The 8 Most Incredible Things Slapped Together in a Day

In addition to helping out their homeland, the organizers were hoping to send the world a message about how much you can do to fight global warming if you put just a little effort into it. You have to admit that a tiny country of 2 million people planting 6 million trees in a single day makes that point a lot better than some hippie shaming you with buzzwords.

Washington went with what we will call the "instant fort" plan, where the British would go to bed to an empty hillside and wake up in the shadow of a fortified bank of cannons pointing down at them. This involved sneaking over 60 cannons up a hill right in front of the town, as well as all the materials for fortifications.

On March 4, 1776, they wrapped their wagon wheels with straw to deaden the sound, put hay bales between whatever they were moving and the city and did the impossible, just like Washington asked.

By morning, there was an impressive fortification staring down on the city, stirring British general William Howe to say, "The rebels have done more in one night than my whole army would have done in a month." Which implies that either the Revolutionary Army had accomplished an extraordinary feat or that the British Army was mostly worthless.

Howe's first plan was to attack, but a sudden storm gave him some time to think about it, as well as giving Washington some time to keep building his fortifications. By the time the storm cleared up, Washington's instant fort was impressive enough that Howe decided to head out. Washington had basically managed to take a city with the military equivalent of flexing his muscles.

Unlike Black Friday, there aren't any records of anyone being trampled to death, but there were quite a few people illegally camping out inside the territory, which is basically like going into Walmart the day before Thanksgiving and hiding yourself in a display of Pepsi cans, and then popping out at 4 a.m. on Black Friday and shouting, "First!"

These people were called "sooners," and Oklahomans are apparently proud of this behavior, because it's their state nickname (the Sooner State) and the Oklahoma University team name.

When the clock struck noon on the 22nd, the crowds piled onto trains and went racing into the territory, many of them getting off at the first station -- Guthrie -- at 1:25 p.m., where they found a handful of sooners already staking their claims. Seeing that they weren't the first to get there, and noticing that lots of the people on the train were as impatient as they were, the campers sprang into action, and the town went from 0 to 10,000 in the course of an afternoon. And since this was back when elbow grease was America's number one export, tire axle lubricant and preferred soup base, the sudden citizens had already laid out the streets, staked out lots and started forming a government by the time midnight rolled around.

Four months later, the town was pretty well built out, with the directory listing "six banks, 16 barbers, 16 blacksmiths, 17 carpenters, two cigar manufacturers, five newspapers, seven hardware stores, 15 hotels, 19 pharmacists, 22 lumber companies, 39 doctors, 40 restaurants" and, of course, 81 lawyers.

The bomb damage, plus all the other damage sustained in the battle, was expected to take three months to repair, although crews estimated that they could get her just barely patched up enough in two weeks to return to the U.S. mainland for serious repairs. Admiral Nimitz, channeling his best Captain Kirk, told them they had three days -- and not just to get the ship limping back to the mainland, but to send her out to fight.

Several sleepless days later, the USS Yorktown was on her way to Midway like a freaking magic trick. The sheer impossibility of the Yorktown being afloat, let alone ready to fight, led the Japanese to assume they must be looking at a new carrier. The Yorktown took down four Japanese carriers before doing what it did best and was shot to pieces. This time, the ship sank like a stone, but the Americans who went down with it had done their damage, and the battle where the U.S. Navy made Japan think they were being attacked by a freaking ghost ship ended up being one of the keys to turning the tide of the war. The battle put the Japanese behind in terms of ships and manpower, and they never caught up.

Charles Sorenson, vice president of production for Ford, had one day to get that time down from one bomber per day to one bomber per hour. The reason for this self-imposed deadline was that on a visit to a Consolidated Aircraft bomber plant, he couldn't resist commenting on how crappy their process was, which led to them asking if he supposed he could do better, which led to him promising he'd have something by morning.

Thanks to opening his big mouth, he was up all night making calculations and rearranging stacks of paper on the floor, trying to solve the puzzle of how to get 100,000 bomber parts together in the right order in one hour. He had the plans drawn up by morning for what would become the Willow Run plant, which eventually did produce one bomber an hour, as promised.

By the end of the war, Willow Run had produced 8,685 B-24 bombers, which probably shut those Consolidated assholes right the hell up.

Iowa decided to get down to business and build a real road across the entire state, and to do it, for some reason, in one day. Presumably, the state of Iowa's schedule was booked solid for the remainder of the week.

Iowans along the route spent months stocking up on supplies, and one Saturday in the summer of 1910, everyone went to the road at 9 a.m. sharp and started paving. One hour later, the road was done, and by evening, all the road signs were up.

The fact that they'd built a 380-mile-long road in one hour was pretty amazing, but the funniest part is what happened next, in the convoluted journey the road took from physically existing to officially existing as a state highway.

First, they had to wait three years for the Iowa State Highway Commission to come into existence in 1913 as an independent state organization. Three years after that, one of the road's sponsors finally sent a letter asking to register it with the state. Letters then went back and forth with lags of up to eight months in between, and together with that and an almost farcical amount of incomplete paperwork and bureaucratic mix-ups, it was 1918 before the road was formally registered with the state.

It had taken one day to physically build the road and eight years to get it registered with the government, which, depending on your perspective, is either a cute funny story about the stupidity of bureaucrats or something to rile up the crowd at your next Tea Party rally.

However, what really got the rivalry going was the Union Pacific boasting about laying 4.5 miles of track in a single day. When the media began fawning over the claim, Charlie Crocker, the Central Pacific labor boss, directed his crews to beat the record, which they did, laying 6 miles of track.

The Union Pacific boss wasn't going to let that stand, so he bravely sacrificed hours of other people's sweat and manual labor to top that record, and even cheated by having the "workday" go from 3 a.m. to midnight, generously giving the people three hours to sleep between shifts of 21-hour-long grueling labor. The cheating paid off -- they laid 8.5 miles of track.

With 14 miles of track to go before their railroads met up, Crocker bet the Union Pacific boss $10,000 that his Central Pacific boys could lay 10 miles of track in one day. Knowing that he'd needed to cheat just to get 8 miles of track down, the Union Pacific boss gladly accepted. At 7:15 the next morning, as orchestral music swelled in the background, crews of Irish and Chinese immigrants hit the rails and worked their hearts out to earn $10,000 for a rich white guy, and also probably to prove to the world they were the best track layers that ever lived.

By 7 p.m., and without cheating, they had laid 10 miles of solid track that you could drive a train over at 40 mph -- which someone promptly did. They built new, permanent track at almost 1 mile per hour, at certain points going as fast as a person might walk. Even today, with human labor mostly replaced by automated machinery, 10 miles in one day is considered pretty impressive.

Known as Mulberry Harbours (they were developed by the English, so they were allowed to misspell it), these artificial harbors were massive structures built out of concrete blocks, sunken ships and wooden roadways, all floated over in pieces, moved into position and locked down, making it by far the largest Lego project ever undertaken.

At about 1 mile long, each harbor was like a floating city, with depots, docks and roadways sturdy enough to drive tanks on.

The skeleton was mostly laid out in a day, the bridges were usable within three and the whole thing was completely assembled within a week. Over the course of 109 days, the week's worth of work allowed 2.5 million troops and 17 million tons of equipment to pour into occupied France and finish Nazi Germany for good.

Why, what'd you do at work this week?

For more innovative genius, check out 5 Accidental Inventions That Changed The World and 5 Simple Things You Won't Believe Are Recent Inventions.