Uncanny Stories...

Once upon a time, in the 19th Century, there was a man in Honey Grove, Texas, called Henry Ziegland. One fine day, in 1893 (Old stuff!), this nice man decides to walk out of his girlfriend, who committs suicide. But then, the brother of that subbed lady, tried to avenge his sister by shooting Henry... Missing the shot! The bullet barely injured Henry, grazing his face and getting encrusted on a tree behind him, but that brother thought he was dead and so, thinking himself (and his sister) avenged, ended his own life with the same weapon.

20 years after that, Henry decides to remove that same tree of his property and so, tries to saw it... But, unable to do that manually, he decides to use some dynamite. In the explosion, that bullet which had originally been intended for Ziegland, became dislodged with such a catapulting jolt that it was shot violently into Ziegland's head, killing him at last...

And the most strange thing is, this story's regarded to be true...This is what we call a Serendipity, an unexpected discovery or action, fruit of a big big big coincidence.

A lot of discoveries in the history had been fruit of some serendipities... Albert Einstein, for instance, recognized some of his findings were serendipities... Niels Bohr spent several time thinking how atoms were. One night he saw in a dream a possible shape of the atom, and he drew it on a paper... When he finally found out the configuration of the atom he realized it was just exactly the same as the one he draw previously. According to Umberto Eco, Columbus discovery of America was a serendipity!


And, this is one of my favourites! In 1898, Morgan Robertson -a well-known short stories American writer- wrote the book Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan. It's the story about a huge ship, called Titan, which sinks in the North Atlantic after striking an iceberg... Is it familiar? Yes! Robertson described one of the most famous shpiwrecks of the history, the RMS Titanic, 14 years before happening! And even if he wrote the novel long before the Olimpic-class Titanic had even been designed, he described some of the features of the ship and the wreck:

- The Titanic was the world's largest luxury ship (882 feet, displacing 66,000 tons), and was once described as being (nearly) "unsinkable".The Titan was the largest ship and the greatest of the works of men (800 feet, displacing 75,000 tons), and was considered "indestructible".

- They both were launched from Southampton in April.

- The Titan and the Titanic carried less than half the number of lifeboats needed (Titanic 20, Titan 24).

- They both crashed with an iceberg, 400 miles away from Terranova, on an April night.

- In both cases, more than half of their passengers (Titanic 2207, Titan 2500) died screaming for help.

Curious, huh?