People Share The Greatest Historical Examples Of 'F*** It, I'll Do It Myself'

Jonas Does.....

Jonas Salk needed human subjects to test his polio vaccine. That's normally a long process and he wanted to make the vaccine available as quick as possible so he just experimented on himself. anarchocowboyism

Give a Hoist....

Otis invented pretty much what we consider the modern elevator.

Nobody was convinced it was safe so he hoisted himself up extremely high and had somebody cut the cable with an axe to prove how confident he was that the elevator was safe regardless of almost worst case scenarios. Iivaitte

TeX/LaTeX......

Donald Knuth is one of the big names in computer science. Back in the 1960s he set out to write the definitive texts on computer programming and analysis of algorithms. The first three volumes came out and he started the fourth in the early/mid 1970s. He was unhappy with how the newer printing/editions were typeset and so he took a summer to "solve" that problem.

A decade later the fourth volume still had not been completed, but as a consolation prize we got TeX (later extended to the more commonly used LaTeX), without question the most comprehensive and powerful language for creating documents with heavy technical requirements; it is a strange mix of a markup language like HTML and a compiled language like C. It is completely free and has been for well over 30 years and is probably the most bug-free piece of software I've ever seen. Certainly for its size and scope, there's not much out there of comparable quality.

There is literally no mathematics that cannot be properly typeset in TeX/LaTeX. Its default style is instantly recognizable to any working mathematician. It is used across nearly all STEM fields and there are hundreds, if not thousands, of journals that only accept manuscripts written in LaTeX.

It wasn't until the early 2000s that drafts of the fourth volume started to appear. Nobody has seemed to mind. shellexyz

John Broke....

John Snow (not that one, the father of epidemiology). No one believed him that the Cholera outbreak in what is now Soho was because of a contaminated water pump. He broke it. They arrested him for vandalism and held him until the outbreak suddenly ended..... pyrangarlit

the other undertaker's wife....

In 1888, Almon Brown Strowger, an undertaker, noticed he was losing a lot of business to the other undertaker in town. He found out that the other undertaker's wife was a telephone operator and when she intercepted people asking to be connected to Strowger's funeral home, the operator would route the call to her husband's funeral home instead.

Three years later, Strowger patented the automatic teller exchange, a system which allowed telephone users to make calls without the need for human operators, singlehandedly destroying an entire workforce. nova3482

People Break Down Their Greatest Accomplishment On The Internet | George Takei’s Oh Myyy

They saved 14 of their friends.​  

Probably the time Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa decided they couldn't wait around any longer and legged it for 10 days across the Andes with no warm clothes, climbing gear, or food except some scraps of their dead friends stuffed into a sock.

They finally found someone out in the middle of nowhere, Sergio Catalan, who rode horseback all night and then took a bus to get some help. The mountain climbers had come from the wreckage of a crashed plane that everyone had been looking for for over 2 mos. They needed help for the other survivors who were injured and starving. They saved 14 of their friends. NotDaveBut

MAJOR! 

Léo Major, he liberated an entire village from Nazis by himself, he's one of the handful of super bad@ss soldiers you sometimes hear about from WW2. Jonyb222

The Finns....

it's gotta be Aimo Koivunen- he was a Finnish soldier in the second world war when the finns were trying to reclaim land from the soviets. he got separated from his unit mid-war in the middle of nowhere- he was the one tasked to carry the drugs they held in case of injury or tiredness, one of which was pervitin (which was literal meth in a tablet form).

instead of just taking one or two, he downed the whole bottle and went on a weeks-long method up rampage. he got hit by a landmine, evaded soviet soldiers, caught a bird and ate it raw, all while on skis. he finally made it back to finish lines where on arrival, he weighed only 90 pounds or so and had a heart rate of 200 beats per minute. he ended up living for another 45 years.

edit: here's an article if you want to read more and see a pic of his unyielding stare. burntwenis

The Global....

Maurice Hilleman invented over 40 vaccines during his career in the pharmaceutical industry.

In 1963 his oldest daughter caught the mumps. He cultured a sample from her, developed a vaccine, and injected it into his younger daughter.

That vaccine is still in use and has saved millions of lives.

In total, it's estimated that his work has saved 118 million lives globally. mrbibs350

Beyond the C....

The guy who started fedex wrote a college paper about a nationwide overnight shipping company, and got a C... started the company anyways.

Later after he started it and it was struggling, he couldn't get a loan and the company was almost bankrupt, and he bet next weeks payroll at the casino on roulette and won.

Also got a silver star in the Vietnam war and now co-owns the Washington redskins... the latter often viewed as the biggest failure in his life. FinanceCorpStrategy