20 Times A Historical Fix Was Worse Than The Problem

In 1935, an entomologist named Reginald Mungomery brought 102 South American cane toads to Queensland to help battle grayback beetles that were destroying the sugarcane crop. That August, Queensland officials bred and released tens of thousands more. This plan was not a success because of a simple oversight: the beetles lived high up on the cane stalks, and the toads couldn’t climb. Instead, the toads took over much of northern Australia, and their population now exceeds 200 million. The animals poison native predators such as quolls and goannas that attempt to eat them.

French officials were building a new sewer system in Hanoi under Governor-General Paul Doumer. They feared it would create nests for the plague-bearing rodents. They solved the problem by paying residents a cent for every tail turned in. This way nobody needed to handle the actual corpses. But people found a loophole and simply cut off the rat’s tail and let it go to breed more, or began farming the creatures themselves on ranches outside of town. Over 20,000 rat tails were brought in at once. When officials began finding tail-less rats roaming the streets, they took the reward away.

The West German pharmaceutical firm Chemie Grünenthal marketed thalidomide (as Contergan) as a safe remedy for morning sickness, never having tested the drug on pregnant animals. It quickly spread to Europe, Canada, Australia, and Africa. By the time the drug was recalled in 1961, its use during early pregnancy had caused at least 10,000 babies to be born with phocomelia, featuring shortened or absent limbs. But U.S. Food and Drug Administration reviewer Dr. Frances Kelsey withheld approval of the drug due to the lack of safety data, effectively preventing a major outbreak in the United States.

GM engineer Thomas Midgley Jr., working under the direction of lab chief Charles Kettering, discovered that adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline eliminated the engine knocking that destroyed high-compression engines. Ethanol was just as effective, and it was already known to be safe, but you can’t patent a plant that anyone can grow. You can patent lead. GM and Standard Oil began marketing leaded gasoline, and it fueled cars for decades across the globe. It inflicted chronic neurological and cardiac injury on the population until the final holdout nations were forced to outlaw it.

A well-to-do Australian named Thomas Austin introduced 24 European rabbits near Geelong so that he’d have animals to shoot, insisting “the introduction of a few rabbits could do little harm.” Mild winters, plenty of food, and no natural enemies proved him totally wrong. The rabbits reproduced, reaching a population of roughly 600 million within decades. They consumed all their plant food and pushed marsupial species to the brink of extinction.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his French counterpart, Premier Édouard Daladier, agreed to let Germany annex the Sudetenland, the heavily fortified border region of Czechoslovakia, and they signed the Munich Agreement with German dictator Adolf Hitler. A Czechoslovak representative was not invited to the conference. Chamberlain believed he’d bought peace and time to rearm, calling it “peace for our time.” But the Sudetenland was the only line of defense Czechoslovakia possessed. Once its mountains were stripped of their fortresses, there was little chance of resisting. And indeed, within six months Germany moved into the rest of the country. Emboldened by its easy victory, Hitler then set his sights on Poland.

GM chemist Thomas Midgley Jr., the engineer who introduced lead into gasoline, developed Freon as a replacement for older refrigerants such as ammonia, which caused human deaths in accidental home leaks. Freon was non-toxic and stable at ground level, and spread into common usage globally in just a few years. No one imagined it would ever rise into the atmosphere. Decades later, scientists found Freon drifting into the upper reaches of our atmosphere, where it destroyed the ozone layer. Eventually, production of the compound was banned worldwide.

Britain’s last Viceroy of India, Lord Louis Mountbatten, came in hopes of averting a military crisis in the face of escalating communal violence. To avoid this, he rushed the timeline for Britain’s departure from the subcontinent to Aug. 15, 1947, about ten months ahead of schedule. He left a British lawyer, who had never been to India, with just a few weeks to create the borders of the new India and Pakistan. The border maps stayed secret until after independence. The haste created a panic that led to riots and displacement, resulting in 15 million refugees and hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Bootleggers had been stealing industrial alcohol from factories and redistilling it for their own purposes, which was simple since the chemicals that made the alcohol undrinkable could easily be removed. In late 1926, however, the administration of President Calvin Coolidge began ordering that the industrial alcohol contain methyl alcohol, gasoline, and chloroform in lethal quantities, because they believed that people would not drink it if it killed them. But they did. New York’s chief medical examiner, Charles Norris, spoke out against the policy that December. About 10,000 people died from drinking poisoned liquor during Prohibition, which ended in 1933.

In a bid to avoid disputes in the years ahead, British diplomat Mark Sykes and his French colleague François Georges-Picot secretly divided the Arab regions of the crumbling Ottoman Empire between their two nations. In the resulting 1916 accord, they largely drew straight lines on the map from the Mediterranean coast to the Persian Gulf, disregarding the Kurdish, Arab, and Druze peoples residing there. The result lumped together antagonistic groups in newly created countries such as Iraq and Syria. The Bolshevik revolutionaries published the agreement soon afterwards, and it remains the basis for regional conflicts today.

As far back as the First World War, when farming in Europe was disrupted and wheat became expensive, the U.S. Department of Agriculture encouraged farmers on the Great Plains to “Plant More Wheat: Win the War.” With new tractors, they plowed up millions of acres of the native prairie grass that had held the soil in place for centuries. Later, when the land suffered severe drought, that uncovered ground blew away in massive dust storms, culminating in a single storm known as Black Sunday, and the resulting Dust Bowl crisis displaced more than 350,000 people.

Winston Churchill’s government, which had little in the way of foreign exchange, exported Britain’s clean, low-sulfur coal and left British homes with dirty, cheap coal. Then in December 1952, bad weather kept the coal smoke hovering over London for days, and it mixed with the fog into an acidic haze that brought the buses to a halt and made breathing difficult. Thousands were reported dead. Subsequent studies suggest a much higher toll. A few years later, Britain enacted the Clean Air Act.

The Treaty of Versailles, signed by the Allied leaders, including British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and French Premier Georges Clemenceau, put an end to World War One. With voters clamoring for punishment, Germany was blamed for starting the conflict and was subsequently saddled with reparations so onerous that they contributed to hyperinflation and the country’s economic collapse over the next decade. Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nazi Party) capitalized on this anger. This resentment was one of many factors that eroded democracy in Germany over the next few years.

In the Lower Mississippi, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers implemented a “levees-only” policy. They built earthen embankments around the river, rather than constructing spillways. They believed that if they confined the river, it would scour out the bottom of the channel, making it deeper. In reality, the sediment accumulated over the course of several decades, raising the level of the riverbed above the surrounding countryside, as civilian engineers had been predicting for years. When one spring saw exceptional rainfall, the water broke through the levees and inundated thousands of square miles, uprooting hundreds of thousands of residents and drowning hundreds.

Florida Gov. Napoleon Bonaparte Broward started a state-funded effort to drain what he called “wasted swampland” so that land could be farmed and developed for housing. Over the next several decades, workers carved hundreds of miles of canals through the region, allowing water to escape quickly. As the nutrient-dense soil was exposed to air, it dried out and subsided up to 8 feet in some areas. The dry peat ignited and smoldered underground for months.

The British sugar planter William Bancroft Espeut transported nine small Indian mongooses to Jamaica in hopes that they would stop rats from devouring up to a fifth of the sugarcane crop each year. The trouble was, mongooses hunt during the day, and the rats they were after slept hidden away throughout the daylight hours. Unable to get enough rats to eat, the mongooses spread throughout Jamaica and dozens of other Caribbean islands, where they ate ground-nesting birds, iguanas, snakes, and sea turtle eggs, driving several native species toward extinction.

Early settlers in New South Wales and Queensland imported the prickly pear cactus from America as a potential living fence for cattle, since it’s cheap and grows without water. But without any predators to keep the plant in check, the prickly pear began taking over large parts of Australia. In the 1920s, ten-foot-high thickets of cactus were covering 60 million acres of farmland and even overtaking abandoned farms. The situation wasn’t remedied until the government finally released a moth whose larvae ate the prickly pear. It was one of the rare fixes that actually worked.

Chinese leader Mao Zedong ordered a “Four Pests Campaign,” calling on the public to kill rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. Mao thought the latter were stealing grain from the fields. So citizens killed hundreds of millions of sparrows despite warnings from biologists that they mostly ate crop-destroying insects. With their primary predator gone, insects thrived and consumed the crops. This was only one of many elements contributing to the Great Chinese Famine, along with forced collectivization and mass grain confiscation, which killed an estimated 15 to 45 million people.

In the 1930s, as the soil in the South eroded into the sea, Hugh Hammond Bennett, chief of the U.S. Soil Conservation Service, hailed kudzu, a fast-growing Asian vine, as inexpensive ground cover. For decades, the government distributed free seedlings to anyone who wanted them and even paid farmers to grow them on roadsides and in fields. Kudzu kept the soil from washing away, but without any native insects to hold it in check, it continued to grow long after its work was done, engulfing trees and electrical lines on hundreds of thousands of acres of woodland.

After raging fires in the Pacific Northwest consumed millions of acres, U.S. Forest Service Chief Ferdinand A. Silcox issued his famous 10 a.m. Policy: any fire would be extinguished by 10 a.m. on the day following detection. It held true for over 40 years as firefighters routinely put out smaller fires. But by preventing these smaller, natural fires from clearing dead wood and brush, it allowed fuel to accumulate for many years. When fires finally broke through, they had far more to burn.

This content was created with the help of AI.