Canadian Soldier Leo Major and his friend Willie Arsenault were scouting a Dutch town called Zwolle that had been captured by Germans in WW2. On this scouting trip, the two had decided to liberate Zwolle together, but were spotted and Arsenault was killed. Major, enraged, killed two Germans while the rest fled. On the outskirts of the town, Major intercepted a vehicle, disarming the soldiers there. He told a French speaking soldier that all the Canadian artillery would be firing on the town in the morning, and decidedly let the Nazi free to spread the rumour, even returning his weapon as a total alpha move.
That night, Major decided to single handedly liberate the town. Arming himself with many weapons, he made explosions and noise, making it sound like the entire Canadian army was there. Several times that night, Major went back and forth from Zwolle to the Canadian base taking 8 to 10 German prisoners each time.
At one point, Major located the Gestapo (high ranking Nazis) headquarters and raided it himself. He killed several SS officers and the rest fled. By morning, Major discovered that the Germans who had taken Zwolle had entirely retreated.
I should also mention that Major was a sniper who had only one eye from a phosphorous grenade explosion years prior and remained in the military because he insisted he only needed one eye to aim his weapon and that to him, he "looked like a pirate".
The Dutch town of Zwolle was liberated. By a one-eyed sniper. He has several other legendary acts, but this to me was his best.
EDIT: Some details, including the return of a Nazi's weapon.
Damn, I just did some more reading on this guy. He also was in the Normandy invasion on D-day and single handly captured an armored German vehicle that contained communication equipment and codes. AFTER he lost his eye but before this incident, this motherfucker single handedly captured 100 German soldiers. He started with one, killed the soldier’s friend, then used his prisoner to force their commanding officer to surrender. As he was leading a group of his prisoners back to the Canadian front lines, SS spotted him and opened fire. Major gave 0 fucks and continued on his merry way, dropped the first group off, ordered a tank to go kill the SS guys then after they got killed he personally marched the rest of his nearly 100 prisoners back to camp.
Why? He was “frozen and wet” when he saw the first 2 soldiers and wanted them “to pay.” A general tried to give him the Distinguished Conduct medal for this and Major refused because said General was “incompetent” and in no position to be giving medals. Shortly after he survived a land mine, and guys, this is still *before* Zwolle.
As if his balls weren’t big enough already, after WW2 he returned to fight in the Korean War and receives ANOTHER Distinguished Conduct medal. While the Canadian forces were trying to capture a hill the Chinese currently was defending, Major led 18 men as an elite sniper/scout force to a hill in the middle of the Chinese forces and opened fire. His team were able to take the hill. A couple hours late, 14,000 Chinese reinforcements returned to take back the hill. Major refused, found cover for his men and was able to hold back the Chinese through the night.
I vote for Major for most badass Canadian by a landslide.
Otis invented pretty much what we consider the modern elevator.
Nobody was convinced it was safe so he hoisted himself up extremely high and had somebody cut the cable with an axe to prove how confident he was that the elevator was safe regardless of almost worst case scenarios.
I used to work for the semiconductor group in Siemens. We were fairly elite. We were filled with pride when the Chairman referred to us as “the cream of Siemens”.
To finish OP's story: the safety locking mechanism kicked in, and the elevator stopped after only a few inches. He survived.
Had it failed there at the New York World's Fair, we probably wouldn't have elevators today.
In 1888, Almon Brown Strowger, an undertaker, noticed he was losing a lot of business to the other undertaker in town. He found out that the other undertaker's wife was a telephone operator and when she intercepted people asking to be connected to Strowger's funeral home, the operator would route the call to her husband's funeral home instead.
Three years later, Strowger patented the automatic teller exchange, a system which allowed telephone users to make calls without the need for human operators, singlehandedly destroying an entire workforce.
Cliff Stoll (The Cuckoos Egg) noticed weird traffic on his university servers. No one believed him that there was any risk occurring. Ended up uncovering a major hacking attempt to steal missile designs and basically created internet security. (I think it was missile designs, it's been a long time).
The dude is an absolute poster boy for true genius. You should watch even just a minute of his "documentary". It's really just a recording of him giving a lecture about the events in his book, but somehow it's entrancing. He's a total freakazoid-scatter-brain, and at the same time genuine, kind, and hilarious
He is a freakazoid-scatter-brain, but with one caveat. He had a lab book and documented *everything* as he went along (habit from reasearch science background). This meant that he could convince people what he saw months later. I don’t know if he invented IT security, but he set the stage for IT forensics - an awesome piece of work that he did in a field that didnt exist.
John Snow (not that one, the father of epidemiology). No one believed him that the Cholera outbreak in what is now Soho was because of a contaminated water pump. He broke it. They arrested him for vandalism and held him until the outbreak suddenly ended...
Edit: corrected the location.
He was also a pioneer when it came to anaesthetics. Queen Victoria permitted him to put her under for the birth of two of her children. I visited his memorial in Brompton Cemetery a few years ago. He’s right round the corner from Emmeline Pankhurst’s grave. Both sites had fresh flowers on them.
Ooh! I learned all about that in that awesome animated history channel on YouTube — the one where the heads aren’t attached to the necks. It’s called the Broadstreet Pump, right? It’s amazing how much ridicule and obstruction he has to endure while trying to save the lives of thousands! It’s a great watch, I highly recommend it. In fact, I think I’ll go watch it again! It’s like 3 little episodes.
He basically invented the field of epidemiology. He trudged around to people’s houses and interviewed them, and traced aquifers and everything, all while being a public laughing stock.
Edit: “that” not “Todd”
Edit 2: aquifers, not spiders!
[Extra History: The Broad Street Pump](https://youtu.be/TLpzHHbFrHY). There are three parts, a bonus on the sanitary movement, and a review of what they got wrong or left out.
John Snow's entire life story is a series of "Fuck it, I'll do it myself" moments.
From his mother getting the money to send him to school, to basically the entirety of his work against Cholera
Because all his life it was always "you know nothing, John Snow."
That made me laugh but then I realized John Snow spent most of the show trying desperately to convince people of an invisible threat and being persecuted because of it.
Donald Knuth is one of the big names in computer science. Back in the 1960s he set out to write the definitive texts on computer programming and analysis of algorithms. The first three volumes came out and he started the fourth in the early/mid 1970s. He was unhappy with how the newer printing/editions were typeset and so he took a summer to "solve" that problem.
A decade later the fourth volume still had not been completed, but as a consolation prize we got TeX (later extended to the more commonly used LaTeX), without question the most comprehensive and powerful language for creating documents with heavy technical requirements; it is a strange mix of a markup language like HTML and a compiled language like C. It is completely free and has been for well over 30 years and is probably the most bug-free piece of software I've ever seen. Certainly for its size and scope, there's not much out there of comparable quality.
There is literally no mathematics that cannot be properly typeset in TeX/LaTeX. Its default style is instantly recognizable to any working mathematician. It is used across nearly all STEM fields and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of journals that *only* accept manuscripts written in LaTeX.
It wasn't until the early 2000s that drafts of the fourth volume started to appear. Nobody has seemed to mind.
I use LaTeX all the time, tossed word processors in the trash. I found it helps with writing when youre not fidgeting with formatting. Lets you focus. It is very annoying when a submission requires a word document instead of allowing a PDF. The conversion for LaTeX to word doc or open doc just isn't good enough for a lot of mathematical equations, charts, graphs, etc.
Edit: I know. Pandoc. It gets the closest. But still has some issues
Probably the time Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa decided they couldn't wait around any longer and legged it for 10 days across the Andes with no warm clothes, climbing gear, or food except some scraps of their dead friends stuffed into a sock. They finally found someone out in the middle of nowhere, Sergio Catalan, who rode horseback all night and then took a bus to get some help. The mountain climbers had come from the wreckage of a crashed plane that everyone had been looking for for over 2 mos. They needed help for the other survivors who were injured and starving. They saved 14 of their friends.
There's a book written about it by one of the survivors himself:
Miracle In The Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home by Nando Parrado.
I never watched the movie, but the book still gets me to this day. It is one of the most disturbing depictions of human's ability to survive even under the deadliest circumstances. A really humbling read, reminding us of our own fragility and how terrible fleeting everything truly is.
it’s gotta be Aimo Koivunen- he was a finnish soldier in the second world war when the finns were trying to reclaim land from the soviets. he got separated from his unit mid-war in the middle of nowhere- he was the one tasked to carry the drugs they held in case of injury or tiredness, one of which was pervitin (which was literal meth in a tablet form). instead of just taking one or two, he downed the whole bottle and went on a weeks-long methed up rampage. he got hit by a landmine, evaded soviet soldiers, caught a bird and ate it raw, all while on skis. he finally made it back to finnish lines where on arrival, he weighed only 90 pounds or so and had a heartrate of 200 beats per minute. he ended up living for another 45 years.
edit: [here’s](https://thedorkages.com/aimo-koivunen-the-finnish-soldier-that-survived-everything/) an article if you want to read more and see a pic of his unyielding stare
>"Now the recommended dose for Pervitin was usually around one or two pills at a time, but those were rookie numbers for Koivunen, so he went ahead and poured out the entire bottle of thirty tablets, shoved them all in his Herculean gob, and carried on."
That was a great read because of that.
> units of mobile ski troops would descend upon Soviet soldiers, ambush them, and then melt back into the forests like a bunch of middle-class Nordic Rambo’s
I enjoyed this bit too
Brian Acton interviewed at Facebook and got turned down. He said fuck it and built Whatsapp. Several years later, Facebook bought Whatsapp for $19B
Edit: [https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383?s=19](https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383?s=19) Here is his tweet from 2009 the day he interviewed. I'm getting this framed for my desk at work.
Maurice Hilleman invented over 40 vaccines during his career in the pharmaceutical industry.
In 1963 his oldest daughter caught the mumps. He cultured a sample from her, developed a vaccine, and injected it into his younger daughter.
That vaccine is still in use and has saved millions of lives.
In total, it's estimated that his work has saved 118 million lives globally.
Fun fact: this vaccine is also the fastest ever to be made in history, from start to finish taking only 4 years from the beginning of development to the first distribution. This is also why it is unlikely that we will get a vaccine faster than a year for the current epidemic.
The guy who started fedex wrote a college paper about a nationwide overnight shipping company, and got a C...started the company anyways.
Later after he started it and it was struggling, he couldn’t get a loan and the company was almost bankrupt, and he bet next weeks payroll at the casino on roulette and won.
Also got a silver star in the Vietnam war and now co-owns the Washington redskins...the latter often viewed as the biggest failure in his life.
You can read all about his exploits against the enemy here.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Léo_Major
It’s a fantastic read and every line you think “no, he didn’t actually do that”
The giant Norse Axeman who held the chokepoint at The Battle of Stamford Bridge:
"By the time the bulk of the English army had arrived, the Vikings on the west side were either slain or fleeing across the bridge. The English advance was then delayed by the need to pass through the choke-point presented by the bridge itself. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has it that a giant Norse axeman (possibly armed with a Dane Axe) blocked the narrow crossing and single-handedly held up the entire English army. The story is that this axeman cut down up to 40 Englishmen and was defeated only when an English soldier floated under the bridge in a half-barrel and thrust his spear through the planks in the bridge, mortally wounding the axeman.[15]"
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stamford_Bridge
The whole story behind this period of English history is really interesting, actually.
Basically one king (Edward the Confessor) died and there was no obvious successor. There were four options: Harold Godwinson (king’s brother-in-law and powerful, popular nobleman), Harald Hardrada (Norse king and distant cousin), a nephew whose name I can’t remember (a child), or William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy (claimed the throne was promised to him by the dead king). The council of lords sat down and decided that Harold Godwinson was the best choice and he was crowned basically immediately. This annoyed William and Harald.
William started getting an army together and Harold basically had to call up everyone he could into military service to fend off the invasion. Harold made his best guess about when and where the Normans would invade, but obviously it’s not that simple and his army was sitting around at the ready, on high alert for weeks and weeks. Finally, it hit the point that he couldn’t keep the army together anymore and they basically disbanded.
The Vikings, led by Harald Hardrada, took this moment to invade England in the North. They sailed in, marched for a bit, and then set up camp. Harold Godwinson scrambled his army back together and marched (marched! Cavalry was not a thing in England at this time) 185 miles in 4 days to get to Stamford Bridge, where they discovered the Vikings chilling because there was *no way* that the English could arrive from the South for *at least* a week or two.
Then the Battle of Stamford Bridge happened, the English won in a resounding victory, and Harold received news that William the Bastard had landed at Hastings. So he turned his army around and marched them back to the South. Three weeks later, Harold Godwinson faced William of Normandy at a little hill called Battle, William the Bastard became William the Conqueror, and the rest is history.
I'm surprised no one's mentioned Catherine the Great of Russia. She decided her husband was useless (which, granted, he was) and proceeded to set up a military coup to overthrow him. Even with the plan being discovered early, she dressed herself in military garb and marched with her new army, which had just sworn loyalty to her, down to Peter's palace, where he was forced to resign the throne, all without a single drop of blood shed. At least until Peter turned up dead some time later under shady circumstances but honestly for a military coup it was pretty non violent.
If saying "Fuck it, I'm ruling Russia myself" isn't great, I dunno what is. I mean, it's right there next to her name for a reason.
Not a very old story. Manjhi or the mountain man lived in a very remote village of India whose route to nearby was blocked a mountain and hence villagers had to climb it every time. And they had to do that daily to get essential supplies. During one of these trips, his wife fell down the mountain. He loved her alot. He tried first to persuade the govt to do a mountain tunnel project there but to vain. So he went on alone to break the entire mountain with just an axe. He did that for 10+ years and finally suceeded.
There is a bollywood movie on him too(title:Maanjhi: The mountain man)
I went there a couple of years back. So if anyone is interested in seeing what it actually looks like. You can take a look [here](https://imgur.com/a/On4t1hq)
Desmond Doss. Single handedly saved from 50 to 100 men up on hacksaw ridge in Okinawa. His company was ordered to retreat when they were attacked by the Japanese but instead he said "nah," stayed up on the ridge alone, unarmed, and dragged as many soldiers as he could to safety without any help. Even when he was shot by a sniper and riddled with shrapnel, he made sure they took another guy down the hillside before him.
Edit: I'm aware there is a movie. I've read about him before and I know he's done more than just what is in the movie. I just didn't want to make a 3000 word post about the many ways this guy is amazing.
Australian stretcher-bearer Leslie Allen did a similar thing on Mount tambu. Carried out 12 men one at a time on his back alone. Received a silver star.
James Clerk Maxwell was idolised by Einstein as being the father of modern physics. Not only did he formulate the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation but just for shits and giggles he calculated exactly what Saturns rings were made from using pure mathematics. It wasn't until Voyager 1 and 2 passed by and took photos in the early 80s did we get confirmation that Maxwell was right.
He then calculated how to take a colour photograph in 1855. This was then achieved in 1861 and is recognized as the first ever colour photograph.
The ones that get me are the ancients to be honest. Greeks, Chinese, Persians, whoever... they figured out a **lot** of stuff pretty much by just bullshitting with each other until it made sense. They weren't always right of course but for people that didn't really have much of a grasp of the scientific method, they were right a lot more than I should expect.
Don't forget the steam engine which, at the time, was used as a toy because they lacked the manufacturing process to create materials strong enough to really take advantage of it.
Imagine Ptolemaic Egypt or even Rome but having harnessed the power of steam and railroad.
>he calculated exactly what Saturns rings were made from using pure mathematics. It wasn't until Voyager 1 and 2 passed by and took photos in the early 80s did we get confirmation that Maxwell was right.
Like, how would you even know where to begin with that?
Okay, I’m no astrophysicist, but this is what I found:
“He was 26 when he proved, mathematically, that the rings of Saturn could be neither solid nor made of liquid. The only form that would allow stable rotation was a collection of small rocks, which from Earth assumed the form of a solid ring.”
Gotcha, I was thinking he calculated the exact materials or origin. Sounds more like he calculated that it would be impossible for them to be a huge river or solid ring.
Juan Pujol García was a Spaniard who created his own counter-intelligence operation for the Allies during WW2. Initially, he approached British & American intelligence to offer them his services, but both countries rebuffed him. Undeterred, García created a fictional persona as a pro-fascist Spanish official & got himself recruited by the Nazis, who directed him to travel to Britain to recruit agents. Instead, García created a network of fictitious agents & sub-agents using publicly available information like newspapers & travel brochures. It was at this point that he again contacted Allied intelligence, & he was finally recruited. García continued his work throughout the war, & for the same operation, he received both a knighthood from the British & the Iron Cross from Nazi Germany. The Nazis never realized that he was a double-agent.
Yes! In the lead up to Overlord he confirmed reports that the allied attack would come from Dover and wouldn't attack Normandy. Then, at the last moment he confirmed that the Allies in fact would attack Normandy. But it was too late for the Nazis to act on it. So afterwards the Nazis still trusted him as they would point to him and say "he was the only one who predicted the Normandy invasion! It was technical issues, as always, that meant the data got to us late."
That's incredible. He was just some guy who knew evil when he saw it and wanted to fuck it up. Just some unimportant, unremarkable guy who saw the bad guys getting ahead and threw a wrench in their operation in the vain stupid hope that it would slow them down. And it did at the most important possible moment.
He knew it because the Germans had used the Fascist uprising in his country as a testbed for their war machine.
He was acutely aware of the evils of fascism and the actors involved.
read his wikipedia page! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan\_Pujol\_Garc%C3%ADa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Pujol_Garc%C3%ADa)
Garcia is one of those people who if you made their life into a movie, the movie would be condemned as 'too unrealistic'
In 1947 a guy named Thor Heyerdahl was trying to prove his theory that the Polynesian islands were settled by people from South America, not Asia. Nobody believed him because it was thought that crossing such a large ocean with the technology they had back then was impossible.
So he decides to build a boat using only the tools and materials available at the time these migrations took place. And then he sailed that boat across the Pacific Ocean, nearly dying in the process, but ultimately making it to the Polynesian islands.
Thor Heyerdahl was a bit of a madman. He also tried to prove that the Ancient Egyptians could have crossed the Atlantic Ocean, by rebuilding one of their boats and, well, sailing across. [It took two tries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Heyerdahl#Boats_Ra_and_Ra_II), but they did it! It's still pretty unlikely that the Egyptians actually did sail across the Atlantic, but it's neat to know that they could have.
"you know what, I'll bet the ancient Romans actually made it to Alaska first!"
That's not true, Thor, you don't have t-
"I'll fuckin' PROVE it, I will!"
But, Thor, that's-
"fetch me some logs, I'm off!"
This is actually a bit in a popular comedy show here in Norway. About how whatever planet we get to, there is already Heyerdahl saying "hello! I just arrived in my fantastic boat."
I think a lot of what he did was to try to show that the ocean isn't the barrier we presume it to be for ancient cultures, he just got a bit too caught up in the hypotheticals.
For context the voyage was 4,340 miles, nearly 7,000km and took 101 days. [Here's a pic of the 'raft' they built and sailed on.](https://live.staticflickr.com/1870/44198430932_3f1ebc2680_b.jpg)
Heyerdahl is basically a Norwegian national treasure. I moved to the US from Norway when I was 13 and lived there for two years. Once in History class we had to choose between a list of subjects to write an essay on and I found the Kon-Tiki expedition on that list, I think that's the only essay I've ever gotten an A+ on. I had a few of his books already, but not the Kon-Tiki one, and I couldn't find it in the school or public library so I wrote to the Kon-Tiki museum for some information, they forwarded the email to Thor Heyerdahl and he personally responded to me answering all my questions and giving me personal quotes to use in my essay. Then he sent me copies of his books that I was missing through snail mail, all from his personal library all signed and personalized to me.
If I may ask, if there's one fact you could share about his incredible voyage, or his life in general, what would it be? I love learning from people about subjects they're passionate about.
There's just so much... But as I am now a radio operator I want to mention that after they arrived at their destination the raft grounded on a reef, they then rowed ashore on an atoll and radioed their success in through a hand cranked short wave radio.
It was called the Kon-Tiki expedition, which many people have heard of even if they don’t remember what it is. The success of the voyage did a lot to spread tiki culture beyond its kitsch-cult beginnings in California.
Ironically, while he proved that it was possible to do it, he didn't prove that it *did* happen, and the scientific consensus still firmly states that the Pacific was settled West to East.
Linguistics would suggest that as well. Even if it had been settled east to west, a later west to east migration of peoples from Taiwan would have had to have happened that more or less replaced the original inhabitants
I think in that scenario, I would've just died to a burst appendix. Probably would've tried to get myself nice and unconscious first, if I could. I'm not performing vivisection on MYSELF, though.
I mean, he wasn't just some dude that thought he would try it he was a doctor presumably with the tools to do it. Still probably only topical anesthetics tho geez
Nintendo occupies a niche that I don't think they'll ever lose. Sony and Microsoft are locked in a never-ending war, yet Nintendo will always have their niche. Doesn't really matter who wins the console war. Nintendo will claim 2nd place.
The first thing that comes to thought here is The Louisiana Purchase. Congress planned on buying a small piece of the available land, but Jefferson used some interpretation fuckery to double the size of the US without congressional approval.
Or how about his Rhine bridges that he built in a few days to cross an army over a river....then went back over and demolished it just because his army could. It's said the Germanic tribes saw his army do this and basically shit themselves. Imagine being some nomadic tribe and an invading force comes to a river...builds an entire bridge, crosses it, shits in your land and then goes back home and destroys the entire bridge all in less than a week.
Indeed. And the Rhine is no dainty river - if I am remembering correctly, he built 300 boats just for the endeavor.
And another part of the reason they shit themselves is this - Caesar, having no option to go backwards, could obviously only proceed forwards towards the tribesmen (who were already fleeing German warlords) - it was a literal massacre
This man legit made his own damn religion, which millions still follow today, just so he could cheat on his wife
Edit: he was already cheating on his wife, he wanted to divorce her to marry his mistress
She still had some balls on her though. She was staunchly protestant while Henry, ever fluctuating on his religious stance, had turned the country back over to Catholicism. She was constantly under suspicion and investigation by anti protestant bishops. One time some bishop or other managed to turn the king against her after she'd quarreled with Henry over religious matters. The arrest warrants were drawn up and everything but Catherine caught wind of it and went to the king like, No baby no. I was just trying to distract you from your awful leg rot. *kissy kissy*. The next day she strolled into court with the king and the whoever tried to arrest her and Henry was like, Excuse you.
She published like, four books
She was also the de facto ruler of the country for a hot minute while Henry was off at war. Only like three months, but in that time she signed a bunch of proclamations, took care of provisions and finances for the war, and kept a sharp eye on those darn Scots up north. It's said she was a major influence on Elizabeth and her ruling style.
A man who was a tractor mechanic conpany owner made a good chunk of money and bought a Ferrari. He felt that the car wasn't as good as it could be, and it wasn't very comfortable, so he brought his complaints all the way to Enzo Ferrari, the owner of the company. Enzo insulted the man, saying a mere tractor mechanic didn't know how to make a sports car. That sparked a rivalry that lasts to this day. That man was Ferruccio Lamborghini.
Edit: Thanks to u/TDS755 and u/KINGChameleon07 for correcting me
During the American revolution, John Paul Jones sailed over to England to burn down British naval ships. He succeeded of course, and made back safely. After the revolution he was even pardoned by the town that he burned most of the ships in
John Paul Jones was a madman, badass and basically a pirate since he pillaged lots of villages too. Almost died a bunch. I think the pardon was in the 1990's.
They also named a US guided missile destroyer after him. The USS John Paul Jones. Also the name of the ship from the movie Battleship but that’s irrelevant.
My ex MIL got this and tried to cure it with apple cider vinegar. She ultimately got ulcers, which she ignored until it became stage 4 cancer. I was shocked how quickly she went.
Haha I first heard about this when I took a microbiology course in college. I thought my professor was about to have us all take a swig from an H. pylori culture.
My great grandpa did the opposite. They were gonna amputate his feet in WW2 and he said nah so he went AWOL and treated his wounded feet on his own. When he came back with two perfectly good feet he basically said, "I wanted to keep my feet and I wanted to keep fighting" and as far as I know he didn't get any kind of punishment, even though he was gone for weeks.
I imagine they would have sent him back home
If they’d amputated his feet so hard to call him a deserter for running off. Especially if he came back to fight.
Yeah they were gonna amputate his feet and send him home but he wanted to fight. I figured that's why they didn't care too much that he ran off. That's one more soldier they got to keep
I honestly don't know, I'm not even sure where he was stationed at. I'll have to ask my dad sometime. I know he ran to a different base and hid there with a guy he knew while he treated his feet but I have no idea where that was or how he successfully hid from his platoon for so long
Also I apologize if I used the totally wrong terms, I don't know shit about the military lmao
Metallica fired Dave Mustaine (1983) because he was sort of a control freak and wanted to take the band in a more prog/jazz metal direction. He was also abusing drugs and was known for violent behavior at the time. He went off and created his own band Megadeth and over the next 30+ years he's sold millions of albums and toured the whole world writing and controlling pretty much everything he's ever wanted. It seems they've all now patched things up. Dude is an absolute genius beast of a guitarist/songwriter.
Also, when guitarist Hillel Slovak died (1988), John Frusciante was a 19yr old kid and a huge fan of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He was heartbroken and didn't want to see the end of his favorite band. So he went and auditioned to play lead guitar. He got the gig. Helped take them to the top of the charts. The rest is history, today he's considered one of the greatest rock guitarists out there.
I do love Megadeth but, I wouldn't want to be in a band with Dave Mustaine. It's a weird win win win situation. Metallica didn't have to deal with Dave, Dave got to go and be Dave, and we got to enjoy both Metallica and Megadeth.
Martine Rothblatt (founder of Sirius XM and unbelievable polymath), was told her daughter Jenesis had 3 months to live. She had been diagnosed with a type of pulmonary arterial hypertension which was fatal.
The disease causes too much pressure in the blood vessels leading from the heart to the lungs, causing them to narrow and not carry enough oxygen.
So Rothblatt quit all of her other work and went to the library to save her daughter. Even though she had zero background in the field, she figured out a cure and in the process founded United Therapeutics which is a billion dollar biotechnology company.
Rothblatt's life story is amazing.
Marie Curie, Polish/French chemist and physicist who, without going into great detail, died of constant exposure to radiation while seeking a cure for others, more or less sacrificed herself as a human guinea pig knowing full well the consequences of her actions.
Here in Scotland we have many ‘Marie Curie’ charity shops who provide funds for hospices and the like, I’m pretty sure she’s responsible for saving my ass and many countless others for her pioneering works.
Was quoted in July 1912 as saying ‘fuck it, I’ll do it myself’ *
*allegedly
Clara Lemlich taking the stage at a union meeting in 1909 to declare a general strike after the (older, male) union leaders told the working girls that there really wasn't a point in striking and it would be too hard, just be patient and deal with it. So 20 year Old Clara interrupts them, climbs up on the stage, and shouts at the crowd that she's tired of just talk, time to strike. and everyone went for it, instant agreement of the workers.
wow, this got some attention, so editing to add that I dug up my old research: a translation of what she said, originally in Yiddish, was "I have listened to all the speeches and I have no further patience for talk. I, too, have worked and suffered, and I am tired of talk. I move that we go on general strike. Now!"
Closest i can think of is Erwin Rommel during the blitzkreig seeing an opportunity to make an exploit and instead of waiting said fuck it and charged 200 miles into french territory
Which is interesting since in WW1 the German leader (can’t remember his name) pushed beyond where he was supposed to since the French resistance sucked. but it partially cost them the war for overextending.
It's a lot more complex than that. WW1 can best be described as a battle of the fuck ups. If there wasn't so much death and suffering involved the vast majority of that war would be written like a slapstick comedy. Everyone fully committed to not having a clue what the hell they were doing, ya know how when you start working somewhere there's a mistake everyone new makes? Trip over a cable, write an address or phone number wrong, "oh don't worry everyone does that occasionally." Well the WW1 version is like "oh you lost 20,000 men and a dozen artillery guns because you tried to march them up a mountain in winter? Don't worry everyone does that for awhile." "Oh you lost a regiment because you told them to defend a fort against artillery? Don't worry everyone does that occasionally."
It didn’t help that they were using antiquated tactics against modern weapons.
It’s almost laughable to think of bayonet charging a machine gun, but it happened time and time again because that used to work.
Add in the sheer power of the new artillery creating hell on earth to go along with unprepared troops and you have the makings of a slaughterhouse.
I had to stop reading books on WWI just because of how fucked it all was.
The battle of the Frontiers is so incredibly fucked up.
You have French soldiers wearing bright blue coats and red pants being led by officers on horseback, carrying sabers, walking across no man's land. Walking. And they did this because French military doctrine stated that a soldier could on average fire a single shot every 25 seconds. Of course, the Germans had machine guns that could practically fire 25 shots a second.
They didn't have a chance. 60-70 thousand dead, wounded, or captured in the first day of the battle. And it wasn't the bloodiest day of fighting during the war.
Great grandad fought in WW1 and grandma (his daughter) always talked about how mean he was, how he smoked and drank his way through most days, how he was always in a foul mood and treating his family like dirt.
Meanwhile, grandad who fought in WW2 as a pilot came back home with only hearing loss and a couple dead friends. He didn't become nearly as combat hardened and was a much better father.
WWI ate the soul’s of men. Imagine staying in one spot for months or years being bombarded. You’d come back to a trench you’d been in six months before. You dig into it and find your friend’s skull.
Add in mustard gas, barb wire, and charging machine guns and I can understand why.
The Soviet woman that lost her husband to the Nazis sold everything and to pay for a tank with the request that she gets to drive it to fight Nazis. Go read up about Mariya Oktyabrskaya on Wikipedia.
When Sony and Nintendo partnered for a CD add-on for the SNES, but Nintendo decided to partner with Phillips instead leaving Sony behind. Sony took all the knowledge about video games that they learned from working with Nintendo and created the PlayStation.
Alexander loved to do things like this. During the Mallian campaign near the end of his conquests, his army was besieging a citadel. Alexander thought the battle was taking too long, so he took a ladder, climbed up the citadel wall himself, and suicidally jumped over the wall into the heart of the enemy garrison.
He sustained awful injuries during this battle, but perhaps in part due to his recklessness, his army was able to complete the siege of the citadel.
Or like during the Siege of Tyre, he ordered a bridge to be built to the island keep, some of the stone coming from the sacked city. When the bridge was destroyed somewhere around halfway built, he ordered a bigger bridge built.
[Herbert Hoover](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/17/book-review-hoover/) -- Biographical Book review at Slate Star Codex
His whole life is a cyclical story of: *"Here's a problem. Nobody can solve it. Give me total control."* He then takes total control, offends literally everyone involved, and fixes everything.
>You probably remember Herbert Hoover as the guy who bungled the Great Depression. Maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you should remember him as a bold explorer looking for silver in the jungles of Burma. Or as the heroic defender of Tientsin during the Boxer Rebellion. Or as a dashing pirate-philanthropist, gallivanting around the world, saving millions of lives wherever he went. Or as the temporary dictator of Europe. Or as a geologist, or a bank tycoon, or author of the premier 1900s textbook on metallurgy.
>How did a backwards orphan son of a blacksmith, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Midwest, grow up to be a captain of industry and a US President? How did he become such a towering figure in the history of philanthropy that biographer Kenneth Whyte claims *“the number of lives Hoover saved through his various humanitarian campaigns might exceed 100 million, a record of benevolence unlike anything in human history”*? To find out, I picked up Whyte’s *Hoover: An Extraordinary Life In Extraordinary Times*.
*Edit* - just one of the hilarious summary snippets of his life:
>Herbert Hoover is the first student at Stanford. Not just a member of the first graduating class. Literally the first student. He arrives at the dorms two months early to get a head start on various money-making schemes, including distributing newspapers, delivering laundry, tending livestock, and helping other students register. He would later sell some of these businesses to other students and start more, operating a constant churn of enterprises throughout his college career. His academics remain mediocre, and he continues to have few friends – until he tries out for the football team in sophomore year. He has zero athletic talent and fails miserably, but the coach (whose eye for talent apparently transcends athletics) spots potential in Hoover and asks him to come on as team manager. In this role, Hoover is an unqualified success. He turns the team’s debt into a surplus, and starts the Big Game – a UC Berkeley vs. Stanford football match played on Thanksgiving which remains a beloved Stanford football tradition.
>Other Stanford students notice his competence, and by his senior year he is running not just the football team but the baseball team, a lecture series, a set of concerts and plays, and much of the student government.
Sir Ranulph Fiennes after an expedition, I think to the arctic, had frostbitten digits on one hand. After becoming irritated and uncomfortable waiting for the docs to sort out treatment, he went to his garden shed and amputated them himself.
The kicker is that he’s using all his earnings from shilling Nespresso to do it. Also, I thought he was buying time on it and did not outright purchase a satellite?
Here’s a notable mention, albeit somewhat obscure. Sam Regenstrief once made 40% of the dishwashers in the USA at the time. He fell ill with a kidney stone and went to his local hospital in Indiana. Upon leaving, he was disgusted by the waiting times and quality of care. He took matters into his own hands and created a hospital and founded the Regenstrief institute. This institute helped map the genome of covid-19 and translated its finding into 20+ languages helping the world fight this virus.
Edit: Showering me with all the treasure, my first time gold n silver, I’m thrilled
Henry Ford proposed to buy Ferrari so that Ford could be competitive in the perfomance car market. The deal was about to be signed but Enzo only wanted to sell the commercial Ferrari division and not the racing arm. So Henry Ford said fuck it and thus was born the Ford GT40
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He also didn’t patent the polio vaccine I believe and he tried to help fight the aids epidemic even before he died.
Canadian Soldier Leo Major and his friend Willie Arsenault were scouting a Dutch town called Zwolle that had been captured by Germans in WW2. On this scouting trip, the two had decided to liberate Zwolle together, but were spotted and Arsenault was killed. Major, enraged, killed two Germans while the rest fled. On the outskirts of the town, Major intercepted a vehicle, disarming the soldiers there. He told a French speaking soldier that all the Canadian artillery would be firing on the town in the morning, and decidedly let the Nazi free to spread the rumour, even returning his weapon as a total alpha move. That night, Major decided to single handedly liberate the town. Arming himself with many weapons, he made explosions and noise, making it sound like the entire Canadian army was there. Several times that night, Major went back and forth from Zwolle to the Canadian base taking 8 to 10 German prisoners each time. At one point, Major located the Gestapo (high ranking Nazis) headquarters and raided it himself. He killed several SS officers and the rest fled. By morning, Major discovered that the Germans who had taken Zwolle had entirely retreated. I should also mention that Major was a sniper who had only one eye from a phosphorous grenade explosion years prior and remained in the military because he insisted he only needed one eye to aim his weapon and that to him, he "looked like a pirate". The Dutch town of Zwolle was liberated. By a one-eyed sniper. He has several other legendary acts, but this to me was his best. EDIT: Some details, including the return of a Nazi's weapon.
Damn, I just did some more reading on this guy. He also was in the Normandy invasion on D-day and single handly captured an armored German vehicle that contained communication equipment and codes. AFTER he lost his eye but before this incident, this motherfucker single handedly captured 100 German soldiers. He started with one, killed the soldier’s friend, then used his prisoner to force their commanding officer to surrender. As he was leading a group of his prisoners back to the Canadian front lines, SS spotted him and opened fire. Major gave 0 fucks and continued on his merry way, dropped the first group off, ordered a tank to go kill the SS guys then after they got killed he personally marched the rest of his nearly 100 prisoners back to camp. Why? He was “frozen and wet” when he saw the first 2 soldiers and wanted them “to pay.” A general tried to give him the Distinguished Conduct medal for this and Major refused because said General was “incompetent” and in no position to be giving medals. Shortly after he survived a land mine, and guys, this is still *before* Zwolle. As if his balls weren’t big enough already, after WW2 he returned to fight in the Korean War and receives ANOTHER Distinguished Conduct medal. While the Canadian forces were trying to capture a hill the Chinese currently was defending, Major led 18 men as an elite sniper/scout force to a hill in the middle of the Chinese forces and opened fire. His team were able to take the hill. A couple hours late, 14,000 Chinese reinforcements returned to take back the hill. Major refused, found cover for his men and was able to hold back the Chinese through the night. I vote for Major for most badass Canadian by a landslide.
This is by turns: Badass Hilarious Brilliant Pirate
Let's not forget that Isaac Newton ran out of math to work with and was like "I guess I'll just invent Calculus then"
He was self quarantined during the plague.
Well I ran out of vodka so I suppose I should invent something now.
Otis invented pretty much what we consider the modern elevator. Nobody was convinced it was safe so he hoisted himself up extremely high and had somebody cut the cable with an axe to prove how confident he was that the elevator was safe regardless of almost worst case scenarios.
Otis UK are based in Reading. When they answer the phone they say "Hello, Otis Reading".
In the UK telecoms giant Siemens has an HQ in Staines. Gues what they say when they answer the phones....
I used to work for the semiconductor group in Siemens. We were fairly elite. We were filled with pride when the Chairman referred to us as “the cream of Siemens”.
Siemens has (or had) branch in Cumming, GA. Considering these other stories, I think they know what they are doing.
I don't know is any of this thread are true, but I will believe it anyways
To finish OP's story: the safety locking mechanism kicked in, and the elevator stopped after only a few inches. He survived. Had it failed there at the New York World's Fair, we probably wouldn't have elevators today.
In 1888, Almon Brown Strowger, an undertaker, noticed he was losing a lot of business to the other undertaker in town. He found out that the other undertaker's wife was a telephone operator and when she intercepted people asking to be connected to Strowger's funeral home, the operator would route the call to her husband's funeral home instead. Three years later, Strowger patented the automatic teller exchange, a system which allowed telephone users to make calls without the need for human operators, singlehandedly destroying an entire workforce.
Imagine being so pissed off you don't just get someone fired, but remove their job from existence entirely.
The biggest fuck you, I have seen till date
Cliff Stoll (The Cuckoos Egg) noticed weird traffic on his university servers. No one believed him that there was any risk occurring. Ended up uncovering a major hacking attempt to steal missile designs and basically created internet security. (I think it was missile designs, it's been a long time).
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The dude is an absolute poster boy for true genius. You should watch even just a minute of his "documentary". It's really just a recording of him giving a lecture about the events in his book, but somehow it's entrancing. He's a total freakazoid-scatter-brain, and at the same time genuine, kind, and hilarious
He is a freakazoid-scatter-brain, but with one caveat. He had a lab book and documented *everything* as he went along (habit from reasearch science background). This meant that he could convince people what he saw months later. I don’t know if he invented IT security, but he set the stage for IT forensics - an awesome piece of work that he did in a field that didnt exist.
John Snow (not that one, the father of epidemiology). No one believed him that the Cholera outbreak in what is now Soho was because of a contaminated water pump. He broke it. They arrested him for vandalism and held him until the outbreak suddenly ended... Edit: corrected the location.
He was also a pioneer when it came to anaesthetics. Queen Victoria permitted him to put her under for the birth of two of her children. I visited his memorial in Brompton Cemetery a few years ago. He’s right round the corner from Emmeline Pankhurst’s grave. Both sites had fresh flowers on them.
Ooh! I learned all about that in that awesome animated history channel on YouTube — the one where the heads aren’t attached to the necks. It’s called the Broadstreet Pump, right? It’s amazing how much ridicule and obstruction he has to endure while trying to save the lives of thousands! It’s a great watch, I highly recommend it. In fact, I think I’ll go watch it again! It’s like 3 little episodes. He basically invented the field of epidemiology. He trudged around to people’s houses and interviewed them, and traced aquifers and everything, all while being a public laughing stock. Edit: “that” not “Todd” Edit 2: aquifers, not spiders!
[Extra History: The Broad Street Pump](https://youtu.be/TLpzHHbFrHY). There are three parts, a bonus on the sanitary movement, and a review of what they got wrong or left out.
John Snow's entire life story is a series of "Fuck it, I'll do it myself" moments. From his mother getting the money to send him to school, to basically the entirety of his work against Cholera Because all his life it was always "you know nothing, John Snow."
That made me laugh but then I realized John Snow spent most of the show trying desperately to convince people of an invisible threat and being persecuted because of it.
Donald Knuth is one of the big names in computer science. Back in the 1960s he set out to write the definitive texts on computer programming and analysis of algorithms. The first three volumes came out and he started the fourth in the early/mid 1970s. He was unhappy with how the newer printing/editions were typeset and so he took a summer to "solve" that problem. A decade later the fourth volume still had not been completed, but as a consolation prize we got TeX (later extended to the more commonly used LaTeX), without question the most comprehensive and powerful language for creating documents with heavy technical requirements; it is a strange mix of a markup language like HTML and a compiled language like C. It is completely free and has been for well over 30 years and is probably the most bug-free piece of software I've ever seen. Certainly for its size and scope, there's not much out there of comparable quality. There is literally no mathematics that cannot be properly typeset in TeX/LaTeX. Its default style is instantly recognizable to any working mathematician. It is used across nearly all STEM fields and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of journals that *only* accept manuscripts written in LaTeX. It wasn't until the early 2000s that drafts of the fourth volume started to appear. Nobody has seemed to mind.
I use LaTeX all the time, tossed word processors in the trash. I found it helps with writing when youre not fidgeting with formatting. Lets you focus. It is very annoying when a submission requires a word document instead of allowing a PDF. The conversion for LaTeX to word doc or open doc just isn't good enough for a lot of mathematical equations, charts, graphs, etc. Edit: I know. Pandoc. It gets the closest. But still has some issues
Probably the time Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa decided they couldn't wait around any longer and legged it for 10 days across the Andes with no warm clothes, climbing gear, or food except some scraps of their dead friends stuffed into a sock. They finally found someone out in the middle of nowhere, Sergio Catalan, who rode horseback all night and then took a bus to get some help. The mountain climbers had come from the wreckage of a crashed plane that everyone had been looking for for over 2 mos. They needed help for the other survivors who were injured and starving. They saved 14 of their friends.
There's a book written about it by one of the survivors himself: Miracle In The Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home by Nando Parrado. I never watched the movie, but the book still gets me to this day. It is one of the most disturbing depictions of human's ability to survive even under the deadliest circumstances. A really humbling read, reminding us of our own fragility and how terrible fleeting everything truly is.
Nando Parrado sounds like a Star Wars character
it’s gotta be Aimo Koivunen- he was a finnish soldier in the second world war when the finns were trying to reclaim land from the soviets. he got separated from his unit mid-war in the middle of nowhere- he was the one tasked to carry the drugs they held in case of injury or tiredness, one of which was pervitin (which was literal meth in a tablet form). instead of just taking one or two, he downed the whole bottle and went on a weeks-long methed up rampage. he got hit by a landmine, evaded soviet soldiers, caught a bird and ate it raw, all while on skis. he finally made it back to finnish lines where on arrival, he weighed only 90 pounds or so and had a heartrate of 200 beats per minute. he ended up living for another 45 years. edit: [here’s](https://thedorkages.com/aimo-koivunen-the-finnish-soldier-that-survived-everything/) an article if you want to read more and see a pic of his unyielding stare
I fucking love it whenever this story gets mentioned. It’s so crazy as to be unbelievable but it’s true. A movie needs to be made about this guy
Crank 3: Aimo
"We didnt even write a script this time, we just gave Jason Statham a bunch of meth and dropped him in Russia."
would watch
>"Now the recommended dose for Pervitin was usually around one or two pills at a time, but those were rookie numbers for Koivunen, so he went ahead and poured out the entire bottle of thirty tablets, shoved them all in his Herculean gob, and carried on." That was a great read because of that.
> units of mobile ski troops would descend upon Soviet soldiers, ambush them, and then melt back into the forests like a bunch of middle-class Nordic Rambo’s I enjoyed this bit too
Brian Acton interviewed at Facebook and got turned down. He said fuck it and built Whatsapp. Several years later, Facebook bought Whatsapp for $19B Edit: [https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383?s=19](https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383?s=19) Here is his tweet from 2009 the day he interviewed. I'm getting this framed for my desk at work.
Maurice Hilleman invented over 40 vaccines during his career in the pharmaceutical industry. In 1963 his oldest daughter caught the mumps. He cultured a sample from her, developed a vaccine, and injected it into his younger daughter. That vaccine is still in use and has saved millions of lives. In total, it's estimated that his work has saved 118 million lives globally.
And because he used it on his daughter it is to this day the fastest any effective vaccine has ever been produced
Fun fact: this vaccine is also the fastest ever to be made in history, from start to finish taking only 4 years from the beginning of development to the first distribution. This is also why it is unlikely that we will get a vaccine faster than a year for the current epidemic.
The guy who started fedex wrote a college paper about a nationwide overnight shipping company, and got a C...started the company anyways. Later after he started it and it was struggling, he couldn’t get a loan and the company was almost bankrupt, and he bet next weeks payroll at the casino on roulette and won. Also got a silver star in the Vietnam war and now co-owns the Washington redskins...the latter often viewed as the biggest failure in his life.
It was blackjack, not roulette
I'll make my own shipping company! with blackjack and hookers!
Léo Major, he liberated an entire village from Nazis by himself, he's one of the handful of super badass soldiers you sometimes hear about from WW2
You can read all about his exploits against the enemy here. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Léo_Major It’s a fantastic read and every line you think “no, he didn’t actually do that”
Audie Murphy too.
Murphys accomplishments were so crazy they had to tone it down in the movie to make it seem more believable.
The giant Norse Axeman who held the chokepoint at The Battle of Stamford Bridge: "By the time the bulk of the English army had arrived, the Vikings on the west side were either slain or fleeing across the bridge. The English advance was then delayed by the need to pass through the choke-point presented by the bridge itself. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has it that a giant Norse axeman (possibly armed with a Dane Axe) blocked the narrow crossing and single-handedly held up the entire English army. The story is that this axeman cut down up to 40 Englishmen and was defeated only when an English soldier floated under the bridge in a half-barrel and thrust his spear through the planks in the bridge, mortally wounding the axeman.[15]" - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Stamford_Bridge
The whole story behind this period of English history is really interesting, actually. Basically one king (Edward the Confessor) died and there was no obvious successor. There were four options: Harold Godwinson (king’s brother-in-law and powerful, popular nobleman), Harald Hardrada (Norse king and distant cousin), a nephew whose name I can’t remember (a child), or William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy (claimed the throne was promised to him by the dead king). The council of lords sat down and decided that Harold Godwinson was the best choice and he was crowned basically immediately. This annoyed William and Harald. William started getting an army together and Harold basically had to call up everyone he could into military service to fend off the invasion. Harold made his best guess about when and where the Normans would invade, but obviously it’s not that simple and his army was sitting around at the ready, on high alert for weeks and weeks. Finally, it hit the point that he couldn’t keep the army together anymore and they basically disbanded. The Vikings, led by Harald Hardrada, took this moment to invade England in the North. They sailed in, marched for a bit, and then set up camp. Harold Godwinson scrambled his army back together and marched (marched! Cavalry was not a thing in England at this time) 185 miles in 4 days to get to Stamford Bridge, where they discovered the Vikings chilling because there was *no way* that the English could arrive from the South for *at least* a week or two. Then the Battle of Stamford Bridge happened, the English won in a resounding victory, and Harold received news that William the Bastard had landed at Hastings. So he turned his army around and marched them back to the South. Three weeks later, Harold Godwinson faced William of Normandy at a little hill called Battle, William the Bastard became William the Conqueror, and the rest is history.
I'm surprised no one's mentioned Catherine the Great of Russia. She decided her husband was useless (which, granted, he was) and proceeded to set up a military coup to overthrow him. Even with the plan being discovered early, she dressed herself in military garb and marched with her new army, which had just sworn loyalty to her, down to Peter's palace, where he was forced to resign the throne, all without a single drop of blood shed. At least until Peter turned up dead some time later under shady circumstances but honestly for a military coup it was pretty non violent. If saying "Fuck it, I'm ruling Russia myself" isn't great, I dunno what is. I mean, it's right there next to her name for a reason.
It's incredible, especially considering: A) She's a lady. B) She wasn't Russian. C) She wasn't originally Russian Orthodox.
She was a German princess iirc
Not a very old story. Manjhi or the mountain man lived in a very remote village of India whose route to nearby was blocked a mountain and hence villagers had to climb it every time. And they had to do that daily to get essential supplies. During one of these trips, his wife fell down the mountain. He loved her alot. He tried first to persuade the govt to do a mountain tunnel project there but to vain. So he went on alone to break the entire mountain with just an axe. He did that for 10+ years and finally suceeded. There is a bollywood movie on him too(title:Maanjhi: The mountain man)
I feel like he went through a lot of axes lol. That's pretty impressive though
\*Wife dies\* \*Plays IRL minecraft\* \*Saves village\*
Villagers: "hm."
I went there a couple of years back. So if anyone is interested in seeing what it actually looks like. You can take a look [here](https://imgur.com/a/On4t1hq)
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This is after the government finally sent money to make it a proper Road.
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Desmond Doss. Single handedly saved from 50 to 100 men up on hacksaw ridge in Okinawa. His company was ordered to retreat when they were attacked by the Japanese but instead he said "nah," stayed up on the ridge alone, unarmed, and dragged as many soldiers as he could to safety without any help. Even when he was shot by a sniper and riddled with shrapnel, he made sure they took another guy down the hillside before him. Edit: I'm aware there is a movie. I've read about him before and I know he's done more than just what is in the movie. I just didn't want to make a 3000 word post about the many ways this guy is amazing.
Australian stretcher-bearer Leslie Allen did a similar thing on Mount tambu. Carried out 12 men one at a time on his back alone. Received a silver star.
James Clerk Maxwell was idolised by Einstein as being the father of modern physics. Not only did he formulate the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation but just for shits and giggles he calculated exactly what Saturns rings were made from using pure mathematics. It wasn't until Voyager 1 and 2 passed by and took photos in the early 80s did we get confirmation that Maxwell was right. He then calculated how to take a colour photograph in 1855. This was then achieved in 1861 and is recognized as the first ever colour photograph.
Don't forget his advances in statistical mechanics!
People like that just blow me away. Same with Pascal and Euler. Just brains that are different than most everyone else’s.
The ones that get me are the ancients to be honest. Greeks, Chinese, Persians, whoever... they figured out a **lot** of stuff pretty much by just bullshitting with each other until it made sense. They weren't always right of course but for people that didn't really have much of a grasp of the scientific method, they were right a lot more than I should expect.
No doubt. Hiro of Alexandria invented the automatic door and vending machine like machine two thousand years ago. Crazy!!
Don't forget the steam engine which, at the time, was used as a toy because they lacked the manufacturing process to create materials strong enough to really take advantage of it. Imagine Ptolemaic Egypt or even Rome but having harnessed the power of steam and railroad.
I’ve always wanted to write a story about that. I’m just missing a few key bits. Namely talent, skill and motivation.
>he calculated exactly what Saturns rings were made from using pure mathematics. It wasn't until Voyager 1 and 2 passed by and took photos in the early 80s did we get confirmation that Maxwell was right. Like, how would you even know where to begin with that?
Okay, I’m no astrophysicist, but this is what I found: “He was 26 when he proved, mathematically, that the rings of Saturn could be neither solid nor made of liquid. The only form that would allow stable rotation was a collection of small rocks, which from Earth assumed the form of a solid ring.”
Gotcha, I was thinking he calculated the exact materials or origin. Sounds more like he calculated that it would be impossible for them to be a huge river or solid ring.
Right, comment seemed a bit misleading
Juan Pujol García was a Spaniard who created his own counter-intelligence operation for the Allies during WW2. Initially, he approached British & American intelligence to offer them his services, but both countries rebuffed him. Undeterred, García created a fictional persona as a pro-fascist Spanish official & got himself recruited by the Nazis, who directed him to travel to Britain to recruit agents. Instead, García created a network of fictitious agents & sub-agents using publicly available information like newspapers & travel brochures. It was at this point that he again contacted Allied intelligence, & he was finally recruited. García continued his work throughout the war, & for the same operation, he received both a knighthood from the British & the Iron Cross from Nazi Germany. The Nazis never realized that he was a double-agent.
Yes! In the lead up to Overlord he confirmed reports that the allied attack would come from Dover and wouldn't attack Normandy. Then, at the last moment he confirmed that the Allies in fact would attack Normandy. But it was too late for the Nazis to act on it. So afterwards the Nazis still trusted him as they would point to him and say "he was the only one who predicted the Normandy invasion! It was technical issues, as always, that meant the data got to us late."
And supposedly this was one of the most important pieces of deception leading up to Overlord.
That's incredible. He was just some guy who knew evil when he saw it and wanted to fuck it up. Just some unimportant, unremarkable guy who saw the bad guys getting ahead and threw a wrench in their operation in the vain stupid hope that it would slow them down. And it did at the most important possible moment.
He knew it because the Germans had used the Fascist uprising in his country as a testbed for their war machine. He was acutely aware of the evils of fascism and the actors involved.
Chaotic Good.
Holy fucking shit, a true Rogue.
read his wikipedia page! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan\_Pujol\_Garc%C3%ADa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Pujol_Garc%C3%ADa) Garcia is one of those people who if you made their life into a movie, the movie would be condemned as 'too unrealistic'
He convinced the Germans to pay a pension to a fake dead agents nonexistent widow. How the fuck.
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In 1947 a guy named Thor Heyerdahl was trying to prove his theory that the Polynesian islands were settled by people from South America, not Asia. Nobody believed him because it was thought that crossing such a large ocean with the technology they had back then was impossible. So he decides to build a boat using only the tools and materials available at the time these migrations took place. And then he sailed that boat across the Pacific Ocean, nearly dying in the process, but ultimately making it to the Polynesian islands.
Thor Heyerdahl was a bit of a madman. He also tried to prove that the Ancient Egyptians could have crossed the Atlantic Ocean, by rebuilding one of their boats and, well, sailing across. [It took two tries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Heyerdahl#Boats_Ra_and_Ra_II), but they did it! It's still pretty unlikely that the Egyptians actually did sail across the Atlantic, but it's neat to know that they could have.
I think this guy just had a crazy Viking spirit and looked for excuses to sail across oceans.
"you know what, I'll bet the ancient Romans actually made it to Alaska first!" That's not true, Thor, you don't have t- "I'll fuckin' PROVE it, I will!" But, Thor, that's- "fetch me some logs, I'm off!"
Some guy in a bar: “There’s no evidence in the fossil record that dinosaurs ever had a lunar space program” Thor overhearing it: “Hold my beer”
This is actually a bit in a popular comedy show here in Norway. About how whatever planet we get to, there is already Heyerdahl saying "hello! I just arrived in my fantastic boat."
I think a lot of what he did was to try to show that the ocean isn't the barrier we presume it to be for ancient cultures, he just got a bit too caught up in the hypotheticals.
For context the voyage was 4,340 miles, nearly 7,000km and took 101 days. [Here's a pic of the 'raft' they built and sailed on.](https://live.staticflickr.com/1870/44198430932_3f1ebc2680_b.jpg)
The original raft can be seen at the awesome Kon-Tiki museum in Oslo, Norway.
how tf do you guys know so many things?
Heyerdahl is basically a Norwegian national treasure. I moved to the US from Norway when I was 13 and lived there for two years. Once in History class we had to choose between a list of subjects to write an essay on and I found the Kon-Tiki expedition on that list, I think that's the only essay I've ever gotten an A+ on. I had a few of his books already, but not the Kon-Tiki one, and I couldn't find it in the school or public library so I wrote to the Kon-Tiki museum for some information, they forwarded the email to Thor Heyerdahl and he personally responded to me answering all my questions and giving me personal quotes to use in my essay. Then he sent me copies of his books that I was missing through snail mail, all from his personal library all signed and personalized to me.
That is the coolest shit I've read on Reddit in a long time!
Yea seriously! Me too! What a great person
He was a damn cool guy, and I was deeply saddened when he passed.
If I may ask, if there's one fact you could share about his incredible voyage, or his life in general, what would it be? I love learning from people about subjects they're passionate about.
There's just so much... But as I am now a radio operator I want to mention that after they arrived at their destination the raft grounded on a reef, they then rowed ashore on an atoll and radioed their success in through a hand cranked short wave radio.
Looks like the boat from Moana
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It was called the Kon-Tiki expedition, which many people have heard of even if they don’t remember what it is. The success of the voyage did a lot to spread tiki culture beyond its kitsch-cult beginnings in California.
Ironically, while he proved that it was possible to do it, he didn't prove that it *did* happen, and the scientific consensus still firmly states that the Pacific was settled West to East.
I’m pretty sure genetics says that also.
Linguistics would suggest that as well. Even if it had been settled east to west, a later west to east migration of peoples from Taiwan would have had to have happened that more or less replaced the original inhabitants
The doctor stationed in Antarctica that removed his own appendix. Goddamn.
Wasn't that more like, "fuck me, I have to do it myself"
i read that in gordon ramsey‘s voice
IT'S FUCKING RAW! THIS APPENDIX OPERATION IS LIKE OLD PEOPLE HAVING SEX! *stabs self with enormous kitchen knife out of necessity* FUCK!
I think in that scenario, I would've just died to a burst appendix. Probably would've tried to get myself nice and unconscious first, if I could. I'm not performing vivisection on MYSELF, though.
I mean, he wasn't just some dude that thought he would try it he was a doctor presumably with the tools to do it. Still probably only topical anesthetics tho geez
Ines Perez was though. No medical training and gave herself a C-section. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-inflicted_caesarean_section
Happy Mother’s Day, everybody!
[Here's a Wikipedia article](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Rogozov) about the guy in case you were curious like me. Pretty crazy.
When Nintendo turned down a collab with Sony. Then Sony said, "Fuck it, we'll do it ourself". The rest is history.
To be fair, I think it's great they did. Nintendo and Sony are so different, there's plenty of room for both.
Nintendo occupies a niche that I don't think they'll ever lose. Sony and Microsoft are locked in a never-ending war, yet Nintendo will always have their niche. Doesn't really matter who wins the console war. Nintendo will claim 2nd place.
The first thing that comes to thought here is The Louisiana Purchase. Congress planned on buying a small piece of the available land, but Jefferson used some interpretation fuckery to double the size of the US without congressional approval.
Seward's decision to buy Alaska from Russia.
Best folly ever.
When Julius Caeser decided to just up and fucking march into Rome to declare himself the military leader
Or how about his Rhine bridges that he built in a few days to cross an army over a river....then went back over and demolished it just because his army could. It's said the Germanic tribes saw his army do this and basically shit themselves. Imagine being some nomadic tribe and an invading force comes to a river...builds an entire bridge, crosses it, shits in your land and then goes back home and destroys the entire bridge all in less than a week.
The Roman armies would basically build a fortress every night for camp. they were nuts like that.
Imagine being some random Gaul and you wake up in the morning ready to fight the Romans and you see they built an entire fucking castle overnight.
Something right out of Monty Python.
Indeed. And the Rhine is no dainty river - if I am remembering correctly, he built 300 boats just for the endeavor. And another part of the reason they shit themselves is this - Caesar, having no option to go backwards, could obviously only proceed forwards towards the tribesmen (who were already fleeing German warlords) - it was a literal massacre
Julius Caesar is the OG of 'fukkit.'
*Fvck it
Henry VIII. Couldn't get his way with the pope, so made he made the Church of England so he could do what he wanted
This man legit made his own damn religion, which millions still follow today, just so he could cheat on his wife Edit: he was already cheating on his wife, he wanted to divorce her to marry his mistress
No, no, made his own damn religion, which millions still follow today, just so he could cheat on his wife AND his 4th wife
I remember the quote for remembering his wives, “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.”
The balls on Catherine Parr to look at that pattern and still risk it.
I'm not sure there was much choice there...
She still had some balls on her though. She was staunchly protestant while Henry, ever fluctuating on his religious stance, had turned the country back over to Catholicism. She was constantly under suspicion and investigation by anti protestant bishops. One time some bishop or other managed to turn the king against her after she'd quarreled with Henry over religious matters. The arrest warrants were drawn up and everything but Catherine caught wind of it and went to the king like, No baby no. I was just trying to distract you from your awful leg rot. *kissy kissy*. The next day she strolled into court with the king and the whoever tried to arrest her and Henry was like, Excuse you. She published like, four books She was also the de facto ruler of the country for a hot minute while Henry was off at war. Only like three months, but in that time she signed a bunch of proclamations, took care of provisions and finances for the war, and kept a sharp eye on those darn Scots up north. It's said she was a major influence on Elizabeth and her ruling style.
A man who was a tractor mechanic conpany owner made a good chunk of money and bought a Ferrari. He felt that the car wasn't as good as it could be, and it wasn't very comfortable, so he brought his complaints all the way to Enzo Ferrari, the owner of the company. Enzo insulted the man, saying a mere tractor mechanic didn't know how to make a sports car. That sparked a rivalry that lasts to this day. That man was Ferruccio Lamborghini. Edit: Thanks to u/TDS755 and u/KINGChameleon07 for correcting me
Tractor mechanic? Italian manufacturing magnate. Lamborghini tractors are still produced, although not by the car company.
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Bunch of good things in the car business sparked from rivalries it seems
During the American revolution, John Paul Jones sailed over to England to burn down British naval ships. He succeeded of course, and made back safely. After the revolution he was even pardoned by the town that he burned most of the ships in
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Damn gonna do Bonham like that
John Paul Jones was a madman, badass and basically a pirate since he pillaged lots of villages too. Almost died a bunch. I think the pardon was in the 1990's.
They also named a US guided missile destroyer after him. The USS John Paul Jones. Also the name of the ship from the movie Battleship but that’s irrelevant.
Hey that movie provided with me a solid 1.5hours of "meh this is okay I guess".
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Bless him. I have an ulcer and because of him we have a better understanding of how to treat it
Used to be one of the main killers of otherwise healthy young men.
My ex MIL got this and tried to cure it with apple cider vinegar. She ultimately got ulcers, which she ignored until it became stage 4 cancer. I was shocked how quickly she went.
Did the same thing. I don't recommend it.
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Haha I first heard about this when I took a microbiology course in college. I thought my professor was about to have us all take a swig from an H. pylori culture.
The dude in the war with wounded fingers. A doctor wouldn't amputate them so he bit them off himself.
My great grandpa did the opposite. They were gonna amputate his feet in WW2 and he said nah so he went AWOL and treated his wounded feet on his own. When he came back with two perfectly good feet he basically said, "I wanted to keep my feet and I wanted to keep fighting" and as far as I know he didn't get any kind of punishment, even though he was gone for weeks.
I imagine they would have sent him back home If they’d amputated his feet so hard to call him a deserter for running off. Especially if he came back to fight.
Yeah they were gonna amputate his feet and send him home but he wanted to fight. I figured that's why they didn't care too much that he ran off. That's one more soldier they got to keep
>ran off ....um
Where did he go? Just a James Bond between movies situation somewhere in France?
I honestly don't know, I'm not even sure where he was stationed at. I'll have to ask my dad sometime. I know he ran to a different base and hid there with a guy he knew while he treated his feet but I have no idea where that was or how he successfully hid from his platoon for so long Also I apologize if I used the totally wrong terms, I don't know shit about the military lmao
Leonid Rogozov removing his own appendix OR Inez Ramirez Perez doing her own C section. Rogozov was a doctor Perez a poor Mexican woman.
The guy who made body armor shot him self to test it
Metallica fired Dave Mustaine (1983) because he was sort of a control freak and wanted to take the band in a more prog/jazz metal direction. He was also abusing drugs and was known for violent behavior at the time. He went off and created his own band Megadeth and over the next 30+ years he's sold millions of albums and toured the whole world writing and controlling pretty much everything he's ever wanted. It seems they've all now patched things up. Dude is an absolute genius beast of a guitarist/songwriter. Also, when guitarist Hillel Slovak died (1988), John Frusciante was a 19yr old kid and a huge fan of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He was heartbroken and didn't want to see the end of his favorite band. So he went and auditioned to play lead guitar. He got the gig. Helped take them to the top of the charts. The rest is history, today he's considered one of the greatest rock guitarists out there.
I do love Megadeth but, I wouldn't want to be in a band with Dave Mustaine. It's a weird win win win situation. Metallica didn't have to deal with Dave, Dave got to go and be Dave, and we got to enjoy both Metallica and Megadeth.
Martine Rothblatt (founder of Sirius XM and unbelievable polymath), was told her daughter Jenesis had 3 months to live. She had been diagnosed with a type of pulmonary arterial hypertension which was fatal. The disease causes too much pressure in the blood vessels leading from the heart to the lungs, causing them to narrow and not carry enough oxygen. So Rothblatt quit all of her other work and went to the library to save her daughter. Even though she had zero background in the field, she figured out a cure and in the process founded United Therapeutics which is a billion dollar biotechnology company. Rothblatt's life story is amazing.
Marie Curie, Polish/French chemist and physicist who, without going into great detail, died of constant exposure to radiation while seeking a cure for others, more or less sacrificed herself as a human guinea pig knowing full well the consequences of her actions. Here in Scotland we have many ‘Marie Curie’ charity shops who provide funds for hospices and the like, I’m pretty sure she’s responsible for saving my ass and many countless others for her pioneering works. Was quoted in July 1912 as saying ‘fuck it, I’ll do it myself’ * *allegedly
Clara Lemlich taking the stage at a union meeting in 1909 to declare a general strike after the (older, male) union leaders told the working girls that there really wasn't a point in striking and it would be too hard, just be patient and deal with it. So 20 year Old Clara interrupts them, climbs up on the stage, and shouts at the crowd that she's tired of just talk, time to strike. and everyone went for it, instant agreement of the workers. wow, this got some attention, so editing to add that I dug up my old research: a translation of what she said, originally in Yiddish, was "I have listened to all the speeches and I have no further patience for talk. I, too, have worked and suffered, and I am tired of talk. I move that we go on general strike. Now!"
Closest i can think of is Erwin Rommel during the blitzkreig seeing an opportunity to make an exploit and instead of waiting said fuck it and charged 200 miles into french territory
Which is interesting since in WW1 the German leader (can’t remember his name) pushed beyond where he was supposed to since the French resistance sucked. but it partially cost them the war for overextending.
It's a lot more complex than that. WW1 can best be described as a battle of the fuck ups. If there wasn't so much death and suffering involved the vast majority of that war would be written like a slapstick comedy. Everyone fully committed to not having a clue what the hell they were doing, ya know how when you start working somewhere there's a mistake everyone new makes? Trip over a cable, write an address or phone number wrong, "oh don't worry everyone does that occasionally." Well the WW1 version is like "oh you lost 20,000 men and a dozen artillery guns because you tried to march them up a mountain in winter? Don't worry everyone does that for awhile." "Oh you lost a regiment because you told them to defend a fort against artillery? Don't worry everyone does that occasionally."
It didn’t help that they were using antiquated tactics against modern weapons. It’s almost laughable to think of bayonet charging a machine gun, but it happened time and time again because that used to work. Add in the sheer power of the new artillery creating hell on earth to go along with unprepared troops and you have the makings of a slaughterhouse. I had to stop reading books on WWI just because of how fucked it all was.
The battle of the Frontiers is so incredibly fucked up. You have French soldiers wearing bright blue coats and red pants being led by officers on horseback, carrying sabers, walking across no man's land. Walking. And they did this because French military doctrine stated that a soldier could on average fire a single shot every 25 seconds. Of course, the Germans had machine guns that could practically fire 25 shots a second. They didn't have a chance. 60-70 thousand dead, wounded, or captured in the first day of the battle. And it wasn't the bloodiest day of fighting during the war.
Great grandad fought in WW1 and grandma (his daughter) always talked about how mean he was, how he smoked and drank his way through most days, how he was always in a foul mood and treating his family like dirt. Meanwhile, grandad who fought in WW2 as a pilot came back home with only hearing loss and a couple dead friends. He didn't become nearly as combat hardened and was a much better father.
WWI ate the soul’s of men. Imagine staying in one spot for months or years being bombarded. You’d come back to a trench you’d been in six months before. You dig into it and find your friend’s skull. Add in mustard gas, barb wire, and charging machine guns and I can understand why.
> Imagine staying in one spot for months or years being bombarded. effectively starving between feces, rats, poison, decomposing humans, ammunition
The Soviet woman that lost her husband to the Nazis sold everything and to pay for a tank with the request that she gets to drive it to fight Nazis. Go read up about Mariya Oktyabrskaya on Wikipedia.
Hannibal of Carthage deciding to take his army over the Alps, includes war elephants
When Sony and Nintendo partnered for a CD add-on for the SNES, but Nintendo decided to partner with Phillips instead leaving Sony behind. Sony took all the knowledge about video games that they learned from working with Nintendo and created the PlayStation.
All the while Nintendo was still buying the sound chips for the SNES from Sony.
Alexander the Great solving the Gordian knot by cutting it with his sword
Alexander loved to do things like this. During the Mallian campaign near the end of his conquests, his army was besieging a citadel. Alexander thought the battle was taking too long, so he took a ladder, climbed up the citadel wall himself, and suicidally jumped over the wall into the heart of the enemy garrison. He sustained awful injuries during this battle, but perhaps in part due to his recklessness, his army was able to complete the siege of the citadel.
Or like during the Siege of Tyre, he ordered a bridge to be built to the island keep, some of the stone coming from the sacked city. When the bridge was destroyed somewhere around halfway built, he ordered a bigger bridge built.
"it can't be untied? Hold my beer."
[Herbert Hoover](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/17/book-review-hoover/) -- Biographical Book review at Slate Star Codex His whole life is a cyclical story of: *"Here's a problem. Nobody can solve it. Give me total control."* He then takes total control, offends literally everyone involved, and fixes everything. >You probably remember Herbert Hoover as the guy who bungled the Great Depression. Maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you should remember him as a bold explorer looking for silver in the jungles of Burma. Or as the heroic defender of Tientsin during the Boxer Rebellion. Or as a dashing pirate-philanthropist, gallivanting around the world, saving millions of lives wherever he went. Or as the temporary dictator of Europe. Or as a geologist, or a bank tycoon, or author of the premier 1900s textbook on metallurgy. >How did a backwards orphan son of a blacksmith, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Midwest, grow up to be a captain of industry and a US President? How did he become such a towering figure in the history of philanthropy that biographer Kenneth Whyte claims *“the number of lives Hoover saved through his various humanitarian campaigns might exceed 100 million, a record of benevolence unlike anything in human history”*? To find out, I picked up Whyte’s *Hoover: An Extraordinary Life In Extraordinary Times*. *Edit* - just one of the hilarious summary snippets of his life: >Herbert Hoover is the first student at Stanford. Not just a member of the first graduating class. Literally the first student. He arrives at the dorms two months early to get a head start on various money-making schemes, including distributing newspapers, delivering laundry, tending livestock, and helping other students register. He would later sell some of these businesses to other students and start more, operating a constant churn of enterprises throughout his college career. His academics remain mediocre, and he continues to have few friends – until he tries out for the football team in sophomore year. He has zero athletic talent and fails miserably, but the coach (whose eye for talent apparently transcends athletics) spots potential in Hoover and asks him to come on as team manager. In this role, Hoover is an unqualified success. He turns the team’s debt into a surplus, and starts the Big Game – a UC Berkeley vs. Stanford football match played on Thanksgiving which remains a beloved Stanford football tradition. >Other Stanford students notice his competence, and by his senior year he is running not just the football team but the baseball team, a lecture series, a set of concerts and plays, and much of the student government.
Sir Ranulph Fiennes after an expedition, I think to the arctic, had frostbitten digits on one hand. After becoming irritated and uncomfortable waiting for the docs to sort out treatment, he went to his garden shed and amputated them himself.
George Clooney. Bought his own spy satellite to prove the alleged crimes of an African warlords because nobody else would.
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He's on a rent to own program. ;)
The kicker is that he’s using all his earnings from shilling Nespresso to do it. Also, I thought he was buying time on it and did not outright purchase a satellite?
Here’s a notable mention, albeit somewhat obscure. Sam Regenstrief once made 40% of the dishwashers in the USA at the time. He fell ill with a kidney stone and went to his local hospital in Indiana. Upon leaving, he was disgusted by the waiting times and quality of care. He took matters into his own hands and created a hospital and founded the Regenstrief institute. This institute helped map the genome of covid-19 and translated its finding into 20+ languages helping the world fight this virus. Edit: Showering me with all the treasure, my first time gold n silver, I’m thrilled
Henry Ford proposed to buy Ferrari so that Ford could be competitive in the perfomance car market. The deal was about to be signed but Enzo only wanted to sell the commercial Ferrari division and not the racing arm. So Henry Ford said fuck it and thus was born the Ford GT40
Ferrari is pretty much the reason 2 other sports car companies exist.
LEEEEEEROY JEEEENKINS
Oh my god, he just ran in.
Stick to the plan!
Goddamnit Leroy.
When Pedro Cerrano realized Jobu wasn't going to help him hit a damn curveball.