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If you didn’t believe in serendipity, well, do we have a story for you—except for it’s not all 100% true. But take the following for what it’s worth, and then have a good laugh.
A guy in Milwaukee who was visiting the Lincoln Library on his day off just so happened to “discover” that Mr. Abraham Lincoln had in his lifetime filed a “patent application” for a newspaper that would “keep people aware of others in the town.” Naturally, this discovery had to be shared with the rest of the world – eventually reaching thousands of people on the Internet. Because well, Abe Lincoln pretty much predicted our entire future, that’s huge!
But unfortunately, this was all a hoax played by a blogger named Nate St. Pierre. And people started second guessing the “article”—could this be true? Of course not. The Atlantic contacted the Lincoln Library to crack the case, and they revealed there was no way this could be true; publications in those days didn’t even feature photographs yet.
“I was crabby; I was in a bad mood; I was tired of looking around at all the boring lame stuff online—all the same people rehashing the same things,” Pierre said. Basically, he just wanted “to write something that would be exciting to read. [...] So I thought, ‘Okay, what would be just fun and crazy?’ ‘What if Lincoln invented Facebook?’”
So maybe Abraham Lincoln didn’t invent social media as we know it, but you can’t argue that this is pretty ironic and awesome that maybe by chance someone had thought of a concept, and maybe our thoughts really are timeless.
(via The Atlantic)
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