3 Small, Random Decisions That Shaped America in Insane Ways

3 Small, Random Decisions That Shaped America in Insane Ways

The Titanic Sank Because A Guy Forgot to Leave His Keys

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“Hey, not to be a bother, but has anybody seen the binoculars?”

Let’s imagine, for a moment, that you are headed up to a ship’s crow’s nest to serve as lookout. Any of us that don’t have superpowers or sci-fi ocular implants might think it prudent to bring up some sort of item that might assist our lowly human eyes. There’s a reason that our mental picture of a crow’s nest includes a spyglass, or better, binoculars. One particularly famous ship’s safety, however, was left to the simple retinas of a normal man. Given that the ship was the Titanic, we can conclude that was probably less than ideal.

The weird thing was, there were binoculars in the crow’s nest of the Titanic, and they would be found in the wreckage, so we know they were there when the boat sank. Unfortunately, they were in a locker that no one on board had the keys to. Those keys were located in the pocket of a man named David Blair, who was not on the Titanic. He had been, up until the last minute, when he was reassigned. And in the same way you might accidentally walk out of a bank with their pen, Blair, when removed from the ship, forgot to put the keys back. If only they’d been as smart as those coffee shops that nail them to a 2×4.

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