Everyone knows that if you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself.
That said, the best of us can often think we can trust others to do the right thing, or do something right, until you see their efforts are sorely lacking – and these 16 historical moments are the proof in the pudding.
16. This is just *chef’s kiss*
Brian Acton interviewed at Facebook and got turned down.
He said f*ck it and built Whatsapp.
Several years later, Facebook bought Whatsapp for $19B.
15. Thankfully that worked out for the best.
Jonas Salk needed human subjects to test his polio vaccine. That’s normally a long process and he wanted to make the vaccine available as quick as possible so he just experimented on himself.
14. When you’re sure you’re good.
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.
13. And he did it in quarantine. What have you done?
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”
12. This doesn’t even sound real.
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.
11. That takes some serious confidence.
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.
10. Who wants to fight a Norseman with an axe?
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]”
9. See what can happen when you’re really mad?
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.
8. In sum…why are men?
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.
7. He deserved to be a little smug.
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…
6. There’s a reason she’s “the Great.”
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 “F*ck 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.
5. Let’s just take a walk, eh?
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.
4. This kind of breaks my heart.
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 a lot. 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 succeeded.
There is a Bollywood movie on him too(title: Maanjhi: The mountain man)
3. That’s one way to get things done.
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 heart rate of 200 beats per minute.
He ended up living for another 45 years.
2. The forever underdog.
Nikola Tesla was tasked with lighting up the world’s fair but Thomas Edison wouldn’t allow him to use any of his patents so Tesla had to invent a new lightbulb that didn’t use any of Edison’s patents and could still have thousands made in time for the event.
1. Legendary indeed.
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 rumor, 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.
I just love history, y’all.
It’s an amazing reminder of how little things actually change.
