- 3 months ago
One missing hyphen, a forgotten key, or a misinterpreted word... Join us as we explore how seemingly minor errors led to catastrophic consequences! From aviation design flaws that claimed hundreds of lives to mistranslations that may have influenced nuclear decisions, these small oversights changed the course of history in dramatic and often tragic ways.
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00:00My station chief asked him about the classified material, and he told us to leave everything on the boat.
00:05The only thing he said was, get out, get out, we are being ramped.
00:08Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at seemingly innocuous choices, errors, or actions that blew up in people's faces.
00:15What begins as a grand and glorious campaign, quickly becomes a nightmare.
00:23The rocket taken down by a hyphen.
00:25Mariner was only seconds away from separating from the errant rocket, when the range safety officer had no choice but to give the destruct command.
00:34In space, numbers can be all that stand between triumph and disaster.
00:38Between life and death, one error can have terrible consequences.
00:42In 1999, for example, NASA lost the Mars Climate Orbiter.
00:46Hundreds of millions of dollars and years of effort burned up in the Martian atmosphere because of a mix-up between imperial and metric units.
00:53But the most egregious mistake happened decades earlier.
00:56In 1962, the Mariner 1 rocket was destroyed just after takeoff thanks to a missing hyphen in the guidance software.
01:04That tiny omission scrambled the rocket's trajectory, forcing engineers to self-destruct it mid-flight.
01:09In space travel, the universe doesn't forgive sloppy math.
01:13Even a typo can prove disastrous.
01:14That flight was probably the largest experience in growing up a young woman could have.
01:23I got through it, and I was very proud of myself for getting through it.
01:29Why Airplane Windows Are Round
01:31During flight, the stress to the skin around the plane's windows and doors reaches 70% of its total strength, four times greater than the rest of the aircraft's skin.
01:41The next time you fly, look at the window.
01:43It's round for a tragic reason.
01:45In the 1950s, the de Havilland Comet became the world's first commercial jetliner.
01:50A revolution in travel, it was also a death trap.
01:53Engineers had designed the comet with standard square windows.
01:56It never occurred to them that sharp corners create stress points in a pressurized cabin.
02:01There is a massive tear in the aircraft's skin, two meters long and one meter deep.
02:07The tear follows the line of the plane's windows and doors.
02:11In 1954, two comet jets tore apart mid-air, killing everyone on board.
02:16The investigation changed aviation forever.
02:19Engineers learned that curves are safer than corners, distributing pressure evenly and preventing cracks from forming.
02:25It was a deadly lesson, etched onto every cabin at 35,000 feet.
02:29Was it a tragic accident?
02:32Or something more sinister?
02:36The cascade of errors that made an army destroy itself.
02:40War is chaotic, but in 1788, the Austro-Hungarian army managed to defeat itself before the Ottomans even arrived.
02:48Near the town of Karantsebes, Husser scouts set out to find the enemy.
02:52Instead, they found schnapps.
02:54In short order, half the army was drunk and fistfights broke out.
02:58Hundreds of drunken soldiers, speaking several different languages, started a chaotic melee.
03:03Someone foolishly yelled, Turks, spreading panic.
03:07Orders to halt were mistaken for Turkish commands, triggering a friendly fire massacre.
03:12A desperate artillery strike compounded the nightmare.
03:15Cavalry charged blind into their own ranks.
03:18By morning, thousands were dead or wounded, with Neri and Ottoman in sight.
03:23Heinrich Albert's Lost Briefcase
03:25Spies are supposed to keep secrets.
03:28But in 1915, German diplomat Heinrich Albert made a rookie mistake that changed history.
03:34Albert was riding New York's 6th Avenue elevated train when he accidentally left his briefcase behind.
03:39Inside were documents revealing Germany's secret sabotage operations and financial dealings in the U.S.
03:45The briefcase landed in the hands of U.S. counterintelligence and British propagandists.
03:51Espionage, which could have given U.S. officials the inside intelligence they needed about the Deutschland's real mission,
03:57was a primitive, part-time pursuit.
04:00They used it to turn American public opinion against Germany.
04:03It was one of the biggest intelligence leaks of World War I.
04:06All because one spy forgot his bag.
04:09While British intelligence listens at keyholes, our people are actually in the room.
04:18Very clever.
04:18The Novobodonivka Explosion.
04:21It doesn't take malice to cause a disaster.
04:23Sometimes a combination of stupidity and laziness does the trick.
04:27In 2004, Ukraine's Novobodonivka Arms Depot exploded.
04:32It was entirely avoidable.
04:33The site was packed with unstable Soviet-era munitions.
04:37In the wake of the Cold War's end, proper procedure meant very little.
04:41The munitions were just lying there, baking in the May heat.
04:44According to some reports, smoking cigarettes near the ammunition may have caused the incident.
04:49That lazy mistake triggered a fire, setting off a chain of explosions that lasted for days.
04:54Thousands were evacuated as artillery shells rained down on nearby villages.
04:59The defense ministry called it an accident.
05:01In truth, it was negligence of the highest order.
05:04Titanic Locker Key.
05:06Prices for Titanic artifacts have significantly increased in recent years.
05:10In 2013, a violin believed to have been played as the doomed vessel Sink.
05:15The Titanic departed Southampton with 2,224 souls aboard.
05:20Little did anybody know that a single forgotten key may have sealed their fate.
05:24David Blair, an officer originally assigned to the ship, was reassigned last minute.
05:30In the rush, he accidentally kept the key to a critical locker.
05:34Among its contents were the ship's binoculars.
05:36Without them, the lookout crew had to rely on the naked eye to scan for danger.
05:41That tiny oversight had massive consequences.
05:44The North Atlantic was extremely calm as they went into Suntown and into the night.
05:50That made it more difficult to find the iceberg.
05:54You can't see it.
05:55The Titanic struck an iceberg and sank, killing over 1,500 people.
05:59Some historians argue that with binoculars, the iceberg might have been spotted in time.
06:04It was a simple human mistake.
06:06Who could have predicted history would be altered forever just because someone walked off with their keys?
06:11Is there anyone there?
06:13Yes, what do you see?
06:15Iceberg, right ahead!
06:17The U-boat escape that gave away Nazi codes.
06:20By capturing Enigma, we saved the war from being lost that summer,
06:24because we would have lost the war that summer.
06:27The losses were too great.
06:29The smallest decisions can change the course of battle.
06:31For the crew of German U-boat U-110, that decision was abandoning ship too quickly.
06:36After a British attack, the U-110 crew believed their submarine was about to sink.
06:41They evacuated in a panic.
06:43Unfortunately for them, in their rush, they left behind something critical.
06:46Their Enigma machine and codebooks.
06:55Maybe they thought it would go down with the ship and didn't bother.
06:59Maybe they forgot it altogether in their fear of the crushing depths.
07:02Either way, they were wrong.
07:04The sub didn't sink right away.
07:06The British had enough time to board her and capture Enigma.
07:09That one mistake blew open Nazi naval secrets.
07:12Allied codebreakers cracked Enigma, tipping the balance of the war.
07:16I had to hold to my revolver and go down this vertical ladder of about 15 feet,
07:23wondering if there was somebody down below who would have certainly shot me.
07:27I'd arrived.
07:28Hannibal's Alpine Gamble
07:30Hannibal recruits a massive barbarian army to execute an audacious strategy.
07:36An overland attack through the Alps.
07:39It was one of history's boldest moves, and a fatal long-term miscalculation.
07:44Hannibal led his army and war elephants across the Alps to invade Rome.
07:48Up to half his army died from avalanches, frostbite, and exhaustion before ever setting foot in battle.
07:54Though he won victories in Italy, he lacked the strength to finish the war.
07:58One apocryphal legend tells of Hannibal striking the snow with his cane during a speech to his freezing, starving men.
08:05To make it through, my men had to march without rest.
08:09If we stopped at all, we would die.
08:14Exposure and hunger ate through us.
08:17Come on! Keep moving!
08:20The blow triggered an avalanche, burying half his army alive.
08:24It likely never happened, but it captures the truth of the moment.
08:28Hannibal's troops were broken, their morale was crumbling,
08:31and Hannibal, unfamiliar with the mountains, missed one thing.
08:34Winter in the mountains is long and deadly.
08:37The horses went mad with terror at the wild shouts,
08:41which echoed and re-echoed ever more loudly from the forests and mountainsides,
08:46while chance blows and wounds so panicked them that they wrought havoc among the men.
08:53Time zones and the Bay of Pigs.
08:55Without air cover, the anti-Castro forces' ships are attacked,
08:59and the men are cut off from their supplies.
09:01The situation looks dire.
09:03The Bay of Pigs invasion is remembered as one of America's greatest foreign policy blunders.
09:08But few realize a time zone mix-up made it worse.
09:11In 1961, the CIA-backed mission to overthrow Cuba's Fidel Castro
09:16relied on coordinated airstrikes to cripple Cuban defenses.
09:20Somewhere along the way, planners messed up the time zones.
09:23As a result, the bombing runs and ground invasion weren't synchronized,
09:28with some planes taking off late.
09:30The first wave of bombers took off on April 15th,
09:33two days before the invasion was scheduled to begin.
09:36By late morning, bombs had fallen on three Cuban airfields.
09:41By the time the exiled Cuban fighters hit the beaches,
09:43Castro's forces were ready and waiting.
09:45The invasion collapsed in 72 hours.
09:48The Bay of Pigs wasn't just doomed by bad strategy,
09:51it was also wrecked by bad clocks.
09:53In war, as in life, timing is everything.
09:56The Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest the superpowers have ever come to nuclear war.
10:02Over the ensuing months and years,
10:03the key players have analyzed its causes and its course.
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10:20A mistranslation may have led to nuclear attack.
10:35If history has taught us anything, it's that words can be as dangerous as weapons.
10:39After Nazi Germany fell, the Allies demanded Japan's unconditional surrender.
10:44Japan's government replied with a single word,
10:46the Allies interpreted it as treat with silent contempt.
10:51They saw it as a rejection of surrender.
10:54Days later, America dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
11:11Here's the rub.
11:12Mokusatsu has a second, less antagonizing meaning.
11:15It can also mean, withhold comment or no comment yet.
11:19Some historians argue that Japan's leaders were stalling for time,
11:23not openly rejecting the Potsdam Declaration.
11:25Historians still debate the statement's true meaning,
11:28but at the very least, it's a reminder that one should always watch their words
11:32when it comes to diplomacy.
11:33Sometimes it's the little things that literally sink the ship.
11:37What tiny mistake do you think changed history the most?
11:49Let us know in the comments below.
11:51American planes often flew overhead without dropping any bombs,
11:55but I had a feeling that something would happen soon.
11:57So let's see what happens.
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