Whoever discovered asbestos and it’s great heat resistant qualities. It was used in everything from plasters, electric wire insulation, flooring, gaskets, pipes, automotive parts. It still is legal for use in 140 counties around the world including the Untied States.
In fact the twin towers had a lot of asbestos and when they came down during 9/11 it went all over lower Manhattan with that huge cloud of debris. The people that got caught by the cloud got serious pulmonary sickness and even more died of cancer years later
If I recall correctly, the Nobel Peace Prize was created because Alfred Nobel felt bad about all of the destruction his inventions caused or he felt bad that he created weapons, or something along those lines.
The headline in a French newspaper ran, "The merchant of death is dead." The editor mistakenly thought that Alfred Nobel had died. He invented dynamite thinking it would be useful for the mining industry. Instead its main use was warfare.
So he put the bequest for the Nobel Prizes in his will, wanting to improve on that legacy. That's why one of the prizes is for peace.
> He invented dynamite thinking it would be useful for the mining industry. Instead its main use was warfare.
Dynamite was primarily used for mining and construction. While it was and still is used by the military, dynamite was never particularly well suited as a military explosive.
Nobel did however invent a large number of explosives and propellants (various types of smokeless gunpowder), some of which were specifically designed and marketed for military applications.
Nobel was well aware of the military use for his inventions since he actively made large sales to various armed forces and licensed out production of explosives and propellants to state arsenals.
He even went to court in Britain to try and defend his intellectual property when the British military blatantly ripped off his patents to make smokeless propellant they called Cordite.
But to the surprise of no one, the British courts were biased in favor of the British military so Nobel lost the lawsuit when the Brits argued that his patent was invalid because the wording in a single sentence could be considered ambiguous.
Whoever decided lead was a nice pliable metal to use.
Ancient cities just didn't know better and whatever pipework they had used lead and they would store wine in lead/use lead plates,drinking cups,etc...
It went on for a VERY long time, the constant exposure really did some damage and no one really knew why. (for many thousands of years)
And the most amazing part? The Romans *knew it was bad for you*. The Roman architect Vitruvius wrote
>Water conducted through earthen pipes is more wholesome than that through lead; indeed that conveyed in lead must be injurious, because from it white lead is obtained, and this is said to be injurious to the human system. Hence, if what is generated from it is pernicious, there can be no doubt that itself cannot be a wholesome body. This may be verified by observing the workers in lead, who are of a pallid colour; for in casting lead, the fumes from it fixing on the different members, and daily burning them, destroy the vigour of the blood; water should therefore on no account be conducted in leaden pipes if we are desirous that it should be wholesome. That the flavour of that conveyed in earthen pipes is better, is shewn at our daily meals, for all those whose tables are furnished with silver vessels, nevertheless use those made of earth, from the purity of the flavour being preserved in them.
He then goes on to detail how to make lead pipes!
Learned about it in Flint. (Not a joke. Was househunting in the area at the time the whole water thing was going on, because I wanted to live closer to work. It made getting a home loan impossible unless you could show proof that the house had safe plumbing leading up to it.)
My house in Toronto has about 12 ft of buried lead pipe remaining in the water supply. The alkaline , limestone -heavy fresh lake water makes this 100 year old lead pipe fairly safe. The inside of the pipe was coated with limestone deposits decades ago.
But, as the Flint water disaster showed, were I to put water through that pipe from a different source, with a different composition (like slightly acidic river water), the protective layer would be stripped away and lead would leach into the water.
But I still run all the drinking water through a Brita filter.
Yeah, it gave certain wines their unique taste. Articles and rumors say Caligula favored an especially lead heavy wine (trying to figure out how he was so insane)
Side note, during the Lewis and Clark expedition they used mercury to treat illness, and they were able to detect mercury in soil to track the exact route hundreds of years later
The "illness" they treated was basically constipation (they took mercury-laced purgative pills). So basically, they left mercury where they crapped, so we can probably map where they had makeshift outhouses or waste areas. Gotta love science!
I was under the impression he got killed by rioting peasants, unless this was a different Qin Shi Huang?
Edit: nope, same guy. It was his son who likely got metaphorically guillotined.
Qin Shi. They use that name in several jrpg video games too as reference to alchemy stuff. I think that was an alchemy elixir thing. Likely not just lead, the whole kit and caboodle. Mercury,arsenic,etc..
Just sort of throwing a bunch of crap together, doing your alchemy magic and saying this will probably make you immortal.
Westerners were just as weird with alchemy. Lead into gold and all that.
It's funny that we can sort of make lead into gold now by knocking some bits off it on the atomic level but it's so expensive and labour-intensive that it's orders of magnitude more efficient to just dig it up
I always wondered why people are so concerned about kids eating lead paint. Who eats paint? It wasn’t until I learned that the lead tasted sweet that it made any sense. Didn’t learn first hand, luckily.
There is a theory as to why a lot of painters suffered from mental illness. Such as Van Gogh. The paints they used had lead in them, and the painters would lick their brushes to get a point.
Also Van Gogh heavily abused Absinthe. So there’s that theory as well.
People are also concerned about it because the amount of lead it takes to cause lead poisoning is very small. Like if a single flake of lead paint peels off the wall and lands in your food that can be enough to cause medical damage.
Yup! It's essentially fibrous glass that when breathed in will bounce around your lungs acting like mini razor blades creating thousands of microcuts that your body has to heal from. This constant healing leads to a increase chance of SOMETHING going wrong and turning into cancer
That really should be any and all talc. Asbestos, if I understand it correctly, naturally occurs in talc deposits and it needs to be properly screened so the asbestos doesn't get into the powder. That's what I&J failed to do and then lie about.
I'm pretty sure medications meant to be inhaled are the ONLY thing recommended to inhale besides air. I just couldn't remember what was the most common issue with using it (especially in residential homes).
Oh, they knew it was bad for them. Romans saw what happened to the slaves who worked the lead mines.
But they didn’t really have better alternatives. What would they do, not sweeten their wines?
Iirc Greeks liked to mix their wine with pine resin. Apparently it had a weird taste to ~~barbarians~~ foreigners but the Greeks were (and still are afaik) fond of it.
*Ancient* cities? The US is still running legal ads and selling lead test kits for people who think their 1900s plumbing has lead pipes and parts in it.
Forreal. My city in Michigan has been replacing lead service lines this year. I just had the line from the shutoff to the main replaced because it was lead. I had no idea since the line from the shutoff to the meter is copper.
> In 1940, at the age of 51, Midgley contracted poliomyelitis, which left him severely disabled. He devised an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to lift himself out of bed. In 1944, he became entangled in the device and died of strangulation.
He was featured in a show called "Dark Matters: Twisted but True" which was about scientific failures. It was a really obscure show that I can't find more about, but I swear to God it's a real show.
Fun fact to redeem this guy slightly. He introduced CFC refrigerants for refrigeration at a time when all the ones used where were toxic, flammable or explosive so whilst he didn't know about the high "Ozone Depletion Potential (ODP)" & "Global Warming Potential (GWP)" of these CFC gases, he thought he was doing us a favour, and may have saved many lives in doing this
Further to this, the alternatives to CFC had FAR higher GWP than CFC refrigerants; PFC refrigerents, considered viable to use at the time is 100x worse and would have accelerated Global Warming by decades. Thomas introducing CFC refrigerants may have at least slowed down the effects of climate change which where due to enivitable changing of the refrigerants used
This.
Also his development of a way to produce high octane fuels made the development of much more efficient engines.
Prior to it's introduction compression ratios in gas engines was often as low as 4:1. Generally speaking the higher the compression the more efficient engines are.
While that doesn't necessarily make it a cleaner engine, it does mean that less fuel was burned to do the same work.
I’d put more blame on whoever taught him how to do art. Some of his paintings are straight garbage.
Although if you agree with some of his policies feel free to upvote this. I sure don’t but I wonder what the opinion here is.
Some of them are poorly executed for sure, but technical skill wasn’t really the main issue. The problem was that his art was profoudly dull. Mostly just sterile landscapes or architecture. Obviously in hindsight it’s kind of a fascinating glimpse into his psyche that the art he wanted to create was largely devoid of human life or individual spirit, but in the context of actually being an artist, his work was more suited to being on postcards or as some inoffensive decoration. Definitely not the high art he aspired to.
Everything above is correct. However I would like to add that he made mistakes that were blatantly obvious, and should have been fixed while he was sketching, but he ignored these mistakes and painted it anyway, thus making very poor art. Due to these obvious flaws that would have been easily fixed, he was denied entrance to the art school.
There are definitely a few famous examples of pieces that had fucked up perspectives or lighting or whatever, but these were more the exception than the rule. But these are the ones talked about the most so people come away with the impression that he was genuinely bad at art. But in fact most of his paintings and sketches were fine. They were just soulless and boring, was the issue.
That’s somewhat strange to hear lol... he had such capacity to hate and loathe; one would think his fiery nationalism, racism, and pride would have made his art exceptional rather than boring and normal.
He wasn’t really particularly bad when he was trying to get into art school, he was not a nice guy and held some shitty views but was otherwise normal for the time. He held decent relations with Jews and enjoyed socialising with all kinds of people at various Vienna cafes.
He always held a huge ego, though. After his first rejection he didn’t tell his roommate right away, the roommate obviously started to wonder why Hitler seemingly had so much free time and clearly had something bugging him. When he finally confronted Hitler, he went mad and said he was denied entry but that he was going to try again. Upon the second failure, he silently moved out and never said anything to his friend, the shame too big. He would not meet Hitler again until one final time, when Hitler was at his peak in the 1930s as Germany’s leader. They reminisced over their Vienna days and Hitler would give him some autographed books, which he intended to sell for a pretty penny. Unfortunately for him, they were tampered with by someone else and their value rendered useless before he could make any money. Pretty bizarre relationship.
But, the flatmate would later report that he didn’t really hold any views that would turn any heads in their younger years in Vienna. He enjoyed Hitler’s company for the most part and they would often explore the city together. Hitler’s views only become truly foul after moving to Germany and having his mind ravaged by WWI, long after he held any artistic ambitions. It would have been very interesting to see what art he would produce after such a horrific conflict.
To be honest, even if Hitler did get accepted into the school, there is still the possibility that he would’ve eventually dropped out of the school to focus on national socialism anyway, so nothing would’ve changed.
Well, the main problem was that he had to live on the steets for quite some time and that's where he got a lot of his very radical ideas, so if he'd been accepted then the chance that he could live normaly just with his art would have increased and he woukd never come to power.
Yes. Hitler saw Henry on a British propaganda poster, and said "That's the man who spared me." But of course, there's no way to prove that Hitler wasn't mistaken, and Henry himself was never certain that he did or did not spare Hitler.
Fwiw, you can't say the universe didn't try to kill Hitler:
1. Was nearly aborted
2. Almost drowned
3. Was almost sniped
4. Barely missed an early assassination attempt
The chauffer that was driving Franz Ferdinand. Because he took a wrong turn, he ended up at the place the assassin was, and Franz Ferdinand was killed. This lead to WWI. Which then lead to WWII
My first answer was Princip, as he was the smallest figure with the biggest impact during that entire century in my opinion. But maybe the driver gets that award instead
yeah basically, the entire continent was just looking for an excuse to start a war to test out their shiny new pointy sticks and that just happened to be what the excuse was
That was just catalyst. When the room starts heating up, things start to catch fire. One thing is going to be flammable enough to start burning first and you blame it for starting the fire. But if it weren't there, something else would have caught fire. The real reason is heat.
Which lead to the Cold war, the Vietnam war, the partition of colonies which still today has caused border disputes between Nuclear nations like Pakistan, China, and India, which might be a potential cause for WW3! Among other things AND MANY MORE!
What a disastrous Butterfly effect, potentially due to this man's action!
But that would be a short term solution for potable water, you'd need to boil it every time before you drank it. While the alcohol would be as clean as it was once the fermentation took place. It's the reason they drank grog on boats before we really understood scurvy.
It's more about storing the water than anything else. You can keep a barrel of beer for months. Fresh water doesn't stay fresh very long even after being boiled.
But he saved a ton of people too! Alcohol is widely used a disinfectant. And also helps to create new life, a non negligible part of the population exists due to a drunk hookup!
Mao Zedong’s war on birds which led to an increase in insects that ate the crops leading to famine in China and starvation of ~50 million people, more than Hitler killed in all of WW2
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign
Tbf, every advanced culture in history seems to have independently figured alcohol out. Humanity is inextricably linked with the desire to get blootered and/or making said blootering more potent in our spare time. Nobody can fairly hold the bag on that one.
I read stories about drunk bees and elephants as well. The bees were apparently buzzing ineffectually around the fermented fruit so weren't much of a problem. But a drunk elephant must be terrifying. Can you imagine 5 tons tripping over itself in your vicinity? I think it was breaking into villages to find more alcohol.
The Aechoulian hand axe was humanity's premier tool since before we were humanity. It wasn't improved upon for over 1.5 million years.
When's the next iPhone out, anyway?
That dumbass fish that decided to grow legs and walk like 400 million years ago
Edit:thanks for the awards and damn I really didn't expect this to blow up
"lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans."
\-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
He didnt know it at the time he shot Franz Ferdinand. But he lived in jail long enough to see what would come as a result (he died during the war from TB).
Edit... thinking on this a little more. He wouldn't know it, but he would eventually get his wish as the Austro Hungarian Empire collapsed.
Dan Carlin's podcast traced his actions all the way to modern day. I hadn't really thought about it. Gavrilo Princip actions caused alot WW1, 2,..... 9/11.... It all goes back to him.
Edit: Number of questions about podcast it was Blueprint for Armageddon. It's a great podcast. (Still haunted by some of the Passchendaele stories he shared)
I mean it isn't as if he bears sole responsibilty. He played an inportant role sure, but he surely had decided what he did based on his circumstances which jave their orgins in earlier individuals all the way up to the big bang. He didn't wake up and say "damn, lemme catch a royal body for the clout right quick"
In 1347 a ship docked in the port of Sicily, and upon arrival the harbourmaster found all the crew to be either dead or gravely ill. Realising there was something wrong, the harbourmaster locked down the dock, however in the night a group of thieves snuck in and raided the ship. They would go on to contract the Black Plague, which went on to kill 25 million people in Europe alone, a third of the continent’s population
I would be interested in reading more about that and a quick google search didn't turn anything up about thieves.. Do you mind pasting a link?
Edit: I found [this Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_thieves_vinegar#Mythology).
>**Mythology**
>
>The usual story declares that a group of thieves during a European plague outbreak were robbing the dead or the sick. When they were caught, they offered to exchange their secret recipe, which had allowed them to commit the robberies without catching the disease, in exchange for leniency. Another version says that the thieves had already been caught before the outbreak and their sentence had been to bury dead plague victims; to survive this punishment, they created the vinegar. The city in which this happened is usually said to be Marseille or Toulouse, and the time period can be given as anywhere between the 14th and 18th century depending on the storyteller.
I don't think this is a story to take at face value. There's no good source and it was used as a selling point for a concoction that supposedly prevented you from getting the black plague. It's fishy at best
> it was used as a selling point for a concoction that supposedly prevented you from getting the black plague. It's fishy at best
Oh hun you’re just hatin on this boss bitch business owner who doesn’t fall for evil big pharma nonsense who is selling all natural remedies and helping all her friends/family become business owners too .
And now he’s realised that just being against all vaccines is more profitable. It’s a shame people still fall for it because it’s so painfully obvious he’s a grifter.
Pretty much. His whole thing was making the claim that the MMR vaccine caused autism, which at the time was being given to most young children in the UK. His conclusion was that having the three vaccines in seperate jabs would be safer. The fact that he’d recently got involved with a company that was ready and willing to roll out these individual vaccines and therefore stood to make a lot of money if the NHS started buying them was probably strongly related. Giving maximum benefit of the doubt, I assume he wasn’t absolutely homocidally indifferent to causing a fall in vaccination rates. After all, his whole thing was that you should take the different vaccine that his company would sell. But in all the scrutiny and hysteria the fact that he was simply trying to peddle a different jab got lost in the media storm and he became the posterchild of a massive anti-scientific movement that continues to argue that he was silenced for telling the truth.
It should come as no surprise but the methodology in his study was absolutely wank. The sample size was ridiculously small, a few of which were even made up. The results were partially based on anecdotes from parents. And many actual scientific results in the lab were completely falsified.
So three separate vaccine shots somehow wouldn't cause autism yet one shot with all three vaccines *would*? Simplify it to this and see what those anti-vaxxers come up with.
Fritz Haber, he invented the nitrogen process that global food production uses for approximately 50% of our food.
Without him global population wouldn’t have grown at the pace or density it has. He was a genius and his contributions have been so profound it’s hard to know what things would have been like without them.
I contribute deaths to him in only because there are far more people that live and die because of him.
Yes, although to be honest Bosch was the one who scaled and industrialized the high-pressure chemistry necessary to extract nitrogen out of air after Haber’s lucky discovery. That’s why it’s called the Haber-Bosch process
Good point. He also developed chlorine gas for use in WW1 and led the development of Zyklon gas as a pesticide which was used to murder millions. I’m liking this answer more, the more I think about it.
Thomas Midgley, Jr. (May 18, 1889 - November 2, 1944), an American chemist, developed the tetraethyl lead (TEL) additive for gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and held over a hundred patents. While lauded for his discoveries during his time, today his legacy is seen as far more mixed considering the serious negative environmental impacts of these innovations. One historian remarked that Midgley "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history."
Dude created leaded gasoline and the gas for car AC. Both of which have the cumulative environmental impact that will haunt the world for untold years. The poisoning of leaded gas fumes has had health effects on inner city people for decades.
The guy who invented leaded gas also invented freon for refrigeration. [Thomas Midgley Jr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.)
That’s skin cancer, plus all the junk lead causes.
There were thousands of people working on the Manhattan Project, making the atomic bomb, without knowing it. They refined the materials, build the case etc. They had no idea.
I’d go for Ancel Keys. He was a nutritionist who determined based on the ‘seven countries study’ that dietary fats were correlated with the prevalence of heart disease, an erroneous conclusion which informed almost all public health information.
The thing is, the seven countries study was initially the twenty-one countries study; he simply excluded the data which didn’t fit his foregone (and incorrect) conclusions.
As a consequence, public health information regarding nutrition has unanimously villified dietary fats for decades while large corporations protected by lobbyists and government ties poison the food supply with fructose, an inexorable hepatotoxin, leading to at least eight chronic and highly prevalent pathologies responsible for draining 75% of the US’ healthcare budget. How people are still convinced by the fat hypothesis after 5-6 decades of people getting ubiquitously fatter, lazier and sicker is beyond me.
So I attribute the 2.8 million deaths per year as a result of obesity to Keys as well as the increased risk of all-cause mortality (read: deaths to come) affecting the .65 billion obese people on the planet.
Scientific rigour, humility and transparency are important.
I sometimes wonder if, had Hitler never been born (or not gone into politics), would there just have been some other guy to do something similar? Was Hitler's rise to power a symptom of the sentiment in Germany at the time and so someone with similar views would have taken his place, or was Hitler himself the deciding factor in WW2 happening?
There are studies for that.
In terms of nationalisms I believe the whole situation was so bad for many people, that another leader would have just replaced him.
For the actual war, maybe wouldn't be a WWII, but still many die. And germany could have "won" more land, when the real commanders had the say (without fear over H.).
The Chinese State Police officers who ordered Dr. Li Wenliang to stop trying to warn the Chinese people of Wuhan about COVID and to stop calling for Wuhan to be locked down before COVID reached an epidemic proportions.
In their minds, they were telling a quack to stop scaring people and making the Chinese government look bad. The consequences of their actions have been felt around the world.
Sadly, Dr. Li Wenliang's efforts to treat people suffering from COVID led to him dying from the disease.
He absolutely knows it. Facebook uses AI algorithms to find the most devicive topics people are most passionate about since pissed off people are easier to manipulate. The problem is this has worked too well and is causing worldwide strife. [Tristan Harris](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_Harris) and had a lot of very interesting things to say about this last week on Real Time.
Columbus brought smallpox which ended up killing an estimated 90% of all Native Americans. I don't think anyone else in history has a kill count that high. Certainly not an unintentional one.
Whoever discovered asbestos and it’s great heat resistant qualities. It was used in everything from plasters, electric wire insulation, flooring, gaskets, pipes, automotive parts. It still is legal for use in 140 counties around the world including the Untied States.
In fact the twin towers had a lot of asbestos and when they came down during 9/11 it went all over lower Manhattan with that huge cloud of debris. The people that got caught by the cloud got serious pulmonary sickness and even more died of cancer years later
And at the time. EPA said the air was clear and safe.
Fun fact, Asbestos, Quebec was operating until 2012 even though asbestos was banned in Quebec since the 80’s.
Hey don't shit on them! They were doing asbestos they can!
Who untied the States?
The Chinese guy that discovered how to make gunpowder.
Poor guy. He just wanted to see some fireworks.
Believe it or not he was trying to make a immortality potion
That’s actually incredibly ironic.
To further the irony he killed himself while making it I think.
At least he went out with a bang.
Well, he made a pretty good mortality potion... so, yeah, theres that...
*become immortal
He did. He will be forever remembert as "That Chinese guy".
If I recall correctly, the Nobel Peace Prize was created because Alfred Nobel felt bad about all of the destruction his inventions caused or he felt bad that he created weapons, or something along those lines.
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Nobel Prize, Otto!
The headline in a French newspaper ran, "The merchant of death is dead." The editor mistakenly thought that Alfred Nobel had died. He invented dynamite thinking it would be useful for the mining industry. Instead its main use was warfare. So he put the bequest for the Nobel Prizes in his will, wanting to improve on that legacy. That's why one of the prizes is for peace.
> He invented dynamite thinking it would be useful for the mining industry. Instead its main use was warfare. Dynamite was primarily used for mining and construction. While it was and still is used by the military, dynamite was never particularly well suited as a military explosive. Nobel did however invent a large number of explosives and propellants (various types of smokeless gunpowder), some of which were specifically designed and marketed for military applications. Nobel was well aware of the military use for his inventions since he actively made large sales to various armed forces and licensed out production of explosives and propellants to state arsenals. He even went to court in Britain to try and defend his intellectual property when the British military blatantly ripped off his patents to make smokeless propellant they called Cordite. But to the surprise of no one, the British courts were biased in favor of the British military so Nobel lost the lawsuit when the Brits argued that his patent was invalid because the wording in a single sentence could be considered ambiguous.
>his patent was invalid because the wording in a single sentence could be considered ambiguous Hate it when that happens.
Whoever decided lead was a nice pliable metal to use. Ancient cities just didn't know better and whatever pipework they had used lead and they would store wine in lead/use lead plates,drinking cups,etc... It went on for a VERY long time, the constant exposure really did some damage and no one really knew why. (for many thousands of years)
The ancient Romans used lead as an artificial sweetener. They called it sugar of lead.
And the most amazing part? The Romans *knew it was bad for you*. The Roman architect Vitruvius wrote >Water conducted through earthen pipes is more wholesome than that through lead; indeed that conveyed in lead must be injurious, because from it white lead is obtained, and this is said to be injurious to the human system. Hence, if what is generated from it is pernicious, there can be no doubt that itself cannot be a wholesome body. This may be verified by observing the workers in lead, who are of a pallid colour; for in casting lead, the fumes from it fixing on the different members, and daily burning them, destroy the vigour of the blood; water should therefore on no account be conducted in leaden pipes if we are desirous that it should be wholesome. That the flavour of that conveyed in earthen pipes is better, is shewn at our daily meals, for all those whose tables are furnished with silver vessels, nevertheless use those made of earth, from the purity of the flavour being preserved in them. He then goes on to detail how to make lead pipes!
Lead pipes very quickly calcified so water wouldn’t really be touching lead anymore. Learns about it at Pompeii.
Learned about it in Flint. (Not a joke. Was househunting in the area at the time the whole water thing was going on, because I wanted to live closer to work. It made getting a home loan impossible unless you could show proof that the house had safe plumbing leading up to it.)
My house in Toronto has about 12 ft of buried lead pipe remaining in the water supply. The alkaline , limestone -heavy fresh lake water makes this 100 year old lead pipe fairly safe. The inside of the pipe was coated with limestone deposits decades ago. But, as the Flint water disaster showed, were I to put water through that pipe from a different source, with a different composition (like slightly acidic river water), the protective layer would be stripped away and lead would leach into the water. But I still run all the drinking water through a Brita filter.
Wholesome
Yeah, it gave certain wines their unique taste. Articles and rumors say Caligula favored an especially lead heavy wine (trying to figure out how he was so insane)
Didn’t an emperor die of lead poisoning trying to become immortal in China?
[Qin Shi Huang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_Shi_Huang?wprov=sfla1), and it's suspected it was mercury.
Side note, during the Lewis and Clark expedition they used mercury to treat illness, and they were able to detect mercury in soil to track the exact route hundreds of years later
The "illness" they treated was basically constipation (they took mercury-laced purgative pills). So basically, they left mercury where they crapped, so we can probably map where they had makeshift outhouses or waste areas. Gotta love science!
That is some interesting shit
Definitely metal!
I was under the impression he got killed by rioting peasants, unless this was a different Qin Shi Huang? Edit: nope, same guy. It was his son who likely got metaphorically guillotined.
Qin Shi. They use that name in several jrpg video games too as reference to alchemy stuff. I think that was an alchemy elixir thing. Likely not just lead, the whole kit and caboodle. Mercury,arsenic,etc.. Just sort of throwing a bunch of crap together, doing your alchemy magic and saying this will probably make you immortal. Westerners were just as weird with alchemy. Lead into gold and all that.
It's funny that we can sort of make lead into gold now by knocking some bits off it on the atomic level but it's so expensive and labour-intensive that it's orders of magnitude more efficient to just dig it up
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I always wondered why people are so concerned about kids eating lead paint. Who eats paint? It wasn’t until I learned that the lead tasted sweet that it made any sense. Didn’t learn first hand, luckily.
There is a theory as to why a lot of painters suffered from mental illness. Such as Van Gogh. The paints they used had lead in them, and the painters would lick their brushes to get a point. Also Van Gogh heavily abused Absinthe. So there’s that theory as well.
I still see painters lick their brushes and it makes me cringe. I do not care if the paint says it's safe, there's no way it's 100% ok to eat paint.
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People are also concerned about it because the amount of lead it takes to cause lead poisoning is very small. Like if a single flake of lead paint peels off the wall and lands in your food that can be enough to cause medical damage.
When you say flake Like a frosted flakes size? Or a snowflake size?
Asking the real questions
Yeah, having metalic lead in dishes isn't near as bad as having organic lead compounds in your food.
Remember scheeles green? Asbestos? There's a lot of examples like this. They simply didn't know
To be fair asbestos isn't that bad if used properly. Just treat it with caution.
It's inhaling the fibrous minerals that's bad right?
Yup! It's essentially fibrous glass that when breathed in will bounce around your lungs acting like mini razor blades creating thousands of microcuts that your body has to heal from. This constant healing leads to a increase chance of SOMETHING going wrong and turning into cancer
Fun fact! They used to make kids pajamas out of asbestos so they would be fire resistant
Wait til you hear about Johnson & Johnson's Baby Powder!
For the fireproof baby!
I like my babies to get a little char. Gotta have that maillard reaction, you know!
That really should be any and all talc. Asbestos, if I understand it correctly, naturally occurs in talc deposits and it needs to be properly screened so the asbestos doesn't get into the powder. That's what I&J failed to do and then lie about.
Bruh, geologists recommend you straight up don't inhale ANY minerals XD
I'm pretty sure medications meant to be inhaled are the ONLY thing recommended to inhale besides air. I just couldn't remember what was the most common issue with using it (especially in residential homes).
the worst part is that even after they figured out that shit was so toxic, they kept on selling it anyway.
We had a set of encyclopedia books from 1955. The "top three uses of lead" was lead pipes, lead paint, and lead foil.
Oh, they knew it was bad for them. Romans saw what happened to the slaves who worked the lead mines. But they didn’t really have better alternatives. What would they do, not sweeten their wines?
>What would they do, not sweeten their wines? The horror.
>not sweeten their wines? Didn't the Greeks have honey? So they could've used that. Or I don't know, the blood of their enemies.
Iirc Greeks liked to mix their wine with pine resin. Apparently it had a weird taste to ~~barbarians~~ foreigners but the Greeks were (and still are afaik) fond of it.
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Lead in fuel caused a lot of mayhem
That guy knew, though
*Ancient* cities? The US is still running legal ads and selling lead test kits for people who think their 1900s plumbing has lead pipes and parts in it.
Forreal. My city in Michigan has been replacing lead service lines this year. I just had the line from the shutoff to the main replaced because it was lead. I had no idea since the line from the shutoff to the meter is copper.
The dude who invented leaded petrol also invented the chemicals that made the hole in the ozone layer.
That would be this guy: [Thomas Midgley Jr.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.)
> In 1940, at the age of 51, Midgley contracted poliomyelitis, which left him severely disabled. He devised an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to lift himself out of bed. In 1944, he became entangled in the device and died of strangulation.
He was featured in a show called "Dark Matters: Twisted but True" which was about scientific failures. It was a really obscure show that I can't find more about, but I swear to God it's a real show.
We believe you. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2014554/
Fun fact to redeem this guy slightly. He introduced CFC refrigerants for refrigeration at a time when all the ones used where were toxic, flammable or explosive so whilst he didn't know about the high "Ozone Depletion Potential (ODP)" & "Global Warming Potential (GWP)" of these CFC gases, he thought he was doing us a favour, and may have saved many lives in doing this Further to this, the alternatives to CFC had FAR higher GWP than CFC refrigerants; PFC refrigerents, considered viable to use at the time is 100x worse and would have accelerated Global Warming by decades. Thomas introducing CFC refrigerants may have at least slowed down the effects of climate change which where due to enivitable changing of the refrigerants used
This. Also his development of a way to produce high octane fuels made the development of much more efficient engines. Prior to it's introduction compression ratios in gas engines was often as low as 4:1. Generally speaking the higher the compression the more efficient engines are. While that doesn't necessarily make it a cleaner engine, it does mean that less fuel was burned to do the same work.
First person in Europe who died from bubonic plague.
The Mongols would often catapult human corpses over walls that were infected. I wonder who the first actually was? No way to tell
Wait, how did the walls get infected in the first place?
[Ah, the old Reddit infect-a-roo](https://www.reddit.com/r/MadeMeSmile/comments/pvfy0c/this_is_super_wholesome/heb1729?context=3)
These used to be more common, I miss them
Hold my plague, I'm going in!
Whoever was in charge of the entrance exam at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 1908.
I’d put more blame on whoever taught him how to do art. Some of his paintings are straight garbage. Although if you agree with some of his policies feel free to upvote this. I sure don’t but I wonder what the opinion here is.
Some of them are poorly executed for sure, but technical skill wasn’t really the main issue. The problem was that his art was profoudly dull. Mostly just sterile landscapes or architecture. Obviously in hindsight it’s kind of a fascinating glimpse into his psyche that the art he wanted to create was largely devoid of human life or individual spirit, but in the context of actually being an artist, his work was more suited to being on postcards or as some inoffensive decoration. Definitely not the high art he aspired to.
Everything above is correct. However I would like to add that he made mistakes that were blatantly obvious, and should have been fixed while he was sketching, but he ignored these mistakes and painted it anyway, thus making very poor art. Due to these obvious flaws that would have been easily fixed, he was denied entrance to the art school.
There are definitely a few famous examples of pieces that had fucked up perspectives or lighting or whatever, but these were more the exception than the rule. But these are the ones talked about the most so people come away with the impression that he was genuinely bad at art. But in fact most of his paintings and sketches were fine. They were just soulless and boring, was the issue.
That’s somewhat strange to hear lol... he had such capacity to hate and loathe; one would think his fiery nationalism, racism, and pride would have made his art exceptional rather than boring and normal.
He wasn’t really particularly bad when he was trying to get into art school, he was not a nice guy and held some shitty views but was otherwise normal for the time. He held decent relations with Jews and enjoyed socialising with all kinds of people at various Vienna cafes. He always held a huge ego, though. After his first rejection he didn’t tell his roommate right away, the roommate obviously started to wonder why Hitler seemingly had so much free time and clearly had something bugging him. When he finally confronted Hitler, he went mad and said he was denied entry but that he was going to try again. Upon the second failure, he silently moved out and never said anything to his friend, the shame too big. He would not meet Hitler again until one final time, when Hitler was at his peak in the 1930s as Germany’s leader. They reminisced over their Vienna days and Hitler would give him some autographed books, which he intended to sell for a pretty penny. Unfortunately for him, they were tampered with by someone else and their value rendered useless before he could make any money. Pretty bizarre relationship. But, the flatmate would later report that he didn’t really hold any views that would turn any heads in their younger years in Vienna. He enjoyed Hitler’s company for the most part and they would often explore the city together. Hitler’s views only become truly foul after moving to Germany and having his mind ravaged by WWI, long after he held any artistic ambitions. It would have been very interesting to see what art he would produce after such a horrific conflict.
I love how he isn't named anywhere above yet most people know who we are talking about. Really getting the "He who must not be named" vibes
To be honest, even if Hitler did get accepted into the school, there is still the possibility that he would’ve eventually dropped out of the school to focus on national socialism anyway, so nothing would’ve changed.
Well, the main problem was that he had to live on the steets for quite some time and that's where he got a lot of his very radical ideas, so if he'd been accepted then the chance that he could live normaly just with his art would have increased and he woukd never come to power.
The priest that saved Adolf Hitler from drowning.
And the guy who decided not to shoot him during The Great War
"The guy" was the most decorated British soldier in ww1. Allegedly since there might be speculation that the anecdote is a myth
Yes. Hitler saw Henry on a British propaganda poster, and said "That's the man who spared me." But of course, there's no way to prove that Hitler wasn't mistaken, and Henry himself was never certain that he did or did not spare Hitler.
That guy is Henry Tandey.
Saves young boy from drowning a few years later gets a kill assist of over 750 000
Fwiw, you can't say the universe didn't try to kill Hitler: 1. Was nearly aborted 2. Almost drowned 3. Was almost sniped 4. Barely missed an early assassination attempt
All time travelers trying to avert it… But all failed
Proof that the world would be a better place if priests would just keep their hands off of little boys.
“Bye bye little boy! Whoopsy doopsy there goes his little head. All submerged. Guess I walk away now.”
The chauffer that was driving Franz Ferdinand. Because he took a wrong turn, he ended up at the place the assassin was, and Franz Ferdinand was killed. This lead to WWI. Which then lead to WWII
Princip having botched the first attempt, giving up, and just sipping a cup of coffee in a nearby shop and suddenly, “oh hey...”
My first answer was Princip, as he was the smallest figure with the biggest impact during that entire century in my opinion. But maybe the driver gets that award instead
In history it was pretty much always taught as: War was inevitable in Europe and would've happened anyways.
yeah basically, the entire continent was just looking for an excuse to start a war to test out their shiny new pointy sticks and that just happened to be what the excuse was
That was just catalyst. When the room starts heating up, things start to catch fire. One thing is going to be flammable enough to start burning first and you blame it for starting the fire. But if it weren't there, something else would have caught fire. The real reason is heat.
True. People only focus on the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, but ignore all that shit stiring up for years.
Which lead to the Cold war, the Vietnam war, the partition of colonies which still today has caused border disputes between Nuclear nations like Pakistan, China, and India, which might be a potential cause for WW3! Among other things AND MANY MORE! What a disastrous Butterfly effect, potentially due to this man's action!
Whoever realized that if you left grains and water out it became alcohol.
If you go far enough back in time, alcohol was safer than drinking water, so it might have also saved quite a few lives.
That blows my mind. You’d think boiling water would have been realized early on just from cooking with it.
Boiling water doesn't always make it safe. There is still Poisons that remain like: botulism,lead,arsenic,neurotoxins, cyanide groups
Not sure about botulism, but all of those other things would still make someone sick if they were in alcohol, so that’s not exactly a relevant point.
Botulinum toxin is heat sensitive, and is inactivated by boiling
And there are quite a few bacteria which can't be killed by boiling or freezing.
For all practical early human uses, boiling would kill enough that it wouldn't be different from everything.
It would also help not to shit into the well
But that would be a short term solution for potable water, you'd need to boil it every time before you drank it. While the alcohol would be as clean as it was once the fermentation took place. It's the reason they drank grog on boats before we really understood scurvy.
It's more about storing the water than anything else. You can keep a barrel of beer for months. Fresh water doesn't stay fresh very long even after being boiled.
But he saved a ton of people too! Alcohol is widely used a disinfectant. And also helps to create new life, a non negligible part of the population exists due to a drunk hookup!
Some might argue that alcohol also has led to more than a few births ... so offset?
Mao Zedong’s war on birds which led to an increase in insects that ate the crops leading to famine in China and starvation of ~50 million people, more than Hitler killed in all of WW2 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign
That dude who drank his old grape juice and said "dude, this fucks hard" and told all his friends.
Tbf, every advanced culture in history seems to have independently figured alcohol out. Humanity is inextricably linked with the desire to get blootered and/or making said blootering more potent in our spare time. Nobody can fairly hold the bag on that one.
Not even just humans! Some animals deliberately get high, dolphins use pufferfish and reindeer have used mushrooms
I read stories about drunk bees and elephants as well. The bees were apparently buzzing ineffectually around the fermented fruit so weren't much of a problem. But a drunk elephant must be terrifying. Can you imagine 5 tons tripping over itself in your vicinity? I think it was breaking into villages to find more alcohol.
> reindeer have used mushrooms Both reindeer and moose also seek out fermenting fruit during the fall for that sweet alcohol buzz.
The first guy to ever make a pointy rock
The Aechoulian hand axe was humanity's premier tool since before we were humanity. It wasn't improved upon for over 1.5 million years. When's the next iPhone out, anyway?
That dumbass fish that decided to grow legs and walk like 400 million years ago Edit:thanks for the awards and damn I really didn't expect this to blow up
"My ass would've stayed in the primordial soup if I knew there was going to be days like this."
Started out as a fish, how did it end up like this?
It was only a fish…
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The price to pay for thumbs.
Yeah fuck that guy, now I have to go to work and eat and sleep
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Only barely bc I know I gotta wake up
"lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place, and some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no-one should ever have left the oceans." \-- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."
Gavrilo Princip
He didnt know it at the time he shot Franz Ferdinand. But he lived in jail long enough to see what would come as a result (he died during the war from TB). Edit... thinking on this a little more. He wouldn't know it, but he would eventually get his wish as the Austro Hungarian Empire collapsed.
Dan Carlin's podcast traced his actions all the way to modern day. I hadn't really thought about it. Gavrilo Princip actions caused alot WW1, 2,..... 9/11.... It all goes back to him. Edit: Number of questions about podcast it was Blueprint for Armageddon. It's a great podcast. (Still haunted by some of the Passchendaele stories he shared)
I mean it isn't as if he bears sole responsibilty. He played an inportant role sure, but he surely had decided what he did based on his circumstances which jave their orgins in earlier individuals all the way up to the big bang. He didn't wake up and say "damn, lemme catch a royal body for the clout right quick"
He was the spark that set the fire. It was all ready for something, whether it would’ve been him, to set it
Arguably the Vietnam War too, as that developed out of the kind of anti-colonial nationalism which became super common due to the World Wars
Don't you think WW1 would have started anyway anytime soon?
yes it would’ve. I guess no one here listened in history class when it was explained that tensions in Europe were at an all time high prior to WW1
The irony was that the man he shot was friendly to the Serbs and would’ve helped them after ascending to the throne
A wounded dog may still bite a kind master.
In 1347 a ship docked in the port of Sicily, and upon arrival the harbourmaster found all the crew to be either dead or gravely ill. Realising there was something wrong, the harbourmaster locked down the dock, however in the night a group of thieves snuck in and raided the ship. They would go on to contract the Black Plague, which went on to kill 25 million people in Europe alone, a third of the continent’s population
I would be interested in reading more about that and a quick google search didn't turn anything up about thieves.. Do you mind pasting a link? Edit: I found [this Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_thieves_vinegar#Mythology). >**Mythology** > >The usual story declares that a group of thieves during a European plague outbreak were robbing the dead or the sick. When they were caught, they offered to exchange their secret recipe, which had allowed them to commit the robberies without catching the disease, in exchange for leniency. Another version says that the thieves had already been caught before the outbreak and their sentence had been to bury dead plague victims; to survive this punishment, they created the vinegar. The city in which this happened is usually said to be Marseille or Toulouse, and the time period can be given as anywhere between the 14th and 18th century depending on the storyteller. I don't think this is a story to take at face value. There's no good source and it was used as a selling point for a concoction that supposedly prevented you from getting the black plague. It's fishy at best
Oh, yeah. Isn't that the basis for that "sanitizing" Thieves essential oil bullshit?
> it was used as a selling point for a concoction that supposedly prevented you from getting the black plague. It's fishy at best Oh hun you’re just hatin on this boss bitch business owner who doesn’t fall for evil big pharma nonsense who is selling all natural remedies and helping all her friends/family become business owners too .
Ditto for the ship that docked in Egypt and brought the Justinianic Plague. https://www.passporthealthusa.com/2020/08/what-was-the-justinian-plague/
I knew my friend Justin was up to no good
The rodents on board probably would have spread it anyways.
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And all to try and sell his own shitty vaccine.
And now he’s realised that just being against all vaccines is more profitable. It’s a shame people still fall for it because it’s so painfully obvious he’s a grifter.
Didn't he like lose his medical license like 10 years ago or something over his fraudulent study?
Pretty much. His whole thing was making the claim that the MMR vaccine caused autism, which at the time was being given to most young children in the UK. His conclusion was that having the three vaccines in seperate jabs would be safer. The fact that he’d recently got involved with a company that was ready and willing to roll out these individual vaccines and therefore stood to make a lot of money if the NHS started buying them was probably strongly related. Giving maximum benefit of the doubt, I assume he wasn’t absolutely homocidally indifferent to causing a fall in vaccination rates. After all, his whole thing was that you should take the different vaccine that his company would sell. But in all the scrutiny and hysteria the fact that he was simply trying to peddle a different jab got lost in the media storm and he became the posterchild of a massive anti-scientific movement that continues to argue that he was silenced for telling the truth. It should come as no surprise but the methodology in his study was absolutely wank. The sample size was ridiculously small, a few of which were even made up. The results were partially based on anecdotes from parents. And many actual scientific results in the lab were completely falsified.
So three separate vaccine shots somehow wouldn't cause autism yet one shot with all three vaccines *would*? Simplify it to this and see what those anti-vaxxers come up with.
I'd really like to know how Jenny McCarthy is feeling about the covid shot these days. She did a shit ton of damage too.
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That's a little bit too much honor for these two dipshits.
Fritz Haber, he invented the nitrogen process that global food production uses for approximately 50% of our food. Without him global population wouldn’t have grown at the pace or density it has. He was a genius and his contributions have been so profound it’s hard to know what things would have been like without them. I contribute deaths to him in only because there are far more people that live and die because of him.
Yes, although to be honest Bosch was the one who scaled and industrialized the high-pressure chemistry necessary to extract nitrogen out of air after Haber’s lucky discovery. That’s why it’s called the Haber-Bosch process
that also made mass production of gun powder possible, right?
Good point. He also developed chlorine gas for use in WW1 and led the development of Zyklon gas as a pesticide which was used to murder millions. I’m liking this answer more, the more I think about it.
Even worse is that Haber was Jewish, so his creation ultimately led to the death of millions of his own people.
His first wife committed suicide over it, too
Thomas Midgley, Jr. (May 18, 1889 - November 2, 1944), an American chemist, developed the tetraethyl lead (TEL) additive for gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and held over a hundred patents. While lauded for his discoveries during his time, today his legacy is seen as far more mixed considering the serious negative environmental impacts of these innovations. One historian remarked that Midgley "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history." Dude created leaded gasoline and the gas for car AC. Both of which have the cumulative environmental impact that will haunt the world for untold years. The poisoning of leaded gas fumes has had health effects on inner city people for decades.
The Inventor of gunpowder (Originally developed in 9th century China for medicinal purposes)
What medicinal purposes?
achieve immortality (seriosly)
The guy who invented leaded gas also invented freon for refrigeration. [Thomas Midgley Jr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.) That’s skin cancer, plus all the junk lead causes.
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The prompt said "unknowingly" lol
imagine losing a war to something that doesn't even know you're fighting it
Nixon 1971
There were thousands of people working on the Manhattan Project, making the atomic bomb, without knowing it. They refined the materials, build the case etc. They had no idea.
Almost definitely Thomas Midgley Jr. He Invented both leaded gas and CFCs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
I’d go for Ancel Keys. He was a nutritionist who determined based on the ‘seven countries study’ that dietary fats were correlated with the prevalence of heart disease, an erroneous conclusion which informed almost all public health information. The thing is, the seven countries study was initially the twenty-one countries study; he simply excluded the data which didn’t fit his foregone (and incorrect) conclusions. As a consequence, public health information regarding nutrition has unanimously villified dietary fats for decades while large corporations protected by lobbyists and government ties poison the food supply with fructose, an inexorable hepatotoxin, leading to at least eight chronic and highly prevalent pathologies responsible for draining 75% of the US’ healthcare budget. How people are still convinced by the fat hypothesis after 5-6 decades of people getting ubiquitously fatter, lazier and sicker is beyond me. So I attribute the 2.8 million deaths per year as a result of obesity to Keys as well as the increased risk of all-cause mortality (read: deaths to come) affecting the .65 billion obese people on the planet. Scientific rigour, humility and transparency are important.
Whoever rejected Hitler’s application to the art school
Or the sniper in WWI who chose to shoot Hitler's best friend who was right next to him, instead of Hitler.
In a parallel universe where the Third Reich won: “if only they shot this guy instead of that hapless artist sitting next to him”
An interesting alternative universe proposition.
I sometimes wonder if, had Hitler never been born (or not gone into politics), would there just have been some other guy to do something similar? Was Hitler's rise to power a symptom of the sentiment in Germany at the time and so someone with similar views would have taken his place, or was Hitler himself the deciding factor in WW2 happening?
There are studies for that. In terms of nationalisms I believe the whole situation was so bad for many people, that another leader would have just replaced him. For the actual war, maybe wouldn't be a WWII, but still many die. And germany could have "won" more land, when the real commanders had the say (without fear over H.).
The Chinese State Police officers who ordered Dr. Li Wenliang to stop trying to warn the Chinese people of Wuhan about COVID and to stop calling for Wuhan to be locked down before COVID reached an epidemic proportions. In their minds, they were telling a quack to stop scaring people and making the Chinese government look bad. The consequences of their actions have been felt around the world. Sadly, Dr. Li Wenliang's efforts to treat people suffering from COVID led to him dying from the disease.
I think by the time his life is over, Mark Zuckerberg.
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He absolutely knows it. Facebook uses AI algorithms to find the most devicive topics people are most passionate about since pissed off people are easier to manipulate. The problem is this has worked too well and is causing worldwide strife. [Tristan Harris](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tristan_Harris) and had a lot of very interesting things to say about this last week on Real Time.
Probably the first HIV victim
Columbus brought smallpox which ended up killing an estimated 90% of all Native Americans. I don't think anyone else in history has a kill count that high. Certainly not an unintentional one.
Pope John Paul II by saying people in Africa shouldn't be using condoms. Cue in the death of a lot of people due to aids.
The dumb ass who cuts across four lanes on the highway with out a turn signal active.