This is very personal for me but my Grandpa (who raised me with my Grandma) retired as an engineer, was bored and saw a need for what back then was called mobility equipment. He invented the standing frame in the 1980s. It allowed people with spinal issues (eg quadriplegia) to be transitioned from lying down to vertically standing up - fully supported and safe - without them leaving their bed. He made quite a few variations for different sizes and ages and they sold all over the world. He simply said “no one else was helping, so I did”. All from our suburban garage in Sydney Australia. He was awarded an Order of Australia, one of our country’s highest honours. He was my hero.

Octonaughty , TOMMY CHAN Report

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I don't know if this fits, but I feel like it deserves an honorabl mention. Theresa Kachindamoto, the paramount chief of the Dedza District in Malawi:

She is renowned for her courageous efforts to eradicate child marriage in her community. Since taking office, she has dissolved over 3,500 child marriages, sending each of those children back to school.

Kachindamoto’s forceful action in dissolving child marriages and insisting on education for both girls and boys has been met with both praise and criticism. **Despite receiving death threats and backlash** from some community members, she has remained committed to her cause. She is now lobbying the government to increase the marriageable age to 21.

In a country with one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world, Kachindamoto’s efforts have made a significant difference. According to reports, she has stopped around 850 child marriages in just three years, and over 300 in a single month. Her work has inspired a community-wide shift towards prioritizing education and protecting children’s rights.

AmettOmega , wikipedia.org Report

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My vote goes to Dashrath Manjhi. When his wife died in 1959 after being injured from falling from a mountain and due to the same mountain blocking easy access to a nearby hospital in time, he decided to carve a 110-metre-long (360 ft), 9.1-metre-wide (30 ft), and 7.7-metre-deep (25 ft) path through a ridge of hills using only a hammer and a chisel.

RowlData , wikipedia.org Report

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In 1888, Almon Brown Strowger, an undertaker, noticed he was losing a lot of business to the other undertaker in town. He found out that the other undertaker’s wife was a telephone operator and when she intercepted people asking to be connected to Strowger’s funeral home, the operator would route the call to her husband’s funeral home instead.

Three years later, Strowger patented the automatic teller exchange, a system which allowed telephone users to make calls without the need for human operators, single-handedly destroying an entire workforce.

Hostificus , Thatbrock Report

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Maybe not in history, but in my own life it’s an example that still makes me smile.

I’m disabled (wear a leg brace on my right leg and use elbow crutches). In second grade we were playing Capture the Flag, and somehow I’d gotten to the circle where the flag was on the opposing side. No one bothered to guard me, or even watch the flag. I stuffed the flag in my pocket and scooted as fast as I could past the line to safety. A few seconds later confusion erupted. All eyes on me, I slowly pulled the long red piece of fabric out of my pocket with the flourish of a magician pulling out a silk handkerchief. My entire team erupted in cheers. I was the hero of the day.

fullmetaldreamboat , ThisIsEngineering Report

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Léo Major.

During the summer of 1944, while he was out on a solo reconnaissance mission, he spotted two German soldiers nearby. Without hesitation, he killed one and captured the other. Then he went after their commanding officer and a whole German garrison, taking down a few more soldiers along the way. Even when under fire from other Germans, he just kept walking and, on his own, managed to capture 93 German soldiers. ON HIS OWN.

In 1945, Leo was in hit a landmine while in a truck, breaking his back, ribs, and both ankles. They told him he'd be discharged. Leo didn’t care. So he snuck out of the field hospital, stayed with a Dutch family until he recovered, and then made his way back to his battalion. He volunteered to scout out the city of Zwolle and, once he set off, decided he’d just take the city himself.

He convinced a German soldier to deliver a message to the German forces, and then spent the night causing havoc around the city. He fired shots, threw grenades, captured soldiers, and cleared out the SS building. His strategy worked so well that the Germans thought the entire Canadian army was invading, BUT IT WAS ONLY F*****G LEO. By morning, the town was empty of Germans, and the Canadian army strolled right in. It literally took him one night.

Fun fact: he also had an eyepatch. He lost his eye earlier because of a grenade. But decided he could still be a sniper.

Adventurous_Book3023 , wikipedia.org Report

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It’s not exactly a ‘f**k it I’ll do it myself’ but a professor called Richard Scoylver along with his research partner Georgina Long had developed breakthrough melanoma research and treatments. Last year Scoyler was diagnosed with a type of grade 4 brain cancer that was incurable. So him and his partner developed a new experimental treatment, with Scoyler being the first patient to receive it. A year later Scolyver appears completely cured with no sign recurrence of the brain tumour.

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Barry Marshall. He thought the ulcers were caused by bacteria, but couldn’t get ethics approval for human testing. So he drank H. pylori bacteria himself, and developed ulcers 3 days later which confirmed his theory.

sunbearimon , Yutaka Tsutsumi Report

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Tony Iommi. Lost the tips of his ring and middle fingers on his right hand in a sheet metal accident at age 17. Told he’d likely never play guitar again, as he was left handed and injured his fretboard hand, Tommy fashioned his own homemade thimbles and learned to play again.

Not having full sensation in his fingers, he found it difficult to play so he tuned his guitar down to loosen the strings, effectively creating the heavy metal sound Black Sabbath would eventually become famous for.

geisterpunk , Carl Lender Report

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The group of elderly people who tunneled under the Berlin Wall because they got told to f**k off.

I recall this exhibit from the Checkpoint Charlie museum about 20 years ago. There was a group of elderly Germans who lived on the east side of the wall, and quite near it. They sought help from someone who ran escape routes to the west and did a lot of tunneling. He basically told them “nah, you’re too old and useless to help me.”

They were not having it.

They set out to make their own tunnel. They devised their own system of signals and codes with the planting of flowers. Each person had a role, from digging to dirt dispersal to manning the planting signals. And the best part is that they made their tunnel tall enough so they could all walk through instead of having to crawl as would have been the case with the other guy’s tunnel.

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After the death of her husband, Pharaoh Thutmose II, Egypt was supposed to be ruled by her stepson, Thutmose III. However, he was still a child, and Hatshepsut was meant to act as regent until he came of age. "F it" Moment*: Instead of merely serving as regent, Hatshepsut declared herself Pharaoh—one of the very few women to do so in ancient Egypt. She ruled for over 20 years, expanded Egypt’s trade networks, commissioned grand architectural projects like her famous temple at Deir el-Bahri, and established a period of peace and prosperity.

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Maybe not the "greatest" but George Lucas wanted to make a Flash Gordan Movie. They wouldn't give him the rights so he wrote is own space opera, created his own special effects company and basically became a multi billionaire by making the biggest money making movie franchise there ever was. (at least for a while).

Doright36 , Harrison Jeffs Report

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Can only remember a moment in personal history. I was the last generation in my country to do mandatory military service. And apparently my generation is particularly lazy.

We were supposed to pass some sort of exercise parcours and had a time that we were supposed to do it in. Almost nobody could do it, and everyone complained that it's some sort of elite target that obviously can't be reached.

We were stunned when the officer, chubby guy in his 50s, flew through that entire thing with a mixture of rage and disappointment in our performance, easily a minute faster than any of us did. Didn't say a word after that, neither did we.

Nobody ever questioned the guy again. If he said it's possible, it WAS possible after that demonstration.

Ratiofarming , Specna Arms Report

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You know that old wives tale about how cracking your knuckles will cause arthritis? Well, Doctor Donald Unger decided to test that theory in the most extreme way he could. Once a day for 50 years, he cracked the knuckles in his left hand but not in his right hand. Neither hand developed arthritis, thus disproving the old wives tale.




50 f***ing years, people. The dedication is just *chef's kiss*.

KevMenc1998 , Eren Li Report

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While not world changing, me. My wife had cancer and was going in and out of the hospital for months because of a life-threatening infection. There were a lot of things that I didn't like about her care. She finally got better but her doctors said that she was going to be having GI problems and probably cancers for the rest of her life. I wanted her to have better care than she had gotten up to that point so I quit being an engineer, went back to school, and became a Registered Nurse.

Then, a few years later, she cheated on me with a guy she worked with who would post on Facebook about how there were dinosaurs on Noah's ark.

stupididiot78 , Andrea Piacquadio Report

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Mariya Oktyabrskaya.

After her husband was killed fighting Nazis in 1941, Oktyabrskaya sold her possessions to donate a tank for the war effort, and requested that she be allowed to drive it. She received and was trained to drive and fix a T-34 medium tank, which she named "Fighting Girlfriend" ("Боевая подруга"). Oktyabrskaya proved her ability and bravery in battle, and was promoted to the rank of sergeant. After she died of wounds from battle in 1944, she was posthumously made a Hero of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union's highest honor for bravery during combat. She was the first female tank driver to be awarded the title.

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That time when this guy’s son was born with adrenoleukodystrophy, an incurable and awful disease. All of the doctors him and his wife spoke to said he was going to live a short and awful life. So they studied neuro chemistry and developed their own treatment and started to modestly fund research.

Their treatment was effective at dramatically slowing the progression of the disease, but unfortunately, their son was pretty far along by the time they worked it out.

[Here’s a bit about them.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto,_Michaela,_and_Lorenzo_Odone).

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In 1981, in the west of Ireland, a local priest decided that his town needed an airport. So he built one. With no money and no planning permission. It's now the West of Ireland's international airport https://www.rte.ie/archives/2016/0215/768106-knock-airport/.

DD_irl_irl , Tanathip Rattanatum Report

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Ol’ mate that removed his own appendix in Antarctica
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/antarctica-1961-a-soviet-surgeon-has-to-remove-his-own-appendix/72445/

Or the Aussie nurse who was working out bush and treated his own STEMI
https://www.iflscience.com/in-remote-western-australia-a-nurse-selftreated-a-heart-attack-46529.

Janedoe_21 , Muhammad Khawar Nazir Report

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In 1940 Polish army officer and Polish resistance soldier Witold Pilecki volunteered to be captured by the German occupier and be placed in Auschwitz concentration camp in order to infiltrate it. He successfully organized a resistance movement inside, collected a lot of intel on Nazi atrocities, and escaped it in 1943. In 1944 he fought in the Warsaw Uprising.

He didn't accept the Soviet occupation of Poland and remained loyal to the Polish government-in-exile (based in London). He returned to Poland after the war in 1945 to report on the situation there. Sadly, he was arrested in 1947 by Communist Poland's secret police, tortured and executed in 1948.

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Girolamo Cardano was a mathematician in the Renaissance who was trying to find a generalized solution for the roots of cubic functions. One of the problems that kept popping up was he needed to take the square root of negative numbers, something traditional “real number” algebra wouldn’t allow. Cardano, instead of writing it off as impossible, simply decided that these “imaginary numbers” (as they were called later) must exist, an astoundingly controversial opinion at the time.

Now we use them every day.

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John Brown tried to end slavery with an army mostly made up of his immediate family members.

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Well, I got tired of waiting on contractors to give me a bid on building my house. It was either super expensive or a year out, so I said, "f*** it, I'll do it myself."

And I did.

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Well he probably didn't say "f**k it," but Georges Lemaitre was a Belgian priest/astronomer who basically came up with what is now known as the "Big Bang Theory." He was at the famous (at least for physicists) 1927 Solvay conference, and while he was still fresh off getting his PhD, he managed to get to talk to Einstein about his idea of an expanding universe that started with a singularity.

He was this young upstart kid among some of the greatest minds of the age (Marie Curie, Neils Bohr, Heisenberg, Dirac) and Einstein was dismissive of his notion, saying “from the point of view of Physics this seems to me abominable”.

Lemaitre was right, of course, and years later Einstein had to admit that he was wrong.

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My vote is Alex Zanardi. Former Formula One and CART racer, back in 2001 he'd returned to CART and got in an accident that caused another car to sheer the nose of his off. If you're unfamiliar with the bodyplan of this kind of car that doesn't sound like much, but these are those low, open wheel vehicles and the nose *has the driver's legs in it*. So he suffered traumatic amputation of both legs, one at and one above his knee, and they had to chop more off to clean up and close the wounds, lost 3/4ths of his blood volume, and woke up after the crash a double amputee.

Now, most people would go, "Wow, I am lucky to be alive after such a crash, I should probably take it easy and make the most of the rest of my life and stay the f**k away from cars after one tore my legs off." But Alex Zanardi is not most people. As soon as he was healed and fitted with prosthetics, he started trying to drive again, and found all the prosthetics to him to just be *insufficient* for driving with, and ended up learning about and designing his own prosthetics, to his own standards, to facilitate getting himself *back behind the wheel of a car and on a track again*.

He was able to get back in a CART to ceremonially finish the race he was nearly killed in in 2003, and moved on to racing again in Touring series later in 2003, and has been racing in various ways up until recently. This includes continuing with handcycling, which he picked up in 2001 while recovering from the amputations, and even competed in the paralympics and winning multiple gold and silver medals, marathons, and setting records in the process. Unfortunately, in 2020 he suffered a second serious racing accident while handcycling during a road race where he lost control and went face first into an oncoming truck.

And lived. Again. As of 2022 he's back home and continuing to recover, and no word on if he'll take his third lease on life to continue racing once recovered.

Incredible man.

On a non-racing note: The man has the weirdest luck, because in the middle of 2022 he got hospitalized *again* from a house fire, and lived, again(I can't easily find if he was actually injured in the fire, the hospitalization is listed as being because the fire damaged equipment he needs to live, so it may just have been the only place that had the stuff he needed, and he wasn't any further hurt). Something really has it out for him and something else will not let him die.

Uturuncu , Race Day Replay Report

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Chewie Baron

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He also won gold medals in the hand-cycling events at the London Paralympics in 2012.

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Upstaged75

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Here's a story about him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqurxsTodOo

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Donald

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Billy Monger from the UK had something similar happen to him and he still races as well.

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cryssH

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WWII English fighter pilot Douglas Bader was a double amputee protecting Britain and later a POW (the Nazi's allowed a plane to land with a new leg for him).

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Carole Martin

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The indestructible man.

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ThatOneFish She/Her

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🎵I couldn't seem to die🎵

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Bay Bo

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Whoa, obsessed much?😉

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Tristan J

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Imagine what you must think about biographers... But yes, does seem a little overdone

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Horacio Pagani while working at Lamborghini suggested that they should buy an autoclave because it would allow them to produce professional lightweight carbon car bodies, Lamborghini refused, so Horacio left Lamborghini, took a bank loan and bought the machine himself. He started making the bodies himself and selling them to other automakers, including Lamborghini. After some time in 1992, Horacio Pagani founded Pagani Automobili and began designing and producing his own cars.

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Linus Torvalds is really an interesting person. After creating Linux, the system running on most servers today, he also made Git purely motivated by dissatisfaction with the then available versioning programs. And it became not only the versioning tool for Linux developers (his goal), but also the most popular versioning tool being used by software companies and developers today.

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Dashrath Manjhi, the “Mountain Man,” was a laborer from a village in Bihar, who undertook an extraordinary journey to carve a path through a treacherous mountain after his wife’s tragic death in 1959. Falguni Devi died due to the inefficiency of government services; the nearest clinic was 70 kilometers away, and she could not receive timely medical attention after falling while bringing him lunch. Frustrated by the lack of action from authorities, who ignored the community’s needs, Manjhi decided to take matters into his own hands. Over 22 years, using only basic tools, he single-handedly created a 360-foot-long road that reduced travel distance for villagers significantly. Despite facing ridicule and threats from local officials, his determination inspired others to join him. In 1982, he completed the path, which ultimately benefited not just his village but also surrounding areas.

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Napoleon. Dude busted out of prison and got the army that was against him on his side.

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