#21
History also offers plenty of examples of coincidences that seem almost too perfectly arranged. Yahoo News highlights several unusual connections involving famous writers, historical figures, and unexpected family ties. Mark Twain, for instance, was born shortly after Halley's Comet appeared in 1835 and reportedly believed his life would be lost when it returned. He passed in April 1910, just one day after the comet reached its closest point to the Sun.
Another striking example involves Morgan Robertson's 1898 novel Futility, or The Wreck of the Titan, which described a supposedly unsinkable passenger liner that struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic in April and lacked sufficient lifeboats. Fourteen years later, the Titanic disaster shared several remarkably similar details
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EDIT: As some have noted, there is a town called Peshtigo, WI today. The title character of the TV show Caroline in the City was from there, in fact, and it was an ongoing gag. However, the original town did burn to the ground (ending over 1,000 people) and they rebuilt it a few years later.
Even the construction of the Hoover Dam produced an unusual family connection: the first recorded worker fatality was George Tierney, who drowned on December 20, 1922, while the final recorded construction fatality was his son, Patrick, who died on the exact same date 13 years later. Such stories show why coincidences continue to capture our imagination.
Whether they involve extraordinary timing, unexpected family connections, or events that seem to mirror something written decades earlier, they remind us that reality can sometimes produce parallels that would be difficult to invent.
#25
- Abraham Lincoln created the Secret Service on the day he was fatally shot. At the time, it wasn't charged with protecting the President, but still.
- John Wilkes Booth's brother once saved Lincoln's son's life.
- If your name is Richard Parker, stay the hell away from boats.
- In March of 1951, both the US and UK were introduced to Dennis the Menace comics. But the two Dennis were totally different and their creators didn't know about the other one across the Atlantic.
- The US Civil War started on Wilmer McLean's farm. He left the area shortly thereafter but couldn't avoid the war, as it ended at the home he fled to.
- The code names of the beaches used for the D-Day landings appeared in crossword puzzles before the campaign.
I'll dig through my archives to see if I find any others that I've written up if you're all interested.
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Coincidences may be easier to explain when we look at them through probability and psychology, but that doesn't necessarily make them any less fascinating. Perhaps the most interesting part is that we never really know when an ordinary day might produce a story we'll be telling for the rest of our lives.
Have you ever experienced a coincidence that you struggled to believe was real? Maybe you ran into someone you hadn't seen in decades, discovered an unexpected connection with a complete stranger, or experienced two events lining up in an almost impossible way. What happened, and did you think it was simply chance or something more? Share your stories in the comments!
#28
20 September 1911 - Survived the sinking of the RMS Olympic, the largest, most luxurious ocean liner at the time.
14 April 1912 - Survived the sinking of the RMS Titanic, the new largest, most luxurious ocean liner at the time.
21 November 1916 - Survived the sinking of the HMHS Brittianic, the Titanic's sister ship.
This lady had a knack for surviving the sinking of the 3 most famous gigantic luxury ships!
#29
And it went missing.
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Not only did the Lions finish with the worst winning percentage in the NFL for the next 50 years and never make a championship game, but in 2008, exactly 50 years later, the Lions became the first team in NFL history to go 0-16 in a season. They went winless.
Because of this, in 2009, the Lions had the #1 pick in the NFL Draft. They chose QB Matthew Stafford... who lived on the same street and went to the same high school as Bobby Layne did.
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In both cases, Japanese forces most likely wouldn't have been able to repel the invasion without help from mother nature.
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Edit: OK, whoa. There are so many celebrities involved with 9/11. Hollywood conspiracy?
#40
EDIT: A lot of people have made some really good comments about the 'coincidentiality' of scientific discovery. To sum up; one discovery always rests on many others, many discoveries naturally lead to others, and often a problem has only one basic solution. Thus, 'coincidences' are natural in scientific discovery and are to be expected; they only look like coincidences to the outside observer. This is what I mean by the discoveries being 'fated' and inevitable. If Newton and Leibniz hadn't discovered/invented calculus, someone else would have, because it was a solution to many many scientific problems, and other mathematical discoveries had paved the way for it.