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No matter how bad you think you screwed the pooch, you can always take heart in the fact that in 1788, the almighty Austrian army attackeditself, killing over 10,000 of its own men. Obviously, people dying isn’t funny by any means, but come on. 10,000 people? Who in the world was in charge of that massive blunder?!
In a society where we all strive for perfection, the truth is that we all make mistakes. In fact, when you really think about it, perfection is an illusion. There’s not a single person on the planet who hasn’t messed up.
Luckily, most times when this happens, the consequences of our silly actions range from the trivial to the nonexistent. We might feel a wee bit embarrassed at our missteps, but more often than not, life just keeps on going.
The world neither notices nor cares that we messed up -- most of the time, that is.
However, sometimes mistakes -- even the itty bitty ones which seem super trifling at the time -- could end up having huge ramifications. How huge? Like, altering-the-course-of-history, huge. Yep. Could you imagine being the idiot responsible for a blunder that shaped the course of history?
Sure, while some mistakes certainly made the world a better place, we can’t help but laugh at the expense of the screwups responsible for them. All in good fun, of course. Besides, in the words of our favorite pop star secretly living a double life, “Nobody’s perfect,” and that’s just facts.
So, what are some of these catastrophically epic fails that we should be wary about? We’ll tell you. Read on for the best classic blunders-- just do us all a favor and promise after you get in a good laugh, you’ll learn from them, mmkay?
Because as they say, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. And these hilarious blunders are surely not ones you want to repeat. Unless, of course, you have a kink for humiliation, then we say do you, boo-boo!
Everyone and their mom know of the Titanic. Known as the “unsinkable ship,” the Titanic was designed to make the long journey to America without any possible risk of going under. But one fateful night, the ship crew ignored warnings of icebergs in their path and made the not-so-smart decision to carry on.
Well, we all know what happened next; the ship slammed into a pretty big iceberg which scraped the entire right side, causing the boat to drop it like it’s hot to the bottom of the ocean, killing a whopping 1,517 passengers.
While we can blame the crew for basically driving the ship directly into an iceberg, the first blunder actually happened before the ship even left port. These yahoos decided that they didn’t need lifeboats because, well… the Titanic was “unsinkable.”
Lesson learned here is to always be safe than sorry!
How dumb would you feel if you had the chance to publish one of the greatest books of all time and turned it down? Pretty dumb, right? Well, that’s exactly how twelve different publishing houses felt when they realized how big Harry Potter was about to get.
JK Rowling’s manuscript was in the hands of twelve different publishing companies that rejected her before finally taking her book to Bloomsbury, who only took the budding author on following the advice of the company chairman’s eight-year-old daughter, Alice.
The books were subsequently translated into over a whopping 60 different languages, earning Rowling’s a cool $1 billion.
The French state railway SNCF spent an impressive $15 billion on a new fleet of trains, but unfortunately, they were the incorrect size and had too much junk in their trunk for their 1300 platforms.
Since they were too wide, they had to start over, costing them an estimated $50 million to correct.
Believe it or not, there was a time when the search engine giant was for sale with a price tag of $1 million. Yep. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page met Excite CEO George Bell in 1999, offering to sell. With Bell not excited about the initial offering, the duo went down to $750,000 in a bit to tempt him. He still rejected.
Not exactly a smart move, seeing as Google is valued at around $365 billion today. Oops.
Did you know that over 150 years ago,Russia decided to sell the vast territory of Alaska to the US in 1867? Yup, it’s true -- the two countries signed a treaty to sell the land for a sum of $7.2 million for 1,518,800 square kilometers of land.
Years after selling,Russia realized that it was an enormous blunder and that they had lost access to a whole bunch of natural resources worth billions and billions of dollars. Yikes!
At the end of 2009, America was completely shook by reports that the beloved Tiger Woods had engaged in not one, not two, but multiple illicit sexual affairs. Within a year, the pro golfer agreed to an unbelievable $750 million divorce settlement with Elin Nordegren.
But that’s not all-- if you include stock loss for Gatorade, Nike, and other sponsors, Tiger’s total loss from sleeping with Everybody but his wife, could be as high as $12 billion. Yes,billion.
At the start of the 19th century, Napoleon’s army *attempted* to invade Russia.Whoops.
A combo of factors spelled doom for the invasion. First, there wasn’t really enough food for the soldiers and horses, so everyone was feeling a bit fatigued, to say the least. Secondly, poor discipline ran rampant within the ranks.
And lastly, none of the men were prepared for the unimaginable brutality of a full Russian winter. It was an extremely devastating failure, one that lost Napoleon 500,000 troops.
Back in the good old days of data tapes, it was really easy to accidentally tape over recordings. Unfortunately for NASA, that is exactly what they did, and the original tapes of themoon landing were erased and reused. Thankfully, the geniuses realized they were able to restore the original broadcast and offered the world a glimpse of the historic event.
The admission that NASA accidentally erased the OG footage fed rocket fuel to conspiracy theorists, who had already believed the entire lunar program that landed people on the moon six times between 1969 and 1972 was staged.
Facebook turned down programmers Jan Koum and Brian Acton at job interviews back in 2009. No big deal, right? Must happen all the time at FB headquarters…
Well, just a few years later, the brilliant duo developed WhatsApp, which Facebook subsequently purchased for $19 billion big ones.
While there is somedispute over the accuracy of this story, it’s still pretty crazy to think about. In 1914, British soldier Henry Tandey - who later became the most decorated private in the First World War - stumbled across an unarmed and injured Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler in a ditch. He reportedly decided not to kill him in cold blood.
In 1999, a group of engineers used the English system of measurement, while the rest of their team used the metric system for a fancy-schmancy Mars orbiter.
The use of the two different measurement systems put a damper in the spacecraft’s navigation coordinates, causing the orbiter to get lost in space, costing NASA around $125 million.
A tall London Skyscraper called “Walkie-Talkie” melted cars by reflecting sunlight. Obviously, it wasn’tsupposed to damage cars, but it did because of the concave design and mirrored glass, which sent 20 focused rays of light onto the street below.
The glare ended up melting vehicles and caused doormats in nearby shops to catch fire.
In 2009, James Howells bought 7,500 Bitcoins when their value was next to nothing. But by 2013, they had risen quite a bit in value, giving him a multi-million dollar portfolio. Pretty sweet, right?
Unfortunately, the only problem was that he had thrown away the hard drive where the bitcoins were stored. When he realized his blunder, he went to the landfill to try and recover it, but he was unable to locate it.
A woman in England who played the lottery every single week without fail picked the correct numbers to win the Euromillions, but her hubby accidentally trashed the winning ticket.
The woman knew that the announced numbers were hers because she always wrote them down on a separate piece of paper before giving the ticket to her husband.
An A&R man named Dick Rowe at Decca Records is known in history as “The man who turned down the Beatles.” Rumor has it that when Rowe heard the Fab Four, he told their manager that “Groups with guitars are on their way out.” Boy, was he wrong!
After their rejection, he went on to sight the Rolling Stones and several other famous groups, but missing out on the beloved Beatles was a big one. How big?
To put it into perspective for you, The Beatles have sold an incredible 600 million albums worldwide, earning over 177 million in the US alone.
The infamous Hindenburg disaster marked the end of the airship era, taking the lives of 35 passengers and one member of the ground crew. The airship went up in flames because of a tiny spark that ignited leaking hydrogen.
As the Germans quickly discovered,hydrogen is super flammable, and using it to fill airships perhaps wasn’t the smartest idea.
OK, so forgetting to close a door or a gate isn’t normally a big deal. Unless, of course, you’re the unfortunate Roman who accidentally forgot to close the Kerkoporta Gate at Constantinople. That poor unfortunate soul single-handedly lost a siege.
You see, the walls of Constantinople were known to be impregnable, which contributed to a sense of security and confidence for the Roman defenders, who were under siege by a much larger Ottoman force.
So when one Roman guard managed to carelessly leave the gate open in the middle of the night, a group of 50 Ottoman soldiers took the opportunity to strike. They snuck in undercover and successfully slaughtered quite a few Roman guards. This caused hysteria in the Roman ranks, who thought that the city had somehow been conquered overnight.
The resulting loss of morale later helped the Ottomans to actually conquer the city with a subsequent invasion. The moral of the story here is to never let your guard down - or leave the gate open.
And there you have it - some of the biggest blunders of all time! While we can’t help but laugh at err caused by other people, hopefully, you learned a thing or two from this post. Whether that be to not hand over your lotto tickets to your SO or that Hydrogen is really flammable, these are life lessons (at other people’s expense) that you can hold onto forever.
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Sources:
World War One: The British hero who did not shoot Hitler | BBC
EXPLOSIVE LESSONS IN HYDROGEN SAFETY | NASA
Treaty with Russia for the Purchase of Alaska | Library of Congress
