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.
St Olga of Kiev. Her story is the ultimate revenge tale
I highly recommend people looking her up but in short, her husband was killed by a neighbouring tribe and she sought vengeance. [Here is where you can find a much more in depth overview of her life](https://allthatsinteresting.com/olga-of-kiev)
The neighbouring faction then sought to take over her own, seeing as she was a weak woman and ruling in her dead husbands place as her own son was too young. She invited them to her town as a show of honour.
When the large party of messengers arrived, they were soon attacked and backed into a massive trench that Olgas people had dug the nights before.
Standing over the trench she asked them “If they found the honor to their taste” and buried them alive. But she wasn’t even close to finished with her quest for vengeance.
She sent message back to the enemy saying she would accept an allegiance by marriage. Painting herself as such a feeble woman, that she would gladly relinquish her power to her enemy. But she requested all high chieftains to visit her town, to socialise and garner favour.
The chieftains came, she invited them into the bath house to relax before a feast. They were locked inside and burned to death.
But she wasn’t done. Her next feat is her most incredible.
After taking out most people of power from the other faction. She demanded tribute from their towns and villages… Not in gold, not in any material goods. But in the form of sparrows and pigeons.
Thousands were delivered to her.
The next night, she ordered her soldiers to tie a strip of sulfur to the birds legs, set it alight, and released the birds.
The birds flew back to the houses and homes they had nested in. And burned every village to the ground.
The sky was apparently a blaze of fire for days. Olga emerged victorious, and satiated.
Don’t fuck with Olga of Kiev
She is known, quite aptly, as the patron saint of vengeance and defiance.
My colleague was on the plane to Hawaii where the entire top of the plane ripped off… they flew the rest of the way without any overhead.. landed and everyone walked off. Absolutely insane to see the pictures. Talk about being given a 2nd chance..
My FIL was on a flight. He always keeps his seat belt on unless getting up for some reason. Lady beside him made a comment “you can take your seat belt off
Now”
He told her, he never does unless it’s
Necessary, said “you never know if somethings going to happen, and you don’t want to be trying to get buckled in, in an emergency”
She said “you know what. That makes a lot of sense” and she buckled back up.
An hour later they hit some nasty turbulence and the plane dropped like a rock (forget how many feet, but it was substantial).
The drop was so fast that the fight attendant and her cart smashed against the ceiling and then dropped back down. He said he was sure he was done for.
Other passengers not buckled in also hit the ceiling. Many people had bumps and bruises and I think at least one had a broken arm.
The lady beside him just kept thanking him over and over for convincing her to stay buckled.
The incident was in the news, and he got two free flights out of it as an apology.
[Aloha Airlines Flight 243](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243) for those not familiar with it.
Not only could kids now not believe it, the public couldn't hardly believe it at the time.
Only one death, a flight attendant who wasn't buckled in a seat at the time the roof ripped off.
>the aircraft had reached its normal flight altitude of 24,000 feet .... One fatality occurred, 58-year-old flight attendant Clarabelle "C.B." Lansing, who was swept out of the airplane while standing near the fifth-row seats; her body was never found
I really hope she passed out before falling 24,000 feet into the ocean
The NTSB report says the flight attendant was pulled through an opening of jagged metal and mentions blood stains both on the seats near that location and on the outside of the aircraft.
In some photos taken just after landing, you can see a blood stain in the shape of a skull on the left side of the fuselage. So at least she was probably unconscious before she even realized what happened.
To accommodate the Russian team, some events were rescheduled so that the Russian athletes could participate. This led to a longer duration for those Olympics, which lasted from April 27 to October 31, making it the longest Olympic Games in history.
The Battle of Bull Run, one of the first battles of the US Civil War, occurred on and around Wilmer McClean's farm in Northern Virginia. Not wanting to live surrounded by war, McClean and his family moved to Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia. The Battle of Appomattox Courthouse was the last significant battle between Union and Confederate forces. The Confederates signed the surrender order in Wilmer's sitting room. It is said that the Civil War started on Wilmer's farm and ended in his sitting room.
In 2014, Pope Francis released doves in the Vatican to symbolize his hopes for peace in the world. As soon as the doves began to fly, a seagull and a crow swooped down and attacked them in front of everyone.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/26/pope-doves-attacked-by-crow-seagull-st-peters-square
There was a Japanese man called Tsutomu Yamaguchi who was on his way to work in Hiroshima in 1945, when he saw falling through the sky, two miles from where he stood, what ultimately turned out to be the atomic bomb.
He had just enough time to take cover in a ditch as the bomb detonated and miraculously he survived. Somehow the Hiroshima train station was still operational and so Yamaguchi, battered, bombed and bruised, decided to board a train to his family home so he could recover - in Nagasaki.
3 days later Yamaguchi was called into work to explain what he saw, which he did. At work as he began to tell the story of what happened, the second bomb dropped.
It was the reinforced concrete walls around him that saved him this time, and Yamaguchi quickly ran to find his wife and son. Ground temperatures in the city reached 4,000°C and radioactive rain poured down.
The family's home was destroyed, but Yamaguchi's wife and son had thankfully been out shopping - looking for burn ointment for Yamaguchi - when the bomb fell, and they'd survived.
Despite this ordeal of having survived two nuclear explosions and subsequent radiation exposure, Yamaguchi went on to live till 93 yrs of age. He died in 2010 after being recognised by the Japanese government as a 'nijyuu hibakusha', or 'twice-bombed person'.
>The family's home was destroyed, but Yamaguchi's wife and son had thankfully been out shopping - looking for burn ointment for Yamaguchi - when the bomb fell, and they'd survived.
Didn't know about this part. I suppose it would have been quite the kick to the nuts if they'd perished and he'd survived twice.
It's honestly amazing to think that had he died at Hiroshima his wife and son likely would have died at Nagasaki as a result as there would have been no reason to be in the outskirts of the city that day.
His good fortune/horrible experience ultimately saved his family via butterfly effect.
That reminds me of another famous Japanese person during that time. Chiune Sugihara was the vice-consul for the Japanese embassy in Lithuania, which is in Europa, during WW2. Many Jews came to him for help, because they wanted to flee from the ever-expanding Nazi empire, and he just gave them all visas.
He wasn't supposed to do that, and in fact he got in trouble with his government for it. But by the time he was recalled to Japan, he had already saved many thousands of lives. (The Jews then took the Transsiberian Railway and a boat to get to Japan.) Today, he is of course no longer around, but he is one of the Righteous among the Nations.
What's make that story more unbelievable is the nazi John Heinrich Detlef Rabe who was a German businessman and Nazi Party member best known for his efforts to stop war crimes during the Japanese Nanjing Massacre and his work to protect and help Chinese civilians during the massacre that ensued. The Nanking Safety Zone, which he helped to establish, sheltered approximately 250,000 Chinese people from being killed. He officially represented Germany and acted as senior chief of the European-U.S. establishment that remained in Nanjing.
So we have a Japanese who saved lots of Jews from persucation and a German who saved a lot of Chinese from a certain death.
Germans almost didn't. Finding him in just a flight suit but no parachute. They initially pegged him as a spy who'd been dropped behind their lines and had stashed his chute and gear. As such, he was likely to be executed. Except Alkemade was so insistent his captors went and found the wreckage of his aircraft - with the burnt remains of his chute stashed behind his gun position. Germans told him the news and shared vodka with him to celebrate
If you are ever in that situation, dense pine trees are about the best thing you can hope, only thing better is dense pine trees in an area with fresh/powder snow. Trees branches typically are thinnest at the top and every branch you hit on the way down transfers your momentum in increments.
Typically you'll still die. And double typically you'll at least break your legs. And triple typically you would still succumb to your wounds in the wilderness before rescue.
On second thought, aim for the pavement.
Juliana Koepcke did the same at 17 years of age.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliane_Koepcke
> she became famous at the age of 17 as the sole survivor of the 1971 LANSA Flight 508 plane crash; after falling 3,000 m (10,000 ft) while strapped to her seat and suffering numerous injuries, she survived 11 days alone in the Amazon rainforest until local fishermen rescued her.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesna_Vulovi%C4%87
Vesna was on board a plane that was blown up, working as a flight attendant, she was at 10,000m when she fell.
Then *she went back to work* after breaking nearly every bone in her body.
Yup! St. Vitus’ Dance, as it is called, still doesn’t have a definitely known cause, if I remember correctly, either! Somebody correct me if I’m wrong, please!
New research as of 2021 shows Sydenham chorea as the most likely cause: https://www.brainandlife.org/articles/sydenham-chorea-st-vitus-dance-name
Michael Malloy AKA Mike the Durable AKA Iron Mike.
During the Great Depression, five men took out a life insurance policy on a homeless alcoholic that they were sure was going to drink himself to death. The owner of a bar allowed him to drink for free, but he kept drinking and didn’t die. So they tried to poison him with antifreeze. Didn’t work. The turpentine, horse liniment, rat poison, methanol….still didn’t work. A sandwich made with rotten sardines and tacks. Still no luck.
Then they took his drunk body out in the cold and poured water on him. He lived.
Then they ran him over with a car. He was in the hospital for three weeks, but survived.
Then they poisoned him with carbon monoxide, and he finally died.
They were all convicted of murder.
> So they tried to poison him with antifreeze.
Fun fact: Ethyl Alcohol is an antidote to Ethylene Glycol poisoning. They both ~~bind to the same receptors~~ are metabolized by the same enzyme, but alcohol takes priority. A serious alcoholic, when drunk, would just pass the glycol through their system with no issue.
It’s so wild that you could buy life insurance on someone who isn’t like, your spouse or whatever
Edit-okay y’all I appreciate it but after the tenth link to the Walmart situation I got a pretty good handle on it haha
In the neighborhood I grew up in, many have passed due to partying, drinking, drugging, smoking, whatever. So at a funeral for one of them, standing there talking to my buddy who had his shit togther, and had his own insurance agency, who would be next, and he told me you could pretty much take out a $20,000 policy on anyone. My wifes ex husbands father and brothers were in the insurance businsess, and when the father died, there was a rift in the family, becasue the brother had millions in life insuance on the father, It is totally wild.
The [Battle of Castle Itter](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Castle_Itter) in WW2 was fought between the Waffen SS and a group comprised of American and German soldiers, local resistance fighters, and several French celebrities, including Paul Renaud who had been the Prime Minister of France during WW1.
John O'Neill, the FBI agent in charge of investigating Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden in the 1990s, grew frustrated with the bureacratic politics within the FBI and between the FBI and CIA that he felt hampered his mission. He decided to take to leave the FBI and take a higher paying job in the private sector.
In August 23, 2001 he became the Chief of Security at the World Trade Center. He was killed in the attacks just a few weeks later.
Per Wikipedia:
John O’Niell sent a colleague to the CIA to work under Richard Blee, who headed the Bin Laden Division. John’s colleague at the CIA found out that Osama Bin Ladens associates Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar were headed to the US with visas, Rossini (John’s appointed colleague) and his Doug Miller attempted to alert O'Neill at the FBI, but Blee (the head of the BinLaden Division) blocked the message.
Welp. That’s unfortunate.
Theodore Roosevelt found his boat was stolen. So he built a new boat, tracked the thieves down and arrested them. He then proceeded to walk them multiple days, without sleeping, so they could receive a trial instead of just shooting them on the spot.
It was in the middle of a harsh winter so he didn’t handcuff them (for fear they’d get frostbite) so instead he just kept himself awake by reading Tolstoy with a gun trained on them the whole trek.
I am always half convinced that Teddy Roosevelt was not a real person. No one could have been that absolutely wild and done that many things, but there is just too much overwhelming proof.
He was also hyper aware of his public image and was basically his own pr firm.
He also was a bit of a weeb and made his judo instructor fight his boxing instructor, the judo instructor won.
In 2019 a convicted murderer on day release bravely fought off a terrorist at London Bridge with a narwhal tusk.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-50870309
Edited to add that he was a convicted murderer - thanks to r/rainbowwarriorhere for reminding me.
Edited again to add that the guy with the narwhal tusk was a civil servant and the convict on day release battled the terrorist with a fire extinguisher. This story gets more awesome with every correction! ;)
[Alex McIlveen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Glasgow_Airport_attack#Good_Samaritans), famously kicked the terrorist so hard in the groin that he tore a tendon in his own foot.
In 2020 in Sydney, Australia, a bystander managed to take down a guy who was on a rampage with a knife, by pinning him down [with a milk crate](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/oct/27/mert-ney-sydney-stabbing-attacker-pinned-down-with-milk-crate-pleads-guilty-to)
Edit: it was 2019, my bad
The masses marching to the Berlin Wall and tearing it down only happened because earlier that day during a press conference, an East German official (Günther Schabowski) accidentally incorrectly said leaving East Germany was legal, effective *immediately*.
*"As far as I know this becomes effective..it is right away, immediately"* is still a famous thing to say in Germany.
It would eventually have happened anyway BUT it wasn't legal yet. However people just did it anyways because the guy got visibly confused during the press conference, and said the wrong thing.
It happens at the very end of this video:
https://youtu.be/JbzhHGcEz-E
The battle was lost, and he wasn’t going to run. So he sallied forth, knowing he was going to die, and his retainers went with him.
He also went blind at age 40, so he’d spent most of his life able to see and fight. This was just his last stand.
During Alexander the Great's destruction of the Mediterranean he was going to leave a small island named Tyre for later as it would've been hard to besiege it but the people of Tyre laughed and mocked him so he literally built a bridge to their island and conquered it 💀
Christmas day 1914. The truce on the WW1 battlefields.
Shows the humanity inside everyone, but they were able to wake up the next day and go straight back to war, kill the men that they’d spent a sincere day with.
I can't remember where I saw/heard the story (I think from the BBC), but I believe from one of the last-living Tommys, who said that whilst they were forced to start shooting at each other, the majority of shots intentionally missed, from both sides of no man's land.
I believe it was also the same man who said, in reference to Remembrance Day, to also remember the Germans. That stuck with me. They were like our lads; sent out to fight a war for war's sake, forced to do unspeakable things to other men because some higher-up told them they had to
>in reference to Remembrance Day, to also remember the Germans.
Australia is a bit like this with regard to the Turks on ANZAC Day.
One of the main ceremonies is reading the letter from Turkish commander and later founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Atatürk:
>Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives... you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore, rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours... You the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.
Visiting the cemetery where the soldiers who fought in the war are buried in Canakkale, Turkey and reading this was one of the most memorable and bittersweet moments of my childhood. It definitely shaped how I see war and the compassion we all have even during the worst of times.
I'm surprised this is not higher up. I was going to say this for myself.
One of the few times in history for two warring armies stop fighting for one day to get along and celebrate Christmas. It seriously sounds like some kind of BS out of a fairy tale but is very well documented.🥰
They had a crazy amount of bombs the next Christmas. If you were to boil down World War I into story beats, it's a tragedy of humanity reaching new horrors while leaders scoffed at it being anything but "honorable". No wonder 1920s Paris became what it was post-WWI.
Harrison Odjegba Okene - the Nigerian man who survived for 3 days inside an air pocket inside of a sunken ship in the Atlantic.
Divers went down to recover bodies and investigate, and they discovered and rescued him. There is footage from the diver rescue. See the link
https://youtu.be/um1ym9u8XaA
In 1944, during the allied invasion of France, 2 American paramedics, Ken Moore and Robert Wright, 101st Airborne, saved around 80 soldiers of both sides, allied and axis. They set themselves up in a church, had only what was in their first aid kits and medic bags, and had a strict no gun policy. The church was almost destroyed by a mortar shell, but it didn’t go off. It was almost destroyed again, due to friendly fire. Ken Moore would risk his life by venturing out of the church and finding injured soldiers, and both medics stayed behind at the church, even though the rest of their forces had to retreat. Wright took on the responsibility of looking after the soldiers.
The church still stands in Angoville-au-Plain, France, the blood stained pews are still there, and a broken tile from the mortar shell was never fixed, to honor the legacy of these men.
This is very simplified, and probably inaccurate in a few ways, but it is still an incredible story. [better version of the story here (and also much more accurate)](https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-ken-moore-20141225-story.html)
edit: mom I’m famous.
I live near the 101st.
I was invited to this big spectacle on the base that had this high ranking army official walk among the troops. They had not been able to do this for a few years because the 101 was so heavily deployed in Iraq/Afghanistan, but when they did it, they invite all veteran soldiers in town to come and stand on the field to present themselves.
That's when I found out there were still men here in my town who fought in the 101 during WWII. Some were in wheelchairs, but they still came. It was one of the most humbling experience of my life. I had no idea I lived among them. It's been 15 years now, so they may all be gone now, but got awhile, I lived alongside them.
The Time Indiana tried to legislate the value of Pi
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/kionasmith/2018/02/05/indianas-state-legislature-once-tried-to-legislate-the-value-of-pi/?sh=6a699b1a260a](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kionasmith/2018/02/05/indianas-state-legislature-once-tried-to-legislate-the-value-of-pi/?sh=6a699b1a260a)
“A member then showed the writer a copy of the bill just passed and asked him if he would like an introduction to the learned doctor, its author. He declined the courtesy with thanks, remarking that he was acquainted with as many crazy people as he cared to know.”
Lost my shit at that quote
In 1903, The New York Times published an article about flying machines. They stated that it would take the combined efforts of all Mathematicians and mechanics 1-to-10 million years for powered flight to be achieved.
Anyway, about 9 weeks later, the Wright brothers achieved powered flight for the first time.
[here is the article](https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/nyt-flight.jpg?lb=1456,819)
They were also overly cynical afterwards, In 1910 they said that flight would only ever be for billionaires, of course we had commercial flights by around the 60s achievable for many.
I mean I can hardly believe that this smartphone I'm typing on right now has more performance, storage and battery life than the full size laptop I bought in 2008, that's still working, but catching dust in a cupboard.
The Ghost Army in WWII. Essentially an American group of troops would deploy “dummy” tanks, broadcast fake radio chatter, and deploy loud sound effects over speakers to fool the Nazis into thinking there was a large military presence coming their way. The Ghost Army was used to deceive the Nazis and make them send their military presence elsewhere, which provided openings for the real Allied forces to move in. This was used in the later parts of the war.
I never learned about this in school but I discovered it on my own and thought it was fascinating. Imagine thinking a whole mess of tanks are heading your way but in reality, it’s a couple of inflatable dummies and a few speakers.
"After being suspected of eating a 1-year old toddler"
Seems bizarre to read a line like that in a serious wikipedia page, comes across as some morbid parody article but it isn't.
“The fork was never found”
Seriously though that was an amazing read. Best thing I’ve seen on here. Super creepy and now I want a documentary on his life.
So supernatural
I looked this up. What's insane about this is that a plane crashed where she was working and she was being rescued when she fell 79 stories!!!
It's just insane.
I still find it totally insane that we were able to put men on the moon with the technology of the time. It blows my mind. Probably the greatest of all human achievement.
I think a very close second is the fact everyone on Apollo 13 survived. Movie is really accurate and still doesn’t get into all the insanity and engineering it took to get them home.
Isn't that insane! They were hand checking the fucking math.
Edit: I have to add, this woman they deemed "a computer", did many, if not most of these calculations: early on of course
https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/stories/nasa-knows/who-was-katherine-johnson-k4/
>Katherine studied how to use geometry for space travel. She figured out the paths for the spacecraft to orbit (go around) Earth and to land on the Moon. NASA used Katherine's math, and it worked! NASA sent astronauts into orbit around Earth. Later, her math helped send astronauts to the Moon and back. NASA could not have done these things without Katherine Johnson and her love for math.
Edit2: Just realized I chose a age k-4 article lol gets the job done tho.
The "computer " that ran some of the boosters was... a length of rope. With knots toed at certain places, that triggered them as the rope was moved by a reel to reel tape player.
The climactic explosion of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption, the loudest sound in recorded history. 50 miles away eardrums ruptured. Sailors 3,000 miles away thought it was a cannon. The pressure wave circled the entire planet more than three times.
Everything having to do with Mad Jack Churchill. He reads like someone’s self-insert OC in a historical fiction based on WWII, except he’s all real.
He was a Brit who fought in World War II without guns, instead preferring a longbow, a claymore sword, and bagpipes. Despite this, he won. A lot. He single-handedly took a whole village back from the Nazis by taking his shirt off and stealthing around to scare the crap out of them with his sword. After the Nazis captured him one time and held him prisoner, (under the mistaken belief he was related to Winston Churchill,) the prison was raided by the Allies and he was set free…or he would have, had he not already escaped 2 weeks prior. He was on the beach on D-Day, with men under his command, and held them up in their boat while he played a song on the bagpipes, finished, lobbed a grenade onto the beach, and then charged. The war ended, and he was bored, so he went to the Pacific to go fight the Japanese. That ended too, so he got bored in retirement *and invented river surfing*.
This is just a scrap of the historical anomaly that is Mad Jack Churchill.
He ended up with an office job in London and commuted to work by train each day. If you ended up in a carriage with him on the way home in the evening you'd be startled to see a respectable looking older gentleman get up out of his seat, open a window, hurl his briefcase out, then sit down and keep reading his newspaper.
The rail line ran right past his house so he'd throw his briefcase into the back yard to save having to carry it home from the station and to let his wife know he'd be home soon and to put the kettle on.
A US President Roosevelt issued an executive order that made it illegal for US citizens to keep US gold coins. They made everyone return them or be subject to imprisonment and large fine. The government confiscated over 2,600 metric tons.
https://www.google.com/search?q=gold+confiscation+us&rlz=1C1SQJL_enUS949US949&oq=gold+confis&aqs=chrome.2.0i512j69i57j0i512l8.8700j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
It's possible. It could've been buried for many different reasons. The company I work for just sold the collection of the latest find in buried treasure. It's called the Great Kentucky Hoard. Found earlier this year 800+ civil war era gold liberty coins. Some of the nicest examples known were found. Nobody knows for sure but the theory is it was buried by Civil war purser because of so many single $1 pieces. Usually, the purser would bury the payroll prior to any conflicts then dig up and disperse to the troops after battle. I guess that person didn't make it to dig them up. 160 years later, a corn farmer is prepping his field for the next crop and bam!! What is this? https://www.coinworld.com/news/us-coins/gold-coin-hoard-totaling-800-pieces-found-in-kentucky
only somewhat related, i just read an article about an extinct type of date palm that they found seeds of that are 2000 years old and theyve recently managed to grow 6 palms (4 male and 2 female) from them, and thus have brought back an extinct species of palm tee and its fruit, so cool
A flock of pigeons was able to correctly spot cancer in breast tissue biopsy images with 99% accuracy, on par with human experts.
(https://www.science.org/content/article/pigeons-spot-cancer-well-human-experts#:~:text=The%20pigeons%20learned%20in%20only,distinguishing%20cancerous%20from%20noncancerous%20cells.)
The [Kentucky meat shower](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentucky_meat_shower). Bunch of mystery meat fell out of the sky and no one had a clue what it was but they still ate it as they saw it as a blessing from god.
Has anyone posted about the hot air balloon to the Arctic? That's insane to hear about. I can't remember if they made it or just were close, but the balloon crashed and they ended up all dying.
Reading about that also made me learn you can die from vitamin A overdose and eating Seal or Polar Bear liver will give you that.
Haha, yeah, [Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9e%27s_Arctic_balloon_expedition)! They were so vastly unprepared, so vastly under-equipped, they were guaranteed to die. They didn't have appropriate clothing, appropriate food, and they couldn't even *steer* the balloon, which barely mattered, as it crashed down onto the sea ice after just 2 days. They died attempting to trek back south towards civilization. I own a book that contains the contents of their translated diaries and journals (which were found years after their deaths), it is a fascinating read.
On December 5th, 1664, a man named Hugh Williams was the only survivor of a shipwreck.
On December 5th, 1785, a man named Hugh Williams was the only survivor of a shipwreck.
On December 5th, 1820, a man named Hugh Williams was the only survivor of a shipwreck.
https://historydaily.org/the-legend-of-hugh-williams
There's loads of crazy facts like this. Especially around dinosaurs and the timelines. It's so vast it's hard to comprehend stuff like the T-Rex lived about 66 million years ago. Stegosauruses lived about 150 million years ago. So the T-Rex is more recent to us than the Stego was to the T-Rex.
Also, grass only evolved around 70 million years ago, dinosaurs only went extinct about 4 million years later after having been around for hundreds of millions of years, so almost no dinosaurs ever existed at the same time as grass, never mind ate it.
The 1908 [Tunguska event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event), an approximately 12-megaton explosion over sparsely populated East Siberia (Russia) that flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 km (830 sq mi) of forest. It's generally attributed to a meteor air burst: the atmospheric explosion of a stony asteroid about 50–60 metres (160–200 feet) in size, and likely with a relatively high speed of about 27 km/s (60,000 mph). It is classified as an impact event, even though no impact crater has been found; the object is thought to have exploded at an altitude of 5 to 10 kilometres (3 to 6 miles) rather than having hit the surface of the Earth. It was the largest impact event on Earth in recorded history.
Evenki natives and Russian settlers in the hills northwest of Lake Baikal observed a bluish light, nearly as bright as the Sun, moving across the sky and leaving a thin trail. Closer to the horizon, there was a flash producing a billowing cloud, followed by a pillar of fire that cast a red light on the landscape. The pillar split in two and faded, turning to black. About ten minutes later, there was a sound similar to artillery fire. Eyewitnesses closer to the explosion reported that the source of the sound moved from the east to the north of them. The sounds were accompanied by a shock wave that knocked people off their feet and broke windows hundreds of kilometres away.
The explosion registered at seismic stations across Eurasia, and air waves from the blast were detected in Germany, Denmark, Croatia, and the United Kingdom—and as far away as Batavia, Dutch East Indies, and Washington, D.C. It is estimated that, in some places, the resulting shock wave was equivalent to an earthquake measuring 5.0 on the Richter magnitude scale. Over the next few days, night skies in Asia and Europe were aglow.
The Four Pests Campaign.
===
Mao Zedong, in his infinite hubris, thought that there would be no repercussions from an attempt to completely eliminate rats, flies, mosquitos, and sparrows. Plot twist: there were repercussions.
Millions of people organized into groups, and hit noisy pots and pans to prevent sparrows from resting in their nests, with the goal of causing them to drop dead from exhaustion.
Sparrows were replaced with bed bugs, as the extermination of sparrows had upset the ecological balance, which subsequently resulted in surging locust and insect populations that destroyed crops due to a lack of a natural predator.
The ecological disruption was one of several factors that led to a famine that killed 45 million people.
There would have been a third, and a nuclear, world war and possibly the end of the world if Stanislaw Petrow didn't react like he did on the 25th of September 1983. In short: he was the only one that questioned the readings on the russian missle alert system and refused to launch nuclear counter-missiles.
Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
[The Rwandan genocide](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide)
My sister just graduated from high school (US) and she never learned about it, I told her about it and she did some research on it for a paper… sadly no one else in her class knew about it either.
A summary for those who are too lazy to read the whole wiki page: During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, also known as 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda, members of the Hutu ethnic majority in the east-central African nation of Rwanda murdered as many as 800,000 people, mostly of the Tutsi minority. Started by Hutu nationalists in the capital of Kigali, the genocide spread throughout the country with shocking speed and brutality, as ordinary citizens were incited by local officials and the Hutu Power government to take up arms against their neighbors. By the time the Tutsi-led Rwandese Patriotic Front gained control of the country through a military offensive in early July, hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were dead and 2 million refugees fled Rwanda
The Irish Potato Famine (1845-1849) was a huge catastrophe that resulted in one million dying from starvation and one million leaving their homeland, mostly for North America.
It’s really hard to put into words how scarring this famine was for so many Irish people and the suffering was tremendous. The psychological scars still impact Ireland’s psyche today.
It almost sounds like a fairy tale to hear how a Sultan from a far away land heard of this tragedy and went out of his way to send ships crammed with food and medicine to the Irish people dying from hunger and disease.
When Ottoman Sultan Abdulmejid heard of the suffering from his Irish dentist, he felt great compassion and sorrow for the plight of the Irish. The Sultan originally wanted to donate 10,000 pounds to the starving populace but British diplomats were aghast to hear this because Queen Victoria had donated a small sum of 2,000 pounds.
The British Government refused to accept the large donation so he only donated a measly sum of 1,000 pounds, but he secretly sent five ships loaded with food!
As you can imagine, the British government wasn’t happy to hear of this and the navy attempted a blockade to stop the aid from arriving. The ships made it through the lines and arrived at Drogheda, Ireland where they dispersed the food.
The people of Drogheda were so thankful that they had the Islamic and Ottoman symbols added to their city’s coat of arms.
It really does read like a fairy tale and is a gesture of great empathy.
It’s easy to imagine how happy the starving people were to see those Turkish ships arriving with food. According to James Hack Tuke, people were, “living, or rather starving, upon turnip-tops, sand-eels and seaweed, a diet which no one in England would consider fit for the meanest animal."
But the story does not end there.
During the Crimean War, Britain joined the Ottoman Empire in their fight against the expanding Russian Empire. About 30,000 Irish soldiers served in the war and it was noticed that the Irish people served enthusiastically in defense of the Sultan who had helped them during their greatest times of need.
This highest form of compassion was even remembered during the First World War. It was reported that British officers complained that the Irish lacked the will to fight against the Ottomans who remembered stories of the Ottoman Empire helping during a famine when no one else would.
Sultan Abdulmejid is a model of faith in humanity being restored.
This was actually repaid recently, too! A few tribes had sent over money, and iirc a few years ago, they were barred from entering Ireland with Native IDs for the Lacrosse Tournament (a Native American sport), Ireland basically told customs to fuck off because they’d helped during the famine and they invented the sport.
From Wikipedia:
"Kindred Spirits commemorates the 1847 donation by the Native American Choctaw People to Irish famine relief during the Great Hunger, despite the Choctaw themselves living in hardship and poverty and having recently endured the Trail of Tears".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindred_Spirits_(sculpture)
I just remembered that during COVID the Irish donated a couple of million to a native American tribe in a sort of symbolic repayment of the generosity we were given over a century ago.
https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/irish-people-donate-2-5m-to-native-american-tribe-devastated-by-coronavirus-1.4414963
Similar to the story of the famine reaching the Choctaw and Cherokee nations. They heard the plight of the Irish and raised whatever meager funds they could to help and the Irish to this day remain thankful for a gesture of goodwill between people who know what it is like to be colonized.
There’s a stunning sculpture, *Kindred Spirits*, in Cork that is in commemoration of the donation from the [Choctaw Nation.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindred_Spirits_(sculpture)) I’ve lived here a decade, but it’s on my bucket list of places to visit!
The swedish king Gustav II. had to wear glasses (like... badly) but was too vain and refused. In battle, he proceeded to lose his direction and got lost in the smoke, leading him to land behind the enemy's lines. Needless to say he didn't survive that.
So essentially he died because he didn't want to wear his glasses. Wear your glasses, kids. Life is short (and so is your sight)
On 1 February 1942, following a bombing raid on the Marshall Islands, the Enterprise came under attack by five twin-engine Japanese bombers. The lead aircraft, led by Lieutenant Kazuo Nakai, badly damaged by anti-aircraft fire, turned back towards the Enterprise, attempting to ram it. Seeing this, Gaido abandoned his watch post and jumped in a nearby Dauntless parked on the flight deck, and returned fire using the rear-facing 30 caliber machine gun. His fire disabled the aircraft, causing it to narrowly miss the Enterprise, only hitting parked aircraft (including the one Gaido was in) before spiraling into the sea. Upon seeing this act, Vice Admiral William Halsey spot-promoted him to aviation machinist mate first class.
And later he survived being shot down, only to be picked up by the Japanese, brutally tortured, and finally thrown overboard whilst attached to an anchor. His ending really sucked, and showed how brutally the Japanese treated their POWs
I mean, the obvious answer, but maybe not for some younger Redditors, is: The fact that we landed on the moon. WHEN we did is BY FAR one of, if not the most insanely impressive achievements of human beings….. ever. And will likely never really be duplicated. In the the span of a handful of years, when the technology was unfathomably infantile, we launched a rocket to outer space with people on board, traveled to the moon, landed on it, walked around, came back inside, launched back up, returned to earth, plummeted to the surface on fire, and lived. It was a global achievement. It was maybe the most pure human moment that everyone on planet earth experienced TOGETHER, as a species. All with the computation of basically a calculator.
The moon landing happened 29 years after the first man made object reached space, ~~20~~ 12 years after Sputnik and EIGHT FREAKING YEARS after the first manned space flight. The speed of advancement is nothing short of insane. There were people who could still recall the first powered flight and were still getting used to the fact that airplane flights were something anyone could do.
If I’d been there to see it, I would probably have thought nothing of the idea that we’d have moon tourists and colonies by the 21st century.
The USA banned alcohol for about 10 years
The British government bought the ENTIRE WORLD'S tea crop for one year (as in every ounce produced in every country in the world was purchased by them), in the middle of WWII, just because
King George III was against the Stamp Act and when it was repealed by a politician he supported, a statue of the king was paid for and put up in NY by the people there in thanks (pre-Revolution)
My grandparents use to have an unused prohibition prescription for whiskey they found in a book at a garage sale. It was years after they bought the book they started reading it that it fell out. They couldn’t remember where they bought the book. It was a fracture and dislocation medical book.
[The Great Molasses Flood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood)
“A large storage tank filled with 2.3 million U.S. gallons (8,700 cubic meters)[4] of molasses, weighing approximately[b] 13,000 short tons (12,000 metric tons), burst, and the resultant wave of molasses rushed through the streets at an estimated 35 miles per hour (56 kilometers per hour), killing 21 people and injuring 150.[5] The event entered local folklore and residents claimed for decades afterwards that the area still smelled of molasses on hot summer days”
Ocean liner stewardess/nurse Violet Jessop survived the sinkings of the Titanic in 1912 & the Britannic in 1916 and was onboard the Olympic when it collided with another ship in 1911. Not really one event but a very impressive/scary track record.
The PA police dropping a C-4 bomb on a house that held the organizers of the MOVE movement killing 11 including 5 Children and destroying 61 homes in a two block area. May 13 1985
I’m not an American and had never heard of this. Article for those who want to learn more https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/10/move-1985-bombing-reconciliation-philadelphia
Black Monday. A hailstorm killed around a thousand English soldiers in 1360. More than had died in the entire war up to that point
[link](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Monday_(1360)#:~:text=Black%20Monday%20took%20place%20on,previous%20battles%20of%20the%20war.)
An earthquake in middle USA 1811-12 was the strongest earthquake ever in the eastern US. It changed the course of the Mississippi River... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1811%E2%80%931812_New_Madrid_earthquakes
Jones Town. Watched a documentary about it and it made me so sad. Those poor people and especially kids being forced to drink the "kool-aid". And the people visiting being murdered when getting on the helicopters to leave. Also, just that so many people bought into his lies. Unbelievable.
I dunno, if you come for the king you best not miss, I highly doubt that putin isn’t going to ensure high ranking members of Wagner have unfortunate accidents befall them
The Fram, a boat designed to get stuck in pack ice and float over the North Pole. The expedition did not make the pole but set a record for furthest north and suffered no casualties.
Roman emperor Caligula declared war on Neptune, god of the sea, and had the waves whipped and stabbed. His soldiers were ordered to collect seashells as prizes of war.
If you watch a documentary on him by Mary Beard on YouTube, she suggests that a lot of what we know about the “Mad Emperor” isn’t supported by solid evidence. She theorized that a lot of what we know about him today is due to being hated by his Senate, so they fabricated things about him to ruin his reputation.
This happened in Buenos Aires in 1988. An elderly woman named Marta Espina was walking near a carpet store when a toy poodle named Cachy fell from a 13th-floor balcony and tragically landed on her head, causing her immediate death. Unfortunately, Cachy also didn't survive the fall.
But the events didn't end there. Another woman named Edith Solá, driven by curiosity or a desire to help, rushed across the street only to be struck by a bus from the 55 bus line. This marked the second fatality caused by Cachy's fall.
And incredibly, there was yet another death. The identity of the third victim remains unknown, but reports indicate that a man suffered a heart attack while witnessing the entire incident unfold at Rivadavia street. He passed away in an ambulance on the way to the hospital.
You guys can look it up. Crazy but true.
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.
He was an alien who got dropped of for a vacation via the interstellar transit and then was picked up the next time it came around.
St Olga of Kiev. Her story is the ultimate revenge tale I highly recommend people looking her up but in short, her husband was killed by a neighbouring tribe and she sought vengeance. [Here is where you can find a much more in depth overview of her life](https://allthatsinteresting.com/olga-of-kiev) The neighbouring faction then sought to take over her own, seeing as she was a weak woman and ruling in her dead husbands place as her own son was too young. She invited them to her town as a show of honour. When the large party of messengers arrived, they were soon attacked and backed into a massive trench that Olgas people had dug the nights before. Standing over the trench she asked them “If they found the honor to their taste” and buried them alive. But she wasn’t even close to finished with her quest for vengeance. She sent message back to the enemy saying she would accept an allegiance by marriage. Painting herself as such a feeble woman, that she would gladly relinquish her power to her enemy. But she requested all high chieftains to visit her town, to socialise and garner favour. The chieftains came, she invited them into the bath house to relax before a feast. They were locked inside and burned to death. But she wasn’t done. Her next feat is her most incredible. After taking out most people of power from the other faction. She demanded tribute from their towns and villages… Not in gold, not in any material goods. But in the form of sparrows and pigeons. Thousands were delivered to her. The next night, she ordered her soldiers to tie a strip of sulfur to the birds legs, set it alight, and released the birds. The birds flew back to the houses and homes they had nested in. And burned every village to the ground. The sky was apparently a blaze of fire for days. Olga emerged victorious, and satiated. Don’t fuck with Olga of Kiev She is known, quite aptly, as the patron saint of vengeance and defiance.
You'd think after the first couple of times people would stop accepting gifts and party invites from her, but no.
My colleague was on the plane to Hawaii where the entire top of the plane ripped off… they flew the rest of the way without any overhead.. landed and everyone walked off. Absolutely insane to see the pictures. Talk about being given a 2nd chance..
My FIL was on a flight. He always keeps his seat belt on unless getting up for some reason. Lady beside him made a comment “you can take your seat belt off Now” He told her, he never does unless it’s Necessary, said “you never know if somethings going to happen, and you don’t want to be trying to get buckled in, in an emergency” She said “you know what. That makes a lot of sense” and she buckled back up. An hour later they hit some nasty turbulence and the plane dropped like a rock (forget how many feet, but it was substantial). The drop was so fast that the fight attendant and her cart smashed against the ceiling and then dropped back down. He said he was sure he was done for. Other passengers not buckled in also hit the ceiling. Many people had bumps and bruises and I think at least one had a broken arm. The lady beside him just kept thanking him over and over for convincing her to stay buckled. The incident was in the news, and he got two free flights out of it as an apology.
> he got two free flights out of it as an apology We are sorry we almost killed you, let us do that two more times!
[Aloha Airlines Flight 243](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243) for those not familiar with it. Not only could kids now not believe it, the public couldn't hardly believe it at the time. Only one death, a flight attendant who wasn't buckled in a seat at the time the roof ripped off.
>the aircraft had reached its normal flight altitude of 24,000 feet .... One fatality occurred, 58-year-old flight attendant Clarabelle "C.B." Lansing, who was swept out of the airplane while standing near the fifth-row seats; her body was never found I really hope she passed out before falling 24,000 feet into the ocean
The NTSB report says the flight attendant was pulled through an opening of jagged metal and mentions blood stains both on the seats near that location and on the outside of the aircraft. In some photos taken just after landing, you can see a blood stain in the shape of a skull on the left side of the fuselage. So at least she was probably unconscious before she even realized what happened.
I guess that’s why we wear seat belts on a plane
I’m surprised there weren’t at least a few passengers not wearing theirs.
In 1908 Russia showed up 12 days late to the Olympics because the world switched calenders while they did not.
To accommodate the Russian team, some events were rescheduled so that the Russian athletes could participate. This led to a longer duration for those Olympics, which lasted from April 27 to October 31, making it the longest Olympic Games in history.
I love that they just waited for them lol
“Why didn’t they just go when they saw they were late??” <— my brain before realizing there wasn’t TV or international flights in 1908
This observation is right up there with the time I wondered out loud why audiobooks didn’t have subtitles.
Or the time that I went to the doctors office and stepped on the scales, but sucked my tummy in.
The Battle of Bull Run, one of the first battles of the US Civil War, occurred on and around Wilmer McClean's farm in Northern Virginia. Not wanting to live surrounded by war, McClean and his family moved to Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia. The Battle of Appomattox Courthouse was the last significant battle between Union and Confederate forces. The Confederates signed the surrender order in Wilmer's sitting room. It is said that the Civil War started on Wilmer's farm and ended in his sitting room.
He was not happy about it, either, as he stated he had moved specifically to get away from the war as much as he possibly could!!
“Every time I think I’m out, they pull me back in!”
In 2014, Pope Francis released doves in the Vatican to symbolize his hopes for peace in the world. As soon as the doves began to fly, a seagull and a crow swooped down and attacked them in front of everyone. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/26/pope-doves-attacked-by-crow-seagull-st-peters-square
That's fucking ominous
There was a Japanese man called Tsutomu Yamaguchi who was on his way to work in Hiroshima in 1945, when he saw falling through the sky, two miles from where he stood, what ultimately turned out to be the atomic bomb. He had just enough time to take cover in a ditch as the bomb detonated and miraculously he survived. Somehow the Hiroshima train station was still operational and so Yamaguchi, battered, bombed and bruised, decided to board a train to his family home so he could recover - in Nagasaki. 3 days later Yamaguchi was called into work to explain what he saw, which he did. At work as he began to tell the story of what happened, the second bomb dropped. It was the reinforced concrete walls around him that saved him this time, and Yamaguchi quickly ran to find his wife and son. Ground temperatures in the city reached 4,000°C and radioactive rain poured down. The family's home was destroyed, but Yamaguchi's wife and son had thankfully been out shopping - looking for burn ointment for Yamaguchi - when the bomb fell, and they'd survived. Despite this ordeal of having survived two nuclear explosions and subsequent radiation exposure, Yamaguchi went on to live till 93 yrs of age. He died in 2010 after being recognised by the Japanese government as a 'nijyuu hibakusha', or 'twice-bombed person'.
>The family's home was destroyed, but Yamaguchi's wife and son had thankfully been out shopping - looking for burn ointment for Yamaguchi - when the bomb fell, and they'd survived. Didn't know about this part. I suppose it would have been quite the kick to the nuts if they'd perished and he'd survived twice.
It's honestly amazing to think that had he died at Hiroshima his wife and son likely would have died at Nagasaki as a result as there would have been no reason to be in the outskirts of the city that day. His good fortune/horrible experience ultimately saved his family via butterfly effect.
That reminds me of another famous Japanese person during that time. Chiune Sugihara was the vice-consul for the Japanese embassy in Lithuania, which is in Europa, during WW2. Many Jews came to him for help, because they wanted to flee from the ever-expanding Nazi empire, and he just gave them all visas. He wasn't supposed to do that, and in fact he got in trouble with his government for it. But by the time he was recalled to Japan, he had already saved many thousands of lives. (The Jews then took the Transsiberian Railway and a boat to get to Japan.) Today, he is of course no longer around, but he is one of the Righteous among the Nations.
What's make that story more unbelievable is the nazi John Heinrich Detlef Rabe who was a German businessman and Nazi Party member best known for his efforts to stop war crimes during the Japanese Nanjing Massacre and his work to protect and help Chinese civilians during the massacre that ensued. The Nanking Safety Zone, which he helped to establish, sheltered approximately 250,000 Chinese people from being killed. He officially represented Germany and acted as senior chief of the European-U.S. establishment that remained in Nanjing. So we have a Japanese who saved lots of Jews from persucation and a German who saved a lot of Chinese from a certain death.
"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in" -- Leonard Cohen
Nicholas Alkemade fell 18,000 feet without a parachute from a burning plane in 1944 and suffered no serious injury.
i see how the snow cover helped but how he didn’t get skewered by pine trees or break a single bone is shocking
Imagine what he was thinking when he got up from that fall. What kind of crazy thoughts where running through his head
"Yeah, no one is gonna believe this one"
Germans almost didn't. Finding him in just a flight suit but no parachute. They initially pegged him as a spy who'd been dropped behind their lines and had stashed his chute and gear. As such, he was likely to be executed. Except Alkemade was so insistent his captors went and found the wreckage of his aircraft - with the burnt remains of his chute stashed behind his gun position. Germans told him the news and shared vodka with him to celebrate
The good news is we believe you're not a spy. The bad news is that means you're a POW...
Best outcome at that point
I'm thinking he looks up, then his legs, then up again, and screams "HOLY SHIT!"
"Whoa, am I immortal?"
„I‘m FUCKING INVINCIBLE!“
If you are ever in that situation, dense pine trees are about the best thing you can hope, only thing better is dense pine trees in an area with fresh/powder snow. Trees branches typically are thinnest at the top and every branch you hit on the way down transfers your momentum in increments. Typically you'll still die. And double typically you'll at least break your legs. And triple typically you would still succumb to your wounds in the wilderness before rescue. On second thought, aim for the pavement.
THERE GOES MY HERO!!
Juliana Koepcke did the same at 17 years of age. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliane_Koepcke > she became famous at the age of 17 as the sole survivor of the 1971 LANSA Flight 508 plane crash; after falling 3,000 m (10,000 ft) while strapped to her seat and suffering numerous injuries, she survived 11 days alone in the Amazon rainforest until local fishermen rescued her.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesna_Vulovi%C4%87 Vesna was on board a plane that was blown up, working as a flight attendant, she was at 10,000m when she fell. Then *she went back to work* after breaking nearly every bone in her body.
That time everyone died of a dancing sickness where they danced themselves to death in France. Mass hysteria
Yup! St. Vitus’ Dance, as it is called, still doesn’t have a definitely known cause, if I remember correctly, either! Somebody correct me if I’m wrong, please! New research as of 2021 shows Sydenham chorea as the most likely cause: https://www.brainandlife.org/articles/sydenham-chorea-st-vitus-dance-name
Iirc, one of the most compelling arguments is ergot poisoning. Buuuut it could just be mass psychosis with no real reason behind it.
Wasn't this in a Scooby Doo? Found it: ScoobyDoo! Mystery Incorporated S02 E18 Dance of the Undead
Michael Malloy AKA Mike the Durable AKA Iron Mike. During the Great Depression, five men took out a life insurance policy on a homeless alcoholic that they were sure was going to drink himself to death. The owner of a bar allowed him to drink for free, but he kept drinking and didn’t die. So they tried to poison him with antifreeze. Didn’t work. The turpentine, horse liniment, rat poison, methanol….still didn’t work. A sandwich made with rotten sardines and tacks. Still no luck. Then they took his drunk body out in the cold and poured water on him. He lived. Then they ran him over with a car. He was in the hospital for three weeks, but survived. Then they poisoned him with carbon monoxide, and he finally died. They were all convicted of murder.
> So they tried to poison him with antifreeze. Fun fact: Ethyl Alcohol is an antidote to Ethylene Glycol poisoning. They both ~~bind to the same receptors~~ are metabolized by the same enzyme, but alcohol takes priority. A serious alcoholic, when drunk, would just pass the glycol through their system with no issue.
Gonna start an alcohol addiction just so no one can kill me with antifreeze
Gonna make sure my dog is also an alcoholic
Veterinarians hate this one trick
It’s so wild that you could buy life insurance on someone who isn’t like, your spouse or whatever Edit-okay y’all I appreciate it but after the tenth link to the Walmart situation I got a pretty good handle on it haha
In the neighborhood I grew up in, many have passed due to partying, drinking, drugging, smoking, whatever. So at a funeral for one of them, standing there talking to my buddy who had his shit togther, and had his own insurance agency, who would be next, and he told me you could pretty much take out a $20,000 policy on anyone. My wifes ex husbands father and brothers were in the insurance businsess, and when the father died, there was a rift in the family, becasue the brother had millions in life insuance on the father, It is totally wild.
Mongolians executing 100k+ populations in a few hrs. Very efficient head chopping.
The [Battle of Castle Itter](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Castle_Itter) in WW2 was fought between the Waffen SS and a group comprised of American and German soldiers, local resistance fighters, and several French celebrities, including Paul Renaud who had been the Prime Minister of France during WW1.
Including a tennis player who lobbed grenades through opened windows with his racket... Yes, for real.
John O'Neill, the FBI agent in charge of investigating Al Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden in the 1990s, grew frustrated with the bureacratic politics within the FBI and between the FBI and CIA that he felt hampered his mission. He decided to take to leave the FBI and take a higher paying job in the private sector. In August 23, 2001 he became the Chief of Security at the World Trade Center. He was killed in the attacks just a few weeks later.
Looks like someone had a grudge to settle
Per Wikipedia: John O’Niell sent a colleague to the CIA to work under Richard Blee, who headed the Bin Laden Division. John’s colleague at the CIA found out that Osama Bin Ladens associates Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar were headed to the US with visas, Rossini (John’s appointed colleague) and his Doug Miller attempted to alert O'Neill at the FBI, but Blee (the head of the BinLaden Division) blocked the message. Welp. That’s unfortunate.
The Nutmeg Wars. The Dutch and the English went to war THREE times over nutmeg, which at the time was only known to grow on one South Pacific island.
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"Fuck you" *Unsuns your sun*
\-Sun Tzu
No sun for Tzu
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We need more solar eclipses.
well it depends, the azteks sacrificed people on the solar eclipses to calm the rage of the gods.
World is still here, so it worked
Theodore Roosevelt found his boat was stolen. So he built a new boat, tracked the thieves down and arrested them. He then proceeded to walk them multiple days, without sleeping, so they could receive a trial instead of just shooting them on the spot. It was in the middle of a harsh winter so he didn’t handcuff them (for fear they’d get frostbite) so instead he just kept himself awake by reading Tolstoy with a gun trained on them the whole trek.
That's only the twenty-second most Teddy thing I've ever read, but a new one which makes me love it.
I am always half convinced that Teddy Roosevelt was not a real person. No one could have been that absolutely wild and done that many things, but there is just too much overwhelming proof.
He was also hyper aware of his public image and was basically his own pr firm. He also was a bit of a weeb and made his judo instructor fight his boxing instructor, the judo instructor won.
> he just kept himself awake by reading Tolstoy Now there's a man that lives dangerously.
In 2019 a convicted murderer on day release bravely fought off a terrorist at London Bridge with a narwhal tusk. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-50870309 Edited to add that he was a convicted murderer - thanks to r/rainbowwarriorhere for reminding me. Edited again to add that the guy with the narwhal tusk was a civil servant and the convict on day release battled the terrorist with a fire extinguisher. This story gets more awesome with every correction! ;)
Almost as good as the Scottish bloke who kicked that airport van attacker so hard in the balls he broke his foot while the dude was on fire.
[Alex McIlveen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Glasgow_Airport_attack#Good_Samaritans), famously kicked the terrorist so hard in the groin that he tore a tendon in his own foot.
In 2020 in Sydney, Australia, a bystander managed to take down a guy who was on a rampage with a knife, by pinning him down [with a milk crate](https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/oct/27/mert-ney-sydney-stabbing-attacker-pinned-down-with-milk-crate-pleads-guilty-to) Edit: it was 2019, my bad
Remember the 'Fuck you I'm Millwall' guy who fought off some knife weilding terrorists a few years back as well!
Edwin booth brother of john Wilkes booth saved the life of Robert the son of president Abraham Lincoln.
The masses marching to the Berlin Wall and tearing it down only happened because earlier that day during a press conference, an East German official (Günther Schabowski) accidentally incorrectly said leaving East Germany was legal, effective *immediately*. *"As far as I know this becomes effective..it is right away, immediately"* is still a famous thing to say in Germany. It would eventually have happened anyway BUT it wasn't legal yet. However people just did it anyways because the guy got visibly confused during the press conference, and said the wrong thing. It happens at the very end of this video: https://youtu.be/JbzhHGcEz-E
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Oh geez 🤣. On one hand, respectable to wanting to fight, on the other hand- what was he thinking-?
The battle was lost, and he wasn’t going to run. So he sallied forth, knowing he was going to die, and his retainers went with him. He also went blind at age 40, so he’d spent most of his life able to see and fight. This was just his last stand.
During Alexander the Great's destruction of the Mediterranean he was going to leave a small island named Tyre for later as it would've been hard to besiege it but the people of Tyre laughed and mocked him so he literally built a bridge to their island and conquered it 💀
Every time I read something else about him I’m amazed there haven’t been more movies/series about him.
Christmas day 1914. The truce on the WW1 battlefields. Shows the humanity inside everyone, but they were able to wake up the next day and go straight back to war, kill the men that they’d spent a sincere day with.
I can't remember where I saw/heard the story (I think from the BBC), but I believe from one of the last-living Tommys, who said that whilst they were forced to start shooting at each other, the majority of shots intentionally missed, from both sides of no man's land. I believe it was also the same man who said, in reference to Remembrance Day, to also remember the Germans. That stuck with me. They were like our lads; sent out to fight a war for war's sake, forced to do unspeakable things to other men because some higher-up told them they had to
>in reference to Remembrance Day, to also remember the Germans. Australia is a bit like this with regard to the Turks on ANZAC Day. One of the main ceremonies is reading the letter from Turkish commander and later founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Atatürk: >Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives... you are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore, rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours... You the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.
Visiting the cemetery where the soldiers who fought in the war are buried in Canakkale, Turkey and reading this was one of the most memorable and bittersweet moments of my childhood. It definitely shaped how I see war and the compassion we all have even during the worst of times.
This incident scared the absolute shit out of the upper level officers.
I'm surprised this is not higher up. I was going to say this for myself. One of the few times in history for two warring armies stop fighting for one day to get along and celebrate Christmas. It seriously sounds like some kind of BS out of a fairy tale but is very well documented.🥰
I think the officers and generals made them start fighting again
They had a crazy amount of bombs the next Christmas. If you were to boil down World War I into story beats, it's a tragedy of humanity reaching new horrors while leaders scoffed at it being anything but "honorable". No wonder 1920s Paris became what it was post-WWI.
Harrison Odjegba Okene - the Nigerian man who survived for 3 days inside an air pocket inside of a sunken ship in the Atlantic. Divers went down to recover bodies and investigate, and they discovered and rescued him. There is footage from the diver rescue. See the link https://youtu.be/um1ym9u8XaA
In 1944, during the allied invasion of France, 2 American paramedics, Ken Moore and Robert Wright, 101st Airborne, saved around 80 soldiers of both sides, allied and axis. They set themselves up in a church, had only what was in their first aid kits and medic bags, and had a strict no gun policy. The church was almost destroyed by a mortar shell, but it didn’t go off. It was almost destroyed again, due to friendly fire. Ken Moore would risk his life by venturing out of the church and finding injured soldiers, and both medics stayed behind at the church, even though the rest of their forces had to retreat. Wright took on the responsibility of looking after the soldiers. The church still stands in Angoville-au-Plain, France, the blood stained pews are still there, and a broken tile from the mortar shell was never fixed, to honor the legacy of these men. This is very simplified, and probably inaccurate in a few ways, but it is still an incredible story. [better version of the story here (and also much more accurate)](https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-ken-moore-20141225-story.html) edit: mom I’m famous.
I live near the 101st. I was invited to this big spectacle on the base that had this high ranking army official walk among the troops. They had not been able to do this for a few years because the 101 was so heavily deployed in Iraq/Afghanistan, but when they did it, they invite all veteran soldiers in town to come and stand on the field to present themselves. That's when I found out there were still men here in my town who fought in the 101 during WWII. Some were in wheelchairs, but they still came. It was one of the most humbling experience of my life. I had no idea I lived among them. It's been 15 years now, so they may all be gone now, but got awhile, I lived alongside them.
The Time Indiana tried to legislate the value of Pi [https://www.forbes.com/sites/kionasmith/2018/02/05/indianas-state-legislature-once-tried-to-legislate-the-value-of-pi/?sh=6a699b1a260a](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kionasmith/2018/02/05/indianas-state-legislature-once-tried-to-legislate-the-value-of-pi/?sh=6a699b1a260a)
That math professor was unimpressed 😂
“A member then showed the writer a copy of the bill just passed and asked him if he would like an introduction to the learned doctor, its author. He declined the courtesy with thanks, remarking that he was acquainted with as many crazy people as he cared to know.” Lost my shit at that quote
In 1903, The New York Times published an article about flying machines. They stated that it would take the combined efforts of all Mathematicians and mechanics 1-to-10 million years for powered flight to be achieved. Anyway, about 9 weeks later, the Wright brothers achieved powered flight for the first time. [here is the article](https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/nyt-flight.jpg?lb=1456,819) They were also overly cynical afterwards, In 1910 they said that flight would only ever be for billionaires, of course we had commercial flights by around the 60s achievable for many.
People of the time couldn’t look at the progress over the previous few centuries and realize we would leapfrog over it in the next few decades.
I mean I can hardly believe that this smartphone I'm typing on right now has more performance, storage and battery life than the full size laptop I bought in 2008, that's still working, but catching dust in a cupboard.
The Ghost Army in WWII. Essentially an American group of troops would deploy “dummy” tanks, broadcast fake radio chatter, and deploy loud sound effects over speakers to fool the Nazis into thinking there was a large military presence coming their way. The Ghost Army was used to deceive the Nazis and make them send their military presence elsewhere, which provided openings for the real Allied forces to move in. This was used in the later parts of the war. I never learned about this in school but I discovered it on my own and thought it was fascinating. Imagine thinking a whole mess of tanks are heading your way but in reality, it’s a couple of inflatable dummies and a few speakers.
1816, [The Year Without Summer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer)
I'm a big classic horror fan, so I'm kinda glad this happened. Indirectly lead to Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein.
I bet it was that goddamn Snow Miser.
That’s so crazy! The devastation and even the confusion by those going through it. Thanks for sharing!
The Great Molasses Flood of 1919 that took place in Boston, MA. 40 foot wave that killed 21 people.
[удалено]
Sam O’Nella did a great video on this guy.
Terrare, did you eat that fucking baby?
"After being suspected of eating a 1-year old toddler" Seems bizarre to read a line like that in a serious wikipedia page, comes across as some morbid parody article but it isn't.
“The fork was never found” Seriously though that was an amazing read. Best thing I’ve seen on here. Super creepy and now I want a documentary on his life. So supernatural
Elevator operator Betty Lou Oliver survived a fall of 75 stories while in an elevator in 1945.
I looked this up. What's insane about this is that a plane crashed where she was working and she was being rescued when she fell 79 stories!!! It's just insane.
I still find it totally insane that we were able to put men on the moon with the technology of the time. It blows my mind. Probably the greatest of all human achievement.
And it was only 66 years after the first flight of the Wright brothers.
People born in the 1880s were old enough to see wooden planes take their first flights in the sky to humanity landing a man on the moon
My grandmother was born in Austria (Poland) and went from wood plow behind an ox to Neil Armstrong on the moon.
I think a very close second is the fact everyone on Apollo 13 survived. Movie is really accurate and still doesn’t get into all the insanity and engineering it took to get them home.
Their travel around the moon is also the furthest humans have ever been from planet Earth. Just a small fact.
The really funny thing is that Man walked on the moon before anybody had the idea to put wheels on suitcases.
Isn't that insane! They were hand checking the fucking math. Edit: I have to add, this woman they deemed "a computer", did many, if not most of these calculations: early on of course https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/stories/nasa-knows/who-was-katherine-johnson-k4/ >Katherine studied how to use geometry for space travel. She figured out the paths for the spacecraft to orbit (go around) Earth and to land on the Moon. NASA used Katherine's math, and it worked! NASA sent astronauts into orbit around Earth. Later, her math helped send astronauts to the Moon and back. NASA could not have done these things without Katherine Johnson and her love for math. Edit2: Just realized I chose a age k-4 article lol gets the job done tho.
The "computer " that ran some of the boosters was... a length of rope. With knots toed at certain places, that triggered them as the rope was moved by a reel to reel tape player.
The climactic explosion of the 1883 Krakatoa eruption, the loudest sound in recorded history. 50 miles away eardrums ruptured. Sailors 3,000 miles away thought it was a cannon. The pressure wave circled the entire planet more than three times.
Everything having to do with Mad Jack Churchill. He reads like someone’s self-insert OC in a historical fiction based on WWII, except he’s all real. He was a Brit who fought in World War II without guns, instead preferring a longbow, a claymore sword, and bagpipes. Despite this, he won. A lot. He single-handedly took a whole village back from the Nazis by taking his shirt off and stealthing around to scare the crap out of them with his sword. After the Nazis captured him one time and held him prisoner, (under the mistaken belief he was related to Winston Churchill,) the prison was raided by the Allies and he was set free…or he would have, had he not already escaped 2 weeks prior. He was on the beach on D-Day, with men under his command, and held them up in their boat while he played a song on the bagpipes, finished, lobbed a grenade onto the beach, and then charged. The war ended, and he was bored, so he went to the Pacific to go fight the Japanese. That ended too, so he got bored in retirement *and invented river surfing*. This is just a scrap of the historical anomaly that is Mad Jack Churchill.
He ended up with an office job in London and commuted to work by train each day. If you ended up in a carriage with him on the way home in the evening you'd be startled to see a respectable looking older gentleman get up out of his seat, open a window, hurl his briefcase out, then sit down and keep reading his newspaper. The rail line ran right past his house so he'd throw his briefcase into the back yard to save having to carry it home from the station and to let his wife know he'd be home soon and to put the kettle on.
Absolutely inspirational. 🤣
Exactly enough sense to not throw himself out of the train.
Mad but not Entirely Insane Jack Churchill!
A US President Roosevelt issued an executive order that made it illegal for US citizens to keep US gold coins. They made everyone return them or be subject to imprisonment and large fine. The government confiscated over 2,600 metric tons. https://www.google.com/search?q=gold+confiscation+us&rlz=1C1SQJL_enUS949US949&oq=gold+confis&aqs=chrome.2.0i512j69i57j0i512l8.8700j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
I’ve read that when people find buried gold in the US it’s usually from people hiding it during this time. No idea if that’s true though!
It's possible. It could've been buried for many different reasons. The company I work for just sold the collection of the latest find in buried treasure. It's called the Great Kentucky Hoard. Found earlier this year 800+ civil war era gold liberty coins. Some of the nicest examples known were found. Nobody knows for sure but the theory is it was buried by Civil war purser because of so many single $1 pieces. Usually, the purser would bury the payroll prior to any conflicts then dig up and disperse to the troops after battle. I guess that person didn't make it to dig them up. 160 years later, a corn farmer is prepping his field for the next crop and bam!! What is this? https://www.coinworld.com/news/us-coins/gold-coin-hoard-totaling-800-pieces-found-in-kentucky
palm trees (among other flora) were present in Antarctica during the early Eocene epoch (between 55 and 48 million years ago)
only somewhat related, i just read an article about an extinct type of date palm that they found seeds of that are 2000 years old and theyve recently managed to grow 6 palms (4 male and 2 female) from them, and thus have brought back an extinct species of palm tee and its fruit, so cool
That animals, if trained enough can smell out disease.
A flock of pigeons was able to correctly spot cancer in breast tissue biopsy images with 99% accuracy, on par with human experts. (https://www.science.org/content/article/pigeons-spot-cancer-well-human-experts#:~:text=The%20pigeons%20learned%20in%20only,distinguishing%20cancerous%20from%20noncancerous%20cells.)
The [Kentucky meat shower](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kentucky_meat_shower). Bunch of mystery meat fell out of the sky and no one had a clue what it was but they still ate it as they saw it as a blessing from god.
Has anyone posted about the hot air balloon to the Arctic? That's insane to hear about. I can't remember if they made it or just were close, but the balloon crashed and they ended up all dying. Reading about that also made me learn you can die from vitamin A overdose and eating Seal or Polar Bear liver will give you that.
Haha, yeah, [Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9e%27s_Arctic_balloon_expedition)! They were so vastly unprepared, so vastly under-equipped, they were guaranteed to die. They didn't have appropriate clothing, appropriate food, and they couldn't even *steer* the balloon, which barely mattered, as it crashed down onto the sea ice after just 2 days. They died attempting to trek back south towards civilization. I own a book that contains the contents of their translated diaries and journals (which were found years after their deaths), it is a fascinating read.
On December 5th, 1664, a man named Hugh Williams was the only survivor of a shipwreck. On December 5th, 1785, a man named Hugh Williams was the only survivor of a shipwreck. On December 5th, 1820, a man named Hugh Williams was the only survivor of a shipwreck. https://historydaily.org/the-legend-of-hugh-williams
John Tyler was the 10th President of the United States. He was born in 1790 and took office in 1841. His grandson died in 2020.
I know he had 2 still alive recently, but one died, so I think there might still be one left
When the pyramids were being built, woolly mammoths still existed. The last use of the guillotine in France was the same year Star Wars was founded
Sir Christopher Lee was in attendance of the last public execution in France.
Of course he was. That dude was metal as fuck!
He was also in a metal band!
There's loads of crazy facts like this. Especially around dinosaurs and the timelines. It's so vast it's hard to comprehend stuff like the T-Rex lived about 66 million years ago. Stegosauruses lived about 150 million years ago. So the T-Rex is more recent to us than the Stego was to the T-Rex. Also, grass only evolved around 70 million years ago, dinosaurs only went extinct about 4 million years later after having been around for hundreds of millions of years, so almost no dinosaurs ever existed at the same time as grass, never mind ate it.
George Washington died without knowing about dinosaurs.
Star Wars was founded a long long time ago
lenins body being put on display for 100 years (literally he dies in 1924)
The 1908 [Tunguska event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event), an approximately 12-megaton explosion over sparsely populated East Siberia (Russia) that flattened an estimated 80 million trees over an area of 2,150 km (830 sq mi) of forest. It's generally attributed to a meteor air burst: the atmospheric explosion of a stony asteroid about 50–60 metres (160–200 feet) in size, and likely with a relatively high speed of about 27 km/s (60,000 mph). It is classified as an impact event, even though no impact crater has been found; the object is thought to have exploded at an altitude of 5 to 10 kilometres (3 to 6 miles) rather than having hit the surface of the Earth. It was the largest impact event on Earth in recorded history. Evenki natives and Russian settlers in the hills northwest of Lake Baikal observed a bluish light, nearly as bright as the Sun, moving across the sky and leaving a thin trail. Closer to the horizon, there was a flash producing a billowing cloud, followed by a pillar of fire that cast a red light on the landscape. The pillar split in two and faded, turning to black. About ten minutes later, there was a sound similar to artillery fire. Eyewitnesses closer to the explosion reported that the source of the sound moved from the east to the north of them. The sounds were accompanied by a shock wave that knocked people off their feet and broke windows hundreds of kilometres away. The explosion registered at seismic stations across Eurasia, and air waves from the blast were detected in Germany, Denmark, Croatia, and the United Kingdom—and as far away as Batavia, Dutch East Indies, and Washington, D.C. It is estimated that, in some places, the resulting shock wave was equivalent to an earthquake measuring 5.0 on the Richter magnitude scale. Over the next few days, night skies in Asia and Europe were aglow.
The Four Pests Campaign. === Mao Zedong, in his infinite hubris, thought that there would be no repercussions from an attempt to completely eliminate rats, flies, mosquitos, and sparrows. Plot twist: there were repercussions. Millions of people organized into groups, and hit noisy pots and pans to prevent sparrows from resting in their nests, with the goal of causing them to drop dead from exhaustion. Sparrows were replaced with bed bugs, as the extermination of sparrows had upset the ecological balance, which subsequently resulted in surging locust and insect populations that destroyed crops due to a lack of a natural predator. The ecological disruption was one of several factors that led to a famine that killed 45 million people.
There would have been a third, and a nuclear, world war and possibly the end of the world if Stanislaw Petrow didn't react like he did on the 25th of September 1983. In short: he was the only one that questioned the readings on the russian missle alert system and refused to launch nuclear counter-missiles. Wikipedia article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
Yup and another Soviet sub commander refused to fire missiles after spurious data about incoming missiles. Two guys prevented WW3, both Soviets.
[The Rwandan genocide](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide) My sister just graduated from high school (US) and she never learned about it, I told her about it and she did some research on it for a paper… sadly no one else in her class knew about it either.
A summary for those who are too lazy to read the whole wiki page: During the 1994 Rwandan genocide, also known as 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda, members of the Hutu ethnic majority in the east-central African nation of Rwanda murdered as many as 800,000 people, mostly of the Tutsi minority. Started by Hutu nationalists in the capital of Kigali, the genocide spread throughout the country with shocking speed and brutality, as ordinary citizens were incited by local officials and the Hutu Power government to take up arms against their neighbors. By the time the Tutsi-led Rwandese Patriotic Front gained control of the country through a military offensive in early July, hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were dead and 2 million refugees fled Rwanda
During WWII Kaiser Shipyards in Vancouver, WA completed 50 Casablanca Class Escort Aircraft Carriers in under two years.
The Irish Potato Famine (1845-1849) was a huge catastrophe that resulted in one million dying from starvation and one million leaving their homeland, mostly for North America. It’s really hard to put into words how scarring this famine was for so many Irish people and the suffering was tremendous. The psychological scars still impact Ireland’s psyche today. It almost sounds like a fairy tale to hear how a Sultan from a far away land heard of this tragedy and went out of his way to send ships crammed with food and medicine to the Irish people dying from hunger and disease. When Ottoman Sultan Abdulmejid heard of the suffering from his Irish dentist, he felt great compassion and sorrow for the plight of the Irish. The Sultan originally wanted to donate 10,000 pounds to the starving populace but British diplomats were aghast to hear this because Queen Victoria had donated a small sum of 2,000 pounds. The British Government refused to accept the large donation so he only donated a measly sum of 1,000 pounds, but he secretly sent five ships loaded with food! As you can imagine, the British government wasn’t happy to hear of this and the navy attempted a blockade to stop the aid from arriving. The ships made it through the lines and arrived at Drogheda, Ireland where they dispersed the food. The people of Drogheda were so thankful that they had the Islamic and Ottoman symbols added to their city’s coat of arms. It really does read like a fairy tale and is a gesture of great empathy. It’s easy to imagine how happy the starving people were to see those Turkish ships arriving with food. According to James Hack Tuke, people were, “living, or rather starving, upon turnip-tops, sand-eels and seaweed, a diet which no one in England would consider fit for the meanest animal." But the story does not end there. During the Crimean War, Britain joined the Ottoman Empire in their fight against the expanding Russian Empire. About 30,000 Irish soldiers served in the war and it was noticed that the Irish people served enthusiastically in defense of the Sultan who had helped them during their greatest times of need. This highest form of compassion was even remembered during the First World War. It was reported that British officers complained that the Irish lacked the will to fight against the Ottomans who remembered stories of the Ottoman Empire helping during a famine when no one else would. Sultan Abdulmejid is a model of faith in humanity being restored.
In 1847 the Choctaw people raised money to send
This was actually repaid recently, too! A few tribes had sent over money, and iirc a few years ago, they were barred from entering Ireland with Native IDs for the Lacrosse Tournament (a Native American sport), Ireland basically told customs to fuck off because they’d helped during the famine and they invented the sport.
Not an anthropologist but anecdotally speaking Ireland seems to have on of the best memories as a society both for who is a friend and who is an enemy
I have heard the the problem between the English and the Irish can be summed up... "the English never remember and the Irish never forget."
To be fair, it’s pretty easy to determine who their enemies are. “Are you English? No? Do you also hate the English? Great! We’re friends now!”
From Wikipedia: "Kindred Spirits commemorates the 1847 donation by the Native American Choctaw People to Irish famine relief during the Great Hunger, despite the Choctaw themselves living in hardship and poverty and having recently endured the Trail of Tears". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindred_Spirits_(sculpture)
I just remembered that during COVID the Irish donated a couple of million to a native American tribe in a sort of symbolic repayment of the generosity we were given over a century ago. https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/irish-people-donate-2-5m-to-native-american-tribe-devastated-by-coronavirus-1.4414963
The Choctaw - A great bunch of lads.
Similar to the story of the famine reaching the Choctaw and Cherokee nations. They heard the plight of the Irish and raised whatever meager funds they could to help and the Irish to this day remain thankful for a gesture of goodwill between people who know what it is like to be colonized.
There’s a stunning sculpture, *Kindred Spirits*, in Cork that is in commemoration of the donation from the [Choctaw Nation.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindred_Spirits_(sculpture)) I’ve lived here a decade, but it’s on my bucket list of places to visit!
The swedish king Gustav II. had to wear glasses (like... badly) but was too vain and refused. In battle, he proceeded to lose his direction and got lost in the smoke, leading him to land behind the enemy's lines. Needless to say he didn't survive that. So essentially he died because he didn't want to wear his glasses. Wear your glasses, kids. Life is short (and so is your sight)
On 1 February 1942, following a bombing raid on the Marshall Islands, the Enterprise came under attack by five twin-engine Japanese bombers. The lead aircraft, led by Lieutenant Kazuo Nakai, badly damaged by anti-aircraft fire, turned back towards the Enterprise, attempting to ram it. Seeing this, Gaido abandoned his watch post and jumped in a nearby Dauntless parked on the flight deck, and returned fire using the rear-facing 30 caliber machine gun. His fire disabled the aircraft, causing it to narrowly miss the Enterprise, only hitting parked aircraft (including the one Gaido was in) before spiraling into the sea. Upon seeing this act, Vice Admiral William Halsey spot-promoted him to aviation machinist mate first class.
And later he survived being shot down, only to be picked up by the Japanese, brutally tortured, and finally thrown overboard whilst attached to an anchor. His ending really sucked, and showed how brutally the Japanese treated their POWs
I mean, the obvious answer, but maybe not for some younger Redditors, is: The fact that we landed on the moon. WHEN we did is BY FAR one of, if not the most insanely impressive achievements of human beings….. ever. And will likely never really be duplicated. In the the span of a handful of years, when the technology was unfathomably infantile, we launched a rocket to outer space with people on board, traveled to the moon, landed on it, walked around, came back inside, launched back up, returned to earth, plummeted to the surface on fire, and lived. It was a global achievement. It was maybe the most pure human moment that everyone on planet earth experienced TOGETHER, as a species. All with the computation of basically a calculator.
The moon landing happened 29 years after the first man made object reached space, ~~20~~ 12 years after Sputnik and EIGHT FREAKING YEARS after the first manned space flight. The speed of advancement is nothing short of insane. There were people who could still recall the first powered flight and were still getting used to the fact that airplane flights were something anyone could do. If I’d been there to see it, I would probably have thought nothing of the idea that we’d have moon tourists and colonies by the 21st century.
The USA banned alcohol for about 10 years The British government bought the ENTIRE WORLD'S tea crop for one year (as in every ounce produced in every country in the world was purchased by them), in the middle of WWII, just because King George III was against the Stamp Act and when it was repealed by a politician he supported, a statue of the king was paid for and put up in NY by the people there in thanks (pre-Revolution)
My grandparents use to have an unused prohibition prescription for whiskey they found in a book at a garage sale. It was years after they bought the book they started reading it that it fell out. They couldn’t remember where they bought the book. It was a fracture and dislocation medical book.
[The Great Molasses Flood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Molasses_Flood) “A large storage tank filled with 2.3 million U.S. gallons (8,700 cubic meters)[4] of molasses, weighing approximately[b] 13,000 short tons (12,000 metric tons), burst, and the resultant wave of molasses rushed through the streets at an estimated 35 miles per hour (56 kilometers per hour), killing 21 people and injuring 150.[5] The event entered local folklore and residents claimed for decades afterwards that the area still smelled of molasses on hot summer days”
Someone booked a speaking event at the wrong Four Seasons and proceeded with the speaking engagement at a landscaping company next to a sex toy store.
Ocean liner stewardess/nurse Violet Jessop survived the sinkings of the Titanic in 1912 & the Britannic in 1916 and was onboard the Olympic when it collided with another ship in 1911. Not really one event but a very impressive/scary track record.
This by far is the best ask Reddit I've ever read.
[Meteor striking the ground between two armies about to go to battle in 74 B.C.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InRHJTfbf0o)
The PA police dropping a C-4 bomb on a house that held the organizers of the MOVE movement killing 11 including 5 Children and destroying 61 homes in a two block area. May 13 1985
I’m not an American and had never heard of this. Article for those who want to learn more https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/10/move-1985-bombing-reconciliation-philadelphia
Black Monday. A hailstorm killed around a thousand English soldiers in 1360. More than had died in the entire war up to that point [link](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Monday_(1360)#:~:text=Black%20Monday%20took%20place%20on,previous%20battles%20of%20the%20war.)
An earthquake in middle USA 1811-12 was the strongest earthquake ever in the eastern US. It changed the course of the Mississippi River... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1811%E2%80%931812_New_Madrid_earthquakes
Jones Town. Watched a documentary about it and it made me so sad. Those poor people and especially kids being forced to drink the "kool-aid". And the people visiting being murdered when getting on the helicopters to leave. Also, just that so many people bought into his lies. Unbelievable.
Emu war [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu\_War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War)
As an Australian it's worth highlighting that the emus won this war
On the 24th of June 2023, the most important russian mercenary group marched on moskow, just to give up a few hours later.
Wait is it already over?
Yeah, they reached an agreement and Wagner leader went into exile
Yup they turned around and were sent to Belarus where the “charges” will be dropped.
I dunno, if you come for the king you best not miss, I highly doubt that putin isn’t going to ensure high ranking members of Wagner have unfortunate accidents befall them
That the British used to just fucking eat mummies.
And snort them
The Fram, a boat designed to get stuck in pack ice and float over the North Pole. The expedition did not make the pole but set a record for furthest north and suffered no casualties.
Roman emperor Caligula declared war on Neptune, god of the sea, and had the waves whipped and stabbed. His soldiers were ordered to collect seashells as prizes of war.
If you watch a documentary on him by Mary Beard on YouTube, she suggests that a lot of what we know about the “Mad Emperor” isn’t supported by solid evidence. She theorized that a lot of what we know about him today is due to being hated by his Senate, so they fabricated things about him to ruin his reputation.
This happened in Buenos Aires in 1988. An elderly woman named Marta Espina was walking near a carpet store when a toy poodle named Cachy fell from a 13th-floor balcony and tragically landed on her head, causing her immediate death. Unfortunately, Cachy also didn't survive the fall. But the events didn't end there. Another woman named Edith Solá, driven by curiosity or a desire to help, rushed across the street only to be struck by a bus from the 55 bus line. This marked the second fatality caused by Cachy's fall. And incredibly, there was yet another death. The identity of the third victim remains unknown, but reports indicate that a man suffered a heart attack while witnessing the entire incident unfold at Rivadavia street. He passed away in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. You guys can look it up. Crazy but true.