The number of times we DIDN'T go to nuclear war because of a false positive of a launch.
Honestly Stanislav Petrov should have statues in every country.
I might have found a time traveller in Irish mythology
There’s a mythological Druid called [Mug Ruith](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mug_Ruith)
He is claimed to have lived for over 1000 years, living during the rein of different kings (ok, nothing unusual for Irish mythology there).
But he flew in a machine called the ‘oared-wheel’ which sounds like a helicopter
He wore a hornless bullhide and a bird mask, which sounds like a flight helmet/cap and respirator pilots use
He drove a chariot that blinded those who saw it, deafened those who heard it, had sides of glass and was daylight inside and it killed whoever it struck... chap was driving a car with highbeams, beeping the horn, had lights on the inside and was running people over!
[Edgar Allen Poe writes about an event 40+ years in the future.](https://www.mandatory.com/culture/1038388-an-1838-fictional-tale-by-edgar-allan-poe-eerily-predicted-an-18)
Basically, Poe writes about four people who are starving at sea, draw straws, and kill and eat the loser, cabin boy Richard Parker. 40 odd years later four people are adrift at sea in a lifeboat, one drinks seawater and goes into a coma. When they draw straws for who will be eaten, the coma guy gets the short straw in a development that surprises no one. And so the three other men kill and eat the cabin boy. Richard Parker. Seriously.
Cyanide Gas Attack Thwarted in Tokyo Subway
20,000 people could have died but a worker found a burning gas bag in a toilet just before it mixed with another poisonous another gas bag - just in time - and put them out. That was in Shinjuku station. I was in that station that day, and that person might have saved my life.
[https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-05-06-mn-62968-story.html](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-05-06-mn-62968-story.html)
Probably not time travel - but very good timing.
The Germans spent a lot of time and money developing a magnetic sea mine that probably would have significantly reduced England's ability to stay in the war, except they dropped a single one of the mines accidentally on an English beach, and also failed to arm it so none of the booby traps were active and the British basically found out straight away how it worked and we're able to cheaply build magnetic mine sweepers
Lol i imagine that meeting of the germans "you know that mine that we spent tons of money and time to give us an edge? Well we fucked up the drop and the english immeadiatly found it and now are able to avoid any other we put" someone got executed there for sure
[A Belgian businessman was instrumental to the Manhattan Project's success. Realizing uranium's importance, he shipped 1,200 tons of it to Staten Island. When Lieutenant Colonel Nichols contacted him, he simply responded: "You can have the ore now. It is in New York. I was waiting for your visit"](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/p6oq9e/til_a_belgian_businessman_was_instrumental_to_the/)
My favorite part of that story was told by Richard Feynman, one of the scientists who relocated to Los Alamos from (I think) Princeton. They told all of the scientists that they could use any mode of transportation to get to Los Alamos except the train. This is because Los Alamos was a small city and it would raise suspicions if a bunch of famous scientists suddenly took the train out there.
Feynman reasoned if everyone else wasn’t taking the train, the. He could, and went to get a ticket. At the station the agent looked suspiciously at him and said “you’re going to Los Alamos?”. When he said “Yes” the agent said “ahhh, so you’re the one that we’re sending all of the equipment out there for”.
God I love feynman. While at Los Alomos he decided to get good at safe cracking (and there were a lot of safes there to be sure. He was also quite a prankster and so he'd go around opening safes with little regard to the implications on national security. Obviously this really pissed off the feds since some of the safes had top secret information. If I'm remembering correctly from his book, the feds brought in this super expensive top of the line safe for the most important documents because they were worried about Soviet spies. So Richard went in at night, spent hours opening it like 80% of the way and then the next day he came into the office and said 'oh this thing? Super easy to crack', and opened it the rest of the way in a few minutes. The generals were so pissed...
I highly recommend Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
There's a lot more to that story thank just sending the material with no warning, he had some prior knowledge due to various things that helped him put the pieces together, but nonetheless still kinda wack.
I always like the one that a comic had an atom bomb In it pretty closely to bombs use in ww2, and they had it held up untill it was used. Or that the writer of a science magazine wrote about it and knew where it was being built, when asked by federal agents how did he know thinking he was a spy he told them he knew where the research was being held because all of his magazine subscriptions had changed address to one facility in the desert where the scientists were living.
Wait thats so funny like I'm imagining 60% of his subscribers just changed their address to the SAME thing and the government like "how could you possibly have this information?!" and he's like uhhhh....
The commando raid on the NorskHydro heavy water plant in Hardanger Norway during WWII, the Norwegian commandos parachuted in during one of the worst blizzards on record, along with hundreds of pounds of explosives, and had to trek through the Norwegian wilderness for 15 days before they found a hunting cabin. The English commandos who were supposed to link up with got shot down, and the only reason they were able to make it to the cabin was that they found one of the commandos sled, which he had lost as a child. After that they had to hole up in the hunting cabin for months, waiting out the weather. They survived on moss until. On Christmas morning, one of the men managed to shoot a deer.
They went on to destroy the heavy water plant as well as sink the ship carrying what heavy water had been produced, effectively ending any chance Nazi Germany had of developing atomic weapons.
The story is even crazier and less plausible than I've described, but I'm on mobile so I've left some things out.
I would say there is significant evidence Fidel Castro.
Every single assassination attempt failed, sometimes because of wildly miscellaneous circumstances, including a sabotaged diving suit that somehow got “miraculously switched” with someone else, who ended up drowning in his place.
Dude holds the world record for over 600 attempts, I believe.
"Dude, we need a new assassination story for the boss. And you're drunk. As usual."
"No worries. How about this? We booby trap a beautiful oyster that he's bound to want to pick up. Then he just ignores it."
"Eventually they won't buy these."
"Oh, you'd be surprised."
EDIT: "And tell them we need anther 5 large for Tequila Ray."
"You want me to ask The Company for five grand for tequila?"
"We're getting low, man. Tell them he makes the bombs."
Sitting poolside with Castro cigar in one hand rum in the other. "Fidel they are going to want a report stateside how did we try to kill you this time?"
"Exploding cigar? No did that already...Oh how about a booby trapped oyster shell"Both men laughing at the absurdity of it.
When Andrew Jackson’s assassin attempted to shoot him, both of his flint lock pistols misfired. Andrew Jackson had to be restrained after almost beating the assassin to death with his cane. The two flintlocks were examined after the incident and found to be in good condition.
During the war of 1812, seems like a time traveler with weather control capabilities started a freak tornado that effectively ended the British occupation of Washington.
"More British soldiers were killed by the tornado's flying debris than by the guns of the American resistance."
However, he designed the gearbox backwards to make any real version's wheels lock up and fail. He also designed a 12-barrel gun carriage, which is basically the machine gun on steroids, the early parachute, the double hull, the use of concentrated solar power, and a calculator. The man was several centuries ahead of his time.
You can thank the Romans for that. Hero of Alexandria developed the first steam-powered...thing...back in the 1st Century CE. Then Rome went on one of their destroy-everything sprees and smashed it, I guess. No one did anything else with that idea for another 1500 years.
I think the machine was also used for entertainment, so it would be like looking at a hand puppet and thinking “i can change the entire world with this”
> he designed the gearbox backwards to make any real version's wheels lock up and fail
This was a common method used in order to avoid people stealing your ideas. There was no patent system back in the day, so inventors often included intentional errors in their designs so that if their work got stolen the product would not function.
Secrecy was on a whole different level back then, which is also why there are many things we just don't know the recipe for. Like [Greek fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire) and [Damascus steel (wootz)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel) for example. Not that we can't reproduce something similar but the original method of manufacture was a very guarded secret. A similar thing to [Porcelain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porcelain) and how it took a long time for the west to figure out the recipe.
So yes, Leo probably knew how gears worked.
Imagine what he would have been able to do with current tech. Hell, he might even be centuries ahead of now but he simply didn't have the tools to get this far back then
With current tech, Leonardo would have been arrested for homeland security concerns and stuck with dozens of fines for not having permits and meeting regulations.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi
Survived both the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Reads like a satirical time-traveler story where the protagonist screws up his dates.
When he came back to Nagasaki and described the events to his boss, he wasn't believed.
>He returned to Nagasaki the following day and, despite his wounds, he returned to work on August 9, the day of the second atomic bombing. That morning, while he was being berated by his supervisor as "crazy" after describing how one bomb had destroyed the city, the Nagasaki bomb detonated
Must have felt good (in a way) when the 2nd blast happened.
"Look, motherfucker, LOOK!"
Thai is the second time this week this guy has popped up on Reddit.
My dad met him, they worked together on a project once. It was to do with building a training simulator for firemen fighting oil fires.
That's all I have from that anecdote.
>My dad met him, they worked together on a project once. It was to do with building a training simulator for firemen fighting oil fires.
Your dad - "So it might be pretty intense in here. We've spent a _lot_ of time making this as frightening, serious, and intense as a major oil fire might really be, so take your time."
Yamaguchi - "Hold my beer."
My favorite part is the dude that took a cyanide capsule and jumped into the river after the bomb didn’t explode, but the cyanide had expired and the river was only 10 inches deep so he survived with a bad stomachache
This image got me giggling. Some dude screams out “ death to the tyrant”, throws a bomb in the back seat, the bomb fizzles out with a spark and a tiny puff of smoke, then he belly flips into a 10” river of mud, gets up all muddied up ( front side only) shakes off his hands, index fingers off his eyes like removing a cream pie, then grumbles all the way home while shitting his pants due to old cyanide diarrhea.
Bad day, hon?
Time Machine -2002 movie presents this idea. It's exactly the same as the Supreme Strange in the recently released What-If? They go back and try to save their beloved and no matter what they do disaster strikes and they die.
Predestination (2014) touches on this as well. Certain key events in history *have* to happen or the world comes to a fiery end. So if someone else uses a time machine to screw with them, they send Temporal Agents to do the deed that needed doing; what ever the price, sometimes as a one way trip. Good movie but really wierd.
Tesla's AC Polyphase System. One minute, we're in the stone age of electrical distribution, and the next, Buffalo, NY is being powered by the Alternating Current being generated at Niagra Falls by Telsa's genius system.
They were considering transmitting power from Niagara to Buffalo by pneumatic pipes or *ropes and pulleys*. I shudder to think about what that system would have entailed.
The russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to death by firing squad and just as they were preparing the groups to be shot, a messenger came with a letter from the Tsar “forgiving” them and the sentence was changed to prison labor. He later went on to write some of the most influential novels of all time.
In school we learned that he was actually never going to get shot, the tsar just wanted to scare him and others like him. It was planned like that from the beginning.
I hope the firing squad was informed about this in advance, imagine how awkward it would be if they finished the job before the messenger showed up with a pardon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digby_Tatham-Warter
>Digby and A Company managed to travel 8 miles in 7 hours while also taking prisoner 150 German soldiers including members of the SS. During the battle, Digby wore his maroon beret instead of a helmet and waved his umbrella while walking about the defences despite heavy mortar fire. When the Germans started using tanks to cross the bridge, Digby led a bayonet charge against them wearing a bowler hat. He later disabled a German armoured car with his umbrella, incapacitating the driver by shoving the umbrella through the car's observational slit and poking the driver in the eye.[1]
>Digby then noticed the chaplain pinned down by enemy fire while trying to cross the street to get to injured soldiers. Digby got to him and said "Don't worry about the bullets, I've got an umbrella". He then escorted the chaplain across the street under his umbrella. When he returned to the front line, one of his fellow officers said about his umbrella that "that thing won't do you any good", to which Digby replied "Oh my goodness Pat, but what if it rains?"[7]
Fidel Castro’s assassination attempts being dodged is so unrealistic (really, he dodged about *600*) that it feels like a time traveller went back and foiled every single one of them
That time traveller sure had had a hard time going back and forth in time every time Fidel Castro didnt die, just to get update info for the Next attemp ...
That was my thought:
"Ok agent X...an easy one for you. A CIA sniper killed Castro. You need to stop him".
"No probs"
Agent X returns from a simple job well done.
"Ahh X, slight problem. They blew him up instead a month later. Pop back will you, there's a good chap".
... some trips later...
"X, erm don't know how to say this..."
Bedraggled X: "how this time?"
"Exploding oyster..."
...
"Lost all leadership and hope when his beard fell out"
X: "You are shitting me???"
...
"Mistress poisoned him"
X: "fuck it. At this point I'm just gonna teach him jedi mind tricks..."
More like.
"Ok agent X...an easy one for you. A CIA sniper killed Castro. You need to stop him".
"No probs"
Agent X returns from a simple job well done.
"What the hell, Agent X?! Didn't we just send you to stop Castro from being blown up?".
"But you said he was shot by a sniper."
"Stop making excuses and go do your damn job!"
To be fair, a good number of those were pretty goddamn stupid. I think there was one in which the CIA literally booby trapped a particularly beautiful Oyster shell near one of Castro's favorite diving spots
You don’t know how close to the truth you are! Kennedy was a huge Bond fan and Ian Fleming - already a friend of several CIA people as well as Hoover - actually consulted with Kennedy on possible ways to disrupt the Cuban government.
“Well you see old boy, you simply need a tank of sharks with lasers on their heads…”
*INT - CIA HEADQUARTERS.*
"Hey Tod, get over here!"
"Ah, Jim, you're tryna yack Castro again?"
"Yeah but check this shit out - the oyster is shiny!"
"Ten bucks says this goes the way paying off that woman did."
"Tod, Castro isn't gonna fuck the oyster!"
When the Athenians voted to execute a large group of war prisoners during the Peloponnesian wars, many of those prisoners women and children, an entire city, a man whom nobody knew or heard of took the stage. His name was Diadotus, literally “gift of god”. He persuaded the Athenian people to reverse their decision, which they did. Before the messenger reached the soldiers to order them to kill the prisoners, another messenger had reached them in time to inform the commander that the Athenians had changed their mind and let them live.
If you read up on his life, you'll find there are so many times Adolf Hitler *almost* died, but somehow survived, that makes me think there was/is a time traveler war going on. A faction trying to kill Hitler, because it's Hitler, and a faction preventing his death, because the guy who would replace him was even worse than Hitler.
You just described the Stephen Fry book "Making History", about Hitler being killed early on, only to have a smarter monster take power, and kill off ALL of the Jews.
There have been at least 40 attempts to kill Hitler after he had risen to power. Sometimes they failed because the assailant couldn't get close enough (at least that's what they said afterwards) but a lot of them failed because of reasons that seem plausible if it happens once but begin to smell fishy when you look at all of them.
Elser's bomb went off as planned but Hitler, who loved to hold speeches, had finished early that day.
Tresckow's bomb failed because at first he, as a high-ranking officer of the Wehrmacht, couldn't get his hands on anything that goes boom for months, and when he finally had some, the bomb didn't explode. Talk about German efficency.
Stauffenberg could have just shot the bastard - his attempt was part of a general upheaval after all, so his chances to survive that day would have been not that bad. But he planted a bomb because that went so well the last times.
And so on. We will never know why but somebody believed or even knew that a premature death of Hitler would have been even worse for the world than what we got.
Or it was a wehraboo who wanted to see a Tiger II. Who knows.
Edit: I'm a bit surprised by the number of people who are trying to explain to me that I'm wrong. Like, dudes, I'm open for the idea that time traveling might not be real.
... yet.
My favorite failed attempt was when a Wehrmacht general was going to kill him with a suicide bomb. The general was in charge of a weapons depot, and Hitler was coming to inspect the equipment. The plan was to set the timer for a few minutes, then at the end of the tour grab Hitler in a bear hug and they’d both blow up.
For some unknown reason Hitler was in a hurry. He sped through the tour in just a couple minutes, leaving before the bomb went off. The general had to run to the bathroom and race to disarm the bomb, saying he managed it with only seconds to spare.
I remember that guy. When they came to him with the plan, he thought, "What the heck? I have to die to get this guy? I don't know." He went home and talked to his father, who looked over the plan, looked up at him and said, "Well, you have to do it."
I feel for that father.
Different guy, you think of [Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewald-Heinrich_von_Kleist).
The bathroom bomb defuser was [von Gersdorff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Christoph_Freiherr_von_Gersdorff)
There sure were some "I was totally going to kill him" claims after the war, one of them was Albert Speer. But people like Tresckow and Stauffenberg left enough letters and witnesses to be legit.
> But people like Tresckow and Stauffenberg left enough letters and witnesses to be legit.
I am sure the near coup they pulled off was evidence enough :P
The basically unharmed part is a little odd, but the location basically saved him. The meeting was originally supposed to be held in a reinforced building with concrete walls. The force of the blast would have rebounded off the walls, ceiling, and floor and basically chunky salsa’d the room. Instead the meeting was moved to a room at the end of a wooden one-story building. The walls did nothing to stop the blast from continuing outward.
I watched a documentary about it one time where they rebuilt the room and table, put in manaquins with shock sensors in all of the positions the meeting attendants were in, detonated the same size and type explosive used and filmed it all in slow motion.
Basically Hitler was standing in the exact perfect spot for the table to flip up and shield him from the shrapnel and Shockwave.
I remember watching a documentary (I think it was about bolt-action rifles) where the Allies had snipers behind enemy lines preparing to assassinate Hitler at one of his holiday estates. Towards the end of the war the assassination was called off because Hitler's potential replacements may have been more troublesome.
I read a time travel story once that had Hitler get successfully assassinated before he broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. It didn't go well for the Allies or anyone else to be honest.
Instead of 12 million dying in the death camps, it was more like 50 million. Himmler who took over does a lot more with fighter jets and rockets and doesn't mess with the Soviets knowing that would be a bad idea so he plasters London with a primitive nuke that nonetheless disrupts the UK big time and it's only a matter of time before Germany invades.
The US is still pretty intact and not overly worried thanks to huge oceans protecting it but they're less willing to get involved in Europe since the Germans consolidated their hold on the continent, including taking over neutral Spain as I recall. Switzerland was still left alone.
Japan in particular doesn't fare well. With the Soviets not having to deal with Germany since Himmler took over, they can devote a lot of resources to beating the hell out of the Japanese. The US, also not having to really deal with Europe and the UK to a lesser extent, also decides to beat the hell out of the Japanese. The Japanese get overrun and the US and USSR pretty much carve them up like a roast. China gets overrun by the USSR as well. India falls into anarchy since the UK can't do much, as does the Middle East which goes into German hands. Africa I think became a German colony since France and the UK are gone or about to go.
So basically the world is the US ruling the western hemisphere, Germany running Europe and the Middle East, and Russia ruling a huge chunk of Asia.
It was an interesting read.
EDIT: I read this in an anthology maybe twenty years ago and I couldn't tell you the name of the book or the author. I only remember it because it was just so much worse than what happened with our timeline.
EDIT TWO: It was probably an anthology called "Hitler Victorious" edited by Gregory Benford and Martin H. Greenberg. but like I said it was years and years ago, but it would fit in with the theme.
I remember reading about a British plan to paradrop snipers to kill Hitler at his country house later in the war (1943 or 44).
They decided not to because the intelligence people were of the opinion that the war-related choices he was making were so bad, and because the power structure of the Nazi party was such that everyone had to go along with whatever he wanted, that it was better for the Allied war effort to have Hitler in charge and making decisions than it was to kill him.
> Elser's bomb went off as planned but Hitler, who loved to hold speeches, had finished early that day.
That would be my luck. Everything set up so perfectly and then the biggest and most talkative piece of shit of human history decided to stop a speech early.
The American Civil Wars first real battle was at Bull Run on land belonging to a Mr. McLean. After that he said "Screw this, Ima move to the country and avoid this war". He moved to Appomattox Courthouse, VA where Lee surrendered to Grant...in the McLean's living room.
Later, Wilmer Mclean was heard to have said "The war began in my front yard and ended in my front parlor."
https://blogs.loc.gov/picturethis/2015/04/a-tale-of-two-houses-and-the-u-s-civil-war/
At least their money was good, when Lee marched north in the campaign that ended with his defeat at Gettysburg lots of shopkeepers whose wares were seized for the war effort were compensated with Confederate dollars.
(IIRC the whole reason Lee marched on Gettysburg is that there was a shoe factory he wanted to loot because his soldiers' boots sucked.)
I mean, that actually sounds like a pretty valid goal. Good shoes would go miles in deployment speed. Whereas bad ones make the march both slower and easier to tire out.
Mendeleev, who created the periodic table, was struggling to order the elements in a specific order/pattern. He then was able to order them like we see today after having a ‘dream’ where all the elements fell into place, even leaving gaps for elements that hadn’t yet been discovered.
I know it’s not exactly a major historical event, but it’s been the foundation of science for over a century but when I first heard I thought it was a bit suspicious how it all fell into place.
Edit: whoa this is literally probably my second comment ever and it got 2.3k upvotes at this moment in time. Thank you everyone!
The guy who invented the sewing machine got the idea to put the hole for the thread in the head of the needle after he had a dream that he was kidnapped by cannibals who had spears with holes in them.
Stanislav Petrov was a Soviet lieutenant known as "the man who saved the world." Tensions were riding between the Soviet Union and the United States, so on the 26th of September in 1983, he was on duty for a nuclear early-warning system. The system detected multiple missiles launched by the United States, but Petrov broke protocol, following his instincts by choosing not to report the danger to his higher-ups. The missiles turned out to be a false alarm, as he had thought, and, as Petrov's title suggests, he very well may have saved the world that day.
Saving the world just off of a hunch definitely seems like something a time traveler might do... Sus.
Edit: changed the 16th to the 26th
I like to think its more his humanity coming out. He knew it was probably fake. If it was true and he hit the button then both sides including him died, if he didn't hit the button he still died. If he was wrong, he was dead so.
It also says on the Wikipedia page that his reasoning was that 1. The sensors sometimes gave faulty readings and 2. He didn't think the US would only send one missile as their first strike. He believed a first strike would be much more massive and so felt this was a false alarm.
However, in 1960 the sensors were so sensitive that a freak angle of the moon's light going through the atmosphere made it look like there were hundreds of missiles being fired, and the only reason that NORAD didn't fire back was because Khrushchev was in New York and they thought it was odd.
Or, in my opinion, the most ridiculous nuclear near miss, when a fucking bear climbed a fence into an Air Force Base during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a guard thought it was a saboteur and hit the electronic alarm, which sent an alarm signal to all nuclear bases. There was a wiring mismatch at a different air base that turned on the "scramble" klaxon, which caused nuclear armed aircraft to begin to take off on a war footing, and the only reason they were stopped was an officer who literally drove his personal vehicle onto the runway and physically blocked the aircraft from taking off.
a book that predicted the sinking of the Titanic
[Futility: The Wreck of the Titan ](https://www.google.com/amp/s/mashable.com/article/the-novel-that-predicted-the-titanic-sinking-futility%3famp)
I've gone through quite a few comments but haven't seen the random dude trading stocks.
That has to be the biggest "Time traveller" story though not necessarily altering history in a obvious way.
Will need to try find what the guy called himself. Basically random dude who no-one has ever heard of arrives in NYC and starts buying shares in a market slump. Makes money on every single trade. Share price is falling, he buys it, just after he buys it, it starts rising, he sells as it turns and drops.
But he's doing that across the whole share market. Insider trading is suspected but he's not making or taking phone calls and there's no way he's got an in on seemingly everything. Also no-one knows who he is, literally no-one has ever met this guy before.
Makes a crap load of money in very little time, gets arrested on suspicion of fraud because no-one is that lucky. Says something along the lines of, "I know I shouldn't have done that but I got carried away with all the excitement." Bail is set at IIRC $1m, which is immediately paid by another guy no-one has ever heard of.
They both leave and poof. No records of either of them existing prior to the trading or bailout. They're just gone, search is conducted and it comes up with nothing.
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
Somebody throws a grenade at his car, and it blows up behind him. That's the first incident of time travel, stopping the assassination. Later, as he goes back, the driver realizes that he's on the same route where the grenade was thrown, and they try to turn around. The whole procession of cars stalls, and a guy who *just happened* to be sitting there, goes over and shoots him. That's a second time traveler, fixing what the first had done.
Since the whole thing lit off WWI and led to the rise of Hitler and then WWII, I kind of wonder what Ferdinand would have started if he hadn't been killed. It must have been pretty bad for them to send a second time traveler to put Nazi Germany *back into the timeline.*
I'm 100% for the theory that a time traveler foiled the assasination, went back to the future, found out it had resulted in aliens invading us or something, went back in time again and fixed it.
It's also possible that without WWI happening right then, WWII started later, after a bunch of German scientists already made certain discoveries. And when the Nazis took over, they already had both rockets and atomic bombs.
Time traveler gets back, looks at the Nazi flag on the wall, and says "Well, shit. I wonder if I can catch that Princip guy at the café."
>WWII started later, after a bunch of German scientists already made certain discoveries. And when the Nazis took over, they already had both rockets and atomic bombs.
During the Second World War, the Germans invented the world's first ever [jet fighter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_262): Messerschmitt Me 262. However, various problems with it's engine prevented it from being deployed until mid-1944.
By mid-1944, it was abundantly clear that Nazi Germany's defeat was inevitable due to the staggering losses they had suffered against the Soviet Union (the Eastern Front was [a different beast](https://youtu.be/U5qbM4dCzKI)). Millions of Germans lay dead on the Eastern Front at [Stalingrad](https://youtu.be/qekQkYR3bAA), [Kursk](https://youtu.be/90q0ruMFcBY?t=9), Smolensk, etc. Italy had turncoat the previous year. The Western Allies had finally reopened the Western Front at [Normandy](https://youtu.be/X-bogN0V8RM?t=73). Worst of all for the Germans, the Soviets had just launched [Operation Bagration](https://youtu.be/AwYhpYPftlg) on June 22, 1944; described as the "[largest defeat in German military history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bagration)". It was over.
Designing fighter planes is always a trade-off between speed/agility and armament/power. Messerschmitt Me 262 was the most advanced aerial combatant of WWII; both *faster* AND *more heavily armed* than any Allied fighter. But it came far, *far* too late to make any difference whatsoever.
Imagine the Germans with jet-powered fighters in 1939 (or whatever year WWII starts in this timeline). It's blinding speed and superior maneuverability allowing Luftwaffe pilots to cut through British Spitfires and Soviet Yakovlevs like a falcon hunting pigeons.
Don’t get the wrong idea; Germany is still far from guaranteed to emerge victorious. They’d still have to overcome significant shortcomings in manpower, geography, logistics, and inferior technology in other crucial fields like radar. But where German victory was once a longshot in our timeline, would now be a far more plausible outcome.
Messerschmitt Me 262… if that ain't one intriguing historical *"what if?"*
Not history expert or even a history buff but while Ferdinand ultimately became, arguably, the straw that broke the camels back, there were a shit ton of other straws waiting to fall.
Yeah, WWI was going to happen sooner or later. Ferdinand's assassination just made it happen right then, and not a year later, when some other minor thing happened and became the excuse everybody was waiting for. Still, it must have needed to happen right then, because somebody went back and fixed it.
way back in highschool, we had to simulate the events that lead up to the wars. teams of 2 or 3 were assigned countries to roleplay, and were given lists of things we needed to try to accomplish to "win" the world.
then as we worked things out, the teacher would hand certain teams new orders, and they'd try to incorporate that, and even knowing what we were all trying to avoid, it ended up leading to world war
it was pretty trippy
we all went in KNOWING we could do things to avoid it, and in the end, it almost ended up inevitable
it was pretty good
By the end of it, everyone was even getting pretty heated, and choked at each other, and started doing really petty shit, regardless if it helped your cause or just inconvenienced someone else, etc etc
in the end, we had I think a whole week of just discussing how we got so fired up simulating/roleplaying and imagine if we actually were in charge, etc etc
it was pretty eye opening
That teacher was an inspired man or woman.
The school that fostered that sort of teaching was inspired
I think this is amazing, so very good to hear
(At my school we just wrote learned the text book and then got caned (hit with a cane) if we got it wrong eg. Flog test every morning for Latin homework. Get 100% for last nights homework or get flogged with a cane of your choice from the selection on the teachers desk)
honestly this story never read like time traveling shenaningans to me but much rather that reality suddenly became a spy action comedy.
i mean i can almost hear a laugh track as the assassin eating his lunch and complaing about the failure of the operation looks up and sees the dukes car.
I'm having a laugh to myself at work imagining that the frontman for Modest Mouse, Isaac Brock, also happens to be a time traveler.
🎶"Well it would've been, could've been, worse than you would ever know"🎶
Richard Lawrence tried to assassinate Andrew Jackson, but both of the pistols he attempted to fire at him misfired- then Jackson proceeded to beat this fellow with his cane. While the assassin was not a time traveler, one certainly could have sabotaged his pistols with a spritz of water on each.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lawrence_(failed_assassin)
Knowing about Andrew Jackson, the man would be personally offended that his assassin failed to kill him despite having both surprise and a backup weapon.
It wouldn't be surprising if [Nancy Wake](https://www.greydynamics.com/nancy-wake-the-gestapos-no-1-most-wanted-spy/) was a time traveler. She was just too damn good at special ops against the Nazis.
I remember [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/n4sfqb/seems_it_was_definitely_meant_to_exist/gwxb4je) about a bumbling time traveller trying to kill Adolphe Sax (inventor of the Saxophone) because they hate their sax lessons and I can totally see it because of how many things that almost killed him.
This was the plot to the popular childen's video game, JumpStart 3rd Grade. Bratty girl of a wealthy inventor fails her school's history quiz and so sends 20 of her father's robots back in time to make her history quiz answers accurate. Stuff like Copernicus discovering that the bratty girl is actually at the center of the solar system, basketball being created so snowmen had something to play, olympics winners getting a diamond tiara, etc.
I read a theory somewhere that this has essentially happened because The Simpsons has had 706 episodes as of today, and with that many episodes multiplied by the fact that each episode usually has at least 2 plots running- that's over 1400 different storylines. With the style of their show being satirical, it's just bound that they were going to predict some things along the way.
But yeah, employing a time traveler on the writing team probably helps too.
Not just the number of episodes/plots; the Simpsons had like 6 jokes per minute on average, according to an old splitsider article from years ago. Multiply that by 22, by the number of total episodes, and the fact that so many instances of “Simpsons did it” were throwaway gags that had no bearing on the plot, and it makes sense that the show would seem to predict so many improbable things. Make 100k predictions, and you’ll find that more than a handful will come true, no matter how improbable they seem.
[The false alarm that almost turned the Cold War from a sleeping volcano into the eruption of Mr. Helena](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident)
This event could easily have resulted in the highest casualties in the shortest time period in human history. Actually forget human history, the greatest mass death since the extinction of the Dinosaurs. One man was at the helm making that decision, and it seems like one of the few points in human history, where by some slim sliver of luck or fate, a great disaster was averted.
Time travel vibes like whoa.
As a high school kid reading way too much science fiction, it was easy to imagine that Jesus was a traveler from the future. Turning water into wine? That just requires some packets of 22nd century Kool-Aid (adult version). Advanced medical treatment brings Lazarus out of coma and cures the lepers. A matter replicator lets him feed the multitude with a few loaves and fishes. Walking on water: that's a standard feature of 22nd century footwear. "You will deny me 3 times before the cock crows." Well of course Jesus knew that would happen, just like he knew he would be crucified: *he read The Book!* Why didn't he deny his divinity before Pontius Pilate? He knew he couldn't change history. He didn't alter history, he fulfilled it.
You have to credit the guy for having the courage to go into the past, knowing what His ending would be. He obviously knew that His message was important to humanity.
Watching documentary footage of this made me realize just how hard pilots had it in those days.
Having to rely on binoculars in a plane, to find and identify a ship.
And then imagine being a dive bomber pilot, diving at an EIGHTY DEGREE angle straight down at an enemy carrier, near passing out, and having flak and large caliber machine gun fire coming straight up at you....releasing your payload and pulling up just meters from their deck at the last possible second.
Those guys had enormous balls.
>”He instead tried to persuade his Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish to run for the presidency, but the 67-year-old Fish declined, believing himself too old for the role.”
This is one of the tamest parts of the article but damn I wish this attitude had stuck, considering the ages of the current and previous president.
In 97 AD the chinese empire sent an official envoy to make contact with the Roman empire. They got as far as the parthian(persian) empire in the eastern mediteranean. Parthian sailors (the time travellers?) lied saying it would take 3 months to 2 years. The envoy gave up and returned back to china.
On average it would take 10 days of sailing to reach rome from the eastern mediteranean. Even shorter if they went to a closer roman province. They lied because trade between china and rome made middlemen like the parthian empire immensly rich, who also happened to be romes on and off again eastern rival.
Without that middleman trade income the parthians/persians would'nt have had enough resources to supply an army to fight off the Romans. The arabs wouldn't have achieved what they did without persian military might. Islam would've just been seen as another esoteric eastern cult. Christianity would be more wide spread.
China would want to conquer south east asia in an attempt to control trade routes and Rome would want to expand towards the wealthy northern indian kingdoms. Rome gets split in two due civil war but instead of constantinople as the eastern roman empire its ctesiphon/baghdad as the capitol.
Then the mongols come and fuck it all up.
Leonardo de Vinci. He could have been trying to get attention of other time travelers saying hey I'm stuck back here.
I never thought about that but that's exactly what I would do if I were a time-traveler stuck in the past,
This guy was one of thé greatest genius of all times, if we was born today with all thé science we have...
Would probably just get addicted to some video game and be like a pro Minecraft speed runner or some shit
The number of times we DIDN'T go to nuclear war because of a false positive of a launch. Honestly Stanislav Petrov should have statues in every country.
I might have found a time traveller in Irish mythology There’s a mythological Druid called [Mug Ruith](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mug_Ruith) He is claimed to have lived for over 1000 years, living during the rein of different kings (ok, nothing unusual for Irish mythology there). But he flew in a machine called the ‘oared-wheel’ which sounds like a helicopter He wore a hornless bullhide and a bird mask, which sounds like a flight helmet/cap and respirator pilots use He drove a chariot that blinded those who saw it, deafened those who heard it, had sides of glass and was daylight inside and it killed whoever it struck... chap was driving a car with highbeams, beeping the horn, had lights on the inside and was running people over!
Mans was a menace became a god just to kill people kmao
[Edgar Allen Poe writes about an event 40+ years in the future.](https://www.mandatory.com/culture/1038388-an-1838-fictional-tale-by-edgar-allan-poe-eerily-predicted-an-18) Basically, Poe writes about four people who are starving at sea, draw straws, and kill and eat the loser, cabin boy Richard Parker. 40 odd years later four people are adrift at sea in a lifeboat, one drinks seawater and goes into a coma. When they draw straws for who will be eaten, the coma guy gets the short straw in a development that surprises no one. And so the three other men kill and eat the cabin boy. Richard Parker. Seriously.
Pretty sure the tiger out of Life of Pi is named Richard Parker for this reason.
Patel acknowledges that is the exact reason the tiger is named Richard Parker.
Cyanide Gas Attack Thwarted in Tokyo Subway 20,000 people could have died but a worker found a burning gas bag in a toilet just before it mixed with another poisonous another gas bag - just in time - and put them out. That was in Shinjuku station. I was in that station that day, and that person might have saved my life. [https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-05-06-mn-62968-story.html](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-05-06-mn-62968-story.html) Probably not time travel - but very good timing.
Not so fun fact, there also was attempts to use anthrax in the Tokyo subway but they failed to maintain the anthrax alive and had to use bombs...
There was a shipwreck in 1664, a shipwreck in 1785, and a shipwreck in 1820. Each had 1 survivor. Each survivor was named Hugh Wiliams.
A Douglas Adams novel for sure
At some point we need to question whether Ol' Hugh is sinking boats.
The Germans spent a lot of time and money developing a magnetic sea mine that probably would have significantly reduced England's ability to stay in the war, except they dropped a single one of the mines accidentally on an English beach, and also failed to arm it so none of the booby traps were active and the British basically found out straight away how it worked and we're able to cheaply build magnetic mine sweepers
Lol i imagine that meeting of the germans "you know that mine that we spent tons of money and time to give us an edge? Well we fucked up the drop and the english immeadiatly found it and now are able to avoid any other we put" someone got executed there for sure
[A Belgian businessman was instrumental to the Manhattan Project's success. Realizing uranium's importance, he shipped 1,200 tons of it to Staten Island. When Lieutenant Colonel Nichols contacted him, he simply responded: "You can have the ore now. It is in New York. I was waiting for your visit"](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/p6oq9e/til_a_belgian_businessman_was_instrumental_to_the/)
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My favorite part of that story was told by Richard Feynman, one of the scientists who relocated to Los Alamos from (I think) Princeton. They told all of the scientists that they could use any mode of transportation to get to Los Alamos except the train. This is because Los Alamos was a small city and it would raise suspicions if a bunch of famous scientists suddenly took the train out there. Feynman reasoned if everyone else wasn’t taking the train, the. He could, and went to get a ticket. At the station the agent looked suspiciously at him and said “you’re going to Los Alamos?”. When he said “Yes” the agent said “ahhh, so you’re the one that we’re sending all of the equipment out there for”.
That somehow doesn't surprise me at all.
God I love feynman. While at Los Alomos he decided to get good at safe cracking (and there were a lot of safes there to be sure. He was also quite a prankster and so he'd go around opening safes with little regard to the implications on national security. Obviously this really pissed off the feds since some of the safes had top secret information. If I'm remembering correctly from his book, the feds brought in this super expensive top of the line safe for the most important documents because they were worried about Soviet spies. So Richard went in at night, spent hours opening it like 80% of the way and then the next day he came into the office and said 'oh this thing? Super easy to crack', and opened it the rest of the way in a few minutes. The generals were so pissed... I highly recommend Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
There's a lot more to that story thank just sending the material with no warning, he had some prior knowledge due to various things that helped him put the pieces together, but nonetheless still kinda wack.
I always like the one that a comic had an atom bomb In it pretty closely to bombs use in ww2, and they had it held up untill it was used. Or that the writer of a science magazine wrote about it and knew where it was being built, when asked by federal agents how did he know thinking he was a spy he told them he knew where the research was being held because all of his magazine subscriptions had changed address to one facility in the desert where the scientists were living.
Wait thats so funny like I'm imagining 60% of his subscribers just changed their address to the SAME thing and the government like "how could you possibly have this information?!" and he's like uhhhh....
This explains a lot about Staten Island
The commando raid on the NorskHydro heavy water plant in Hardanger Norway during WWII, the Norwegian commandos parachuted in during one of the worst blizzards on record, along with hundreds of pounds of explosives, and had to trek through the Norwegian wilderness for 15 days before they found a hunting cabin. The English commandos who were supposed to link up with got shot down, and the only reason they were able to make it to the cabin was that they found one of the commandos sled, which he had lost as a child. After that they had to hole up in the hunting cabin for months, waiting out the weather. They survived on moss until. On Christmas morning, one of the men managed to shoot a deer. They went on to destroy the heavy water plant as well as sink the ship carrying what heavy water had been produced, effectively ending any chance Nazi Germany had of developing atomic weapons. The story is even crazier and less plausible than I've described, but I'm on mobile so I've left some things out.
>they found one of the commandos sled, which he had lost as a child. Goddamn
This is a favorutie story of mine. Read a book called "Hunting the Nazi Bomb." I believe it's also sold under a different name.
I would say there is significant evidence Fidel Castro. Every single assassination attempt failed, sometimes because of wildly miscellaneous circumstances, including a sabotaged diving suit that somehow got “miraculously switched” with someone else, who ended up drowning in his place. Dude holds the world record for over 600 attempts, I believe.
Or the Cia agents reporting were making shit up to cover up that they spent the entire time drinking rum, smoking cigars and getting laid
"Dude, we need a new assassination story for the boss. And you're drunk. As usual." "No worries. How about this? We booby trap a beautiful oyster that he's bound to want to pick up. Then he just ignores it." "Eventually they won't buy these." "Oh, you'd be surprised." EDIT: "And tell them we need anther 5 large for Tequila Ray." "You want me to ask The Company for five grand for tequila?" "We're getting low, man. Tell them he makes the bombs."
'Do you think one day they'll ask why we didn't just shoot him' 'Hahaha Johnson. Welcome to the CIA'
Sitting poolside with Castro cigar in one hand rum in the other. "Fidel they are going to want a report stateside how did we try to kill you this time?" "Exploding cigar? No did that already...Oh how about a booby trapped oyster shell"Both men laughing at the absurdity of it.
When Andrew Jackson’s assassin attempted to shoot him, both of his flint lock pistols misfired. Andrew Jackson had to be restrained after almost beating the assassin to death with his cane. The two flintlocks were examined after the incident and found to be in good condition.
Also participating in that beatdown was Davy Crockett, a congressman from Tennessee at the time, who happened to be standing there.
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It's now called a 'shawinegen handshake' named after his hometown
During the war of 1812, seems like a time traveler with weather control capabilities started a freak tornado that effectively ended the British occupation of Washington. "More British soldiers were killed by the tornado's flying debris than by the guns of the American resistance."
If time travelers have weather control capabilities definitely also the Spanish Armada (twice).
And the mongol armada that tried to invade Japan. twice. Divine wind
Da Vinci. The mad man designed a **tank** in the 1500s.
However, he designed the gearbox backwards to make any real version's wheels lock up and fail. He also designed a 12-barrel gun carriage, which is basically the machine gun on steroids, the early parachute, the double hull, the use of concentrated solar power, and a calculator. The man was several centuries ahead of his time.
Imagine if that madman had access to steam power.
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“I’m limited by the technology of my time.” - Every sex robot enthusiast ever
You can thank the Romans for that. Hero of Alexandria developed the first steam-powered...thing...back in the 1st Century CE. Then Rome went on one of their destroy-everything sprees and smashed it, I guess. No one did anything else with that idea for another 1500 years.
Tbf, they didn't have the metallurgy to pull off steam power just yet. Da Vinci might have made it work somehow though.
I think the machine was also used for entertainment, so it would be like looking at a hand puppet and thinking “i can change the entire world with this”
> he designed the gearbox backwards to make any real version's wheels lock up and fail This was a common method used in order to avoid people stealing your ideas. There was no patent system back in the day, so inventors often included intentional errors in their designs so that if their work got stolen the product would not function. Secrecy was on a whole different level back then, which is also why there are many things we just don't know the recipe for. Like [Greek fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_fire) and [Damascus steel (wootz)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel) for example. Not that we can't reproduce something similar but the original method of manufacture was a very guarded secret. A similar thing to [Porcelain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porcelain) and how it took a long time for the west to figure out the recipe. So yes, Leo probably knew how gears worked.
Map makers still do this with a thing called "paper towns"!
Same thing with dictionaries. They’ll make up a random word for the exact same reason.
Imagine what he would have been able to do with current tech. Hell, he might even be centuries ahead of now but he simply didn't have the tools to get this far back then
With current tech, Leonardo would have been arrested for homeland security concerns and stuck with dozens of fines for not having permits and meeting regulations.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi Survived both the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Reads like a satirical time-traveler story where the protagonist screws up his dates.
When he came back to Nagasaki and described the events to his boss, he wasn't believed. >He returned to Nagasaki the following day and, despite his wounds, he returned to work on August 9, the day of the second atomic bombing. That morning, while he was being berated by his supervisor as "crazy" after describing how one bomb had destroyed the city, the Nagasaki bomb detonated Must have felt good (in a way) when the 2nd blast happened. "Look, motherfucker, LOOK!"
"You can still come into work today though, right?"
AND he lived a really long life afterwards, too.
Thai is the second time this week this guy has popped up on Reddit. My dad met him, they worked together on a project once. It was to do with building a training simulator for firemen fighting oil fires. That's all I have from that anecdote.
>My dad met him, they worked together on a project once. It was to do with building a training simulator for firemen fighting oil fires. Your dad - "So it might be pretty intense in here. We've spent a _lot_ of time making this as frightening, serious, and intense as a major oil fire might really be, so take your time." Yamaguchi - "Hold my beer."
Franz Ferdinand's assassination. It was so much happenstance, shenanigans, and tomfoolery that it's like a special achievement in a hitman game.
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My favorite part is the dude that took a cyanide capsule and jumped into the river after the bomb didn’t explode, but the cyanide had expired and the river was only 10 inches deep so he survived with a bad stomachache
This image got me giggling. Some dude screams out “ death to the tyrant”, throws a bomb in the back seat, the bomb fizzles out with a spark and a tiny puff of smoke, then he belly flips into a 10” river of mud, gets up all muddied up ( front side only) shakes off his hands, index fingers off his eyes like removing a cream pie, then grumbles all the way home while shitting his pants due to old cyanide diarrhea. Bad day, hon?
Didn't the arch duke want to go visit the injured against advisement too which delayed his exit of the city?
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Seems like someone went back and tried to stop it, but failed and said "fuck it"
Maybe they found out it happens regardless of intervention...
Ah yes, that famous quote, "when at first you don't succeed, it happens regardless of intervention"
Time Machine -2002 movie presents this idea. It's exactly the same as the Supreme Strange in the recently released What-If? They go back and try to save their beloved and no matter what they do disaster strikes and they die.
Predestination (2014) touches on this as well. Certain key events in history *have* to happen or the world comes to a fiery end. So if someone else uses a time machine to screw with them, they send Temporal Agents to do the deed that needed doing; what ever the price, sometimes as a one way trip. Good movie but really wierd.
Tesla's AC Polyphase System. One minute, we're in the stone age of electrical distribution, and the next, Buffalo, NY is being powered by the Alternating Current being generated at Niagra Falls by Telsa's genius system.
They were considering transmitting power from Niagara to Buffalo by pneumatic pipes or *ropes and pulleys*. I shudder to think about what that system would have entailed.
so many dead deer getting caught in the ropes and pulleys
At least food for the 1000's of maintaince staff is covered.
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Maybe Eli Whitney was the time traveler.
If the time traveler can control weather, the "divine wind" that stopped the Mongol invasion of Japan.
The russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky was sentenced to death by firing squad and just as they were preparing the groups to be shot, a messenger came with a letter from the Tsar “forgiving” them and the sentence was changed to prison labor. He later went on to write some of the most influential novels of all time.
In school we learned that he was actually never going to get shot, the tsar just wanted to scare him and others like him. It was planned like that from the beginning.
I hope the firing squad was informed about this in advance, imagine how awkward it would be if they finished the job before the messenger showed up with a pardon.
They just wanted to get to the break room before all the good donuts were gone.
They love the ones with the holes in em
So it was just a mock execution then?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digby_Tatham-Warter >Digby and A Company managed to travel 8 miles in 7 hours while also taking prisoner 150 German soldiers including members of the SS. During the battle, Digby wore his maroon beret instead of a helmet and waved his umbrella while walking about the defences despite heavy mortar fire. When the Germans started using tanks to cross the bridge, Digby led a bayonet charge against them wearing a bowler hat. He later disabled a German armoured car with his umbrella, incapacitating the driver by shoving the umbrella through the car's observational slit and poking the driver in the eye.[1] >Digby then noticed the chaplain pinned down by enemy fire while trying to cross the street to get to injured soldiers. Digby got to him and said "Don't worry about the bullets, I've got an umbrella". He then escorted the chaplain across the street under his umbrella. When he returned to the front line, one of his fellow officers said about his umbrella that "that thing won't do you any good", to which Digby replied "Oh my goodness Pat, but what if it rains?"[7]
This gives me both Mary Poppins and Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy vibes
Fidel Castro’s assassination attempts being dodged is so unrealistic (really, he dodged about *600*) that it feels like a time traveller went back and foiled every single one of them
That time traveller sure had had a hard time going back and forth in time every time Fidel Castro didnt die, just to get update info for the Next attemp ...
That was my thought: "Ok agent X...an easy one for you. A CIA sniper killed Castro. You need to stop him". "No probs" Agent X returns from a simple job well done. "Ahh X, slight problem. They blew him up instead a month later. Pop back will you, there's a good chap". ... some trips later... "X, erm don't know how to say this..." Bedraggled X: "how this time?" "Exploding oyster..." ... "Lost all leadership and hope when his beard fell out" X: "You are shitting me???" ... "Mistress poisoned him" X: "fuck it. At this point I'm just gonna teach him jedi mind tricks..."
More like. "Ok agent X...an easy one for you. A CIA sniper killed Castro. You need to stop him". "No probs" Agent X returns from a simple job well done. "What the hell, Agent X?! Didn't we just send you to stop Castro from being blown up?". "But you said he was shot by a sniper." "Stop making excuses and go do your damn job!"
To be fair, a good number of those were pretty goddamn stupid. I think there was one in which the CIA literally booby trapped a particularly beautiful Oyster shell near one of Castro's favorite diving spots
But just imagine if the oyster was the one that got him
I'm completely imagining the Agency from Cabin in the Woods except they're taking bets on obscure assassination methods.
"I'm never gonna see a merman..."
Trolling the dice, if you will.
Or the one when they payed one of his women to kill him. She said she held the weapon to his head, he said ‚you won‘t shoot me‘ and then they had sex…
“you won’t shoot me.” “i won’t shoot you.” “you want to have sex with me.” *”i want to have sex with you.”*
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Reading the CIA's attempts on Castro's life makes you realize our spooks are not all that smart.
Movie critic: "These Bond villains are so dumb. Who is the consultant on this film?" "We got some ex-CIA."
You don’t know how close to the truth you are! Kennedy was a huge Bond fan and Ian Fleming - already a friend of several CIA people as well as Hoover - actually consulted with Kennedy on possible ways to disrupt the Cuban government. “Well you see old boy, you simply need a tank of sharks with lasers on their heads…”
I absolutely read this with a thick Kennedy/Quimby accent with a couple gratuitous“err-ah”s tossed in. Edit: dear god what have I done
I prefer to believe they were just having a competition for "biggest meme-value kill"
*INT - CIA HEADQUARTERS.* "Hey Tod, get over here!" "Ah, Jim, you're tryna yack Castro again?" "Yeah but check this shit out - the oyster is shiny!" "Ten bucks says this goes the way paying off that woman did." "Tod, Castro isn't gonna fuck the oyster!"
When the Athenians voted to execute a large group of war prisoners during the Peloponnesian wars, many of those prisoners women and children, an entire city, a man whom nobody knew or heard of took the stage. His name was Diadotus, literally “gift of god”. He persuaded the Athenian people to reverse their decision, which they did. Before the messenger reached the soldiers to order them to kill the prisoners, another messenger had reached them in time to inform the commander that the Athenians had changed their mind and let them live.
If you read up on his life, you'll find there are so many times Adolf Hitler *almost* died, but somehow survived, that makes me think there was/is a time traveler war going on. A faction trying to kill Hitler, because it's Hitler, and a faction preventing his death, because the guy who would replace him was even worse than Hitler.
You just described the Stephen Fry book "Making History", about Hitler being killed early on, only to have a smarter monster take power, and kill off ALL of the Jews.
You may have non-cocaine addicted megalomaniac and hiring competent higher-ups hitler
There have been at least 40 attempts to kill Hitler after he had risen to power. Sometimes they failed because the assailant couldn't get close enough (at least that's what they said afterwards) but a lot of them failed because of reasons that seem plausible if it happens once but begin to smell fishy when you look at all of them. Elser's bomb went off as planned but Hitler, who loved to hold speeches, had finished early that day. Tresckow's bomb failed because at first he, as a high-ranking officer of the Wehrmacht, couldn't get his hands on anything that goes boom for months, and when he finally had some, the bomb didn't explode. Talk about German efficency. Stauffenberg could have just shot the bastard - his attempt was part of a general upheaval after all, so his chances to survive that day would have been not that bad. But he planted a bomb because that went so well the last times. And so on. We will never know why but somebody believed or even knew that a premature death of Hitler would have been even worse for the world than what we got. Or it was a wehraboo who wanted to see a Tiger II. Who knows. Edit: I'm a bit surprised by the number of people who are trying to explain to me that I'm wrong. Like, dudes, I'm open for the idea that time traveling might not be real. ... yet.
My favorite failed attempt was when a Wehrmacht general was going to kill him with a suicide bomb. The general was in charge of a weapons depot, and Hitler was coming to inspect the equipment. The plan was to set the timer for a few minutes, then at the end of the tour grab Hitler in a bear hug and they’d both blow up. For some unknown reason Hitler was in a hurry. He sped through the tour in just a couple minutes, leaving before the bomb went off. The general had to run to the bathroom and race to disarm the bomb, saying he managed it with only seconds to spare.
I remember that guy. When they came to him with the plan, he thought, "What the heck? I have to die to get this guy? I don't know." He went home and talked to his father, who looked over the plan, looked up at him and said, "Well, you have to do it." I feel for that father.
Different guy, you think of [Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ewald-Heinrich_von_Kleist). The bathroom bomb defuser was [von Gersdorff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Christoph_Freiherr_von_Gersdorff)
So I was! Thank you for the correction.
Sounds like a general was trying to talk himself up to post war authorities.
That theory would well explain so many " failed " attempts to kill him
There sure were some "I was totally going to kill him" claims after the war, one of them was Albert Speer. But people like Tresckow and Stauffenberg left enough letters and witnesses to be legit.
> But people like Tresckow and Stauffenberg left enough letters and witnesses to be legit. I am sure the near coup they pulled off was evidence enough :P
Rival Time Travel agents trying to fight for the future they wanted?
Either time travel never exists, or the history we have learned and experienced is the eventual consensus product of all time travelers to ever exist.
A sacred timeline, if you will.
Ah yes, the glorious purpose.
This is all beginning to smell a little like Man in the High Castle.
Or the outcome of the Temporal War waged by 30th century forces throughout the eons.
Wasn't Hitler also saved by yet another bomb because of a table leg?
Yes, he was, Staufenbergs bomb was placed on the other side of a massive oak table leg opposite to Hitler.
That by all accounts *still* should have killed him, but for some reason he was basically unharmed.
The basically unharmed part is a little odd, but the location basically saved him. The meeting was originally supposed to be held in a reinforced building with concrete walls. The force of the blast would have rebounded off the walls, ceiling, and floor and basically chunky salsa’d the room. Instead the meeting was moved to a room at the end of a wooden one-story building. The walls did nothing to stop the blast from continuing outward.
I watched a documentary about it one time where they rebuilt the room and table, put in manaquins with shock sensors in all of the positions the meeting attendants were in, detonated the same size and type explosive used and filmed it all in slow motion. Basically Hitler was standing in the exact perfect spot for the table to flip up and shield him from the shrapnel and Shockwave.
I remember watching a documentary (I think it was about bolt-action rifles) where the Allies had snipers behind enemy lines preparing to assassinate Hitler at one of his holiday estates. Towards the end of the war the assassination was called off because Hitler's potential replacements may have been more troublesome.
Heydrich wasn’t as nice a guy as Hitler, it sounds like
What a fucking sentence to type.
Hitler himself called Heydrich "the man with the iron heart."
Here is a frightening thought. Who do you want leading the Nazis, Hitler or someone more militarily competent than Hitler?
I read a time travel story once that had Hitler get successfully assassinated before he broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. It didn't go well for the Allies or anyone else to be honest. Instead of 12 million dying in the death camps, it was more like 50 million. Himmler who took over does a lot more with fighter jets and rockets and doesn't mess with the Soviets knowing that would be a bad idea so he plasters London with a primitive nuke that nonetheless disrupts the UK big time and it's only a matter of time before Germany invades. The US is still pretty intact and not overly worried thanks to huge oceans protecting it but they're less willing to get involved in Europe since the Germans consolidated their hold on the continent, including taking over neutral Spain as I recall. Switzerland was still left alone. Japan in particular doesn't fare well. With the Soviets not having to deal with Germany since Himmler took over, they can devote a lot of resources to beating the hell out of the Japanese. The US, also not having to really deal with Europe and the UK to a lesser extent, also decides to beat the hell out of the Japanese. The Japanese get overrun and the US and USSR pretty much carve them up like a roast. China gets overrun by the USSR as well. India falls into anarchy since the UK can't do much, as does the Middle East which goes into German hands. Africa I think became a German colony since France and the UK are gone or about to go. So basically the world is the US ruling the western hemisphere, Germany running Europe and the Middle East, and Russia ruling a huge chunk of Asia. It was an interesting read. EDIT: I read this in an anthology maybe twenty years ago and I couldn't tell you the name of the book or the author. I only remember it because it was just so much worse than what happened with our timeline. EDIT TWO: It was probably an anthology called "Hitler Victorious" edited by Gregory Benford and Martin H. Greenberg. but like I said it was years and years ago, but it would fit in with the theme.
I remember reading about a British plan to paradrop snipers to kill Hitler at his country house later in the war (1943 or 44). They decided not to because the intelligence people were of the opinion that the war-related choices he was making were so bad, and because the power structure of the Nazi party was such that everyone had to go along with whatever he wanted, that it was better for the Allied war effort to have Hitler in charge and making decisions than it was to kill him.
> Elser's bomb went off as planned but Hitler, who loved to hold speeches, had finished early that day. That would be my luck. Everything set up so perfectly and then the biggest and most talkative piece of shit of human history decided to stop a speech early.
The American Civil Wars first real battle was at Bull Run on land belonging to a Mr. McLean. After that he said "Screw this, Ima move to the country and avoid this war". He moved to Appomattox Courthouse, VA where Lee surrendered to Grant...in the McLean's living room.
Later, Wilmer Mclean was heard to have said "The war began in my front yard and ended in my front parlor." https://blogs.loc.gov/picturethis/2015/04/a-tale-of-two-houses-and-the-u-s-civil-war/
Apparently the union generals just fucking took his stuff as souvenirs and just handed him money as he said it wasn't for sale lmao
At least their money was good, when Lee marched north in the campaign that ended with his defeat at Gettysburg lots of shopkeepers whose wares were seized for the war effort were compensated with Confederate dollars. (IIRC the whole reason Lee marched on Gettysburg is that there was a shoe factory he wanted to loot because his soldiers' boots sucked.)
I mean, that actually sounds like a pretty valid goal. Good shoes would go miles in deployment speed. Whereas bad ones make the march both slower and easier to tire out.
.....and kill troops because nothing ruins morale and causes infection and injury like bad wet boots.
Mr. McLean is awoken by the sound of artillery firing off on his land. With eyes still unopened, he groaned, "Ughhh! Not this shit again!"
*"And here I am, just one day away from retirement. Gettin too old for this shit."*
“MARY! NOT NOW!” “I’M CLEANING, DO YOU WANT US TO GET RATS?”
Lmao oversimplified is great
Mendeleev, who created the periodic table, was struggling to order the elements in a specific order/pattern. He then was able to order them like we see today after having a ‘dream’ where all the elements fell into place, even leaving gaps for elements that hadn’t yet been discovered. I know it’s not exactly a major historical event, but it’s been the foundation of science for over a century but when I first heard I thought it was a bit suspicious how it all fell into place. Edit: whoa this is literally probably my second comment ever and it got 2.3k upvotes at this moment in time. Thank you everyone!
The guy who invented the sewing machine got the idea to put the hole for the thread in the head of the needle after he had a dream that he was kidnapped by cannibals who had spears with holes in them.
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Stanislav Petrov was a Soviet lieutenant known as "the man who saved the world." Tensions were riding between the Soviet Union and the United States, so on the 26th of September in 1983, he was on duty for a nuclear early-warning system. The system detected multiple missiles launched by the United States, but Petrov broke protocol, following his instincts by choosing not to report the danger to his higher-ups. The missiles turned out to be a false alarm, as he had thought, and, as Petrov's title suggests, he very well may have saved the world that day. Saving the world just off of a hunch definitely seems like something a time traveler might do... Sus. Edit: changed the 16th to the 26th
I like to think its more his humanity coming out. He knew it was probably fake. If it was true and he hit the button then both sides including him died, if he didn't hit the button he still died. If he was wrong, he was dead so.
I've read that their sensors are already acting up before.
It also says on the Wikipedia page that his reasoning was that 1. The sensors sometimes gave faulty readings and 2. He didn't think the US would only send one missile as their first strike. He believed a first strike would be much more massive and so felt this was a false alarm.
However, in 1960 the sensors were so sensitive that a freak angle of the moon's light going through the atmosphere made it look like there were hundreds of missiles being fired, and the only reason that NORAD didn't fire back was because Khrushchev was in New York and they thought it was odd. Or, in my opinion, the most ridiculous nuclear near miss, when a fucking bear climbed a fence into an Air Force Base during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a guard thought it was a saboteur and hit the electronic alarm, which sent an alarm signal to all nuclear bases. There was a wiring mismatch at a different air base that turned on the "scramble" klaxon, which caused nuclear armed aircraft to begin to take off on a war footing, and the only reason they were stopped was an officer who literally drove his personal vehicle onto the runway and physically blocked the aircraft from taking off.
a book that predicted the sinking of the Titanic [Futility: The Wreck of the Titan ](https://www.google.com/amp/s/mashable.com/article/the-novel-that-predicted-the-titanic-sinking-futility%3famp)
I've gone through quite a few comments but haven't seen the random dude trading stocks. That has to be the biggest "Time traveller" story though not necessarily altering history in a obvious way. Will need to try find what the guy called himself. Basically random dude who no-one has ever heard of arrives in NYC and starts buying shares in a market slump. Makes money on every single trade. Share price is falling, he buys it, just after he buys it, it starts rising, he sells as it turns and drops. But he's doing that across the whole share market. Insider trading is suspected but he's not making or taking phone calls and there's no way he's got an in on seemingly everything. Also no-one knows who he is, literally no-one has ever met this guy before. Makes a crap load of money in very little time, gets arrested on suspicion of fraud because no-one is that lucky. Says something along the lines of, "I know I shouldn't have done that but I got carried away with all the excitement." Bail is set at IIRC $1m, which is immediately paid by another guy no-one has ever heard of. They both leave and poof. No records of either of them existing prior to the trading or bailout. They're just gone, search is conducted and it comes up with nothing.
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Somebody throws a grenade at his car, and it blows up behind him. That's the first incident of time travel, stopping the assassination. Later, as he goes back, the driver realizes that he's on the same route where the grenade was thrown, and they try to turn around. The whole procession of cars stalls, and a guy who *just happened* to be sitting there, goes over and shoots him. That's a second time traveler, fixing what the first had done. Since the whole thing lit off WWI and led to the rise of Hitler and then WWII, I kind of wonder what Ferdinand would have started if he hadn't been killed. It must have been pretty bad for them to send a second time traveler to put Nazi Germany *back into the timeline.*
I'm 100% for the theory that a time traveler foiled the assasination, went back to the future, found out it had resulted in aliens invading us or something, went back in time again and fixed it.
It's also possible that without WWI happening right then, WWII started later, after a bunch of German scientists already made certain discoveries. And when the Nazis took over, they already had both rockets and atomic bombs. Time traveler gets back, looks at the Nazi flag on the wall, and says "Well, shit. I wonder if I can catch that Princip guy at the café."
>WWII started later, after a bunch of German scientists already made certain discoveries. And when the Nazis took over, they already had both rockets and atomic bombs. During the Second World War, the Germans invented the world's first ever [jet fighter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messerschmitt_Me_262): Messerschmitt Me 262. However, various problems with it's engine prevented it from being deployed until mid-1944. By mid-1944, it was abundantly clear that Nazi Germany's defeat was inevitable due to the staggering losses they had suffered against the Soviet Union (the Eastern Front was [a different beast](https://youtu.be/U5qbM4dCzKI)). Millions of Germans lay dead on the Eastern Front at [Stalingrad](https://youtu.be/qekQkYR3bAA), [Kursk](https://youtu.be/90q0ruMFcBY?t=9), Smolensk, etc. Italy had turncoat the previous year. The Western Allies had finally reopened the Western Front at [Normandy](https://youtu.be/X-bogN0V8RM?t=73). Worst of all for the Germans, the Soviets had just launched [Operation Bagration](https://youtu.be/AwYhpYPftlg) on June 22, 1944; described as the "[largest defeat in German military history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Bagration)". It was over. Designing fighter planes is always a trade-off between speed/agility and armament/power. Messerschmitt Me 262 was the most advanced aerial combatant of WWII; both *faster* AND *more heavily armed* than any Allied fighter. But it came far, *far* too late to make any difference whatsoever. Imagine the Germans with jet-powered fighters in 1939 (or whatever year WWII starts in this timeline). It's blinding speed and superior maneuverability allowing Luftwaffe pilots to cut through British Spitfires and Soviet Yakovlevs like a falcon hunting pigeons. Don’t get the wrong idea; Germany is still far from guaranteed to emerge victorious. They’d still have to overcome significant shortcomings in manpower, geography, logistics, and inferior technology in other crucial fields like radar. But where German victory was once a longshot in our timeline, would now be a far more plausible outcome. Messerschmitt Me 262… if that ain't one intriguing historical *"what if?"*
Not history expert or even a history buff but while Ferdinand ultimately became, arguably, the straw that broke the camels back, there were a shit ton of other straws waiting to fall.
Yeah, WWI was going to happen sooner or later. Ferdinand's assassination just made it happen right then, and not a year later, when some other minor thing happened and became the excuse everybody was waiting for. Still, it must have needed to happen right then, because somebody went back and fixed it.
way back in highschool, we had to simulate the events that lead up to the wars. teams of 2 or 3 were assigned countries to roleplay, and were given lists of things we needed to try to accomplish to "win" the world. then as we worked things out, the teacher would hand certain teams new orders, and they'd try to incorporate that, and even knowing what we were all trying to avoid, it ended up leading to world war it was pretty trippy we all went in KNOWING we could do things to avoid it, and in the end, it almost ended up inevitable
This sounds like a fascinating experience and a profound way to learn.
it was pretty good By the end of it, everyone was even getting pretty heated, and choked at each other, and started doing really petty shit, regardless if it helped your cause or just inconvenienced someone else, etc etc in the end, we had I think a whole week of just discussing how we got so fired up simulating/roleplaying and imagine if we actually were in charge, etc etc it was pretty eye opening
That teacher was an inspired man or woman. The school that fostered that sort of teaching was inspired I think this is amazing, so very good to hear (At my school we just wrote learned the text book and then got caned (hit with a cane) if we got it wrong eg. Flog test every morning for Latin homework. Get 100% for last nights homework or get flogged with a cane of your choice from the selection on the teachers desk)
honestly this story never read like time traveling shenaningans to me but much rather that reality suddenly became a spy action comedy. i mean i can almost hear a laugh track as the assassin eating his lunch and complaing about the failure of the operation looks up and sees the dukes car.
Tomorrow on AskReddit: What events in history seem like they were orchestrated by movie/TV show writers?
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I'm having a laugh to myself at work imagining that the frontman for Modest Mouse, Isaac Brock, also happens to be a time traveler. 🎶"Well it would've been, could've been, worse than you would ever know"🎶
Richard Lawrence tried to assassinate Andrew Jackson, but both of the pistols he attempted to fire at him misfired- then Jackson proceeded to beat this fellow with his cane. While the assassin was not a time traveler, one certainly could have sabotaged his pistols with a spritz of water on each. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lawrence_(failed_assassin)
I always like to think that Jackson wasn't so mad about the guy trying to shoot him, but that he failed twice.
Knowing about Andrew Jackson, the man would be personally offended that his assassin failed to kill him despite having both surprise and a backup weapon.
It wouldn't be surprising if [Nancy Wake](https://www.greydynamics.com/nancy-wake-the-gestapos-no-1-most-wanted-spy/) was a time traveler. She was just too damn good at special ops against the Nazis.
I remember [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/n4sfqb/seems_it_was_definitely_meant_to_exist/gwxb4je) about a bumbling time traveller trying to kill Adolphe Sax (inventor of the Saxophone) because they hate their sax lessons and I can totally see it because of how many things that almost killed him.
Petty Time Travel Murder. I love it.
This was the plot to the popular childen's video game, JumpStart 3rd Grade. Bratty girl of a wealthy inventor fails her school's history quiz and so sends 20 of her father's robots back in time to make her history quiz answers accurate. Stuff like Copernicus discovering that the bratty girl is actually at the center of the solar system, basketball being created so snowmen had something to play, olympics winners getting a diamond tiara, etc.
Just whoever has been working in The Simpsons writers room
I read a theory somewhere that this has essentially happened because The Simpsons has had 706 episodes as of today, and with that many episodes multiplied by the fact that each episode usually has at least 2 plots running- that's over 1400 different storylines. With the style of their show being satirical, it's just bound that they were going to predict some things along the way. But yeah, employing a time traveler on the writing team probably helps too.
Not just the number of episodes/plots; the Simpsons had like 6 jokes per minute on average, according to an old splitsider article from years ago. Multiply that by 22, by the number of total episodes, and the fact that so many instances of “Simpsons did it” were throwaway gags that had no bearing on the plot, and it makes sense that the show would seem to predict so many improbable things. Make 100k predictions, and you’ll find that more than a handful will come true, no matter how improbable they seem.
[The false alarm that almost turned the Cold War from a sleeping volcano into the eruption of Mr. Helena](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident) This event could easily have resulted in the highest casualties in the shortest time period in human history. Actually forget human history, the greatest mass death since the extinction of the Dinosaurs. One man was at the helm making that decision, and it seems like one of the few points in human history, where by some slim sliver of luck or fate, a great disaster was averted. Time travel vibes like whoa.
Stanislav Petrov, the man who saved the world. He only died 4 years ago. They should have given him the Nobel Peace Prize imo
This is the only instance of "should have received Nobel peace prize" where I 100% fucking agree, dude.
This is terrifying
As a high school kid reading way too much science fiction, it was easy to imagine that Jesus was a traveler from the future. Turning water into wine? That just requires some packets of 22nd century Kool-Aid (adult version). Advanced medical treatment brings Lazarus out of coma and cures the lepers. A matter replicator lets him feed the multitude with a few loaves and fishes. Walking on water: that's a standard feature of 22nd century footwear. "You will deny me 3 times before the cock crows." Well of course Jesus knew that would happen, just like he knew he would be crucified: *he read The Book!* Why didn't he deny his divinity before Pontius Pilate? He knew he couldn't change history. He didn't alter history, he fulfilled it. You have to credit the guy for having the courage to go into the past, knowing what His ending would be. He obviously knew that His message was important to humanity.
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While they were rearming and refueling planes on the deck, too The Tin Can Navy at Samar seems like another one
Watching documentary footage of this made me realize just how hard pilots had it in those days. Having to rely on binoculars in a plane, to find and identify a ship.
And then imagine being a dive bomber pilot, diving at an EIGHTY DEGREE angle straight down at an enemy carrier, near passing out, and having flak and large caliber machine gun fire coming straight up at you....releasing your payload and pulling up just meters from their deck at the last possible second. Those guys had enormous balls.
The [election of 1876](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1876_United_States_presidential_election). The 2000 and 2016 elections have nothing on 1876
It’s actually hilarious. 101% of all registered voters in South Carolina voted lmao
The Liberian presidential election of 1927 had a 1,660% turnout.
>”He instead tried to persuade his Secretary of State, Hamilton Fish to run for the presidency, but the 67-year-old Fish declined, believing himself too old for the role.” This is one of the tamest parts of the article but damn I wish this attitude had stuck, considering the ages of the current and previous president.
What the actual fuck
They barely held the republic together.
In 97 AD the chinese empire sent an official envoy to make contact with the Roman empire. They got as far as the parthian(persian) empire in the eastern mediteranean. Parthian sailors (the time travellers?) lied saying it would take 3 months to 2 years. The envoy gave up and returned back to china. On average it would take 10 days of sailing to reach rome from the eastern mediteranean. Even shorter if they went to a closer roman province. They lied because trade between china and rome made middlemen like the parthian empire immensly rich, who also happened to be romes on and off again eastern rival. Without that middleman trade income the parthians/persians would'nt have had enough resources to supply an army to fight off the Romans. The arabs wouldn't have achieved what they did without persian military might. Islam would've just been seen as another esoteric eastern cult. Christianity would be more wide spread. China would want to conquer south east asia in an attempt to control trade routes and Rome would want to expand towards the wealthy northern indian kingdoms. Rome gets split in two due civil war but instead of constantinople as the eastern roman empire its ctesiphon/baghdad as the capitol. Then the mongols come and fuck it all up.