These 10 Human Blunders Changed The Course Of Modern History

The last “oops” moment you suffered didn’t result in history books having to be re-written, did it? Yeah, we didn’t think so.Show more

Mistakes happen. They are one of the defining features of being a human. If you haven’t made mistakes, means you haven’t tried. Hindsight, as we are all often reminded by those who have made a blunder or two, is 20/20.

Take a look back to 1867 when the United States sealed the deal with Russia on the purchase of “some useless land” for roughly two cents an acre. It was viewed as a major mistake by the U.S. Congress, with some members sarcastically referring to Alaska as then-president Andrew Johnson’s “polar bear garden.”

Russia’s Emperor Alexander II had been trying for years to tempt the United States with the purchase of Alaska’s 375 million acres, in part to pay off some hefty debt his country had accumulated as a result of the Crimean War. Although economist David Barker infamously made the argument the deal was a bust for the United States, others counter that with the millions of barrels of oil that Alaska has provided over the decades America definitely came out on top.

A decade later, one Italian astronomer described the trenches on Mars as “canali”, which means “channels”. An American colleagues of his thought he meant “man-made” channel, which in turn made him assume that there was life on the Red Planet.

Titanic could have been saved and just in time, if only the crew on the ship had their binoculars. The equipment had been locked away in a cabinet whose key was missing! Talk about a blunder…

World War One began because the Archduke of Austria’s chauffeur took a wrong turn, bringing Franz Ferdinand right in front of Gavrilo Princip’s gun in the streets of Sarajevo.

Remember D-Day in Normandy? The German army lost that battle because their commander had to go home for his wife’s birthday! Thank you, madam!

You can learn about these and many others of humanities blunders in the video above! So many facepalms…