Mistakes

Notable Historical Mistakes

• The Titanic ignored at least 7 iceberg warnings sent by telegraph. It ended up famously colliding with an iceberg and sinking in 1912. Approximately 1,500 out of the 2,200 passengers met their end in the icy waters of the North Atlantic.
• The Charge of the Light Brigade (1854) was a disastrous British cavalry assault in the Crimean War caused by a vaguely worded order that sent them into devastating enemy fire.
• A botched safety test in 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine triggered the world's worst nuclear disaster.
• The 1999 loss of the $125 million NASA Mars Climate Orbiter was caused by a failure to convert between metric and imperial units. The spacecraft disintegrated in the Martian atmosphere.
• Warnings about O-ring risks in cold weather were ignored by NASA managers due to schedule pressures. This lead to the Challenger shuttle disaster of 1986.
• In 2000, Blockbuster had an opportunity to buy Netflix and declined the proposal. Blockbuster felt Netflix was a "niche business." This decision allowed Netflix to dominated the future streaming market, resulting in Blockbuster's bankruptcy.
• Following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, firefighters and military personnel used dynamite to create firebreaks to stop the fires. But this decision actually worsened the destruction.
• Although Kodak invented the first digital camera in 1975, they failed to embrace it. This allowed competitors to eventually dominate the market, leading to the company's bankruptcy in 2012.