【海外の反応】「不可能だと知らなかったから、やってのけた」歴史を変えた人たちが凄すぎる件

Emil Zatopek after winning the 5000m and 10000m races in the Olympics decided to run the Marathon. A distance he had never run before.

He was running with the world record holder and asked if they were going the right pace. He told him, no we're going too slow. Emil sped up and set the Olympics record completing the sweep of long distance races in the 1952 Olympics.

 Berta Benz, mother Mercedes, wife of Karl, 
 wanted him to test his Patented Motorwagen with a long drive. He didn’t think it would work. She did it without telling him, MacGyvered her way 106 kilometers to success, wired him about what they could improve, and made history. 

After several early failures in their Mars program, the Soviet Union decided to instead focus on landing a probe on Venus, unaware at the time that Venus is a much more inhospitable environment and that a probe would have to contend with a corrosive atmosphere and searing temperatures, neither of which are present on Mars.

They succeeded, and in 1970, Venera 7 became the first space probe to safely land on another planet.

Bill Atkinson developed overlapping windows for the Apple Lisa because he thought he’d seen the Xerox PARC do it, so he figured out a way to do it and invented QuickDraw in the process. Basically he figured out a way to only redraw the portion of the window that was actually needed.

Turns out the Xerox GUI (Smalltalk) actually only had tiled windows, and if the windows did overlap the system had to redraw the whole thing which was very slow. The Xerox team were stunned when they saw that Apple had been able to achieve smooth overlapping windows.

Atkinson later remarked that if he had known Xerox hadn't actually solved the problem, he probably would have given up, thinking it was mathematically impossible on a low-powered computer.

[United 232](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232)

A manufacturing error in the tail mounted (number 2) engine fan disk caused the fan disk to explode during cruise and shred the tail of the airplane. It severed *all three* hydraulic lines used for flight controls, which was a scenario that the manufacturer and airlines considered to be unrecoverable. Pilots train for a lot but airlines didn’t bother training their pilots for what to do if this happened because it was considered certain death. They are almost entirely unable to control the airplane.

Despite this, the pilots figured out that they could steer the aircraft using differential engine thrust, increasing and decreasing power on the wing mounted engines to make the plane climb, descend, and turn to some extent. Because the plane was banking right when the incident occurred, the control surfaces were stuck in a right hand bank and so only right turns could be made.

By doing this, they managed to descend from cruising altitude, **line up with a runway**, and execute a landing that saved 185 people. Unfortunately, 112 did die, but over half those onboard survived.

Let me reiterate – engineers and airline executives considered this situation to be absolute certain death for everyone onboard to the point they didn’t even waste time training for it. Following the incident they tried to recreate what happened in a simulator to see if they could’ve saved more people. Among 28 attempts in the simulator, not one person was able to produce the conditions for a survivable landing, yet the pilots of this aircraft pulled it off in real life with no training and no plan for what to do.

There’s a lot more to the story I didn’t cover here but it was an absolute miracle.

[Origin](https://mylordshesacactus.tumblr.com/post/170401018158/please-make-a-post-about-the-story-of-the-rms)

*Carpathia* received *Titanic*’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely *could not* be covered in less than four hours.

(*Californian*’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

*Carpathia*’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to *Titanic*’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of *Carpathia*’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

*Carpathia* had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And *then* he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, *Carpathia* needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted *all* that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not *designed* to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

*Carpathia*’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a responsibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, *five minutes* off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over *three* hours later, they arrived at *Titanic*’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from *Carpathia* universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of *Titanic*’s original 2208 were brought onto *Carpathia* alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: *I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.*

I think the least we can do is remember them for it.

During graduate school, the mathematician George Dantzig famously mistook two famous unsolved math problems for homework and solved them. They became his doctoral dissertation and he ended up teaching at Stanford.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George\_Dantzig](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Dantzig)