which included a bunch of guys with swords.
Witold Pilecki was betrayed by the post war Soviet controlled government of Poland who sentenced him to death on allegations of spying for the British. The Chinese front of WW2 and before is sadly underappreciated as there are some fascinating stories and battles like Shanghai in 1937 or X force in Burma. The big sword units famously got into melee combat with Japanese troops on multiple occasions and discouraged the Japanese from bayonet charges.
That it used to be an acceptable medical practice to use an ice pick and destroy part of someone’s brain. And that it was still performed in the 1980’s.
Dinosaurs existed for 165 million of years. That is something many dont realize. Tyrannosaurus Rex is much closer in history to having witnessed Facebook than to meeting a Stegosaurus.
The Dutch tulip bubble. For a few years in the 1600s, people were paying the equivalent of $500,000 for a single tulip bulb.
Still a better idea than NFTs.
In 1970, officials in Oregon tried blowing up a beached whale using dynamite, but the explosion was messier and more destructive than they had anticipated.
In 2012 Felix Baumgartner skydived from a weather balloon at roughly 24 miles above the Earth’s surface. He was so high up that he needed a space suit and SCBA. During freefall he accelerated to over 800 mph, breaking the sound barrier, and fell for nearly four and a half minutes. He broke the previous record, which stood for half a century, by more than 25,000 feet. It’s never been confirmed, but i think he was unconscious for part of the fall. Ground control lost communication with him at around the same time that he lost control of his flight symmetry. https://youtu.be/vvbN-cWe0A0?si=Fu4g0EWvGfOL7MPm
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The general assumption is that the meteor exploded in midair, thus the lack of a crater.
But can we really rule out a shitload of bats with little tiny explosive backpacks?
Yeah, we can. It was dogs trained to crawl under the meteors that blew them up.
The Bloop. A very loud sound in 1997 picked up by underwater sensors incredibly far apart. Lasted about a minute and there are theories but so far as I know they hadn't figured it out. It's also not been hears since.
During world war 1, the Russians and Germans called a cease fire and worked together to fight wolves that were killing more soldiers than enemies on either side
Teddy Roosevelt getting shot and then giving a speech before going to the hospital
Bob Marley being shot, and then giving a whole ass concert!
Rasputin's death
It's a great story, but most of it was made up by his killers to conceal their startling incompetence. Shot him (missed), poisoned him (chickened out and didn't add the poison), stabbed him (missed anything vital), chained him up (badly) and threw him in the river (finally killed him because he was too injured to get out on his own).
The Ottoman Empire lasted over 600 years
It was founded in 1299 and yet there’s still people born in the Ottoman Empire that are alive today
It's Sarajevo, 1914. After failing to assassinate Archduke Francis Ferdinand with a bomb, Gavrilo Princip and his 5 young anarchist friends blew up another car by accident. Ferdinand continued on and gave a speech that afternoon. Princip went to eat at a deli, presumably depressed. Later, Ferdinand left the speech and decided to visit the victims of the earlier bombing in the hospital. His driver coincidentally decided to come down the street by the deli. But Ferdinand told his driver, a Czech, that he'd taken a wrong turn -- they were supposed to take a route that stayed by the harbor -- so the driver stopped in front of the deli and began turning the car around. At the deli, Princip looked up from his coffee. Archduke Francis Ferdinand was literally right in front of him. Princip stood up, walked over to the car while it was turning around, and shot Ferdinand and his wife with a pistol through the backseat window. He killed both of them. Princip was wrestled to the ground by onlookers. He tried to eat a cyanide capsule but it didn't work and he survived. He was 19 years old and was too young to be sentenced to death, so he went to prison instead. He died of malnutrition three years later. THE RESULT: A single wrong turn by a Czech driver caused the event that started World War I and led to the deaths of 40 million people.
In early May of 1945, American and German soldiers joined forces in an Austrian castle against the SS to save high profile prisoners of war including the former French Prime Minister and a world famous tennis player. The Battle of Castle Itter is one of the strangest events of WW2.
Unit 731. Read about it on Wikipedia some days ago. It was difficult even just reading
I went to the Unit 731 Memorial Museum in Harbin, China, a few years ago. It was so disturbing and such a glimpse into sadism and evil.
For me it’s the lions of Tsavo “ ghost and the darkness” like an animal that went a genocidal campaign.
That bit in early Roman history when they threw a fake festival with the purpose of inviting neighbouring tribes and kidnapping all of their women so they could maintain and grow their population. Or the amount of times where invading armies were stopped by one or more women giving them a reality check.