Awkward moment: 10 failures in history

Did you fall, were you doused with water? The cat wrote to your shoes, did you buy expired milk? Do not get upset and do not consider yourself the loser of the decade, because history knows more ridiculous cases of bad luck. 

12 publishers rejected the Harry Potter manuscript before Bloomsbury finally agreed to publish the immortal story of the boy who survived. It turned out such magic thanks to the advice of the eight-year-old daughter of the head of the publishing house Alice. The books were eventually translated into 60 languages, and Rowling earned about $ 1 billion.

James Howells bought 7,500 bitcoins in 2009, when their value was almost zero. By 2013, one bitcoin was valued at 613 pounds sterling. Thus, Howells' securities were worth 4.5 million pounds. The only problem was that Howels left his hard drive with data in a drawer and forgot about it, and then threw it away with unnecessary papers. After realizing the terrible, he tried to find the disk, but he was told that it was already in the general landfill and could be anywhere.

Google owners Larry Page and Sergey Brin entered into negotiations with Excite founder George Bell in 1999 because they wanted to sell the search engine for $1 million. Bell was willing to pay no more than $750,000. Well, today Google is valued at $365 billion. Oops.

In 1914, the British soldier Henry Tandy, who was awarded the largest number of medals during the First World War among the ranks, walked past the unarmed and wounded Adolf Hitler lying in a ditch, but decided not to finish him off.

In 2005, a Japanese stock exchange employee cost his company 190 million pounds after an error in stock trading: he sold 610,000 shares at a cost of 1 yen (50 pence) instead of selling one share for 610,000 yen, as he was told. The exchange rejected the company's requests to cancel the sale, so it had to buy back its own shares.

The first great khan of the Mongol Empire, Genghis Khan, tried to establish diplomatic and trade relations with Ala ad-Din Muhammad, the shah of the neighboring State of Khorezmshahs (the territory of modern Iraq and Iran) in the XIII century. However, after all Genghis Khan's proposals were rejected and the Mongolian diplomat was beheaded, Genghis Khan reacted furiously to this form of refusal and sent 200,000 soldiers to destroy the state.

Facebook did not hire programmers Brian Acton and Jan Kuma when they were interviewed in 2009. A few years later, Facebook bought their WhatsApp project from rejected programmers for $19 billion.

The French state-owned railway has spent $16 billion on a new set of trains. Unfortunately, the trains turned out to be too wide for more than 1,300 platforms at stations across the country. The solution to the problem costs 50 million euros. It's almost like buying a car and not checking if it will fit in your garage.

In 1962, the Decca recording studio was looking for new bands and new artists. They listened to two bands in their studios in London and signed a contract with Brian Poole and The Tremeloes. Do you know which group they turned down? A quartet from Liverpool, who would later become famous as The Beatles.

The British government was sued for damages of 9 million pounds due to a bureaucratic error: an extra letter was written in the name of the company, as a result of which the company was liquidated. More than 250 people were left out of work when Taylor and Son was mistaken for Taylor and Sons, which went bankrupt in 2009.