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When World War I broke out, navies on both sides of the conflict commandeered privately
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owned transatlantic liners. Germany, for example, took over the Cap Trafalgar and painted it
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red and black to mimic British merchant ships like the HMS Carmania. The idea was to have
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a bit of deception that might let the ship avoid unwanted attention or even give the converted
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vessel a leg up in battle. Then, on September 14, 1914, the Un-Carmania faced off against
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the actual Carmania. By this point, the British ship had been painted gray
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so the ships weren't mere images of each other, but you have to assume the subterfuge
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wasn't particularly effective. A fierce battle, the first ever between ocean liners, ensued
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and ended with the Captur-Folgor sinking in a victory for British forces. Incidentally
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some sources say the Carmenia was disguised as the Captur-Folgor at the time of the battle
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a sort of deadly Gift of the Magi situation or something. That's not true, but when I write a
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screenplay about anthropomorphic battleships falling in love, that is the version I'm going with
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Hi, I'm Justin Dodds, subbing in for Aaron this week. This is The List Show, and that bizarro battle is just the first strange coincidence that
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I'm going to share with you today, from deadly historical timing to some baffling serendipity
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found in literature. Let's get started. Depending how you see things, Violet Jessup may be one of the luckiest women in history
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or one of the unluckiest. She worked as a ship stewardess and was aboard the Olympic in 1911 when it collided with
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the HMS Hawk. The Olympic sustained damage but didn't sink, and Jessup lived to tell the tale
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Then in April 1912, she was on board the Titanic. You know how that one went
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But Jessup did escape aboard a lifeboat. At this point, most people would probably have sought out a land-based line of work
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but not Jessup. She soon took a job working as a nurse aboard the Britannic, the Titanic's sister ship
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which had been turned into a hospital ship in World War I. Maybe they should have disguised it as the Cap Trafalgar for good luck
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The Britannic suffered an explosion, probably from an underwater mine, and sank in less
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than an hour. According to Jessup's memoir, she made it to a lifeboat, but when it got into the water
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everyone but her ditched it because they couldn't get loose of the Britannic's propellers
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Jessup, who had improbably never learned to swim, finally followed suit and jumped off
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the lifeboat, and was evidently saved by her lifejacket. She lived to the age of 84, at which point she blew up in a submarine—or, uh, succumbed
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to congestive heart failure. Sorry, I knew it was one of the two
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Tutomu Yamaguchi had a similar habit of surviving extremely unfortunate circumstances. He was working in Hiroshima the day the United States
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dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan. Yamaguchi was thrown into the air by the impact
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but survived the blast and went back home to Nagasaki. There, he ended up in the blast zone of the second A-bomb
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in the most improbable way. As Sam Keen tells the story in his book
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The Violinist's Thumb, Yamaguchi was telling his boss about the devastation in Hiroshima
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His boss countered, How could one bomb destroy a whole city? At that moment, a white light swelled inside the room
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I thought, he later recalled, The mushroom cloud followed me from Hiroshima
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Though it's estimated that around 150 people were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
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on the respective days of the attacks, very few were in both blast zones like Yamaguchi
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Amazingly he still lived to be 93 years old Let pop back to the water for one more nautical coincidence Edgar Allan Poe wrote a novel called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket in which a ship crew ends up in a desperate situation with their boat badly damaged
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Eventually, the crew draws straws to decide who among them will be the next life-sustaining meal
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The unlucky character in the story is named Richard Parker. He's stabbed to death, and well, you get the idea
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Two of the characters survive to be rescued thanks in part to some Richard Parker-flavored sustenance
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the story, they also eat a tortoise. A few decades later, a real-life yacht named the
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Minionette sank in a storm in the Indian Ocean. The four-man crew escaped to a dinghy
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but didn't have time to stock many provisions. Like the men in Poe's story, at one point
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they ate a tortoise. And like the men in Poe's story, they resorted to eating one of their own
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in a horrifying but potentially necessary case of cannibalism. The unlucky young man's name
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Richard Parker. In early 1611, William Shakespeare was 46 years old. That same year
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the King James Bible came out, arguably one of the few books that has influenced English literature
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more than Shakespeare himself. Allowing for what is arguably a little bit of fuzzy math
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the 46th word of Psalm 46 in the Bible is shake, while the 46th from the last word is spear
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This has led some to speculate that William Shakespeare worked on the King James version
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of the Bible and surreptitiously slipped his own name into the text
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Like a lot of conspiracy theories about the bard, though, this one is more fun to imagine than supported by evidence
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Shakespeare was not the type of formerly educated scholar who would have worked on the KJB
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As the British playwright and poet Ben Johnson put it, he had small Latin and less Greek
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Devastating classics, Byrne. And as Jim Carrey taught us in the seminal film The Number 23
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you can twist numbers around to make basically anything seem like an eerie coincidence. My
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initials are J and D, the tenth and fourth letters of the alphabet, and my niece and nephew are 4
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and ten years old. Does that mean they secretly wrote The Catcher in the Rye? I think yes
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This next item is one of the more popular coincidences on record, but if you're not familiar with it, I'm happy to be the one to tell you
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Abraham Lincoln's son, Robert, was not, as you might read online, present for three presidential assassinations, but his connection to the three tragedies was
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close enough to raise a few eyebrows. On the night of his father's assassination in 1865
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Robert declined an invitation to Ford's Theater, but he was with the president when
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he passed away the next morning. In 1881, while serving as Secretary of War, Robert was at the
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Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station when President James Garfield was shot. Eventually
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Garfield died—probably from the substandard medical attention given to the bullet wound
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Two decades later, the star-crossed Lincoln went to Buffalo to visit the Pan-American Exposition
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a sort of New World version of the World's Fair. When he arrived, Robert was immediately told that
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President William McKinley had been shot. He visited McKinley on two occasions that week and
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and was heartened to see that, in his estimation, the president was on the road to recovery
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Sadly, McKinley took a turn for the worse and died a week later. We can chalk all that up to Robert Lincoln's close ties to the halls of American power
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It's all a bit unlikely, perhaps, and certainly tragic, but not completely astounding
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But here's the weirdest part. It's possible that Robert wouldn't have been witness to any of these presidential tragedies
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if he hadn't narrowly avoided an accident himself at a Jersey City train station
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During the Civil War Robert had found himself in a potentially lethal situation when he fell between a moving train and the platform He was yanked to safety by one of the most famous actors of the day Edwin Booth brother of John Wilkes Booth the man who would soon kill Robert father
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While we're on the more well-trodden path, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the 50th anniversary of the approval of the Declaration of Independence
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July 4th, 1826. Jefferson went first. The Founding Fathers and longtime political enemies had rekindled their friendship later in life
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but perhaps maintains some sense of rivalry. Among Adam's last words was this erroneous
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pronouncement, Thomas Jefferson survives. Germans have their own coincidentally significant day, November 9th. A number of famous or infamous events in German history have fallen on that day
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from the announcement of Kaiser Wilhelm II's abdication of the throne in 1918
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which put an end to the German monarchy, to the horrors of Kristallnacht in 1938
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In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, cementing the day standing in the German public
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consciousness. Germans even have a word for it, Schicksalstag, or the day of fate
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This next coincidence might be obvious, but I'll admit I never considered it. Think about
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a total solar eclipse. The moon seems to cover up the sun pretty much perfectly. The reason the sun
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and the moon appear almost identical in size to us is an accident of time and space. As astronomer
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Mark Galloway said, The diameter of the moon is almost exactly 400 times smaller than the sun's diameter
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and the sun is almost exactly 400 times further away than the moon
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That all adds up to a really cool sky show whenever a total eclipse happens
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But in a few hundred million years' time, that won't be the case. As Galloway told Live Science
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the moon is slowly moving away from the Earth at about the rate your fingernails grow
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a concept which hurts my brain to think about. That means that eventually the moon won't appear large enough from Earth to completely
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eclipse the sun. And back when the dinosaurs were around, the moon would have appeared relatively larger in the sky
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which would probably eliminate the momentary cool diamond ring effect sometimes seen at the edge of eclipses today
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That effect is referred to as Bailey's beads, by the way, in honor of the British astronomer Francis Bailey
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Let's stick with moons, or actually with Saturn. And with moons, I'll explain
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When Galileo Galilei observed the rings of Saturn in his telescope, he wasn't sure exactly what to make of them
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Given the technology of the time, they probably looked like a couple of amorphous blobs on
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the side of the planet. He sent letters to friends and colleagues, proudly declaring
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SMICE MIER MILME POTALI UMABUN NUGTARUS. No he didn't… His cat didn't walk across the keyboard
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He had actually disguised his observation in a jumbled anagram, which could be reordered
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to read, ALTISMUM PLANETUM TERGAMINUM OBSERVAVI. I have observed that the highest planet is threefold
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At the time, Saturn was considered the highest planet because it was the farthest one from
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the Earth that had been observed. The German astronomer Johannes Kepler received one of these cryptic letters
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The message he deciphered from that same jumble of letters read, Salve umbustinium geminatum martia proles, which he translated as
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Be greeted double knob children of Mars. He concluded that Galileo was saying Mars had two moons
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Despite his completely incorrect method of deciphering the message, Kepler's conclusion was correct
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Mars two moons were discovered centuries later Today we know them as Phobos and Deimos Bonus weird moons of Mars coincidence After Kepler time but well before Mars moons were actually discovered Jonathan Swift wrote Gullifer Travels In the book Swift satirized
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the sometimes obscure research being done by British scientists of his day, which he seemed
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to think lacked an important element of practicality. As an example of this type of frivolous scientific inquiry, Swift discusses how the Laputins have
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discovered two lesser stars, or satellites, which revolve about Mars. There are some wild stories out there about doppelgangers
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One which seems likely to be either embellished or entirely apocryphal is about King Umberto
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I of Italy. He was said to have met a restaurateur who looked just like him and had some uncanny similarities
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Same birth date, a wife and child with the same name, etc
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There's nothing in the way of contemporary sources to back the story up, but strange
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synchronicities between long separated twins is a real phenomenon, as one particular pair
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of gyms demonstrated. The two Jims were separated by adoption a few weeks after their birth in 1940 and were
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independently named James by their adoptive parents. When they reunited almost 40 years later, the similarities between their lives flummoxed observers
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Each had married a woman named Linda and gotten divorced. Okay, a bit odd
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They each got married a second time, each to a woman named Betty. It gets weirder
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Both Jims had grown up with a dog named Toy and an adopted brother named Larry
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had sons who they named James Allen, though the spelling of the James Allens differed
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As psychologist Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr., director of the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart
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Project, said, I'm flabbergasted by some of the similarities. The gym's story can teach us a couple things
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One, in the battle of nature versus nurture, nature obviously can claim some victories
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The two men dealt with similar tension headaches and put on weight at a similar time in life
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There could be a genetic component that led them to enjoy the same classes and school
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or develop similar smoking habits. But the gyms can also tell us something about coincidences in general and how our brains
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approach and sometimes construct them. Well over a million twins are born each year, and stories about long-lost twins who have
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little or nothing in common don't exactly drive clicks. Given a large enough dataset, random distribution means that some long-lost twins are gonna share
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some interesting commonalities. Once we find one area of crossover, our brains are practically hardwired to seek out patterns
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identifying more. Numerous studies have shown people perceiving patterns where they don't even exist
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Perhaps it's a way for our brains to order the vast amount of stimuli we're constantly
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taking in. Maybe it's more comforting to believe the universe is ordered rather than chaotic and unpredictable
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So sure, maybe the two gyms had another set of kids who didn't share the same first name
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Maybe there are two other long-lost gym twins out there right now who married women with
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different names. Maybe one married a man or vowed celibacy. The takeaway isn't that our DNA is destiny or that some unseen hand is guiding our actions
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Confirmation bias is real, but coincidences are fun. In a certain way, they might mean nothing, but the fact that we persist in identifying
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them and finding them noteworthy means something. Aaron will be back for the next episode of The List Show
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And if you haven't watched our series Food History or Misconceptions, check them out
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Highly trained professionals assure me that the likes and comments on those videos will not make me happy, but I'm willing to put that to the test
