Idiotic Facts About The Dumbest Moments In History
History brims with many incredible, defining moments, undertaken by long-ago figures who can seem larger than life. We're taught these glorified moments in school, and we honor them during remembrance ceremonies.
But there are also dumb moments, buried in time, that those involved might have wished to erase. Whether the result of foolishness, insanity, heartlessness, grave mistakes, or just plain awkwardness—here are 48 of history's dumbest moments.
1. Playing It Too Safe
Walter Hunt invented the safety pin in Brooklyn, all the way back in 1849. He sold the patent right away for a measly $400. Hunt later became penniless and, by that time, billions of safety pins were being manufactured each year.
Talk about pricking yourself.
2. Pass me the beverage.
With all due respect to Charlton Heston's shirtless overacting in The Ten Commandments, there's evidence that the Egyptian pyramids were built with the sweat of paid labor—not broken slaves. However, ancient Egyptian leaders were notorious for being extremely stingy, and one of their money-saving tactics was compensating their employees with fermented grain beverages.
Each laborer received up to five liters of brewed beverage each workday, and historians speculate that the Egyptians would have faced a worker rebellion if the barrels were ever emptied.
Nothing like being permanently tipsy in the blazing desert heat to take the edge off a lengthy construction job.
3. This Sounds Dumb
Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis Presley's manager, wanted to profit directly off of an Elvis record through his label. Presley was under contract to RCA, but greedy Parker figured he could release an album of strictly "spoken word" Elvis, and that RCA wouldn't complain. That album, Having Fun With Elvis On Stage, was a complete disaster.
It contained zero songs, just Elvis's banter from his live shows—which was mostly just Elvis mumbling jokes at the audience between tunes.
Critics called it an auto wreck plowing into a carnival freak show, and RCA ended up claiming all the rights anyway.
4. What He Needed Was Smart Pills
Qin Shi Huang was China's first emperor and the first man to singlehandedly rule over the seven kingdoms that he'd conquered. But Huang wasn't resting easy—he was absolutely obsessed with his quest for immortality.
Huang spent the last decade of his life badgering every medicine man in China to invent an elixir for immortality.
One of his browbeaten alchemists finally convinced Huang he'd found the magic pills, and Huang swallowed the bait with gusto. What that alchemist gave him was poisonous mercury, and Huang perished shortly afterward.
