Effects of Minor PODs?

Hey Guys,

Something I've been interested in lately are minor PODs that could have happened and what their overall affect on OTL would be. A good example of something like this is of course EdT's TL "A Greater Britain" in which Oswald Mosley gaining just 78 votes in Birmingham Ladywood leads to a huge impact on a worldwide scale.

So I was thinking about other minor things and how they may affect a timeline. I only put this in 'Post-1900' as I used the "Greater Britain" example, though I mean before or after 1900. But what small things could've happened that could've changed world history over a small or large period of time? Whether it's someone getting some more votes, or whether it's a gun jamming. A letter making it to someone in time, or out of time.

A few ones I've wondered about are for a TL I'm still thinking about, but there are also a few things that I've just randomly thought about. Whether they'd actually have an impact or not I have no idea, but they're random little things that may've had a larger impact.

For Example:
  • What if Winston Churchill had 44 more votes in the 19 March 1924 by-election in Westminster Abbey and thus become an MP 7 months earlier than in OTL?
  • What if in the by-election of Westminster St George's in 1931 the 'Empire Free Trade Crusade' Party had won somehow, and thus had two MPs. Could this have stopped Admiral Ernest Taylor joining the Conservative Party after they [the Conservatives] won the General Election? Would Lord Beaverbrook have fielded more candidates?
  • What if Lord Liverpool's news of the repeal of the Orders in Council had reached the Americans ears before they declared war on Britain in 1812?

So yeah, you can either discuss the examples I've given, or come up with your own and talk about them etc.

EDIT: By 'Minor POD' I didn't just mean a different piece of clothing, or if some 'unimportant' person wasn't born. I did mean the POD should involve an Organization (i.e. Political Party.) Or a well known person.
 
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wormyguy

Banned
Well, the amount of butterflies from events happening on earth could be abstracted as:

Size of the POD x Historical (OTL) importance of the figures involved x Distance from the present day
 
Hitler is accepted in the arts academy in Vienna. There he meets a woman, marries and gets 2 children.
 
A good POD, 1994, I turn out to be a miscarriage, what would happen?

The world would be plunged into a third world war?
 
Stalin had children, and he was even more brutal. Saddam did too. As did Cromwell, Napoleon, and so on.

Stalin wouldn't have his son back when he was prisoner of war and could be traded for a german general and the sons of Saddam were monsters like himself.

I don't know much about Cromwell and Napoleon. They could have been good tender familymen
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Kim Young Il (or so) of North Korea is as mad as his father. So madness could be a genetic thing with dictators.
 
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Stalin wouldn't have his son back when he was prisoner of war and could be traded for a german general and the sons of Saddam were monsters like himself.

I don't know much about Cromwell and Napoleon. They could have been good tender familymen
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Kim Young Il (or so) of North Korea is as mad as his father. So madness could be a genetic thing with dictators.

Cromwell was a lovely family man.
 
I like minor PoDs a lot. They're a bit more subtle than the obvious "X gets shot/battle of Y goes the other way", and let you have a fair bit more control over what happens. For example, in the original first tentative version for "Fight and Be Right" (see sig) I had OTL's Jubilee Plot work and Queen Victoria blown up in Westminster Abbey. While big and flashy, it's a far blunter (and less plausible) instrument to use than "The Marquess of Blandford's maid tidies up some letters that had been set aside for safe keeping", and forces you down certain routes you might want to avoid- by having a smaller, subtle PoD you can get everything nicely in place for when the big divergence comes.

There's also the fact that these little things happen- people fall out over small things, miss trains, lose their baggage and the like. A mundane PoD rams home one of the joys of Alternative History, the whole "for want of a nail" thing. It'd be a crap poem if it was just "For want of a battle, the Kingdom was lost"...
 
Hey Guys,

Something I've been interested in lately are minor PODs that could have happened and what their overall affect on OTL would be. A good example of something like this is of course EdT's TL "A Greater Britain" in which Oswald Mosley gaining just 78 votes in Birmingham Ladywood leads to a huge impact on a worldwide scale.

So I was thinking about other minor things and how they may affect a timeline. I only put this in 'Post-1900' as I used the "Greater Britain" example, though I mean before or after 1900. But what small things could've happened that could've changed world history over a small or large period of time? Whether it's someone getting some more votes, or whether it's a gun jamming. A letter making it to someone in time, or out of time.

A few ones I've wondered about are for a TL I'm still thinking about, but there are also a few things that I've just randomly thought about. Whether they'd actually have an impact or not I have no idea, but they're random little things that may've had a larger impact.

For Example:
  • What if Winston Churchill had 44 more votes in the 19 March 1924 by-election in Westminster Abbey and thus become an MP 7 months earlier than in OTL?
  • What if in the by-election of Westminster St George's in 1931 the 'Empire Free Trade Crusade' Party had won somehow, and thus had two MPs. Could this have stopped Admiral Ernest Taylor joining the Conservative Party after they [the Conservatives] won the General Election? Would Lord Beaverbrook have fielded more candidates?
  • What if Lord Liverpool's news of the repeal of the Orders in Council had reached the Americans ears before they declared war on Britain in 1812?

So yeah, you can either discuss the examples I've given, or come up with your own and talk about them etc.

EDIT: By 'Minor POD' I didn't just mean a different piece of clothing, or if some 'unimportant' person wasn't born. I did mean the POD should involve an Organization (i.e. Political Party.) Or a well known person.


One very minor change which would have a massive effect would be The driver of the car carrying the Archduke of Austria-Hungary not making a wrong turning, thus preventing Princip from assassinating the heir to the throne in 1914. World War I would not happen.
 
Is this sufficiently small to count as a minor POD ?

Fermat finds a spare sheet of paper and writes down the proof of his last theorem.

How does this affect future mathematical research, and are there wider consequences ? There are two cases to consider, in that the proof may be verified or may be found to be invalid. Fermat cannot have found the modern-day proof, as that relied on concepts not known to him.
 
Fermat finds a spare sheet of paper and writes down the proof of his last theorem.

How does this affect future mathematical research, and are there wider consequences ? There are two cases to consider, in that the proof may be verified or may be found to be invalid. Fermat cannot have found the modern-day proof, as that relied on concepts not known to him.

I'd say his proof was invalid. If there was an easy proof, someone would have found it by now. So the invalidity of the original proof might be found, leading to history as IOTL. If the proof on the other side was valid, I'd think it would be a lesser known theorem from number theories, nothing important. Something else would have become the great question of mathematics Fermat's last theorem was IOTL.


Another minor POD: Adenauer became chancelor by one vote only. His own. One vote less and probably the social democrats would rule Germany...
 

Typo

Banned
Is this sufficiently small to count as a minor POD ?

Fermat finds a spare sheet of paper and writes down the proof of his last theorem.

How does this affect future mathematical research, and are there wider consequences ? There are two cases to consider, in that the proof may be verified or may be found to be invalid. Fermat cannot have found the modern-day proof, as that relied on concepts not known to him.
Fermat probably just made up the fact he had a proof
 
Hitler, not moving the suitcasebomb on the other side of the table could be another minor POD with big consequence
 
Thursday nov 21st 1963 Oswald goes to the bar for one last beer before his big day.

Some nameless drunken tramp rocks his world.:eek:

He wakes up late and to hung over to trust his aim. :)
 
In the spirit of CMIV's POD: How about 6/5/68. One sneeze gives 0.5 inch clearance so the .22 round hits bone, not brain, thereby saving RFK.
 
Personally the reason AH interests me is because Mosely missed out by 78 votes, Franz Ferdinand's car took a wrong turn and the British Army's appointment/promotion system put Percival into Malaya in 1941 instead of someone better. Small PoDs to me are changing close-run things, and can have vast impacts on the world stage simply with the interplay of personality with determinism.
 
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