What Was This Mysterious Sea on Old American Maps?

0:00Some mistakes have the power to change the course of history. One such story has to do with an old boring key that could have saved the Titanic from its infamous demise. The key belonged to the crow's nest locker that housed binoculars, which could have helped the lookout spot the iceberg sooner. There's more. The key wasn't even on board the ship when it set sail. The second officer took it with him when he was taken off the ship at the last minute. As the story goes, the officer forgot to hand the key over to his replacement in his hurry to disembark. So, when the lookouts were in desperate need of binoculars, they were out of luck. One of the lookouts, named Fred Fleet, even testified that if they had had binoculars, they would have spotted the iceberg in time to avoid it. And when asked how much sooner, Fleet replied, enough to get out of the way.

1:02In 2015, some auctioneers got their hands on Blair's key and presented it as one of the most important artifacts from the Titanic. They truly believed it could have saved the ship. Blair kept the key as a souvenir and passed it down to his daughter Nancy. At one point, it was up for auction with a price tag of over $80,000. Blair himself was quite the hero it seems. A year after the Titanic disaster, he was awarded a gallantry medal for saving a crewman who had fallen overboard while he had been on board the liner majestic. He may have forgotten the key, but he sure didn't forget to be a hero when it counted. This next story is both funny and tragic. It's about NASA's lost $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter. The spacecraft engineers failed to convert from English to metric measurements before the craft was launched, and as a result, they lost it.

2:09The navigation team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory used the metric system of millimeters and meters, while Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver used the English system of inches, feet and pounds. JPL engineers mistook acceleration readings measured in English units of pound seconds for a metric measure of force called Newton seconds. What's worse is that none of JPL's quality control procedures caught the error. In the nine months, it took the spacecraft to make its 461 million mile flight to Mars. That's a long time to be lost in translation, don't you think? The miscalculations were enough to throw the spacecraft so far off track that it flew too deeply into the Martian atmosphere and was destroyed when it entered its initial orbit around Mars. It's embarrassing to lose a spacecraft to such a simple math error, and it's hard to think of another example of such a large loss due to English versus metric confusion.

3:14Ever heard about the mathematical mistake that led to the discovery of the new world? Spoiler alert, it involves a guy named Christopher Columbus and a really big globe. Back in 1492, Columbus set sail from Spain with a mission to find a new trade route to Asia. He was convinced that he was less than 3,000 miles away from Japan, and just a bit more sailing would get him to the Indies, with all their tasty spices. The only problem was that Columbus was a bit off in his calculations, like way off. He made a mistake in estimating the size of the globe, which led him to believe that Earth was far smaller than it actually is. Now I know what you're thinking. Wasn't Columbus afraid that he would fall off the edge of the world? Contrary to popular myth, Columbus and his crew knew the Earth was a globe. Just like the ancient Greeks did to millennia earlier.

4:14They weren't worried about falling off the edge, but rather about the size of the ocean they planned on crossing. And to make matters worse, Columbus had no idea that an unknown landmass existed between Spain and Asia. After weeks at sea, Columbus finally reached the Caribbean. He believed that he had landed on the outskirts of Asia, and so named the islands the West Indies. He went on to explore the Caribbean and the northern coast of South America. But here's where things get really interesting. Even though Columbus insisted until his last day that he had reached Asia, another Italian explorer named Amerigo Vespucci mapped the eastern shore of South America down to Brazil, and proved conclusively that Columbus had actually discovered a whole new world. A German map maker saw Amerigo's maps and labeled the new landmass America, after him.

5:15And since his maps were super popular at the time, the name stuck. One man named Alexander Fleming stumbled upon one of the most significant medical discoveries of all time by accident. At one point in his career, Fleming observed the demise of many people from uncontrollable infections. Anticeptics were used to fight this, but they often did more harm than good. In 1922, while he had a cold himself, Fleming transferred some of his, well, nasal discharge to a petri dish and left it on his cluttered desk. When he finally examined it weeks later, he found that an enzyme had some antimicrobial properties. It wasn't until 1928, when Fleming left an uncovered petri dish next to an open window, that he stumbled upon the discovery that would change the world. The dish became contaminated with fungus spores.

6:17And when he examined them under the microscope, Fleming discovered that the bacteria near the fungus were dying. He managed to isolate the fungus and found that it was effective against numerous things that caused diseases. And thus, Penicillin was discovered. As Fleming himself put it, I did not discover Penicillin. Nature did that. I only discovered it by accident. Talk about a lucky break. In the early 1520s, the east coast of the United States of America was a big mystery waiting to be solved. The Spanish found Florida, and the English and Portuguese found Newfoundland, but the area in between was like a blank spot on the map. France decided to take action and sent an expedition to explore the area. They chose a guy called Giovanni da Verrazano to lead the trip. For this expedition, he got four ships. Unfortunately, two of them were shipwrecked, and a third one went home after doing some other business on the Spanish coast.

7:22Only the flagship, La Dolfín, crossed the Atlantic with Verrazano and his 50-man crew. Verrazano set sail from Madera and landed at Cape Fear. From there, he sailed south, but got a little scared of running into the Spanish, so he returned somewhere north of Charleston. He anchored, not far from his original landing spot, but unlike other explorers, he preferred to anchor well out at sea. He did send a boat to the shore, and he met the natives. They were described as wearing just some animal skins covering their bodies and garlands of bird feathers. As Verrazano sailed along the coast, he reached the outer banks of North Carolina. He thought that the waters he discovered were those of the Pacific. In reality, what he'd stumbled upon was the pommelco sound. He thought that North America was just a long, extremely narrow strip of land.

8:23This mistake led map makers to show North America as almost completely divided in two. Moving on, Verrazano reached a beautiful place that he called Arcadia. Probably Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Sailing further north, he missed the entrances to Chesapeake and Delaware Bayes, because he kept quite far from the coast until New Jersey. Then, the moment we've all been waiting for, Verrazano discovered New York Harbor, and he anchored in the narrows. Later, it was named after him, and now it is spanned by the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. Once Verrazano's sea appeared on the map, it became widely accepted and impacted loads of future explorers. For example, Henry Hudson went looking for a passage to the Pacific in the middle latitudes of the continent. But, as it turns out, the Englishmen never did find the Pacific Ocean anywhere near Virginia.

9:27And, the cartographic myth eventually faded away. It's funny to think about how a mistaken belief could have such an impact on history.