Sweat the Small Stuff -- ---Andy Andrews, The Noticer

Have you ever been bitten by an elephant? How about a mosquito? It's the small stuff that will get you.

A few years ago, a squirrel climbed onto the Metro-North Railroad power lines near New York City. He set off an electrical surge, which weakened an overhead bracket. The bracket allowed a wire to dangle toward the tracks. The wire tangled in a train that tore down all the lines. As a result, forty-seven thousand commuters were stranded in Manhattan for hours that evening.

Remember the Hubble Space Telescope? It was conceived in 1946 and cost $2.5 billion to produce. Yet when it was launched into orbit, NASA discovered that a particular lens had been ground 1/1000^th of an inch less than it should have been. That "little thing" until it was repaired by astronauts, rendered the most expensive telescope in history no better than a good one on the ground.

Then there was Napoleon: a tiny part of the battle became immensely important to Napoleon when he defeated Wellington at Waterloo. But wasn't Waterloo Napoleon's greatest defeat?

On the eighteenth of June 1815, Napoleon did indeed suffer his greatest defeat---an unmitigated disaster---at Waterloo. But that was only after he had won!

Napoleon had brilliantly outmaneuvered Wellington's 77,000 men---this in addition to the more than 100,000 Prussians nearby. Together, those armies easily outnumbered Napoleon's 76,000, but when he got in between them, Napoleon prevented the two from combining. He had already beaten the Prussians two days before, so he detached a part of his force to hold them at bay while pointing the rest of his army toward Wellington and the British.

Napoleon began the battle at a bit after eleven in the morning with an artillery barrage and an initial assault against the British right flank. Pushing back and forth most of the day, at one point Napoleon watched from a hillside as his troops pushed past Wellington's lines, capturing almost all of the 160 British cannons.

Muzzle-loading cannons were packed with black gunpowder, wadding, and a projectile of some sort. The touchhole of the cannon was then contacted with a flaming torch, which ignited the powder and fired the cannon.

It was customary in those days for several of the troops to carry small metal rods---nails---with them in the event they overran the enemy's guns. The metal rods were then hammered into the cannon's touchhole, rendering it useless. When Napoleon's men overran Wellington's position---and his cannons---it became immediately apparent that there were no spikes among his troops. As Napoleon screamed from the hilltop for the cannons to be destroyed, he watched Wellington's men retake the guns and turn them on their attackers. Napoleon was defeated…and all for lack of a fistful of nails.