Horde of Rabbits

In April 1945, the German submarine U-1206 was on its first combat patrol in the North Sea when it sank — not from enemy action, but from a toilet malfunction. The sub featured a new high-pressure toilet system designed to work at depth, but it required specialized training to operate. When a crew member misused it, seawater flooded in and reached the batteries below, creating chlorine gas. Captain Karl-Adolf Schlitt was forced to surface, where the sub was spotted and bombed by Allied aircraft. The crew abandoned ship.

Born Araminta Ross and enslaved in Maryland, Harriet Tubman escaped alone in 1849 — ninety miles on foot through swamp and forest, guided by the North Star. She reached Philadelphia. She was free. And then she went back. Thirteen times over ten years, she returned as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, using disguises, coded songs, live chickens as props, and a pistol she was entirely prepared to use. A childhood head injury had left her with sudden, uncontrollable sleeping spells — and she led every one of those night journeys knowing she might drop unconscious on a path with bloodhounds behind her. She went anyway. When the Fugitive Slave Act made the whole Northern United States dangerous, she simply extended her route to Canada. In 1857 she carried her own elderly parents out in a cart she rigged herself. By 1860, she had freed around seventy people — and lost none. Then the Civil War began, and Tubman went south again, this time as a Union spy and scout. On the night of 2 June 1863, she led three gunboats up the Combahee River in South Carolina, navigating past hidden Confederate mines using intelligence gathered from enslaved people who knew the land. More than seven hundred people ran to the water that night. She became the first woman in American history to lead an armed military raid. The reward ever actually posted for her capture — placed by the woman who had enslaved her, hunting a runaway called Minty Ross — was one hundred dollars. The famous figure of forty thousand was invented by a well-meaning supporter in 1867. They never caught her either way.

In July 1799, French soldiers were rebuilding and reinforcing an old fort in the town of Rosetta (Rashid), Egypt. Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard noticed a stone with three different scripts: Greek, Demotic, and hieroglyphics. He realized it might be important. The Rosetta Stone turned out to be the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics—a writing system that had been unreadable for 1,400 years. The same decree was written in all three scripts, allowing scholars like Jean-François Champollion to crack the hieroglyphic code by 1822. One stone, found by accident in a fort wall, unlocked an entire lost civilization.

On 24 August 1875, Captain Matthew Webb dived from Admiralty Pier, Dover, into the cold grey English Channel. He was 27 years old, coated in porpoise fat, and carried nothing but determination and a support boat stocked with beef tea, brandy, and ale. Twenty-one hours and forty-five minutes later — after a jellyfish sting, a three-hour tidal reversal that pushed him backwards, gusts of wind, and at least two cups of ale handed over the gunwale — he crawled ashore near Calais and became the most famous man in the world. The Mayor of Dover declared that no one would ever do it again. He was wrong: the next person managed it 36 years later. Webb's story is about what happens when a human being decides to do something that everyone agrees is impossible — and what happens after, when the fame runs out and the next impossible thing beckons.

On November 9, 1970, a 45-foot (14-metre) sperm whale carcass washed ashore one mile south of the Siuslaw River, near Florence, Oregon. The Oregon State Highway Division, responsible for Oregon beaches (which are classified as state highways), decided to dispose of it using dynamite — reasoning the explosion would disintegrate the remains and scavengers would clean up the rest. Assistant District Highway Engineer George Thornton supervised the operation, reportedly landing the job because his supervisor had gone deer hunting. On November 12, 1970, they detonated 20 cases (half a ton / 1,000 pounds) of dynamite. The explosion launched massive chunks of blubber up to 800 feet (240 metres), crushing a parked car (a brand-new 1969 Oldsmobile 98 belonging to Walter Umenhofer — a charcoal company executive who had warned them they were using too much dynamite) and sending spectators fleeing. Most of the whale remained intact. The story became one of the first viral videos when reporter Paul Linnman's KATU footage spread online decades later, after Dave Barry's 1990 column 'Moby Yuck' brought it renewed attention.

After the oxygen tank explosion on Apollo 13, the three astronauts had to shelter in the lunar module—designed for two people for two days. The carbon dioxide was building up to lethal levels. The command module had spare filters, but they were square. The lunar module's sockets were round. Engineers on Earth had to figure out how to fit a square peg in a round hole using only materials on the spacecraft. They grabbed everything the astronauts had—duct tape, plastic bags, cardboard from manuals, a sock—and built an adapter. Instructions were radioed up, and the crew assembled it in space. It worked. The improvised air scrubber kept them alive for the four-day journey home. Sometimes the most sophisticated space mission in history depends on duct tape.

In 1856, during the Easter holidays from London's Royal College of Chemistry, 18-year-old William Henry Perkin was attempting to synthesise quinine — the antimalarial drug derived from cinchona tree bark — from coal tar. He failed. But when he cleaned out his flask with alcohol, a vivid purple solution formed. Perkin recognised something extraordinary. He sent a sample to a dyer in Perth, who confirmed it could colour silk beautifully. Perkin patented his discovery on 26 August 1856 and opened a factory the following year. The colour, named 'mauveine' or 'aniline purple', became a sensation. Queen Victoria wore it to the 1862 International Exhibition. Empress Eugénie of France adopted it as her signature shade. The craze became known as 'mauve measles.' But the real significance ran deeper: Perkin's accidental discovery launched the synthetic dye industry, which in turn created the modern pharmaceutical and plastics industries. A failed experiment to cure malaria ended up being the foundation of almost everything.

In 1897, a German Jewish doctor named Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee — the world's first organisation dedicated to LGBTQ+ rights. By 1919, he had opened the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin: a clinic, research centre, archive, and refuge that housed the world's most extensive collection of material on human sexuality. It offered gender-affirming care decades before the term existed. It employed trans people. It campaigned for the decriminalisation of homosexuality. It was extraordinary. On 6 May 1933, the Nazi German Student Union raided and occupied the Institut. Four days later, on 10 May 1933, students and SA members carried 20,000 books from the Institut to the Opernplatz and threw them onto a bonfire. The famous photographs of Nazi book burnings? That's Hirschfeld's library. He was in Paris when it happened — he watched his own library burning in a cinema newsreel — and never returned to Germany. He died in exile in Nice on 14 May 1935, his 67th birthday. Decades of research, thousands of patient records, irreplaceable archives — gone in an afternoon.