Can you think of historical disasters that happened largely because a single person failed to complete a single, easy task?
PW Botha: He had one easy task of abolishing apartheid and he only abolished two racist laws out of 148. Thank goodness for FW de Klerk.
There was the Mars probe that sailed off into the void because someone used American units of measurement instead of metric units.
There was the guy who dropped Lee’s battle plans, wrapped around some cigars, just before the battle of Antietam. But this one breaks even, because George McClellan also messed up royally, failing to capitalize on this incredible intelligence coup.
The reactor operator at Chernobyl? I guess that was more of a team screw-up, not just one individual’s blunder.
Along the lines of the tropical fruit comma, the Constitution of the Confederate States of America lifted intact the Bill of Rights from the US Constitution, except for one change. In Sec. 9 (13), the first and third troublesome commas were removed from the Second Amendment, making the regulation of the militia more unambiguously the law of the land.
Captain Louis Edward Nolan pointed at the wrong artillery battery to attack. That cause the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade. Out of 670 troopers, 156 were killed; 128 were wounded; and 355 horses died. They did reach the artillery battery, but had to abandon it immediately.
When can their glory fade? Oh, the wild charge they made!
Yeah, I was thinking about the McClellan side of this, earlier this morning. All he had to do to go down in history as the general who destroyed Lee’s army was march his troops to Sharpsburg before Lee’s troops started showing up piecemeal.
But like practically every general having anything to do with the Army of the Potomac before Grant assumed command, he wasn’t in a hurry, when being in a hurry would have made all the difference in the world.
General James Ripley was the Chief of Ordnance for the United States Army in 1860. And he believed in established weapons - which meant that muzzle-loading muskets were the only weapon he thought an infantryman should be using. He simply refused to buy repeaters or rifles. And he avoided buying breech-loaders or foreign-made weapons as much as he could.
Ripley was wrong on two counts. The first was his view on the worth of new technology; the war would show these new weapons were much more effective than muzzle-loading muskets. But even if his views had been right, Ripley missed the big picture. The two rapidly expanding armies were scrambling to arm their troops. Ripley was not in a position where he could be choosy. Even if the new weapons had been inferior, he should have been buying them anyway in order to arm American troops.
Some have even suggested he should have been buying up all the new weapons and dumping them in the ocean if he was that set against their use. Because by refusing to buy them for the Union army, he left them available for the Confederates to purchase.
This really wasn’t the error of a single person. In an effort to do things “faster, better, cheaper” JPL (the mission operator) and Lockheed Martin (the vehicle integrator) and abandoned the exhaustive systems engineering approach and mission assurance management on the Mars Climate Orbiter in favor of a more “agile” development method which placed the responsibility for verifying that methods, models, and parameters were correct upon the people who were developing the same. This is like having a machine operator perform the quality assurance check of his own work; of course he’ll tend to think that it is good. In the case of this particular snafu, the job of checking unit conversions was given to an intern who reviewed the Excel spreadsheets where unit and coordinate transforms were being performed with cell formulas instead of having this documented in a rigorous specification under configuration control.
And this is why you spend the time and effort to do things right rather than do them fast, and why that “blizzard of paperwork” that commercial space advocates complain about is actually a largely valuable activity, albeit one that doesn’t reveal itself until you find a problem. When a single error can end a multi-hundred dollar mission, spending ten or twenty million dollars on good documentation and thorough detail review by an independent assessment team is money well spent.
The RBMK type reactor is a highly flawed design that is in no way failsafe or, indeed, even safe. That there are still a dozen of these operating in the work (and even with the major design changes they are still vulnerable to operator error or aging damage which could result in another Chernobyl-scale event) is a testament to how difficult it is to change an established system with a large capital investment. This argues for putting a lot more effort and consideration into reactor designs which are passively failsafe and can consume their own waste products in a nearly complete burn up cycle rather than produce waste which will persist for centuries.
Stranger
The US Army been following this doctrine ever since and it hasn’t really done much to win wars. As any early Vietnam veteran what they thought of the M-16 when it first came out. There is a good reason to use established weapon systems; the flaws and mitigations are known, training is established, and supply chains and parts inventories are really available, which is why the Marine Corps generally maintains older, ostensibly less capable systems which have an established history of reliable performance.
Stranger
David Duncan, partner with Arthur Anderson (AA, the largest accounting and consulting firm globally in 2002) failed to abide by firm policy of not shredding documents associated with the Enron investigation. This resulted in a AA being convicted on “obstruction of justice” charges (although overturned in 2005) and the entire firm going out of business (85,000 employees worldwide). All because of one man’s poor judgment and lack of integrity.
How about the guy who was supposed to check the optics on the Hubble?
What about the manager who overruled the engineers who didn’t want the Challenger to fly that cold day in Florida?
Nick Leeson, whose only job really was not to lose money, lost over a billion dollars for Barings Bank from basically just fucking around from his Singapore desk, forcing the long-standing firm into bankruptcy and near liquidation.
How about the doctor in the Oklahoma execution chamber who just had to hit an artery with a needle in a patient lying quietly on a gurney.
Neither of these were the responsibility of a single person or even single entity.
Stranger
Sounds unproductive and possibly messy. I think you may mean vein.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Thomas Midgley, Jr.! A genuine two-fer!
I’ll nominate John Frederick Parker. He had a fairly cush assignment, but decided to go next door and have a beer with his buddies. As a result, John Wilkes Booth was able to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.