For Want of a Nail: the nail that changes everything

Hi again! Today's post will be about a concept that is quite well known in the uchronic community: the For Want of a Nail.

There is a short poem in English, with an origin that can be traced back to the 14th Century, that shows very well how the most tiny details can end up having great consequences:

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost;
For want of a shoe, the horse was lost;
For want of a horse, the rider was lost;
For want of a rider, the message was lost;
For want of a message, the battle was lost;
For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost;
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Yes, the most small of details and end up causing one thing to happen in one or the other way. As if it were a domino effect, a simple throwing of a coing can end up causing a multiple car accident (in the TV series Alphas, episode "Cause and Effect") o a small explosion in space ends up destroying all satellites and space stations in certain orbits (something called Kessler Syndrome, which appears in the film Gravity).

Maybe, you have also heard about the Butterfly Effect (no, not the film). Suggested by Edward Lorenz in the 1960s, the small joke that gives name to this effect is the idea that a butterfly's wingbeats can end up causing hurricanes in Japan. The idea started when Lorenz was testing a weather prediction model, and, having a result and wishing to see if it worked correctly, he decided to round one of the numbers, with the conclusion that the results were radically different.

However, the idea of the influence of a butterfly in the course of history had already appeared in the short story The Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury, in which a time travel where someone accidentally steps on a butterfly ends up changing the result of an election. This idea was parodied by The Simpsons in "Time and Punishment", a segment of the chapter "The Treehouse of Horror V", where Homer accidentally travels back in time to the age of dinosaurs and ends up causing all kind of changes due to his classical blunders.

To see how this can happen in real life, one of the best examples is the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, the spark that started the First World War (although, it must be taken into account that it would have happened in one or another way due to the tension and arguments that existed between the main European powers, particularly France and Germany).

This story begins on June 28^th 1914. Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Duchess Sophie of Hohenberg, were visiting the city of Sarajevo, a fact that a group of Serbian and Serbo-Bosnian nationalists (The Black Hand and Young Bosnia, respectively) tood advantage of to attent against him, in order to claim for the unificatio of Bosnia-Herzegovina (recently annexed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire) with the Kingdom of Serbia. Several members were armed and placed along the path the group of vehicles escorting the Archduke would follow. For seom reason, the first two men did not act, and the third, Nedeljko Cabrinovic, threw a bomb that rebounded on the Archduke's car and exploded right under the car immediately behind that of the Archduke, injuring several people. The Archduke's vehicle accelerated and left the place, passing near the other would-be killers, who were unable to act.

After learning that the attack had been unsuccessful, Gavrilo Princip decided to stop at a delicatessen to buy something to eat. By chance, right then a car where Franz Ferdinand, his wife and the military governor of Austria were riding was passing near, as the Archduke wanted to visit the people injured in the previous attack. The driver, however, took a wrong turn and stopped the car... right in front of the shop Princip had entered, at the same moment he was coming out. Princip took his gun out of the pocket and shot several times, with the bullets hitting the Archduke and Duchess Sophie. The second was a complete accident, as Princip had planned to kill the military governor, but the first could have been saved if the bullet had gone for his chest, as he had clothes thick enough to stop the bullets coming out of Princip's gun. Unfortunately, the bullet hit him in the neck.

So, you can see how something that simple can end up causing more than fifty million dead people (this is counting the many people that died during the Second World War).

See you around, and I hope you read the next post on Tuesday!