On 21 October 1997, a Swedish journalist performed a routine emergency swerving test on a brand new Mercedes-Benz A-Class. The car tipped over. The photographs went global, forcing Mercedes to halt deliveries and fit electronic stability control as standard across their small car range. That decision, born from acute embarrassment, eventually made stability systems mandatory across the European Union and saved countless lives. Also on this date: Fidel Castro fell down some stairs in 2004, producing headlines that briefly seemed to announce his political downfall. In 2015, the internet celebrated Back to the Future Day, the date Marty McFly arrived in a gleaming, absurd vision of tomorrow that got the flying cars wrong but the overwhelming noise of the future uncomfortably right. And in 1520, a Portuguese explorer named a cluster of Atlantic islands after eleven thousand martyred virgins, a figure that almost certainly began as a clerical error. Four stories about the gap between confidence and reality, and what happens when the two finally meet.
