20 Ridiculed Historical Figures Owed an Apology By Society
![20 Ridiculed Historical Figures Owed an Apology By Society](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/1/4/8/1069148_320x180.jpg)
A lot of things we know today — eggs are tasty, governments perform horrifying experiments on their citizens, disease is caused by tiny little gremlins that crawl into our body holes — would sound completely wackadoo if we didn’t already know them. But someone had to be the first to figure them out; so before they had enough evidence to convince the public, they were often shunned by society as paranoid, delusional egg eaters.
Even in modern times, speaking out against atrocity and corruption can ruin your career by making you look like some kind of overreactive radical, at least until everyone realizes the atrocities and corruption were real. Oopsie.
From the scientists who first figured out how the world really works to the pop stars who suggested that war might not always be good, we as a society owe apologies to a whole lot of people. That’s why, when user TheCheeryStranger asked r/AskReddit, “What ‘crazy’ person (in) history was right the whole time?,” Reddit had a long list of people wronged for being right.
![javanator999 2y ago Alfred Wegener figured out continental drift in 1912, but nobody would buy it until research in oceanography and geology proved it in the early 1960's.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/0/5/3/1067053.jpg)
![FlukeStarbucker1972 2y ago The Dixie Chicks/Natalie Maines speaking out against the imminent invasion of Iraq in March, 2003. When every other country music singer was thumping their chests, beating the war drums, & jockeying to be the next Lee Greenwood, she spoke up against the coming war & President Bush...and was crucified for it. Boycotted. Received death threats from unhinged hillbillies. Turns out she was right the whole time.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/0/4/8/1067048.jpg)
![wholewheatscythe 2y ago John Lydon. Told a BBC interviewer in 1978 that Jimmy Saville was into all kinds of seediness and that the BBC probably wouldn't air him saying that. Не was right on both counts.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/0/4/9/1067049.jpg)
![boozooloo 2y ago Lord Kitchener (Horacio Herbert Kitchener) Secretary State of War for the British Army. At the onset of WW1, everyone thought the war would end very quickly, either going one way or the other. Kitchener was one of the few people to envision a long war, and to prepare accordingly, even though the British government actively hampered many of his efforts (even though he was a war hero)](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/0/4/6/1067046.jpg)
![DelMarion67 2y ago Martha Mitchell.. She was like part of the reason why it was discovered that Nixon was involved in Watergate. Her husband was part of the Nixon group so she got some inside details. When she wanted to tell the news about the whole scandal, her husband and Nixon men put her in a hotel and restrained her from having any contact with anyone. She was seen as an insane person her husband and Nixon's men even managed to convince the psychiatrists that she was out of her mind. Actually there's a phenomenon in psychology which was named](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/0/5/1/1067051.jpg)
![Sudden-Lettuce2317 2y ago Clair Patterson-he was made out to be crazy by giant oil companies bc he tested ice cores in the Arctic and figured out that the amount of lead in the atmosphere, the water, and our bodies was extremely high and caused by leaded gasoline. Не petitioned Congress for years to make it illegal to add lead to gasoline, but the corporations kept getting him shut down because they used lead as an anti-knock agent for internal combustion engines. Ironically, lead was causing everyone else to go crazy because it is shaped like a neurotransmitter and blocks receptors](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/0/4/7/1067047.jpg)
![Reymond_StJames 2y ago Edwin Jay Quinby, a mid-century crackpot and conspiracy theorist who was instrumental in revealing that General Motors, Firestone Tires, and Standard Oil (among others) were using a shell company called National City Lines (originally a Midwestern bus line) to systematically buy insolvent or failing streetcar systems and convert them to buses. Nobody believed it was happening until he reported on it and had the Great American Streetcar Conspiracy seen to by the Supreme Court. While he failed to get all the companies indicted on conspiracy, it did leave a bad taste in the mouths of a lot](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/0/5/2/1067052.jpg)
![Doodle_Brush 2y ago John Snow was right about the miasma-theory being bullshit and is one of the main reasons you don't have human waste sewage flowing through your street. The other doctors thought he was crazy when he started to talk about contamination causing disease which led to a high death toll amongst people who's drinking water had been infected by cholera-laced sewage water.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/0/5/4/1067054.jpg)
![Royally-Forked-Up 2y ago Anyone prior to Louis Pasteur who advocated for germ theory. People like Ignaz Semmelweis were openly mocked for suggestions that doctors should wash their hands before assisting with a birth, as he noted that maternal death was significantly lower when midwives washed their hands. Не died in an asylum after suffering a nervous breakdown, and was only vindicated decades after his death when Pasteur and his contemporaries work on germ theory gained traction over the prevailing miasma theory (diseases and infections were caused by bad air).](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/0/4/5/1067045.jpg)
![2y ago Democritus. Everyone said his theory was wrong about the atomic theory of the universe. Aristotle said everything is made of four elements, earth, water, air, and fire. Guess he saw avatar early, but then years upon years later Lecretius revived the atomic theory.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/0/5/0/1067050.jpg)
![nsfwtttt 2y ago Al Gore. ManBearPig.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/0/4/4/1067044.jpg)
![Swerfbegone 2y ago Actress Jean Seeberg wasn't paranoid. The FBI were out to get her.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/0/4/1/1067041.jpg)
![ArchieBellTitanUp 2y ago Hemingway talked about the FBI following him prior to his suicide. They thought he was paranoid. Decades later some papers get released, turns out the FBI was following him.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/0/3/8/1067038.jpg)
![enriged 2y ago Sinead O'Connor jeopardizing/ruining her career by forcing a spotlight on the Catholic church protecting pedophile priests.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/0/3/5/1067035.jpg)
![5kyl3r 2y ago the dingo ate my baby lady](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/0/3/9/1067039.jpg)
![. 2y ago The lady who sued McDonald's for hot coffee. Everyone treated her like some ridiculous entitled Karen, but she was 80 and the coffee was so hot the skin on her legs fused together and he was hospitalized. She wasn't crazy at all.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/0/4/2/1067042.jpg)
![plasticbegone 2y ago Rachel Caron found that DDT was weakening the shells of bird eggs and contributing to the decline in the bald eagle population. She faced quite a bit of backlash from publishing her book Silent Spring detailing her research on the topic.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/0/4/3/1067043.jpg)
![ChaoticForkingGood 2y ago Heinrich Schliemann. Не 100% believed that ancient Troy had really existed. So he armed himself with a copy of the Iliad, and actually managed to find and excavate the city. He'd told everyone and their sister that Troy was a real place for 40 years before he found it, and everyone thought he was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Not so much, it turns out.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/0/4/0/1067040.jpg)
![SnooGoats1557 2y ago Giordano Bruno suggested that the earth went round the sun and that we live in an infinite universe. While the starts in the sky were much further away and were potentially all as bright as our own sun. The Catholic Church burned him to death for being a heretic.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/0/3/6/1067036.jpg)
![MathPerson 2y ago Edited 2y ago Gary Webb: Webb wrote a series of articles for the San Jose Mercury called Dark Alliance. In his report, Webb wrote that the Reagan CIA was responsible for bringing crack cocaine to the United States in the 1980s. Не lost his job, and couldn't find another. I guess being a Pulitzer Award winner does not count for much.](https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/imageset/0/3/7/1067037.jpg)