I was reading a post about unique things you wouldn’t want, such as a nasty medical condition named after you.
That got me thinking.
What is the most unique thing.
Being the tallest person doesn’t count, because there is always a tallest person…
I thought maybe units of measure, there are not really that many units named after people. Newton, Pascal, ampere etc… Turns out there are quite a few.
Next thought was atomic elements, there are 19 named after 20 people. That is fairly unique 20 people out of the ~110 billion to have ever lived, have an element named after them.
There’s a whole series of books about this lol
(Referring to Guinness)
True.
I haven’t looked at one since I was a kid.
I know they do, tallest/fastest/biggest etc… But they are all things that always exist.
E.g. the biggest pizza in the world, well before that there was also a biggest pizza it was just smaller than the current one, and before that etc…
I guess anything with a single record, not just the latest in a long string should count.
Robert Liston performed a single surgery with a 300% mortality rate (probably).
I wonder how much is embellishment over the years.
If you sawed off your assistants fingers (hard to do with a hand saw); good chance they would also catch gangrene. Far more likely is that at the first sign of a saw hitting your finger, you move it out of the way.
The third person “died of fright”, could have been heart attack. So definitely plausible.
These surgeons were moving fast, I can see it.
I was sawing wood one night and barely touched my thumb webbing, split open like a mouth. Bet you could take 3 fingers an single forward and back stroke. You can for sure with modern blades.
(If anyone is considering a new saw, get the kind with this sort of edge: https://www.amazon.com/REXBETI-Folding-Camping-Pruning-Quality/dp/B07BLQBN8X/ Those are modern day light sabers.)
Born under a bad sign? This guy is the only officially recognized person to have survived two nuclear bomb detonations.
https://www.damninteresting.com/eyewitnesses-to-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/
Saving the world from nuclear war is a good unique one:
It happened twice!
Thomas Midgley Jr. Invented putting lead in fuel and using CFCs for refrigeration. He died when he was strangulated by the machine he invented to help him get out of bed.
Environmental historian J. R. McNeill opined that Midgley “had more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth’s history”
Ouch.
I have often thought about who the person with the worst carbon footprint would be if you accounted for factors like inventions/policies/war etc. This answers my question, unless there are even worse contributors.
