In 2013, a British guy named James Howells threw away a hard drive containing a virtually worthless cryptocurrency known as Bitcoin.

Napoleon’s army attempted to invade Russia 200 years ago...

PIPER BRAVO OIL RING: A safety inspector forgot to replace a valve after a routine check, and when a worker (unaware that a valve was missing) pushed the start button, gas leaked out. The explosion killed 167 men.

Twelve publishing houses rejected JK Rowling's Harry Potter manuscript.

On March 30, 1867, the United States reached an agreement to purchase Alaska from Russia for a price of $7.2 million. The Russian government thought it was just a useless tundra.

In 1977, Kodak filed a patent for one of the first digital cameras, but they decided to focus purely on film and film cameras. They went bankrupt in 2012.

Captain Edward Smith crashes the Titanic into an iceberg. (1912)

New Mexico loses control of a controlled burn in the Cerro Grande. (2000)

Yahoo rejected offer to buy Google for $1 million. (1998)

A hunter starts the biggest fire in California history. (2003)

Nintendo suddenly stopped communicating with Sony about the console the two companies were meant to create together. The name of the videogame was PLAYSTATION.

In 2009, Facebook turned down a pair of programmers for jobs. A few years later, though, the pair developed WhatsApp. Facebook subsequently purchased that venture for $19 billion.