History's Ultimate Blunders

Five small mistakes that ruined everything

0:00 Introduction
1:19 Weather
7:51 X-Rays
17:36 Golf
25:04 Cans
29:57 Paper

[SmallPoxRobot]

The biggest historical blunder is when I slipped on a wet floor in front of my crush in seventh grade

[greenlightxbpg]

my man created the machine then said "well your the first man to photograph particles" then walked off back to keep observing clouds. what a gigachad

[jakeguerras_fan]

A young aspiring painter from Austria getting his art school application rejected would prove to be a massive blunder worth 80M+ lives…

[Nidvard]

the introduction of lead into gasoline could also be mentioned. lead-poisoning, even in small amounts, could have some effect on intelligence. Someone somewhere calculated an estimate of the total amount of "iq" lost due to the release of so much lead into the air, and it was massive. A huge setback for millions of people, and the effects are still present today, all due to one inventor's idea of adding lead to the fuel.

[doaimanariroll]

I just love the idea of a large team of doctors with the best equipment, looking at a guy smoking 90 cigarettes a day.

All scratching their head “ what could it be?”

[elihyland]

I saw a “Glory” while skydiving. Was totally convinced I was dead heading towards a giant target. Never even heard of those. Honestly… was glorious

[no-replies]

My favorite is the Soviet radar operator that prevented nuclear destruction. Radar picked up clouds as incoming missiles. Brave man took a second to think before firing back. "If they attacked there would be more missiles". I can't remember his name but we owe our lives to that man

[tekaname]

1:04 I like how in this section each segment shows something like explosions or a golf course and the final one label catastrophic is just Florida.

[Gmackematix]

The ballot that Theresa LePore designed was called the "butterfly ballot" because of the names appearing on two sides of the paper. As a result she was nicknamed Madame Butterfly. So this chain of events was literally the Madame Butterfly effect!

[lizziehn]

There are almost certainly some huge blunders going on right now. We just won't know what they'll end up being until later 👁️

[LegendarySkip]

Man, time is such a weird concept. From the present looking back, the gap between 1945 and 1955 feel like a minor span, but 2013 feels like centuries ago from the present

[eewag]

I think quite a large and underrated butterfly effect was when the Republic of Genoa sold Corsica to France. If Corsica remained a Genoese colony, Napoléon Bonaparte, who was Corsican, would have never become a French Revolutionary general and therefore never risen to power in France. Even crazier, if Napoléon was somehow elected Doge of Genoa in this alt timeline (which would be unlikely, as no one from the colonies was ever Doge), Italian unification could have happened a lot sooner but under the Genoese rather than the Savoyards

[AurickLeru]

The x-raying of pregnant women reminds me of a memoir titled "Stitches." The primary event was the author's surgery to remove throat cancer when he was an adolescent. The cancer was caused by his radiologist doctor father regularly dosing his head and neck with x-rays to try treating his asthma and allergies.

[jasonrichard]

A little fun fact about what he said on 27:24 the canned food that was provided for that expedition was later found to contain high does of lead which cause lead poisoning, that’s because the Royal Navy decided to buy their canned goods for the voyage from the lower bidder hence the lead

[operationboxtrot]

In my opinion, the largest, most butterfly effect blunder to ever occur was by Leopold Lojka, the chauffeur of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on the day of his assassination. On that day the motorcade Ferdinand was in was bombed, with the device nearly killing him. Once the motorcade arrived at the town hall, they decided to visit those injured by the bombing earlier that day in hospital. To discourage further attacks, the governor of the town (who was also the motorcade) decided to take a longer, alternate route on the way to the hospital. This information was not communicated to Leopold Lojka or the other drivers in the motorcade, so when Lojka took a wrong turn, following the more direct path, the governor shouted that he took a wrong turn. While reversing to perform a u-turn and go back onto the main road, Lojka accidentally stalled the car with an assassin sitting in a nearby sandwich shop, who was there by complete chance, taking his chance to shoot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, killing him. The death of Archduke Franz Ferdinand would start World War 1, which would start World War 2 due to the instability in Germany after the treaty of Versailles. The aftermath of World War 2 as well as the development of nuclear bombs would lead to tensions rising between the US and the USSR, kicking off the Cold War, including many proxy wars from the Cold War like the Vietnam War and the Korean War. The total deaths from these wars totals over 100 million, all because one man took a wrong turn

[Shadowwolf]

I just want to bring up something I view as a butterfly effect I thought was interesting.

Back in the 1920s, Byron Carter was killed by the hand crank used to start cars, this lead to his friend Henry Leland having a starter you push with your foot created, the first car it was used in was Leland's Cadillac Model 30, problem with the model 30 is that it ran lean, basically what this means is that fuel was over combusting and leading to a piston knock, this lead to him reaching out to Thomas Midgley Jr to create something that would cause it to stop knocking, he tried ethenol, but it was expensive, he tried tullurium, but it was pungent, he finally settled on tetraethyllead, tetraethyllead lead to numerous deaths, generational IQ loss, birth defects, and illnesses.

The death of one man, not only lead to the death and illness of many people due to an attempt to try to do some good, but it also lead to one of the most significant global environmental disasters in history.

Coincidentally, in the 70s, the EPA regulation to remove lead from road fuels also lead to the death of the classic muscle, and one of the biggest oil protests in history.
Just wanted to share, thought it was kind of interesting.

[blacklight]

Pain. Am really sad for the woman who did everything right and people still didn't believe her. We all had this happen to us but this is another level of pain

[Mr--_--M]

17:37 Fascinating how the tobacco industry slipped under the radar while scientists and gov’t were arguing over fat vs sugar. Devious and evil, yet brilliant.

[kellilas]

an interesting fact about the heart attack study: the placement of each country on the graph depends more on the country's criteria for qualifying a heart attack than the average person's diet

[absolutelysobeast]

This video was so well done and informative. This is the EXACT type of video that carries YouTube every day. This should be recommended to everyone everywhere. Thank you so much for this phenomenal content and teaching me a bunch of stuff i didnt know. This video could not be any more up my alley. I absolutely ate up every single morsel of this video