Every known you were right but the dimwits around you refuse to listen? Here are 28 historical figures who were totally, completely right about huge things like world wars and medical innovations. It would have been nice it anyone had listened!
I Am Right. Period.
“Dimitri Mendeleev, who wrote the periodic table. At the time, there were dozens of gaps in it, and he said those were for elements that hadn’t yet been discovered. He was ridiculed for positing that there still were undiscovered elements, but within 10-20 years, other scientists began discovering some of those missing elements, validating Mendeleev.
The best part about that one is the next element discovered DISPROVED his table (Gallium, I think?). Mendeleev then, without any evidence or testing on his end, told the scientist who found the element that his numbers were wrong and to retest them. And…. he was right. The scientist had done the calculations on atomic weight and such wrong.
Fortunately he was still alive then and lived to see his theory proved.”
The Good Doctor
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Dr. Semmelweis: ‘Maybe doctors should be washing disinfecting their hands after handling cadavers, before delivering babies. This might reduce the spread of disease.’
(Most of the) Medical community: ‘How DARE you, sir? We are gentlemen, not diseased lepers. We are not responsible for making our patients sick.’
{Semmelweis dies horribly.}
Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister: ‘There are these things called germs and they make people sick.’
Medical community: ‘Hmm… maybe we should be disinfecting our hands between patients.’
He was ridiculed by his peers in the medical community. He was committed to an asylum and died of septicemia after being beaten by the guards who had most likely not washed their hands.”
The Morton Thiokol Engineers
“Robert Borsjoly, the Morton Thiokol engineer who correctly predicted that the Challenger’s SRB o-rings would fail leading to LOCV.
Bob Ebeling was another one of the Morton Thiokol engineers that fought to keep Challenger grounded, only to be overruled – he actually told his wife the night before the launch that he knew the shuttle was going to explode.
‘On Jan. 27, 1986, the former engineer for shuttle contractor Morton Thiokol had joined four colleagues in trying to keep Challenger grounded. They argued for hours that the launch the next morning would be the coldest ever. Freezing temperatures, their data showed, stiffened rubber O-rings that keep burning rocket fuel from leaking out of the joints in the shuttle’s boosters.
But NASA officials rejected that data, and Thiokol executives overruled Ebeling and the other engineers.
“It’s going to blow up,” a distraught and defeated Ebeling told his wife, Darlene, when he arrived home that night.
And it did, 73 seconds after liftoff. Seven astronauts died. Cold weather and an O-ring failure were blamed, and Ebeling carried three decades of guilt.'”
The Man Who Saved The World By Doing Nothing
“Stanislav Petrov — it could be argued that he single-handedly prevented World War III, or at the least a nuclear retaliation against the US, by simply doing nothing.
Long story short, he didn’t believe a very complex and expensive nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that multiple missiles had been launched from the USA. He suspected the system was malfunctioning, and decided to not report what he saw.
It was later determined that indeed the system malfunctioned, and had he reported what he saw, a nuclear response from the USSR was highly likely.”
The Old Man and the FBI Surveillance
“Ernest Hemingway.
In the later years of his life, he became paranoid that the FBI was watching him: bugging his phones, reading his mail, freezing his bank accounts and assets. No one close to him believed him and thought he was just paranoid.
This paranoia (and other genetic factors) led to a complete mental breakdown that had to be treated with over 30 rounds of electric-shock therapy. Hemingway, little more than a shell of his former self, killed himself several days after his 36th round of electric-shock treatment.
In the 1990s, the Freedom of Information Act was passed and all government agencies were required to make their declassified records viewable to the public. FBI documents were discovered that revealed the FBI was, in fact monitoring Hemingway via all of the methods he described under orders signed by J. Edgar Hoover himself over perceived ties between Hemingway and Communist Cuba, where Hemingway lived.
The FBI even bugged his phone in his hospital room at the Mayo Clinic where he was undergoing shock treatments under an assumed name.”
And Now Hundreds of High Schoolers Forget Him Everyday
“Avogadro. His theory wasn’t accepted until nearly 50 years later.
And now, the Avogadro principle is one of the fundamental principles of analytical chemistry.
Other chemists:
‘Wow, this guy just goes on and on about his s—-y theory.’
‘Yeah, Avogadro’s constant.'”
An Unpleasant Truth
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“Motherf—king John Snow
‘Snow was a skeptic of the then-dominant miasma theory that stated that diseases such as cholera and bubonic plague were caused by pollution or a noxious form of ‘bad air’.
After the cholera epidemic had subsided, government officials replaced the Broad Street pump handle. They had responded only to the urgent threat posed to the population, and afterward they rejected Snow’s theory. To accept his proposal would have meant indirectly accepting the fecal-oral route of disease transmission, which was too unpleasant for most of the public to contemplate.’
…because at the time London was literally covered in s–t and the Thames was a massive open sewer which permanently reeked.”
Pretty Extreme
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“Barry Marshall, who believed that peptic ulcers were mainly caused through bacterial infection and not as previously believed, by stress, spicy food and too much stomach acid.
He was ridiculed by the scientific community who said that the acidity of the stomach was far to high for bacteria to live.
So he drank a culture of H. pylori, 14 days later once it was confirmed that his stomach was now massively colonized by the bacteria and he had major inflammation and gastritis (which is likely to lead to ulceration), started taking antibiotics and all returned to normal.
20 years later him and his research partner were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
So I think technically, he did get awarded the ‘Damn, there really were right’ award.”
He Didn’t Say It’d Be Good…
“In a Rolling Stones interview from 1969, Jim Morrison (very) vaguely predicted the rise and popularity of electronic music:
‘…some brilliant kid will come along and be popular. I can see a lone artist with a lot of tapes and electrical … like an extension of the Moog synthesizer — a keyboard with the complexity and richness of a whole orchestra, y’know? There’s somebody out there, working in a basement, just inventing a whole new musical form. We’ll hear about it in a couple years. Whoever it is, though, I’d like him to be really popular, to play at large concerts, not just be on records — at Carnegie Hall, to play at dances …’
TL:DR Jim Morrison is God.”
I Hope They Said Thank You!
“Kotaku Wamura, he was the Japanese mayor of Fudai and predicted a tsunami would destroy the town so he build a anti-tsunami wall and floodgates. At first it was mocked and said it was just a folly but 50 years after he died a tsunami hit the town and the wall saved the city. Over 3000 people owe their lives to someone they made fun of.”
“Tomorrow it will be you”
“Haile Selassie’s speech to the League of Nations. They stood by and watched when Italy invaded Ethiopia and issued a toothless weapon’s embargo on both Italy and Ethiopia which only affected Ethiopia; because Italy already had an arm’s industry.
Haile Selassie went to the league and made a speech that earned him Times man of the year and a legendary status among world leaders when he spoke the prophetic words ‘…today it is us, tomorrow it will be you’ among a chorus of cheers and boo’s from Italian representatives. Shortly after Hitler invaded Poland, after exploiting the league’s appeasement policy, with the knowledge that the league was powerless to prevent it and started the second world war.
Full speech http://astro.temple.edu/~rimmerma/appeal_to_the_league_ofnations.htm “
What An Inquisition
He proposed that the stars in the sky were like our sun, and that they also had planets around them.
He was condemned as a heretic by the inquisition and burned at the stake.” Source
W.E.B. Du BOIS
“Holy s–t! It’s not on here.
W.E.B. Du Bois, you know, the guy the White House tweeted, apologized and misspelt his name?
He wrote The Souls of Black Folk
In the forethought he has this:
HEREIN lie buried many things which if read with patience may show the strange meaning of being black here in the dawning of the Twentieth Century. This meaning is not without interest to you, Gentle Reader; for the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.
He wrote this in 1903. He articulated really well how race would be a big issue of the century ahead.
Later on, he also describes that Jazz is the only thing that can be considered American from America, yet, it was created within Black culture–a “subhuman” peoples at the time.” Source
Booed Off Stage
“Sinead O’Connor. In 1992, she went on SNL, tore up a photograph of the pope and accused the Catholic church of child sexual abuse on a massive scale, claiming that the scandal was being covered up by the church hierarchy.
In those few seconds of live TV, she basically committed career suicide. Next day, steamrollers crushed hundreds of her CDs outside 30 Rock. She was booed off stage at the Bob Dylan tribute at Madison Square Garden a couple of days later. The next week’s SNL host, Joe Pesi, said he’d like to give her ‘such a smack.’
Her career never recovered. But here’s the thing… It turned out every supposedly crazy thing she said on SNL and in interviews back then was completely true.” Source
20 Years Later WWII Happened
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“On 11 November 1918 Foch accepted the German request for an armistice. Although Foch advocated peace terms that would make Germany unable to pose a threat to Europe ever again, when the Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June 1919, Foch declared: “This is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years”. His words proved prophetic: the Second World War started twenty years and 64 days later.” Source
He Predicted WW I!
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“‘Europe today is a powder keg and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal . . . A single spark will set off an explosion that will consume us all . . . I cannot tell you when that explosion will occur, but I can tell you where . . . Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans will set it off.’
Otto von Bismarck, 1878
re: World War I — Told you so” Source
Japan Would Be Devastated
“A Japanese general, Isoroku Yamamoto, at the time of Pearl Harbor said, ‘I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.’ I’d say that was pretty accurate.” Source
Maybe He Had A Coupon
“Many people thought Secretary of State William H. Seward was stupid to buy Alaska for $7.2 million because it was largely unexplored and many people thought it would be barren. This was before anyone discovered the massive oil reserves and now Alaska produces about a quarter of the United State’s oil playing a large role in the impending self sufficiency of oil coming sometime in the next 15-20 years.” Source
Their Bad
“On April 14th, 1912, a radio operator on the SS Californian tried to warn a nearby ship called the Titanic that they’d encountered a large ice field that could possibly affect the other ship. The other ship’s radio operator had been in the middle of something and was annoyed at being disturbed; he told the Californian to shut up.” Source
Never Engage In A Land War With Russia
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“Before Napoleon’s 1812 campaign, his advisor Calauincourt strongly advises him against invading Russia citing the poor weather to which Napoleon simply remarks how ‘the weather is fine’.
His 1812 campaign would result in the loss of half a million of his own soldiers.” Source
Mama Warned Marie-Antoinette Not To Lose Her Head
” ‘You lead a dissipated life. I hope I shall not live to see the disaster that is likely to ensue.’
Maria Theresa of Austria to her daughter Marie-Antoinette in 1775. Not as much a ‘I told you so’ but a terrible and perhaps accidental foreshadowing. Maria Theresa was very aware that her daughter’s life at Versailles was either going to be perfect or awful beyond her imagination” Source
Prophecy or Sales Technique?
“I like the part played by artillery in the fall of Constantinople. Urban of Hungary was trying to sell this technology to the Byzantines, telling them it was the next coming thing, but his sales pitch fell on deaf ears. So he flipped around and sold his inventory to Mohammet 2, who started poking holes in the city defenses and proved Urban right.” Source
George Washington Is Rolling In His Grave
“George Washington was chosen as first president because of his immaculate reputation, Virginian roots, and his prominent stature (both militarily and in actual height- at 6’3” he was literally the tallest person at the Constitutional Convention). He left voluntarily after two terms with an even shinier legacy. He had set numerous precedents and established the young country firmly as an independent nation.
He also left a pretty firm good bye letter with wisdom for the country to follow- WHICH EVERYONE PRECEDED TO COMPLETELY IGNORE.
Here are the four bits of discarded wisdom that have him rolling in his grave:
1. He warned against the dangers of political parties
Literally, every president since has been a member of a political party. He warned of a country torn apart from petty bickering, damning words, huh? Looking at present day America we live in a country where you can vote by blindly bubbling in your party of choice and people joke about voting third party as wasting your vote.
2. He warned against Sectionalism (North Vs. South, Urban vs. Rural, etc.)
The south and the north continued to quietly and not so quietly think the other sucked. 78-years later (basically one old person later) it ended in the deadliest war for Americans ever- The Civil War. Sadly, while the Civil War is over, the nation still votes along sectional lines and there exists a disdain for anyone who lives differently.
3. He warned against involvement in foreign wars and affairs
Most pages in a history book cover us doing EXACTLY that. Not to mention the current mess that is ISIS because of generations of playing in the Middle East like a kid in a sandbox. George Washington would probably say that line from that song by Metallica One with a questions mark “Democracy has something to do with young men killing each other?” (in countries they’ve barely heard of and never been to, that has really nothing to do with their life)
I think most people can agree that George Washington was pretty right on track and deserving of a “We’re so sorry, you were completely right” Award.” Source
Charles de Gaulle
“Not precisely an ‘I told you so,’ but Charles de Gaulle flounced out of the French government in 1946 because he didn’t like the Fourth Republic, and he totally expected they would come crawling back to him, begging for help. They didn’t, and he was pretty much in the political wilderness for the next decade, making tweets that probably said ‘hanging out by myself, not in gov’t! #CALLME #LOSTINTHEWILDERNESS’ or whatever.
Then in 1958 the government is falling apart and so the Fourth Republic does, in fact, call him. Twelve years later, but he was right: their government did fall apart. (Then, he got to completely redesign the government on his own terms!)” Source
The Ground Below
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She used her work on mapping ocean floors to discover and propose plate tectonics and explain continental drift. She was ignored and laughed at for quite a while before science eventually accepted the data.”
Really?
“The most influential person of the Czech National Revival, called ‘Father of the Nation’, warned against dismantling of the Austrian (later Austro-Hungarian) empire.
Basically, there were three major language groups in the empire – Austrian (speaking German, but not a part of the neighboring German empire), Slavic (Czech, Slovak, Polish, Croatian…) and Hungarian. Although nationalist tensions were extremely high in the 19th century, especially, Frantisek Palacky was opposed to the idea of the destruction of the Austrian empire, wanting to reform it instead. He argued that a small nation having Germans on the west border and Russians on the east border would suffer tremendously if not a part of the big empire. He even said: ‘If we didn’t have the Austrian empire, we’d have to invent one.’
But the increasing nationalist tensions, combined with the political will of the winners of WWI, led Czechs to ignore the wise words of the ‘Father of the Nation’. So, as Palacky predicted, the country was devoured by its neighbors – first the Germans (1938-1945), then the Russians (1945-1989, the years may vary depending on interpretation).
Frantisek Palacky must have been rotating in his grave for the major part of the 20th century.” Source
Hooked On Drugs
“That guy who said the CIA was responsible for the crack epidemic due to flooding the streets with cocaine to pay for the Contra rebellion. It may not have all been 100% correct, but it sure as s–t was not wrong, either. Guy lost everything and eventually killed himself, I believe.
The government strong-armed the s–t out of him. A few years after his death, classified documents were unveiled that confirmed a lot of what this whistleblower was saying. Really depressing, and my mother refuses to believe Reagan would have flooded urban centers with drugs and not given a s–t about the low income families it destroyed” Source
What A Salty Book Title
“Harry Markopolos, the man who figured out Madoff’s scheme before anyone else. He send information about the scheme to the Securities and Exchange Commission 5 times (in 2000, 2001, 2005, 2007, 2008) before being taken seriously.
‘It took me five minutes to know that it was a fraud. It took me another almost four hours of mathematical modeling to prove that it was a fraud. ‘ Source“