My Favorite Stories

Our brains run on stories. They tell us value statements that a dry statement never could.

This is a compilation of my favorite (mostly true) stories.

Just so you don’t think I’m misrepresenting reality, I’ll hyperlink when I can.

Railroad Gauges

The standardized distance between the rails of US rail vehicles is 4 feet, 8.5 inches (1.4351m). This is a very specific number.

English engineers imitated the standard from the first rail lines. After all, there was no good reason to change it.

The English train engineers drew their plans from wagon carts, since they were using the same tooling.

England’s standard wagon cart design was for withstanding the ruts created on the older, long-distance roads. Any other size, and they’d break more frequently.

Europe’s first long-distance roads came from the Roman Empire’s need for their legions’ travel. Those roads are still in use.

Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which required everyone else to match or risk damaging their wagon wheels.

The Roman war chariot standard is the most efficient way to accommodate two horses drawing it.

The width of two horses creates many logistical size constraints, including for rockets, RVs, and prefabricated homes.

Expensive Doorstop

In 1799, a 12-year-old boy named Conrad Reed found a shiny 17-pound rock on his family’s farm. He took it home and the family used it as a doorstop for several years.

In 1802, his father John Reed showed it to a jeweler. The jeweler offered to buy it for $3.50 (about $70 in 2020). It was a gigantic gold nugget worth about $3,600.

In 1803, John established a business partnership and found a 28-pound nugget. The story made its way to the regional newspapers, and was the start of the Carolina gold rush.

Greenwich Mean Time

Until the mid-1800’s, each British city and town kept its own local time. This time could differ by up to half an hour. For that reason, carriage service schedules only specified the hour of departure, not arrival.

In 1842, multiple groups came together to create an organization called the Railway Clearing House. They tracked which trains rented rail usage from the rail owners and maintainers. In 1847, they agreed that all train timetables would use Greenwich Observatory time instead of any local times.

From here, it became the time standard. To this day, every country is synchronized to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), then modified to the corresponding time zone.

Affordable Camera

In 1962, the USA’s NASA was obsessing about getting into space to catch up with the Soviet Union. They debated not even using windows, but saw it would give the astronauts claustrophobia. Also, the astronauts needed to see where they were going. Technical difficulties and weather conditions had postponed the launch 10 times already. The new launch date was for February 10, 1962.

The seasoned pilot/astronaut John Glenn just purchased a Minolta Ansco Autoset camera for $40 (~$350 adjusted for inflation to 2020). It was one of the first automatic exposure cameras on the market, meaning less fiddling was necessary to use it.

He worked with the astronauts to modify that camera to work with bulky astronaut gloves. They flipped the camera upside down and added a pistol grip to control the shutter and film advance. They also adapted the 36-shot reel to take 70 shots.

Scheduled delays, the impulse to buy a trendy camera, and NASA engineers willing to tinker made space photography a public interest.

Missing Fingers

In 1965, Tony Iommi was an impulsive 17-year-old who had a factory injury on his last day of work. That injury sliced off the tips of his right middle and ring fingers. Since he was an aspiring guitarist, this was a devastating circumstance that meant he’d never conventionally play again.

His friend insisted adamantly for him to listen to a recording of Django Reinhardt. He relented, and his friend disclosed Django had also lost two fingers in a horrible fire. Django had found a way to adapt to it.

Tony was impatient and had been playing 2-3 years, so he didn’t want to relearn left-handed guitar. His playing developed across several stages:

  1. He improvised a prosthetic by melting a detergent bottle to create plastic caps, but his fingers kept slipping.
  2. He attached leather to the end to grip the guitar, but he couldn’t feel the strings properly.
  3. He used lighter strings and down-tuned the guitar as much as three semitones to make the notes easier to play.
  4. Even then, he had to use the fingers more for fretting chords than playing single-note solos.

All of this created a darker and fiercer style. He was able to play on a band with 3 other members. They were called “Black Sabbath” after a Boris Karloff horror movie.

Broken Windows

In 1969, the research psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment with two completely identical cars in perfect condition. He set one in the poor part of the Bronx and the other in Silicon Valley’s Palo Alto. The team raised the hood, took off the plates, opened the doors, and waited to see what would happen.

The car parked in the Bronx had 20 instances of destruction and looting within 2 days. It took 2 trucks to remove it. Nobody, by contrast, had harmed the Palo Alto car for over a week. In fact, when it started to rain, one passerby lowered the car’s hood to protect the motor.

To continue the experiment, Zimbardo caused some visible damage to the Palo Alto vehicle, including breaking one of the windows. Once people saw the vehicle clearly abandoned, the Palo Alto residents behaved the exact same way as the Bronx residents.

Lawnchair Larry

On July 2, 1982, in San Pedro, California, Larry Walters and his girlfriend had a fun idea. They filled and attached 42 8-foot weather balloons to his lawn chair. He then took a parachute, snacks, a pellet gun, a camera, and a CB radio and released the restraints.

His original plan was to drift into the Mojave Desert and shoot out balloons slowly until he safely landed.

Instead, he drifted toward Los Angeles International Airport. He tried alerting air traffic control and two commercial pilots alerted them, which alerted the Federal Aviation Administration.

He was nervous about the risks of unbalancing his chair. After 45 minutes, he got the courage to shoot out the balloons one by one. He touched down after another 45 minutes.

The shot balloons caused a 20-minute power outage in the region by tangling with power lines.

Eventually, he was given a fine for $4,000, but it was lowered to $1,500.

He became a bit of a celebrity. He made a failed career move to motivational speaker after leaving his job as a truck driver. Sadly, he committed suicide in 1993.

However, he inspired other people to create cluster ballooning. To this day, people strap themselves into a harness attached to helium balloons.

Ratner Jewelry

In 1991, Gerald Ratner was the CEO of Ratners Group, a UK near-monopoly on the jewelry market. Gerald spoke at a private event about his jewelry:

…We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, ‘How can you sell this for such a low price?’ I say, because it’s total crap.

(and later)

[Our earrings are] cheaper than an M&S prawn sandwich but probably wouldn’t last as long.

Those remarks became very public. The company lost £500 million almost overnight, and Ratner resigned in 1992. The company rebranded as the Signet Group in 2002 to further distance itself from him. He recuperated from the decision and became an executive later, but never entirely redeemed his name.

GameStop Short Squeeze

A short is an investing trick someone can use to profit from a decline in stock price:

  1. Borrow money to buy shares.
  2. Immediately sell the shares.
  3. Before the debt is due, and the stock price has dropped significantly, buy the same number of shares.
  4. Give back the shares, plus the interest from the debt, and anything left over is a profit.

In 2021, hedge funds were holding many short sales in GameStop stock (waiting in between #2 and #3 above).

On the social media site Reddit, specifically r/wallstreetbets, the community rallied to buy GameStop stock to raise its price.

The story rapidly became a meme styled as “taking down the gigantic corporations”. A deluge of random investors (including people who never used the stock market) put money into GameStop stock. In only one day in February, the price had doubled within a 90-minute period.

Investing brokers placed a hold on trades, including the ironically named Robinhood platform.

For years afterward, there were endless legal debates about whether a meme directing stock purchase decisions was “market manipulation”.

Blank Paper

In 2022, Chinese protesters held up blank sheets of paper to represent the censorship they felt against their country’s leadership. This was similar to Russian protesters the same year and a Hong Kong protest in 2020.

The basis for this story comes from a Soviet joke about the police confronting a man distributing blank leaflets. When they asked why it was blank, he said, “Everyone already knows”.

This is very similar to a 1980s anti-communism movement in Poland called the Orange Alternative. People would draw a small gnome doodle wherever there was censored content.

This is a common theme. There are other stories that also represent a trend of passive resistance in the face of overwhelming suppression.

Easy Insurance Fraud

In 2024, most fraud schemes have become elaborate and arcane. Most of them involve obfuscated reporting, concealed information, multiple steps to directly steal money, and often involve hacking.

This isn’t always the case, though. The US Department of Justice sentenced two farmers to federal prison and $6.5 million for tampering with rain gauges. The “gauges” are buckets in an open area to collect rainfall. They performed the fraud via two methods:

  1. They put umbrellas over the buckets, then removed them before the measurement employee checked.
  2. They dumped water out of the buckets before the measurement employee checked.

Hines Lumber

The CEO of the Hines Lumber Company had to fill a top executive position. Two managers had equal experience, but the choice went to the one with fewer years with the company.

After hearing about the decision, the other one asked the CEO why he wasn’t selected.

Instead of answering, the CEO asked him if any lumber had come in that day. The manager said he would check. A few minutes later, he said a truckload came that morning.

The CEO then wanted to know the type of lumber. The manager left to check, then told him it was #6 pine.

The CEO then asked him how many board feet were in the order. He left the room again to check and told him it was 3,500 board feet.

After several more trips, the CEO asked the man to sit in the next room and left the door ajar.

The CEO then summoned the promoted manager and asked him if any lumber had arrived that day. The manager said he would check and returned with a very specific answer. A carload of #6 pine had come in on track 3 at 9:30 a.m. and totaled 3,500 board feet. The lumber was unloaded by 2:00 p.m. and stored in warehouse 18. It was order number 65-03 for the Williams Company, and its total value was $16,352.00.

The CEO thanked him and dismissed him. After he left, the CEO called in the first manager again, who had heard the entire conversation. The first manager responded that he understood why he didn’t get the promotion.

8 Pixels at Microsoft

Tom Edwards, the geopolitical strategy team leader at Microsoft, had some issues with localization.

Microsoft’s team was coloring in 800,000 pixels on a map of India for Windows 95. However, 8 of them were a different shade of green to represent the disputed Kashmiri territory. The difference in greens meant Kashmir was shown as non-Indian, and India promptly banned the product. Microsoft had to spend millions to recall all 200,000 copies of its operating system software to heal the diplomatic wounds.

Elsewhere, in a Spanish-language version of Windows XP, a translation error had gender selections between “not specified”, “male”, or “bitch”.

Abstracted Stories

NOTE: these are all condensed stories that omit details. They’ve become urban myths, and still have value.

A Henry Ford myth: [Wealthy magnate] hired people to scour junkyards for [broken-down parts]. They found all of them in every form of failure, except [unique part]. [Wealthy magnate] decided the part was being made too well. He lowered the quality of [unique part] production to match the rest of the product, saving the company money.

In the early 20th century, a shoe company sent a sales representative to [poor country]. After a few weeks he wired back, “I’m coming home, nobody wears shoes here.” A second competing shoe company sent their sales representative. After a few weeks he wired back, “Business is fantastic, nobody has heard of shoes here.”

In a [small object] factory, boxes sometimes went down the factory line without being filled with the [small object]. A [management person] went through a lot of work and money to make an advanced solution. They installed a scale that would [annoying production halt] when the box was too light. This meant someone would remove the box and press a button to start the line again. This solved the problem, but [management person] later noticed the scale was picking up 0 empty boxes, which confused them. [Management person] went to the factory floor and saw a fan placed a few feet before the scale. [Management person] asked how it got there. One of the workers said “oh, another worker was tired of the [halted production], so he put that there”.

Other Little (Probably) True Stories

My Favorite Fiction Short Stories

A Mexican fisherman met a businessman. The businessman said he could make the fisherman scale his business. The fisherman asked what the point of it was. The businessman said it was so he could retire and live a life of leisure. The fisherman said he already had that.