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26 Little Things That Changed History Forever - mental_floss List Show (Ep. 234)
Apr 3, 2025
A weekly show where knowledge junkies get their fix of trivia-tastic information. This week, John looks at little things that changed history such as a Hitler's rejection into art school, the invention of the stethoscope, and the time that Napoleon had hemorrhoids (and subsequently lost the Battle of Waterloo).
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Hi, I'm John Green. Welcome to my salon
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This is Mental Floss on YouTube, and did you know that one single possibly misinterpreted Japanese word
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may have influenced the decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
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The Japanese premier Kentaro Suzuki used the word moksatsu when reporters asked him about the Potsdam Declaration
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He probably meant no comment, but the word has multiple meanings, and many translated it to mean
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we're ignoring the declaration. That's how it was reported, and soon the atomic bombs were dropped
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And that's the first of many little things that changed the course of history that I'm going to share with you today in this video brought to you by GEICO
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The Roman Emperor Constantine, who ruled from 306 to 337 AD, claimed to have seen a cross of light in the sky before a battle
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a battle, and some geologists believe that Constantine actually saw a meteor, making that
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meteor responsible for the spread of Christianity. Speaking of space, in 1999, NASA lost communication with a Mars rover they'd launched about a
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year earlier, because one team working on the mission worked in metric units, and the
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other used English units. This cost NASA about $125 million. They should have just used our spaceship
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It cost like, 10 bucks. Every middle schooler's favorite planet, Uranus, might have had a different name
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It was discovered by William Herschel, and some astronomers thought it should be named after him
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but eventually it was named for the father of Saturn. The crew of the Titanic wasn't using binoculars, which would have helped them spot the iceberg
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Apparently, David Blair was given the job of second officer on the boat, but he was replaced
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and when he left the ship, he took the key to his locker, which contained the binoculars
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The ship's lookout later said that with those binoculars, they would have seen the iceberg
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soon enough to get out of the way In 1961 John F Kennedy sent six American B to the Bay of Pigs to help out with the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba They ended up showing up an hour late and were shot down
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Most historians believe that they were confused by the shift in time zone
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Many historians also believe that the American Civil War could have been a short conflict, rather than a four-year-long one
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if it hadn't been for one man, James Wolfe Ripley. Ripley was a general in the Union Army who delayed the Army's purchase of modern rifles
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so for a long time they were fighting against Confederates who had modern guns that they'd purchased from overseas
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In 2003, the largest wildfire in California's history, the Cedar Fire, was caused by one person who got lost while hunting in West Covina and started the fire to be rescued
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Johann Rall fought against General George Washington in the Revolutionary War, and there's a story that he was warned about Washington crossing the Delaware River into Trenton while he was playing chess or cards
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So the warning was given via note, which he put in his pocket and then forgot about because he was so distracted by his game
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George Washington getting his face onto Mount Rushmore by not playing chess
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Going back a little further in history, the Turks were able to easily capture Constantinople, thus leading to the Ottoman Empire
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for a simple reason, someone accidentally left the gate open. And that was historically important because it eventually led to Constantinople being renamed Istanbul
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which in turn led to They Might Be Giants' only top 40 hit
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In 1944, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel went on leave so he could return to Germany for his wife's birthday
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which made it a little bit easier for the Allies to land in Normandy on D-Day
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Bill Clinton had the option to kill Osama bin Laden in 1998, 13 years before bin Laden was actually killed
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but Clinton opted not to because 300 innocent civilians would also have died
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In 1816, physician René Lenoc invented the stethoscope on the spot because he was examining a woman
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and felt uncomfortable pressing his ear to her chest So he created a simple paper tube and then later put together a real stethoscope Many historians believe that Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo because he was distracted
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by his bleeding hemorrhoids. Which never would have even happened. I mean the Battle of Waterloo, not the bleeding hemorrhoids, which were probably inevitable
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But anyway, it wouldn't have happened if Napoleon weren't French, and he almost wasn't
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The island he was from, Corsica, only became a French island three months before he was born
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Okay, last Napoleon fact. In 1802, General Charles Leclerc was working for Napoleon to suppress the rebellion in Haiti
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but the majority of the army, including Leclerc, got yellow fever, a mosquito-borne illness
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and only a few thousand of the 50,000 French soldiers lived. And that's a major reason why Napoleon abandoned the New World, which is a big deal for Haiti
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but also for the United States, because he sold us the Louisiana Purchase
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In 1972, security guard Frank Wills noticed that somebody in the Watergate office building
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had put duct tape over a door lock to keep it open. He removed it, but it reappeared within 30 minutes
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So he called the police, and thus the Watergate burglars were busted
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For this, by the way, Wills received a raise of $2.50 per week
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But he got to decide who the next president was. So if you're a huge Gerald Ford fan like myself, he was only president because of Frank Wills
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Now, this isn't confirmed, but many historians believe that Robert Clive tried to commit suicide when he was 19 years old
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but he lived and went on to establish the East India Company in Bengal
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In 1933, Guiseppe Zangara attempted to assassinate FDR, who was giving a speech
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Zangara was a shorter man, so he had to stand on a chair, which started to wobble
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He shot five times, and he missed FDR all five times. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, of course, sparked World War I, and
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it was only made possible when Ferdinand's driver took a wrong turn right in front of
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Gavrilo Princip, who then shot at the car. Modern life wouldn't be as good without safety glass, you know, the kind on your car windshield
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It was actually invented by accident when French chemist Edouard Benedictus dropped a glass flask containing cellulose nitrate The glass shattered but it didn break In 1913 Emily Davison became a symbol of the British women suffragette movement when
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she stood in front of King George V's horse at the Ebsen Derby. It was viewed as a powerful
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suicide that led to thousands of suffragettes attending her funeral, but she probably didn't
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intend to die. She'd bought a return train ticket home. If Joseph Stalin hadn't had such a strict security policy, he might not have died when
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he did. His security guards were not allowed to bother him unless he'd okayed it, and on the day
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he died they noticed that he was sleeping much later than usual, but they didn't enter
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his room until 10 o'clock because, you know, fear of death. By then, Stalin had been dead for around four hours
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In 1899, British inventor Percy Pilcher had designed and built a motorized hang glider
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but before he was able to show it off, he decided to fly another one for a demonstration
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He crashed and died. One year later, the Wright brothers started experimenting in Kitty Hawk
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Nine months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, high school
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student Claudette Colvin did the exact same thing, and the NAACP knew about it, but they
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ended up using Rosa Parks as the face of their bus boycott because Colvin was a teenager
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who'd gotten pregnant by a married man. And finally, I returned to my salon to tell you that the world might be very different
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today if Adolf Hitler hadn't been rejected from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna
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He applied to a drawing class in 1907 when he was 18 and then again in 1908 and still didn't get in
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And so he didn't become an artist. Thanks for watching this episode of Mental Floss on YouTube
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which was brought to you by Geico and made with the help of all of these nice people. Don't forget to check out our other shows
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Thanks again for watching. And as we say in my hometown, don't forget to be awesome
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