On December 18, 1776, the American Revolution was near collapse. The commander in chief of its forces, George Washington, warned his brothers in Virginia that "I think the game is pretty near up," unless a new army were instantly recruited, which was not happening. In six months of shattering defeats, he had nearly lost the army he'd been given.
In the fall of 1887, Nikola Tesla was scared. Three years earlier, he had emigrated from Europe to New York City, set on becoming an electrical inventor. He had pinned his hopes on inventing an electric motor that used alternating current (AC) instead of direct current (DC), and had just demonstrated such a motor to one of his backers, Alfred Brown.
But, when Brown saw that Tesla's amazing new motor consisted of a shoe-polish tin spinning around in the middle of a large doughnut-shaped coil, he was distinctly unimpressed. How could a spinning tin can represent a revolution in electrical technology? Why would anyone replace Thomas Edison's recently introduced DC-powered incandescent lamps with such a piddling AC motor?
It has been 65 years since D-Day—the early June day when the United States and its allies launched a massive attack on the shores of Normandy in a bid to liberate western Europe from the Nazis. It's been long enough for most people who still remember the date to have come to think of its success as natural and foreordained. But of course it was neither of these things. Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force Dwight D. "Ike" Eisenhower himself gave it no better than a 50-50 chance of success, even if the weather was good and everything went right.