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A monkey bites a king,
Explore 33 tiny coincidences that accidentally shaped history, from a monkey bite killing a king to a typo creating Google.
Key Takeaways
- Small, seemingly insignificant events can have massive historical consequences.
- Human errors and accidents often shape history more than grand plans or genius.
- Luck and timing play crucial roles in the development of civilizations and technologies.
- Many major historical outcomes were influenced by overlooked or forgotten details.
- Innovations and discoveries sometimes arise from frustration or mistakes.
Summary
- A monkey bite infected King Alexander of Greece, leading to his death and a political crisis causing 250,000 deaths.
- A careless guard left Lincoln's box unprotected, enabling John Wilkes Booth to assassinate the president.
- An asteroid hit the Yucatan Peninsula at a precise moment, causing mass extinction and enabling human evolution.
- Chef George Crum invented potato chips out of spite for a picky customer, spawning a global snack industry.
- A forgotten unlocked gate allowed Ottoman soldiers to capture Constantinople, ending a thousand-year empire.
- Christopher Columbus accidentally discovered America due to miscalculations about Earth's size and Asia's extent.
- Sacred geese alerted Romans to a Gaul attack, saving the city when soldiers and dogs failed to wake up.
- Google's name resulted from a typo of the word 'Googol' during a brainstorming session by its founders.
- Mexican General Santa Anna's nap without defenses led to a surprise Texan victory at San Jacinto.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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and a quarter million people die.
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A chef gets petty with a customer, and a multi-billion dollar snack industry is born.
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A soldier forgets to lock a gate, and a thousand-year empire collapses before lunch.
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History isn't written by geniuses with master plans.
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It's written by people who forgot things, broke things, overslept, or just got really, really unlucky.
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These are 33 tiny, dumb, and absolutely absurd coincidences that accidentally changed the entire course of human history.
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One: In 1920, the King of Greece, Alexander, was casually strolling through the royal gardens in Athens when his German Shepherd got into a fight with a Barbary macaque,
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which is basically a very aggressive monkey with zero respect for royalty.
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Alexander, being a decent pet owner, stepped in to break it up.
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The monkey bit him on the leg.
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No big deal, right?
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Except the wound got horrifically infected, sepsis set in, and within three weeks, the 27-year-old king was dead.
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His death triggered a political earthquake.
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His exiled father returned to the throne,
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fired the prime minister,
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reversed Greece's entire foreign policy, and completely botched the Greco-Turkish War.
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As Winston Churchill later put it,
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"a quarter of a million people died because of that monkey bite."
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One angry primate literally rewrote the map of the Eastern Mediterranean.
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Two:
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On the night of April 14th, 1865,
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a man named John Parker had one job.
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One.
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He was a Washington police officer assigned to guard the door to President Abraham Lincoln's private box at Ford's Theatre.
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That's it.
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Just stand there and make sure nobody walks in and shoots the President.
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But Parker apparently found standing still incredibly boring,
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so during the intermission, he wandered off to the saloon next door for a drink.
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He left the door to the presidential box completely unguarded.
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And that's exactly when John Wilkes Booth strolled right through it with a pistol.
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The man literally had the easiest security assignment in history,
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"stand near a door," and he couldn't even do that without a beer break.
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Parker was never seriously punished, by the way.
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His disciplinary records later conveniently disappeared.
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Three:
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Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid roughly the size of a small city slammed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico,
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and it wiped out about 75 percent of all life on Earth, including the dinosaurs.
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But here's the insane part.
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Scientists have calculated that asteroid had arrived just 30 seconds earlier or later, it would have hit deep open ocean instead of a shallow coastline loaded with sulfur-rich minerals.
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The impact into that specific spot blasted unimaginable amounts of sulfur and debris into the atmosphere, blocking sunlight and triggering a global winter that lasted years.
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Hit the ocean instead?
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Way less dust, way less sulfur,
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way less extinction.
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Dinosaurs might still be here, and you'd probably be reading this from inside something's stomach.
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Thirty seconds.
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That's the margin between human civilization existing and a T-Rex still running the planet.
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Four:
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In 1853, at a resort restaurant in Saratoga Springs, New York,
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a chef named George Crum was having a terrible day.
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A customer kept sending back his fried potatoes, complaining they were too thick and too soggy.
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Again and again.
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Crum, who was not exactly known for his patience, finally snapped.
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He sliced the potatoes as thin as physically possible, practically transparent, fried them until they were hard and crunchy,
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and absolutely buried them in salt, fully expecting the customer to hate them even more.
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The customer loved them.
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Couldn't get enough.
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Other diners started demanding them too.
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Crum had just rage-invented the potato chip, one of the most consumed snack foods in human history.
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An entire multi-billion dollar global industry exists today because one chef got petty with a picky eater.
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Sometimes spite really is the mother of invention.
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Five:
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For over a thousand years, Constantinople was basically the most fortified city on Earth.
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Its massive walls had survived sieges by Arabs, Vikings, Bulgars, and basically everyone else who wanted a shot at the Roman Empire's crown jewel.
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By 1453, the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed the Second had been hammering those walls for weeks with the largest cannons ever built,
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and he still couldn't break through.
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And then someone forgot to lock a small side gate called the Kerkoporta.
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During the chaos of battle, a group of Ottoman soldiers found this tiny, forgotten postern door just hanging open.
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They poured through it,
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got behind the defenders, and raised their flag on the inner wall.
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When the other defenders saw Ottoman banners inside the city,
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panic spread instantly and resistance collapsed.
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A thousand-year empire, undone because one exhausted soldier forgot to turn a lock.
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Six:
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Christopher Columbus did not discover America on purpose.
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Let's just get that straight.
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He was trying to reach Asia by sailing west, and the entire plan was built on spectacularly wrong math.
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He calculated the Earth's circumference to be about 25 percent smaller than it actually is,
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and he thought Asia stretched way farther east than it does.
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Basically, he believed the distance from Spain to Japan was roughly 3,700 kilometers.
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The real distance?
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Over 19,000.
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Every serious geographer of his time told him he was wrong,
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and they were absolutely right.
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If the Americas hadn't been conveniently sitting in his path like a giant continental speed bump,
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Columbus and his entire crew would have slowly starved to death in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
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He didn't prove the Earth was round.
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He got lucky that an entire hemisphere existed where he didn't expect it.
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Seven:
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Around 390 BC, a massive army of Gauls had just sacked the city of Rome.
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The last Roman defenders retreated to the top of Capitoline Hill, basically the city's final stronghold.
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One night, the Gauls attempted a silent climb up the steep cliffs to finish them off.
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The Roman soldiers were asleep.
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The guard dogs were asleep.
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But the sacred geese kept in the temple of Juno were very much awake, and they were not happy about uninvited guests.
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The geese started honking and flapping like absolute maniacs, waking up a former consul named Marcus Manlius,
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who grabbed his sword and started shoving Gauls off the cliff.
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The defense held.
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Rome survived.
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And all because a bunch of geese in a temple had better security instincts than trained Roman soldiers.
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The Romans were so grateful they held an annual ceremony honoring the geese for centuries.
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The dogs, meanwhile, got publicly shamed every year.
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Seriously.
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Eight:
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The name "Google," which is now literally a verb in most languages, exists because of a spelling mistake.
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In 1997, Stanford grad students Larry Page and Sergey Brin were brainstorming names for their new search engine, which was originally called BackRub, and yes, that was its real name.
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A fellow student named Sean Anderson suggested "Googol," which is the mathematical term for the number one followed by a hundred zeros,
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representing the massive amount of data they wanted to organize.
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Anderson went to check if the domain was available, but he accidentally typed "Google" instead of "Googol."
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Turns out Google.com was available.
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Page liked the sound of it and registered the domain on the spot.
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So the most recognizable brand name of the 21st century, a company now worth over a trillion dollars,
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is the direct result of one guy's typo during a late-night brainstorming session at a university.
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Nine:
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On April 21st, 1836, Mexican General Santa Anna had every reason to feel confident.
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He had a larger, better-equipped army,
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and the Texan rebels were on the run.
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So confident, in fact, that he ordered his soldiers to stack their weapons and take an afternoon nap near the San Jacinto River.
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No sentries posted.
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No defensive positions set up.
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Just a nice siesta in the middle of a war.
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Sam Houston and his ragtag Texan army could not believe their luck.
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They charged across the open field screaming, "Remember the Alamo!"
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and hit the sleeping Mexican camp like a freight train.
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The entire battle lasted exactly 18 minutes.
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Eighteen.
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Santa Anna himself was captured the next day, hiding in a swamp, disguised in a common soldier's uniform.
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Texas won its independence because one general decided naptime was more important than national security.
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That's not even a metaphor.
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He literally napped away an entire country.
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Ten:
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In the year 1131, the future of the French monarchy was changed forever by a pig.
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Prince Philip, the eldest son of King Louis the Sixth, had already been crowned co-king at age 13,
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a standard move to secure the succession.
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One day, young Philip was riding his horse through the streets of Paris when a filthy pig came sprinting out of a pile of garbage and ran directly under the horse's legs.
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The horse stumbled, Philip was launched from the saddle,
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hit the ground, and broke his neck.
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He was dead.
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Just like that.
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His younger brother Louis, who had been raised to be a monk and had zero training for leadership,
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suddenly became heir to the throne.
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That kid grew up to become Louis the Seventh, led France into the disastrous Second Crusade, and his messy divorce from Eleanor of Aquitaine
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helped spark centuries of war between France and England.
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All because a random Parisian pig chose the worst possible moment to go for a jog.
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Eleven:
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On June 28th, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary survived an assassination attempt in Sarajevo,
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when a bomber's grenade bounced off his car and exploded behind him.
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After the failed attack, the motorcade changed its route.
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But nobody told the driver.
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So when the driver followed the original route and realized his mistake, he stopped the car to reverse, right in front of a delicatessen where a 19-year-old named Gavrilo Princip happened to be standing.
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Princip, one of the original conspirators who had already given up on the whole plan,
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suddenly found his target parked directly in front of him.
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He pulled out his pistol and fired two shots, killing both the Archduke and his wife Sophie.
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One wrong turn.
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One confused driver, one coincidental stop, and within weeks, the entire continent was at war.
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Four empires collapsed,
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20 million people died,
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and the entire 20th century was reshaped because a chauffeur didn't get the memo about a route change.
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Twelve:
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In September 1940, a teenager named Marcel Ravidat was wandering through the woods near Montignac in southern France when his dog, a small mutt literally named Robot, suddenly vanished into a hole beneath an uprooted tree.
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Marcel and his friends widened the opening and crawled down to rescue the dog, only to discover they had stumbled into the most spectacular prehistoric art gallery ever found.
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The Lascaux Cave.
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The walls were covered with over 600 paintings of horses, bulls, deer, and other animals, created roughly 17,000 years ago by Ice Age humans with astonishing skill.
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The detail and artistry were so advanced that some experts initially refused to believe they were real.
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One of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century happened because a dog named Robot fell into a hole.
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Marcel, by the way, appointed himself the cave's unofficial guardian and protected it for the rest of his life.
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Thirteen:
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In 1805, the Austrian Empire was gearing up for a massive showdown with Napoleon.
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The plan was simple: the Austrian army would hold its position near the city of Ulm in southern Germany and wait for the Russian army to arrive as reinforcements.
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Together, they would crush the French.
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Brilliant plan.
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One tiny problem.
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Austria used the Gregorian calendar.
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Russia still used the old Julian calendar.
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The difference between the two?
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Twelve days.
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The Austrians were counting down the days until their Russian allies would show up,
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and the Russians were operating on a completely different schedule.
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By the time the Russians realized the miscommunication, Napoleon had already surrounded the Austrian army,
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forced a humiliating surrender of about 30,000 troops, and marched on to his greatest victory at Austerlitz.
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Two major empires lost a war because they couldn't agree on what day it was.
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That's not a military blunder,
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that's a scheduling error.
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14:
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In 1945, an engineer named Percy Spencer was walking through a lab at the Raytheon Corporation, past an active magnetron, which is basically the guts of a military radar system.
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He noticed something weird.
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The chocolate bar in his pocket had completely melted.
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Now most people would just be annoyed about ruined chocolate.
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Spencer was curious.
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He grabbed some popcorn kernels and held them near the magnetron.
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They popped.
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Then he tried an egg.
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It exploded.
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Spencer immediately realized that these microwave emissions could heat food,
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and he filed a patent that same year.
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The first commercial microwave oven, called the Radarange, was nearly six feet tall, weighed 750 pounds,
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and cost the equivalent of about 40,000 dollars today.
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All because one engineer noticed his candy bar getting suspiciously warm near some military hardware.
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Every frozen burrito you have ever nuked at 2 AM owes its existence to Percy Spencer's melted pocket chocolate.
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15:
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In August 1814, during the War of 1812, British troops marched into Washington and set fire to practically everything,
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including the White House, the Capitol Building, and the Treasury.
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The young American capital was burning, and there was almost nothing anyone could do about it.
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And then the weather intervened in the most dramatic way possible.
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A massive, sudden thunderstorm rolled in, accompanied by what multiple sources describe as a full-blown tornado that tore right through the center of the city.
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The tornado ripped roofs off buildings, lifted cannons into the air, and killed more British soldiers than the entire American defense of Washington had managed.
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The downpour extinguished the fires that were consuming the government buildings.
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The stunned and battered British troops, apparently deciding that nature itself was fighting for America, packed up and retreated.
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A freak tornado saved the American capital from total destruction, which is the kind of thing that,
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if you put it in a movie, nobody would believe it.
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16:
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On March 15th, 44 BC, as Julius Caesar walked toward the Senate for what would be his final meeting,
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a Greek philosopher named Artemidorus physically pressed a scroll into Caesar's hand.
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The scroll contained the names of every single conspirator and detailed their plan to murder him that very day.
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Caesar took the scroll, casually rolled it up with his other papers,
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and kept walking.
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He never read it.
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Within minutes, he was surrounded by senators and stabbed 23 times.
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The most powerful man in the ancient world had a literal cheat sheet to his own assassination,
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a complete list of everyone who was about to kill him, and he treated it like junk mail.
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If Caesar had taken literally 30 seconds to glance at that note, the entire history of Rome, and arguably Western civilization,
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would have unfolded completely differently.
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But no, he was apparently too busy to read his messages.
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17:
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In the early 1800s, nitrous oxide, as laughing gas, was purely a party drug.
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Traveling showmen held "laughing gas frolics" at fairs and exhibitions where audience members would inhale the stuff and stumble around in a state of giggling euphoria
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while everyone else watched and laughed.
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Pure entertainment, zero medical purpose.
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Then in 1844, a dentist named Horace Wells attended one of these demonstrations in Hartford, Connecticut.
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He noticed something remarkable.
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A man who had inhaled the gas slammed his leg violently against a heavy wooden bench and didn't react at all.
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No pain, no flinch, nothing.
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Wells had his eureka moment.
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He tested the gas on himself during a tooth extraction and felt absolutely nothing.
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Modern anesthesia, the foundation of painless surgery, was born because a dentist watched a guy at a laughing gas party smash his leg into furniture and not care.
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Millions of painless surgeries every year trace back to one observation at what was essentially a 19th-century rave.
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18:
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On October 25th, 1415, the elite of the French army, thousands of heavily armored knights mounted on armored warhorses,
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lined up to obliterate a small, exhausted, and starving English army led by King Henry the Fifth at Agincourt.
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On paper, this should have been a massacre of the English.
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But it had rained heavily the night before.
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The freshly plowed field between the two armies had turned into a thick, deep, sucking quagmire.
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When the French knights charged, their horses sank into the mud.
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Knights in 60-pound suits of armor fell from their mounts and literally could not stand back up.
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They were stuck in the muck like upside-down turtles while English and Welsh archers, who were lightly equipped peasants with longbows,
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calmly picked them off from a distance.
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The cream of French nobility was slaughtered not by superior tactics, but by overnight rain and bad soil drainage.
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One of the most decisive battles in medieval history was won by weather and mud.
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19:
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In the 1880s, a pharmacist and Civil War veteran named John Pemberton was struggling with a serious morphine addiction he had developed after being wounded by a saber during battle.
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He was desperately trying to create a medicine, some kind of nerve tonic or painkiller that could help him kick the habit.
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He mixed together coca leaf extract, kola nut, sugar, and a bunch of other ingredients in a brass kettle in his backyard in Atlanta.
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The result tasted nothing like medicine.
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It tasted weirdly good.
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He brought it to a local pharmacy, where it was mixed with carbonated water and sold as a fountain drink for five cents a glass.
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He called it Coca-Cola.
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One of the most iconic brands in human history, a company that now sells beverages in literally every country on Earth except maybe two, was accidentally invented by a man trying to cure his own drug addiction.
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Pemberton, tragically, never kicked the morphine and died just two years later,
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having sold the rights for almost nothing.
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20:
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By 1762, Frederick the Great of Prussia was finished.
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The Seven Years' War had ground his kingdom into dust.
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Russian armies had occupied Berlin.
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His treasury was empty, his army was shattered, and he was so desperate he was writing letters about ending his own life.
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Prussia's total destruction seemed like a matter of days.
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Then, on January 5th, Russian Empress Elizabeth died of a stroke.
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And her successor was Peter the Third, a man who was, and this is not an exaggeration, obsessed with Frederick the Great.
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Peter idolized him.
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He collected Frederick memorabilia.
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He dressed his servants in Prussian-style uniforms.
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The moment Peter took the throne, he didn't just stop the war with Prussia,
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he gave back every single piece of territory Russia had conquered and offered Frederick a military alliance.
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He literally handed his enemy total victory for free, simply because he was a fan.
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Frederick himself called it "the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg."
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It is probably the most consequential case of celebrity worship in all of history.
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21:
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Right before the Titanic's maiden voyage in April 1912, there was a last-minute reshuffling of officers.
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Second Officer David Blair was bumped from the crew to make room for a more senior man.
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In the rush of leaving, Blair accidentally took with him the key to the locker that contained the binoculars for the ship's lookouts.
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The lookouts in the crow's nest, whose entire job was to spot icebergs in the dark North Atlantic,
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had no binoculars for the entire voyage.
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They had to rely on their bare eyes.
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On the night of April 14th, lookout Frederick Fleet spotted the iceberg, but by the time he saw it without binoculars, it was far too late to turn the ship.
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At the inquiry afterward, Fleet was asked directly if binoculars would have made a difference.
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His answer:
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"We could have seen the iceberg soon enough to get out of the way."
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Over 1,500 people died in part because one officer forgot to leave a key behind when he packed his bag.
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22:
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In 1826, an English chemist named John Walker was stirring a mixture of chemicals in his workshop in Stockton-on-Tees,
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when a dried lump of the mixture hardened on the end of his wooden stirring stick.
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Annoyed, he tried to scrape the lump off by dragging it across his stone hearth floor.
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It burst into flame.
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Walker stared at it for a moment, and instead of panicking, he realized he had just accidentally invented the friction match.
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Before this moment, starting a fire was genuinely inconvenient.
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You needed flint, steel, tinder, patience, and sometimes prayers.
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Walker began selling his "friction lights" in small tin boxes, and the world suddenly had instant portable fire at its fingertips.
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And the wildest part?
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Walker never patented his invention.
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He just didn't think it was important enough.
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A man invented one of the most useful tools in human history by accident,
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and then basically shrugged it off.
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Someone else eventually made millions from it.
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23:
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In the sixth century BC, the kingdoms of Lydia and Media had been locked in a brutal, bloody war for five straight years
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across what is now modern Turkey.
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Thousands had died, and neither side showed any sign of backing down.
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Then, on May 28th, 585 BC, right in the middle of a raging battle,
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the sky suddenly went dark.
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A total solar eclipse plunged the battlefield into nighttime.
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Both armies immediately dropped their weapons in absolute terror, convinced the gods were furious and punishing them for the bloodshed.
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They agreed to a peace treaty almost on the spot.
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Five years of relentless killing, ended in minutes by the moon passing in front of the sun.
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The Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus allegedly predicted this eclipse, which, if true, makes him the only person in recorded history to have effectively ended a war using astronomy.
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Imagine texting your general: "Hey, stop fighting at 4 PM.
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There's an eclipse coming and the other guys will freak out."
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24:
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The Battle of Gettysburg, the bloodiest and most pivotal clash of the American Civil War,
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was never supposed to happen where it did.
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In late June 1863, a Confederate division under General Henry Heth sent a brigade toward the small town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,
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largely because there were rumors of a supply of shoes there.
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Confederate soldiers were famously under-equipped, and many were literally marching barefoot.
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They expected to find a warehouse,
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grab some boots, and leave.
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Instead, they stumbled directly into Union cavalry.
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Both sides called for reinforcements, more troops poured in, and within hours, the small shoe-shopping expedition had escalated into a three-day battle
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involving over 160,000 soldiers and roughly 50,000 casualties.
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The battle that turned the tide of the entire war, the one that Abraham Lincoln memorialized in the Gettysburg Address,
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started because a bunch of guys needed footwear.
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The most important battle in American history was essentially triggered by a shoe run that went catastrophically wrong.
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25:
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In 1903, a French chemist named Edouard Benedictus was working in his laboratory when he knocked a glass flask off a high shelf.
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It crashed to the floor and shattered, as glass does.
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But something weird happened.
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The flask cracked into a web of fractures but didn't break apart.
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The pieces held together in the shape of the flask.
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Benedictus was confused until his assistant mentioned that the flask had previously contained a solution of cellulose nitrate, a liquid plastic,
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which had dried and coated the inside like an invisible film.
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He filed the discovery away in his mind.
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Shortly after, he read newspaper reports about car accidents where passengers were being horrifically injured by flying shards of windshield glass.
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The connection clicked.
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He sandwiched the plastic coating between layers of glass and patented laminated safety glass.
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Every car windshield, every storefront window, every phone screen protector you have ever used traces its lineage back to one clumsy chemist dropping a flask and being curious enough to ask why it didn't explode into a million pieces.
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26:
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When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, they devastated the American battleship fleet.
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But their primary strategic target was actually the American aircraft carriers, because Japanese admirals knew carriers would dominate the future of naval warfare.
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The USS Enterprise, one of America's most important carriers, was supposed to be in port that morning.
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It was scheduled to arrive on December 6th.
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But a storm at sea delayed its return by just a few critical hours.
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By the time the attack happened, the Enterprise was still safely out at sea, beyond the reach of Japanese bombers.
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That single stroke of weather-related luck proved enormous.
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The Enterprise went on to fight in almost every major Pacific naval battle, including the decisive Battle of Midway six months later,
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where it helped sink four Japanese carriers and turned the entire war around.
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One random storm in the Pacific saved a single ship that arguably saved the entire Allied strategy in the Pacific Theater.
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27:
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In 1948, a Swiss engineer named George de Mestral went on a perfectly normal hunting trip in the Alps with his dog.
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When they got home, both of them were covered in burdock burrs,
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those annoying little seed pods that cling to absolutely everything.
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Most people would just pick them off and complain.
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De Mestral, being an engineer, put one under a microscope.
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What he saw fascinated him: hundreds of tiny hooks on each burr that grabbed onto the tiny loops in fabric and fur.
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He realized you could replicate this principle with synthetic material to create a reusable fastener.
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It took him nearly ten years of experimentation to get the design right,
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but eventually he created what he called Velcro,
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combining the French words "velour" and "crochet," meaning velvet and hooks.
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NASA adopted it.
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The military adopted it.
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Your shoes, bags, jackets, and probably something within arm's reach right now use it.
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All because a guy was annoyed at plant seeds stuck on his dog.
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28:
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In the 1830s, a French artist and inventor named Louis Daguerre had been struggling for years to find a way to permanently capture photographic images.
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He could expose an image onto a silver-coated copper plate,
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but he could not figure out how to develop it clearly.
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One day, frustrated and out of ideas,
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he tossed an exposed plate into a storage cabinet full of various chemicals and forgot about it.
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A few days later,
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he opened the cabinet and found the image perfectly developed with stunning clarity.
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He had no idea why.
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Through a process of elimination, removing one chemical at a time from the cabinet, Daguerre eventually figured out that a thermometer inside had broken,
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and the mercury vapor leaking from it had developed the image.
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The entire art and science of photography,
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something that fundamentally changed how humanity records its own existence, got its breakthrough because a mercury thermometer happened to crack inside a cupboard at exactly the right time.
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29:
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The Russian Revolution of February 1917, the one that toppled a 300-year-old dynasty and ended the reign of the Tsars,
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began on International Women's Day as a march by female textile workers in Petrograd demanding bread.
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Russia was deep in World War One,
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food shortages were devastating, and anger was boiling.
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But here's the overlooked detail:
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February 23rd in Petrograd was unusually warm and sunny for that time of year.
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Temperatures were mild enough that hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who might otherwise have stayed home in the bitter Russian winter decided to go outside.
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They joined the march, not necessarily out of revolutionary fervor,
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but because the weather was nice and the streets were full.
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What started as a bread protest swelled into a mass uprising of nearly 200,000 people in a single day.
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Within a week, the Tsar had abdicated.
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A freak warm day in February helped transform a food protest into one of the most consequential revolutions in human history.
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30:
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In May 1941, a German submarine called U-110 attacked a British convoy in the North Atlantic.
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British warships counterattacked with depth charges, and the explosions damaged the submarine so badly that its captain,
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Fritz-Julius Lemp, panicked.
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Convinced the boat was about to sink any second, he ordered his crew to abandon ship immediately, without following the standard protocol of destroying the Enigma cipher machine and its codebooks.
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The crew jumped into the freezing water.
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But here's the thing.
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The submarine didn't sink.
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It just sat there, floating, with its hatch open and everything intact inside.
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A British boarding party climbed in and found the complete, working Enigma machine along with all its current codebooks and settings, completely undamaged.
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This haul was one of the single most important intelligence captures of World War Two,
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giving British codebreakers at Bletchley Park the keys they needed to crack German naval communications.
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Thousands of Allied ships and countless lives were saved because one submarine captain panicked about 15 minutes too early.
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31:
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By 1241, the Mongol Empire had ripped through Eastern Europe like a chainsaw through butter.
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They had annihilated Polish and Hungarian armies in devastating back-to-back victories,
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and there was essentially nothing between them and the rest of Western Europe.
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The Mongol forces wintered on the Hungarian plains, planning to push further west in spring.
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But the spring of 1242 brought unusually heavy rains.
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The flat Hungarian grasslands, which Mongol cavalry needed for their fast-moving style of warfare, turned into vast, impassable swamps.
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Horses couldn't gallop.
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Supply wagons couldn't move.
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The grazing land their massive herds depended on was underwater.
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Combined with the death of Great Khan Ogedei back in Mongolia, which triggered a succession crisis,
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the environmental conditions gave the Mongols every reason to turn around.
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And they did.
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They withdrew back to Asia and never returned to Western Europe in force.
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A few extra weeks of rain may have been the difference between Europe as we know it and Europe as a Mongol province.
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32:
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In July 1799, a group of French soldiers under Napoleon's command were stationed near the Egyptian port town of Rashid,
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known to Europeans as Rosetta.
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They weren't doing anything remotely archaeological.
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They were just digging and moving dirt to rebuild the walls of an old fort.
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During the excavation, a soldier's shovel struck a large dark slab of stone embedded in the rubble.
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The stone turned out to have three different scripts carved into it:
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ancient Greek, Demotic Egyptian, and hieroglyphics.
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Nobody on site fully understood its significance at the time,
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but scholars quickly realized that because the Greek text could be read, it could be used as a key to decode the hieroglyphics that had baffled researchers for centuries.
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That single slab, the Rosetta Stone, became the foundation for deciphering an entire lost language and unlocking thousands of years of Egyptian history.
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The most important translation tool in archaeology was found by soldiers who were literally just doing construction work.
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33:
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In December 1899, during the Anglo-Boer War, a 25-year-old war correspondent named Winston Churchill escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in Pretoria, South Africa.
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He climbed a wall, dodged sentries, and started walking into the dark South African countryside with no map, no compass, no food, and no plan beyond "head east and hope for the best."
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After hours of stumbling through the night, exhausted and desperate, Churchill approached a house and knocked on the door.
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The man who answered was John Howard, the manager of a local coal mine, and a British sympathizer.
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Howard himself later said:
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"Thank God you came here.
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It is the only house for twenty miles where you would not have been handed over."
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In every direction, the surrounding farms and homes belonged to Boers, who would have arrested or shot Churchill on sight.
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Howard hid Churchill in the mine, eventually smuggling him out on a freight train to safety.
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Churchill returned to Britain as a national hero, launched his political career, and eventually became the Prime Minister who led Britain through World War Two.
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The entire trajectory of the 20th century was shaped in part by a desperate man knocking on the one right door in twenty miles of wrong ones.
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Forgotten keys, sleeping generals, angry chefs, honking geese,
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and a pig with the worst timing in French history.
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That's what actually shaped the world you live in right now.
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Not grand strategies.
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Not brilliant leaders.
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Just a chain of stupid, random, beautiful accidents.
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Now, I know we covered 33, but I guarantee we missed some.
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So here's what I want from you: What is the craziest, dumbest, most absurd coincidence in history that we left out of this video?
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Drop it in the comments, because I know some of you have one that's even wilder than a monkey killing a king.
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And if this video made you rethink everything you thought you knew about history, smash that like button and subscribe,
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because we have a lot more where this came from.
Topics:historycoincidencesaccidentshistorical eventsmonkey biteLincoln assassinationasteroid impactpotato chipsConstantinopleGoogle typo
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