Bulldrek v3.0

If you could change one moment in history, what would it be and how?

I'd make Adolf Hitler's mother have a miscarriage.

I cheat. And with apologies to James Burke - that book seems to have really penetrated my consciousness - I provide:

There are so many possibilities, and so little ability to predict their results, the Theory of Complex Systems being what it is. Certainly, I could kill a dictator here, or save some books there, or change my childhood or be a little more clever about some of the decisions I've made in relationships, but as has been pointed out, such results are unpredictable and would alter the world as we know it, which, as a whole, I'm fairly satisfied with. So beyond the changing of things just to see what might happen - and I'd probably indulge a bit in that, as well - I would choose instead to make certain the end of one man's life was less rife with tragic irony than it was in reality.

Archibald Cochrane ascended to the title of 9th Earl of Dundonald in 1778. Unfortunately, the previous eight Earls were all...well, "complete windowlickers" might be a bit much, but they'd anyway managed to waste the family fortune, having backed unfortunate Dukes or gambled quite poorly. So when Cochrane took over, all that was left of the family estate was Culross Abbey, the family's ancestral home, and a small coal mine nearby.

Somewhat desparate to rebuild the family fortune - and fortunes, if you take my meaning - Cochrane set about attempting to use the one asset remaining to make money: the coal mine. He tried most everything, financing his experimentation with the proceeds of three marriages, but everything he tried his hand at, failed. Either someone else found a less expensive way to do it, or what he had planned simply didn't work out at all.

England, at the time, was experiencing severe problems with the hulls of their ships. The great Carribean expansion was going on, and there was a mollusc in those waters - <i>teredo navalis</i> - which bored holes in the hulls. The solution at the time was to cover the hulls in a mixture of pitch and tar, produced by burning great tracts of forest to recover relatively small quantities of pitch. The problem with this was that England didn't have great tracts of forest, having burned most of the trees already either to keep warm during the Little Ice Age - for which the chimney, and thus the basic elemental layout of the house you live in now, was invented - or to fire the furnaces which produced glass, then in great demand. That situation had grown so grave that in 1615, James I passed the Proclamation Touching Glass, which disallowed the cutting of forests for use in glassmaking. [They had earlier forbade cutting timber within twenty-two miles of the Thames, within four miles of the Sussex forests, or within three miles of any portion of the coastline.]

By the 1770s, Britain looked much like it did now: practically treeless. This meant importing pine at great expense from the Baltics and America. A full four-fifths of the pitch used in England by 1725 came from America, which was all well and good until America decided to keep its pitch - and most overthing else - to itself, and damn be to the English.

The situation was most grave, and Cochrane decided this was where he'd make his mark. He would cook the coal in a great vessel - a large metal, fully enclosed vat - and condense the vapors to produce coal tar. He got his patent in 1781, and built four such apparatuses on his estate grounds, capable of burning 14 tons of coal at a time. Deep in debt from financing this great endeavor, he found out - and one can only imagine his reaction - that the Admirality had "switched to sheathing ships' bottoms with copper."

And that's not even what I'd change. It gets worse.

In the early 1780s, one of the kilns full of baking coal built up too much pressure and exploded. Cochrane discovered that the fumes would burn, but did nothing much else but play with this discovery, attaching gun barrels to the kiln and shooting flames around. Ten years later, one William Murdock made the same discovery - perhaps independently - while working for James Watt, and while Watt advised him not to move forward until the patent rights were clear, after the signing of armistice between England and Napoleon, Murdock installed two kilns at either end of their Soho factory and lit the resulting fumes. Gaslight had been invented.

Cochrane himself - and this is, to my mind, the worst blow of all - died penniless in a Paris slum in 1831, just miles from a relative who also died the same year. Neither knew the other was in town.

This is the tragedy, to me, the horrible irony I would seek to avoid. To die, alone, a failure, having been so close, so often in your life, to success, but always being slightly too early or slightly too late or slightly too foolish, seems like the greatest of injustices. Cochrane distilled ammonia from coal tar, but someone else had found a way to do it cheaper. He'd discovered a way to solve the greatest problem facing the British trading fleets, but someone decided to go with copper, instead. He'd discovered gaslight, which was to light Europe for the next hundred years, but he just never saw the possibilities. And then he died, alone, ignorant of a relative who could have given him comfort as he passed from his failed life.

I would whisper in his ear, then, in 1781, after the kiln explosion, "Wouldn't that be cheaper than candles, or oil lamps?"

Certainly, it wouldn't change history, unless by butterfly wings. But it would save one man from dying alone and penniless, miles from someone who could have offered him succor. It would avert a tragic irony in the life of someone who deserved something better, and that's a worthy enough cause, don't you think?

Well, I'd really like to go back to about the first century AD and drop the Antikythera mechanism in Heron's lap so that he realizes the potential of the aeolipile and we can have Greco-Roman Steampunk by the 2nd Century AD.

Yeah? Well, I'd still punch Hitler's mama in the stomach.

Ah, yeah McFly, I can see Doc Browin giving you the keys to the DeLorean so you can go back and deliver a cervical punch. Fuck, I'm for it! Let's get Spielberg and make this movie!

I think that the only thing that can really be said on changing the past have already been said in Back to the Future 1, 2, and 3.

I'd make sure that kung-fu monkeys were freely given to all citizens of America. I mean, come on...kung fu monkeys!

Give King Harold II a face shield and hand out Rockstar to his men. Hilarious repercussions.

MissTeja wrote:Yeah? Well, I'd still punch Hitler's mama in the stomach.

I do agree that that would have saved this world the terrible tragedy of WW II and the Holocaust....yet, as always, would this have averted it all? The spirit of that time in Germany was that they had a failing economy, a hefty setback which was partially the result of WW 1 and no politically strong leader to help them through those troubled times. Wouldn't some other extremist have emerged and, although in a different manner, made just the same amount of mess?

Heavy_D wrote:

MissTeja wrote:Yeah? Well, I'd still punch Hitler's mama in the stomach.

I do agree that that would have saved this world the terrible tragedy of WW II and the Holocaust....yet, as always, would this have averted it all? The spirit of that time in Germany was that they had a failing economy, a hefty setback which was partially the result of WW 1 and no politically strong leader to help them through those troubled times. Wouldn't some other extremist have emerged and, although in a different manner, made just the same amount of mess?

I don't remember who said it, but recently (on this board, I believe) someone said that Hitler had a right-hand guy in the early years that was as crazy as he was. I'm sure that the zeitgeist of the Germans at the time would've seen someone else fill the vaccuum of Hitler's absence. Perhaps that person would've been a more positive character, a different kind of leader, but it could've easily been another megalomaniac. But it's definitely worth punching Mrs. Hitler in the stomach during pregnancy to see what kind of effect it would have. The only way is up, in my opinion.

DV8 wrote:I don't remember who said it, but recently (on this board, I believe) someone said that Hitler had a right-hand guy in the early years that was as crazy as he was. I'm sure that the zeitgeist of the Germans at the time would've seen someone else fill the vaccuum of Hitler's absence. .

Are you talking about Reinhard Heydrich? Someone who was capable of at least the same attrocities as Hitler was...good thing he got assasinated.

Heavy_D wrote:

DV8 wrote:I don't remember who said it, but recently (on this board, I believe) someone said that Hitler had a right-hand guy in the early years that was as crazy as he was. I'm sure that the zeitgeist of the Germans at the time would've seen someone else fill the vaccuum of Hitler's absence. .

Are you talking about Reinhard Heydrich? Someone who was capable of at least the same attrocities as Hitler was...good thing he got assasinated.

I forget what his name was. He had a short name, kind of odd, like Udo or something.

I feel that I should point out that without WWII, we wouldn't have human rights as we know them today.

Crazy Elf wrote:I feel that I should point out that without WWII, we wouldn't have human rights as we know them today.

Maybe.

A lot of shit came to head in WWII, but would it not have been an issue with out the war? Who knows?

I would prevent Hypatia of Alexandria from being killed by a mob.

I have been thinking about this for a while now, and I think I would have Truman not drop the atomic bomb on Japan, but instead invade it.

Flavius Theodosius would have been killed during his fight against Eugenius in 394 CE.

Serious Paul wrote:I have been thinking about this for a while now, and I think I would have Truman not drop the atomic bomb on Japan, but instead invade it.

That's an amazingly cool answer.

One thing that would really really fuck up the world would be to kill Saul on the road to Damascus. If he never gets to tell everyone about his vision of Jesus, then Christianity remains a very small Jewish sect that doesn't spread much further than Judea.

Without Christianity as a focus for the evolution of Western society, the world would be a very very different place indeed.

Crazy Elf wrote:One thing that would really really fuck up the world would be to kill Saul on the road to Damascus. If he never gets to tell everyone about his vision of Jesus, then Christianity remains a very small Jewish sect that doesn't spread much further than Judea.

Without Christianity as a focus for the evolution of Western society, the world would be a very very different place indeed.

You've got to wonder where the world would end up, then. Who would have been the dominant religious force in the West. Who would have filled that void, which religion or sect. Certainly, viewed narrowly, you can see obvious changes: like, for instance, without Christianity - and the bishop-to-bishop mail system - during the Dark Ages, we'd have lost so very much more knowledge, but it's difficult to predict if they'd even have happened without Christianity. The butterfly effect makes predictions beyond months or years impossible...but fun.

I would prevent the burning of the Library of Alexandria, or the beginning of the Dark Ages in Europe, either one set reason back centuries.

I'd ensure Henry V drink wine instead of water contaminated with poo. If that didn't work I'd make sure Bedford smacked Jacqueline around the head and send her packing back to Phillip.

Then the French would be well fucked.

Johnny the Bull wrote:Then the French would be well fucked.

Hmm... yet even under British rule the French would still probably have had the Revolution.

Crazy Elf wrote:I feel that I should point out that without WWII, we wouldn't have human rights as we know them today.

And also that Stalin would probably have conquered Europe. Like, all of it.

Salvation122 wrote:And also that Stalin would probably have conquered Europe. Like, all of it.

Or none of it since Red Army would not have had a reason to march west and Yalta would not have happened.

I'm gonna go on a wee hunch and guess that Stalin's territorial ambitions, combined with the lack of fascism's mitigating influence on homegrown communism, would have been more than enough to lead to a more or less united red Europe by, oh, 1955. The holdouts would have been Britain and maybe maybe France, both of which would have gotten utterly stomped without nuclear intervention.

Not quite as simple as that, I'm afraid, Salv. There were plenty of right-wing authoritarian regimes in Europe, and most of them would likely have appeared even if Hitler did not. In many cases, they held down both communists and fascists (as with Dollfuss in Austria and Horthy in Hungary, I believe it was (don't hold me to that though. Will check later.)). Consequently, there was opposition to Russia's territorial ambitions, and the very last thing that France and the UK wanted to see was a Red Germany. Hence why Hitler was seen as so palatable; he was vociferously anti-communist.

Secondly, getting rid of Hitler gets rid of Nazism (potentially). Not fascism. Fascism was Italian in origin, and so Mussolini is still with us in theory. Hence, Germany is still likely to turn out fascistic, or right-wing authoritarian, but rather less likely to turn out Nazi as we understand it, given that Hitler is lacking as a catalyst for that particular movement.

If Hitler hadn't been there, we might've had a WWII, but it'd have been fought between the UK, France, Spain, and Italy, against Russia, with Germany as the wild-card depending on whether or not it goes democratic, fascist, authoritarian, red, or neutral.

MissTeja wrote:Yeah? Well, I'd still punch Hitler's mama in the stomach.

Hitler's a good choice, but I just think that he's a little... passé nowadays. Everyone seems to go after him when these things go up.I'd much rather go after someone like Mao Zedong - mass murdering pederast that fucked up the economy to such an extent that tens of millions of his own people starved to death or Stalin - paranoid psychotic Georgian that helped enslave a large portion of the world population and killed off or Gulag-ed a hell of a lot more people than Adolf ever did IIRC. Marx or Lenin maybe to see if it'd knock the Russian revolution off course slightly and try to get at least a limited for of democracy out of it. Consider it a two-fer since if no Pterograd Soviet takeover then no Stalin. That and I just think that Communism has brought pretty much nothing positive to the world, just a shame you couldn't stop it by capping one guy.

Selfish personal change - go back to when random asshole T-boned Hal, my old '85 Pontiac. Find him right before he gets into his car and spend the next half an hour trying to figure out the prime percussion spots on the human body while utilizing only the sidewalk and my beatin' stick. I loved that car so much.

And maybe punch old missus Bush in the belly a few times before she gives birth to the beautiful bouncing baby bastard that we're dealing with today. Might not be as drastic of a change as the whole Hitler thing, but I like bein' me, and I probably wouldn't be in that timeline. And I'd wield the coathanger of justice personally.[/i]