Historical Blunders: More Mistakes That Changed the World

What’s the biggest mistake of your life, and what were the consequences? Not to worry, no matter what your biggest mistake was or how embarrassing it seemed at the time, it probably didn’t play a part in the ultimate downfall of a 1,500 year old empire.

The interesting thing about history is that it’s often the blunders rather than the successes that have shaped our world most. Of course, not all blunders are negative, and sometimes happen to be a step on the road to the mass production of penicillin.

On the other hand, sometimes best intentions can result in a mistake that sends an entire country spiralling into years of famine, killing millions in the process.

The Killing of Sparrows in China and the Great Famine

In the late 50s Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong of the People’s Republic of China attempted to eliminate every sparrow in the country. A rather radical step, but all part of Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward campaign; a strategy to evolve China from an agrarian society into an industrialised one, thereby ushering in a communist utopia. But, as you can imagine attempting to irrevocably alter an ecosystem doesn’t come without serious consequences. In this case consequences so severe that China suffered one of the biggest famines in human history.

The Great Leap Forward was based on Chairman Mao’s Eight Elements Constitution, a proposed plan to introduce industry to China’s agriculture as well as to reform the economy more in line with communist principles. It was all scientifically sound, according to Chairman Mao, and thus his vision was swiftly adopted into the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee’s Resolution National Economic Plan. Chief among the reform policies was mandatory agricultural collectivization, forced labour, and the now infamous Four Pests Campaign.

In regards to the Four Pests Campaign, Chairman Mao explained that the new era of communist prosperity would benefit from a higher standard of hygiene, thus there was no place for disease spreading pests like mosquitoes, rats and flies. The PRC would also need to increase grain output enough to surpass a quota, hence there was also no room for grain stealing birds like sparrows.

Orders were given and the Chinese Communist Party set about mobilising the population, drawing on Chairman Mao’s slogan “ren ding sheng tian”, “man must conquer nature,” as the central theme for a massive propaganda campaign. It was all in the spirit of achieving industrialisation, and even as the Chinese people set about exterminating tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of sparrows, they believed it was for the good of the country.

As it turns out, although the sparrows did eat some grain the amount was nothing in comparison to the damage locusts can cause if left without a natural predator. Chinese grain fields were soon besieged by locusts and other insects, reducing grain output and resulting in an unprecedented shortage.

The targeting of sparrows was officially halted in April 1960, swiftly replaced with a campaign to eliminate bed bugs. But the damage had already been done and the Great Chinese Famine swept across the country.

Now, there is no doubt that attempting to exterminate sparrows was a big part of why the famine occurred, but the other communist reform policies were just as much to blame. Chairman Mao had rushed his reforms into practice, had given no thought as to what would be done if the agricultural reforms failed, and had even fostered a government atmosphere where officials were afraid to report the devastation. If anything, the Four Pests Campaign stands as a microcosm of how poorly thought out the entire Great Leap Forward was across the board.

The Great Chinese Famine devastated the country between 1959 and 1961, seeing a death toll that ranges between 15 million and 55 million. Chairman Mao, after spending much of his remaining time in government trying to comprehend the extent of the destruction, passed on day to day leadership in 1959. He officially stepped down in 1976.

Discovery of Penicillin

If you were unlucky enough to be living before 1945 you effectively gambled with death every time you suffered a paper cut. No antibiotics meant that virtually any bacterial infection could be fatal, which is exactly why living into your 60s back then was such a challenge.

Not to worry though, it’s 1928 and Dr Alexander Fleming is here to revolutionise medicine. As is fairly well known, the bacteriologist at St Mary’s Hospital, Dr Fleming, left for a vacation in Suffolk, though neglected to clean his lab before departing. Upon his return he discovered he had made a rather silly blunder; a Petri dish of the bacteria Staphylococcus aureus had been infected with mould, namely Penicillium notatum.

Upon examining the Petri dish Dr. Fleming discovered that the Penicillium was actively fighting back the staphylococci, thus prompting the good doctor into frantic research. For around 7 months Dr Fleming poured all his time into understanding the illusive bacteria killing chemical he called penicillin.

But penicillin wasn’t officially used on a human until 1942, and wasn’t put into mass production until 1945; so what took so long? It comes down to the second, much more significant blunder of this particular story; the medical community’s apathetic response to Dr Fleming’s research.

The doctor revealed his work at the Medical Research Club in 1929, only to be met with little to no interest, more or less hamstringing what could have been a much faster adoption of the antibiotic. Not to put too much blame on the Medical Research Club though, since Dr Fleming also published his findings in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology that same year, and again his discoveries got no response. To be fair, the research was still in the very early stages at the time with no way to purify penicillin or mass produce it. To put it into perspective, current medical science is well aware that elephants almost never get cancer, but since there’s no way to harness that immunity we aren’t exactly celebrating a cure.

Either way, we can all be thankful that Dr Fleming took the apathy of his peers in his stride and persisted, enlisting the help of several specialists in the field including the renowned expert Professor Harold Raistrick. Research progress was slow, however, given Dr Fleming’s limited budget and the inferior medical facilities at St. Mary’s Hospital. Any attempt to improve conditions was hampered by further apathy, including a particularly painful rejection at the Second International Congress of Microbiology.

A colleague and co-worker of Fleming, Dr V.D Allison, is quoted as saying:

“Fleming suggested the possible value of penicillin for the treatment of infection in man. Again there was a total lack of interest and no discussion. Fleming was keenly disappointed, but worse was to follow. He read a paper on his work on penicillin at a meeting of the International Congress of Microbiology, attended by the foremost bacteriologists from all over the world.

There was no support for his views on its possible future value for the prevention and treatment of human infections and discussion was minimal. Fleming bore these disappointments stoically…”

By the mid-1930s, with professor Raistrick declaring that finding a purified form of penicillin was “almost impossible,” Dr Fleming finally lost steam. This could well have been an end to penicillin, putting medical research back decades. But, little did Dr Fleming know, in Oxford, based on the discovery of his work in 1937, a team including Ernst Chain and Edward Abraham under department head Howard Florey, were working on an official Penicillin Project.

Thanks to the work at Oxford, supported by dozens of researchers and many unnamed contributors from the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, penicillin was purified and went into testing in 1940. The team published their results and Fleming flew to Oxford to help. Thus, in 1945 penicillin went into mass production, though only 17 years after the original discovery.

In 1945 Dr Fleming shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain.

Constantinople’s Unlocked Gate

According to legend the sacking of Constantinople, the final downfall of the 1,500 year old Roman Empire, and the official end of the Middle Ages can all be attributed to a gate being accidentally left unlocked.

It isn’t clear who left the Kerkoporta Gate open in 1453, thus allowing the Ottoman Empire to take control of the legendary wall of Theodosius, but had the gate been locked it’s possible the Byzantine Empire may have survived the siege and modern day Istanbul may still be Constantinople. Or, is the story perhaps a bit more complicated than a single gate?

The Ottoman Army, led by the 21 year old Sultan Mehmed II, sieged Constantinople on the 6th of April 1453. The defending Byzantine city was controlled by Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos, who found himself with just 5–8,000 soldiers versus an attacking army of some 60,000. Adding to Emperor Constantine’s woes was Mehmed II’s new “super-guns” or “monster guns,” enormous cannons capable of smashing walls to rubble.

One of the guns, named Basilica, was said to be capable of hurling a 270kg stone ball over 1 and a half kilometres. Needless to say if nothing else this was the siege that officially made classic castle wall defences obsolete, ushering in a new era of gunpowder warfare.

Looking at Constantinople itself, up until that point the legendary city had been viewed as having the most elaborate defences in the Western world. Nestled against the ocean on one side, and boasting vast, triple layered walls on the other, including the double layered, 12 km long, 12 meter high Theodosian Walls, Constantinople had previously protected the Byzantine Empire against sieges.

The city walls were so well-built that even Mehmed II’s impressive super guns initially proved to not be the decisive victory you might assume. The reality was that although the super guns were far beyond any other siege weapon at the time, repairs could be carried out as fast as the super guns’ painfully slow 2 to 3 hour reload times.

All in all, the early days of the siege seemed to suggest that the Turks weren’t going to be successful. Mehmed II was certainly a genius strategist and demonstrated superior organising and deployment of his troops, but his early efforts saw the Turkish army suffering terrible losses. In particular the commitment of the Turks to not leave the bodies of fallen comrades out in the open proved very costly. As Niccolò Barbaro, a Venetian surgeon in Constantinople recounted:

“They found the Turks coming right up under the walls and seeking battle, particularly the Janissaries … and when one or two of them were killed, at once more Turks came and took away the dead ones … without caring how near they came to the city walls. Our men shot at them with guns and crossbows, aiming at the Turk who was carrying away his dead countryman, and both of them would fall to the ground dead, and then there came other Turks and took them away, none fearing death, but being willing to let ten of themselves be killed rather than suffer the shame of leaving a single Turkish corpse by the walls.”

So was it a single unlocked gate that turned the battle in favour of the Turks?

The truth is that the Byzantine Empire had been on a steady decline for a long time, really only existing as fractured, disorganised shadow of its former self. At the time of the siege the Emperor was forced to divide his attention between defending against the attackers and calming tensions between Orthodox natives and the Catholic mercenaries called in to help. This internal conflict was just a hint of the feuding that had torn the Roman Empire apart, emphasised by the fact that Constantinople had not even managed to secure support from other, nearby Western powers.

Thus, although the legend of the unlocked gate is fascinating, acting as an ultimate demonstration that even an insignificant mistake may have dramatic, potentially history altering consequences, the reality is that Constantinople would likely have fallen regardless. The Turks were vastly better equipped, demonstrated superior tactics and discipline in every regard, and were more than willing to spend months, if not years securing the city. The unlocked gate, very simply, just hastened the final downfall of a long crumbling empire.

Constantinople was conquered by the Turks on the 29th of May, 1453, was adopted as the new capital of the Ottoman empire, and officially became present day Istanbul on the 28th of March 1930.

Russia Sells Alaska

After suffering a rather devastating defeat in the Crimean War in 1865, Alexander II of Russia needed to wrangle the situation back into his favour. To this end, he decided that perhaps having a precarious Russian presence in Alaska wasn’t a particularly good idea. Should he ever be at war with the UK again, Alexander reasoned, protecting Russians in Alaska would be expensive and very inconvenient. Thus, he sold the entirety of Alaska to the United States for just over $17 million dollars.

Little did Alexander know in a few decades Alaska would be worth multiple billions.

At that time the Russian American presence in Alaska existed almost exclusively as a fur trading operation. The population in the region was made up mostly of often hostile indigenous people under Russian jurisdiction, overseen by around 500 Russian colonisers at any given time. Infrastructure included a handful of trading posts, plus the largest settlement and capital New Archangel, later named to Sitka.

Tsar Alexander had declared sovereignty over the North American Pacific Coastline in 1821, insisting that no foreign ship approach within 185 km. The move had been rather controversial, with Secretary Of State John Quincy Adams expressing concerns over what that meant for the then expanding United States. A middle ground was ultimately reached, seeing Russia agree to reduce the size of its claim as well as open ports to United States ships.

The matter was temporarily put to bed, until again being raised by Alexander II in 1867. Alexander II decided that a few million dollars and clearing the worry of Russians in Alaska was best, and so allowed negotiations to proceed.

The United States, meanwhile, was then beyond the Civil War and ready to start thriving. Many Americans believed that Alaska could act as a base for trade with Asia, thus helping the economy evolve into a new era of prosperity, and so talks began between U.S Secretary Of State William H Seward and Russian diplomat Eduard de Stoeckl.

It wasn’t long before a price of $0.36 per acre was settled on, and the total sum of $7.2 million was handed over, around $129 million in today’s money. The treaty was ratified, the paperwork signed, and Alexander II let Alaska officially became part of the United States in October of that same year.

Reactions to the purchase in the United States were largely positive, though some political opponents did refer to the purchase as “Seward’s Folly” or “Seward’s Icebox,” declaring Alaska to be nothing more than a vast, empty wasteland that offered little to no gain for the US. Those derogatory remarks were silenced, though only after another 2 decades.

The Klondike Gold Rush kicked off in 1896, with prospector Skookum Jim discovering gold in the Klondike River near Dawson City. The discovery transformed the then languishing Alaskan region, which had fallen into decline since the initial purchase, into a veritable frenzy of activity. It’s estimated that around 100,000 gold seekers stampeded into Alaska over the course of 2 years, all hoping to get their hands on some of the $1 billion worth of gold, adjusted for 2023 currency. Let’s keep in mind that Alexander II had sold Alaska for the equivalent of $129 million, and that had Russia discovered the gold the nation would have had legal claim over every ounce.

Of course, given that Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 he wasn’t around to appreciate the magnitude of his mistake. He also wasn’t around to see the discovery of more gold in Nome in 1899. Though he probably would have already passed on one way or the other by the time oil was discovered in the Kenai Peninsula in 1957, and on the Alaskan North Slope in 1968. It is estimated that the oil reserves in Alaska in 2022 were around 3.2 billion barrels.

At an average value of around $86 per barrel, well, you do the maths.

Key Takeaways

• Mao Zedong’s Four Pests Campaign in China led to a massive famine, highlighting the dangers of disrupting ecosystems.
• Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of penicillin was initially met with apathy, delaying its widespread use.
• The fall of Constantinople was likely inevitable due to the Byzantine Empire’s decline and the Ottoman’s superior tactics.
• Russia’s sale of Alaska to the U.S. for $7.2 million in 1867 proved to be a significant underestimation of its value.
• Historical blunders, such as the killing of sparrows in China, often have far-reaching and unintended consequences.

Sources

• Original Side Projects video: Historical Blunders: More Mistakes That Changed the World
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign
• https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0306422018800259
• https://www.historydefined.net/how-killing-sparrows-led-to-one-of-the-greatest-famines-in-history/
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fleming
• https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stories/how-was-penicillin-developed
• https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/the-real-story-behind-the-worlds-first-antibiotic
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penicillin
• https://www.ancient-origins.net/weird-facts/constantinople-0016929
• https://www.quora.com/Did-a-carelessly-left-open-gate-really-contribute-greatly-to-the-fall-of-Constantinople-to-the-Ottomans
• https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-aug-09-et-book9-story.html
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Constantinople
• https://www.energy.gov/management/march-13-1968-oil-discovered-alaskas-north-slope
• https://content.lib.washington.edu/extras/goldrush.html
• https://www.nps.gov/klgo/learn/goldrush.htm
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klondike_Gold_Rush
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_War
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Purchase
• https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/check-for-the-purchase-of-alaska

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