10 Overlooked People Who Accidentally Changed the World

History loves famous names. We credit kings, generals, and visionaries with shaping the world—but the record is full of cases where an ordinary, largely forgotten person made one small decision that set everything in motion. A border guard who got tired of waiting for orders. A submarine officer who simply said no. A man who thought twenty-four rabbits sounded like a fine idea.

These are the people history textbooks skip. Their names are almost never mentioned. And yet, without them, the twentieth century and beyond would look unrecognizable.

Related: 10 of History’s Most Infamous Female Prisoners

10 Thomas Austin and the Twenty-Four Rabbits

In October 1859, a wealthy English settler in Victoria, Australia, named Thomas Austin arranged for twenty-four wild rabbits to be shipped from England and released onto his property at Barwon Park. He wanted something to hunt on weekends, and he told a relative that “the introduction of a few rabbits could do little harm and might provide a touch of home.” That phrase has since become one of the most catastrophically wrong predictions in the history of wildlife management.

Within ten years, Australia’s rabbit population had exploded into the millions. By the early twentieth century, estimates placed the population in the billions, making it one of the fastest spreads of any mammal on record. The animals devastated native vegetation across vast stretches of the continent, stripping topsoil, outcompeting native species for food, and driving several indigenous animals toward extinction. Entire farming regions were stripped bare, and the damage to Australia’s agricultural industry ran into the hundreds of millions of pounds over the following century.

Australia spent the better part of 150 years trying to undo what Austin started on a single autumn afternoon. Governments tried poison, trapping, shooting, and the deliberate introduction of the myxomatosis virus. A 1,138-mile (1,833 km) rabbit-proof fence—one of the longest fences ever built—stretched across Western Australia in a largely unsuccessful attempt to contain the spread. Austin himself died in 1871 without any apparent awareness that his weekend hobby had set off one of the worst ecological disasters in recorded history.^[1]

9 Günter Schabowski and the Memo He Never Read

On the evening of November 9, 1989, East German Politburo spokesman Günter Schabowski sat down at a press conference in East Berlin and announced, from notes he had barely glanced at, that East Germans would be permitted to travel freely to the West. A reporter asked when the new rules would take effect. Schabowski shuffled his papers, paused, and said: “Immediately, without delay.”

There was one problem: that was not what the memo said. The new regulations were meant to take effect the following morning, with an orderly process for issuing travel visas. Schabowski had not been present at the meeting where the policy was finalized. He had been handed the memo only minutes before the press conference and had not read it carefully. His answer was an error, not an announcement.

But no one in the room knew that. The statement was broadcast on West German television within the hour, and within minutes, thousands of East Berliners were streaming toward the Wall’s checkpoints, demanding to be let through. The guards on duty had no orders and no idea what was happening. Schabowski was already at home having dinner. The moment helped trigger the chain of events that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall.^[2]

8 Harald Jäger and the Checkpoint He Opened Alone

While Schabowski’s press conference set the crowd in motion, it was one man on the ground who physically opened the Wall. Lieutenant Colonel Harald Jäger commanded the Bornholmer Strasse border crossing on the night of November 9, 1989. His standing orders were to let no one through without authorization. But by 11 p.m., thousands of East Berliners had packed against his checkpoint, growing louder and more volatile by the minute.

Jäger called his superiors repeatedly. Nobody gave him a usable order. One superior called him a coward for being unable to control the situation. Jäger had served the East German regime loyally for nearly thirty years. He believed in the system. And yet, standing there in the noise and the dark with fifty guards behind him and tens of thousands of people in front of him, he made a calculation: if he did not open the gate, somebody was going to get hurt or killed. At 11:20 p.m., he ordered the gate open and told his men to stop checking papers. People flooded through.

Images of the Bornholmer crossing went out on television within minutes, and other checkpoints followed. By morning, the Wall was effectively over—not because of a diplomatic agreement or a military order, but because a mid-ranking border officer decided to end his shift without a massacre. Jäger spent the following years selling newspapers and training as a taxi driver. Reunified Germany had no particular use for a former Stasi-affiliated checkpoint commander, however historic his decision had been.^[3]

7 Vasili Arkhipov and the Torpedo He Refused to Fire

On October 27, 1962, deep in the Caribbean and completely cut off from Moscow, the Soviet submarine B-59 had been hunted for days by a fleet of eleven American destroyers and the aircraft carrier USS Randolph. The submarine was running low on battery power, its air conditioning had failed, and the internal temperature had risen above 113°F (45°C). The crew had not received any radio contact from home for days and had no way of knowing whether nuclear war had already begun.

The submarine’s captain, Valentin Savitsky, concluded it had. He ordered the submarine’s single nuclear torpedo—a weapon roughly equivalent in yield to the Hiroshima bomb—to be prepared for launch against the American ships above. Under normal Soviet protocol, only the captain and the political officer needed to agree. On B-59, however, a third signature was required: that of Vasili Arkhipov, chief of staff of the entire submarine flotilla, who happened to be aboard. Savitsky and the political officer both wanted to fire. Arkhipov said no.

He held his ground through what witnesses described as an extremely heated argument in a sweltering, barely breathable metal tube. He eventually persuaded Savitsky to surface and await orders. The Americans, who had no idea the submarine was nuclear-armed, had been dropping small signaling charges—not weapons—to force it up. Contact was made. War had not started. The B-59 turned north and headed home. In 2002, at a conference marking the crisis’s fortieth anniversary, National Security Archive director Thomas Blanton said simply that Arkhipov “saved the world.” ^[4]

6 Stanislav Petrov and the Alert He Decided to Ignore

Just after midnight on September 26, 1983, Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was the duty officer at a secret command center outside Moscow when the early-warning system lit up with an alert: the United States had launched five intercontinental ballistic missiles toward the Soviet Union. The protocol was clear. He was supposed to report the launch to his superiors immediately, which would have set the Soviet nuclear response machinery in motion.

Petrov did not report it. Something felt wrong. The system had only just been activated, and he knew it had some unresolved technical issues. Five missiles also seemed like an oddly small first strike for a superpower—not enough to make strategic sense. He had minutes to decide, and he decided the alert was a malfunction. It was. The system had mistaken sunlight reflecting off clouds for missile plumes. There were no missiles.

Petrov was neither praised nor punished for his decision in any formal sense—he was reprimanded for a paperwork error during the incident, and his story was suppressed for years. His superior officers were uncomfortable with the implication that one man’s judgment call had prevented an accidental nuclear war. He retired in 1984, worked in relative obscurity, and was not publicly recognized until the 1990s. When a journalist finally asked him how he felt about being credited with saving the world, he reportedly said: “I was just doing my job.” ^[5]

5 James Marshall and the Gold Flake That Upended a Continent

On the morning of January 24, 1848, a carpenter named James W. Marshall was inspecting a newly built water channel at Sutter’s Mill in Coloma, California, when he noticed something glinting in the water. He picked it up, beat it with a rock to test whether it was malleable, and went to tell his employer, John Sutter. The two men tried to keep the discovery quiet. They failed almost immediately.

Word of the gold find spread through California within weeks and across the United States and much of the world within months. By 1849, more than 80,000 people had arrived in California—by ship around Cape Horn, overland through the Rockies, and across the Isthmus of Panama. By the early 1850s, the population of California had grown from roughly 14,000 non-native inhabitants to more than 250,000. It triggered one of the largest voluntary mass migrations in American history and accelerated California’s admission to the Union as a free state in 1850, which in turn contributed to rising sectional tensions that would erupt a decade later in the Civil War.

Marshall himself made almost nothing from the discovery. He was pushed off his land, could not profit from his find because he had no legal claim to the gold itself, and spent much of the rest of his life bitter and impoverished. He died in 1885, largely destitute. The California Gold Rush transformed a continent. The man who started it died broke.^[6]

4 Captain Louis Nolan and the Order He Misdelivered

On October 25, 1854, during the Battle of Balaclava in Crimea, a British cavalry officer named Captain Louis Nolan rode at full gallop to deliver a written order from Field Marshal Lord Raglan to Lord Lucan, commander of the cavalry. Raglan’s order was meant to direct the cavalry to recover British guns that were being hauled away by Russian forces on a nearby hill. Nolan either misread the order or explained it so poorly—and with such dismissive contempt when Lucan asked for clarification—that Lucan believed he was being ordered to charge an entirely different artillery battery: one at the far end of a valley, heavily defended on three sides.

The result was the Charge of the Light Brigade—673 horsemen riding directly into massed Russian artillery fire in one of the most catastrophic and celebrated cavalry disasters in military history. In the charge itself, about 110 men were killed and 160 wounded, with hundreds of horses lost. The attack achieved nothing of military value. Nolan himself was the first casualty of the charge, killed within seconds of its beginning by a Russian shell burst. He never got the chance to explain what he meant.

Whether Nolan was incompetent, reckless, or simply the victim of a genuinely ambiguous order has been debated ever since. What is clear is that a single botched communication from a junior officer turned a routine maneuver into a catastrophe that defined the Crimean War in public memory and inspired one of the most famous poems in the English language.^[7]

3 Gavrilo Princip and the Sandwich Shop

On June 28, 1914, nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip had already failed to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary. Earlier that morning, another member of his conspirator group had thrown a bomb at the Archduke’s car. Still, Ferdinand had deflected it, and the bomb detonated under the following vehicle. Princip, dejected and believing the attempt finished, wandered away from the planned ambush site and stopped into a delicatessen called Schiller’s to buy something to eat.

What happened next defies probability. Ferdinand’s motorcade, following the bombing, took an unplanned route change that his driver was not told about in time. The driver turned down Franz Josef Street—directly in front of Schiller’s—then had to stop the car to reverse. Princip looked up from the deli, found himself standing roughly five feet from the Archduke’s open car, drew his pistol, and fired twice. Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were both fatally wounded.

Within weeks, Austria-Hungary had issued its ultimatum to Serbia, the alliance system of Europe had activated, and the First World War had begun. Approximately seventeen million people would die over the following four years. Historians debate whether the war was inevitable, but the sequence remains striking: one failed assassin, one unplanned stop, one wrong turn, and one man buying lunch.^[8]

2 Frank Wills and the Piece of Tape He Noticed

At about 1 a.m. on June 17, 1972, a 24-year-old security guard named Frank Wills was making his rounds at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C., when he noticed that a door latch on a parking garage stairwell had been taped over to prevent it from locking. He removed the tape and continued his rounds. When he returned and found the latch had been re-taped, he called the police.

The officers who responded found five men inside the offices of the Democratic National Committee, attempting to plant listening devices and photograph documents. The burglars were connected to the Committee to Re-Elect the President. The arrests led, over the following two years, to congressional investigations, Senate hearings, the Saturday Night Massacre, the discovery of the White House taping system, and ultimately the resignation of President Richard Nixon on August 9, 1974—the only time a sitting American president has resigned from office.

Frank Wills was paid eighty cents an hour. He received a brief moment of recognition when the break-in became famous, including a cameo appearance playing himself in the 1976 film All the President’s Men. He was let go from his security job not long after the break-in, reportedly in a dispute over pay. He spent much of the rest of his life working low-wage jobs, filed for bankruptcy in the 1990s, and died in 2000 at age 52 of a brain tumor, largely forgotten by the country whose political history he had redirected.^[9]

1 The Officers Who Chose Not to Act During Able Archer 83

On the night of November 20, 1983, NATO was conducting a large-scale military exercise across Western Europe known as Able Archer 83. The exercise simulated a nuclear war scenario so convincingly that segments of Soviet intelligence concluded it might be a cover for an actual first strike. KGB officers across Europe sent urgent messages to Moscow warning that nuclear launches could be imminent, and Soviet nuclear forces were placed on heightened alert.

Military historians now consider Able Archer 83 one of the most dangerous moments of the Cold War—arguably more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis because neither side fully understood how the other was interpreting events. The situation de-escalated in part because Western intelligence, informed by Soviet double agent Oleg Gordievsky, recognized the depth of Soviet concern and adjusted communication accordingly.

Another critical factor, though less visible, was the restraint shown by Soviet officers at multiple levels of command. Faced with ambiguous information and a genuine fear that war might be imminent, they chose not to act precipitously. Their decisions helped prevent a potentially catastrophic escalation. Most of their names were never recorded publicly, but their restraint remains one of the quiet turning points of the Cold War.^[10]