20 of History’s Biggest Trolls

Remember the fake restaurant in London?
20 of History’s Biggest Trolls

The internet age may have invented the terminology of trolling, but it didn’t invent the type of person who trades in it. Throughout history, there have always been those whose only motivation in life is to confuse people, piss them off, or ideally, both. They might earn some material gain by scamming their audience or accomplishing some real feat as a side effect, but the primary goal is always the lulz.

Most of those people don’t get immortalized in the history books because, well, they usually don’t accomplish anything. Sometimes, they’re otherwise notable people whose reputations historians don’t want to tarnish. If a story is big enough, though, not even those fussy gatekeepers can suppress them, as proven by the responses when user drbdrbdr asked r/AskReddit, “Who is the biggest troll in history?”

rukioish 4y ago That guy who created the machine that summoned rain in california and actually got the government to fund him.
dirtyaccomplice . 4y ago The guy who opened a fake no 1 restaurant in London using Google reviews and his back garden and shed with microwave meals.
Requiem_Of_The_Past 4y ago Probably the turk automaton that fooled countless chess players
liinexy 4y ago the person behind the max headroom incident, no one knows who did it 33 years later
Blitzilla 4y ago This Chinese general whose city was besieged by a much larger army, so he opened the main gate and sat atop it playing his flute. The enemy thought it was a trap so they packed their stuff and left.
THE_BANANA_KING_14 4y ago Sapphos of Lesbos is a pretty good one. She was a greek poet who named Kerkylas of Andros as the one she was to marry which translates to Dick Allcocks from Man island. In reality, she was believed to be a lesbian and her name is where the word is derived from.
 4y ago Not the biggest troll but Beethoven. Не was in love with one of his students so while he was writing Für Elise he made it very easy to play but when he found out she got engaged and denied his love, he made the song exponentially harder so that she'd never be able to play it.
Pepperspray24 4y ago George Psalmanazar- a blond-haired, blue-eyed Frenchman who pretended he a royal from the island of Formosa (now modern-day Taiwan). Came up with his own fake religion, diet, and language (with fucking syntax) that he taught in universities across Europe. This was in the 17th century.
- Lord_Explosion 4y ago Edited 4y ago Miyamoto musashi. Known to be one of the greatest swordsman in the history of Japan. Не had an undefeated dueling record because he would always psych out his opponent. Не would show up late to the duels by several hours, once he even showed up after a night of drinking. Another time he was late to a duel and arrived by raft and his excuse was that it took a long time to carve a raft from logs using his sword
 4y ago Edited 4y ago I was thinking more like the mortician who patented the automatic telephone switch 3 years after finding out his rivals wife worked as a telephone operator and would reroute calls asking for his funeral parlor to her husbands. The guy put a whole worldwide workforce out of work for one persons actions.
jgpdvs 4y ago April fools day 1974 when a man burned 70 rubber tires on a dormant volcano in Alaska! This has to be up there. Не waited 3 years to get a helicopter to fly the tires to the top to get a picture perfect condition.
 4y ago Steve Wilhite Не invented the gif, then he won a Webby Award for it. Webby Award speeches are only allowed to be five words long. Не went up and said it's pronounced JIF, not GIF. Jod himself could come down and tell me that, I wouldn't believe it. It's GIF. Forever. Bye.
FIBAgentNorton 4y ago The guy that sent the first spam email. On May 3, 1978, Gary Thuerk sent the first spam email on ARPANET, marketing the Decisystem-20 family of office computers. Не succeeded in annoying many people, and the governing authorities even started a crackdown, stating: Nobody should be allowed to send a message with a header that long, no matter what it is about. Thuerk didn't know it at the time, but he created a new type of email
ilinamorato 4y ago J.D. McMahon, who reportedly successfully sold investors on blueprints for a 480-inch-tall tower in Wichita Falls, Texas, in 1919. The troll was that the investors all assumed it was a 480-foot-tall tower-a building twelve times larger-and invested commensurate with that assumption. The thing is, he never lied to those investors. Не never verbally claimed the tower would be nearly 500 feet tall, and the blueprints clearly showed the inch mark () on every measurement, not the foot mark ('). Не just never corrected their misconceptions, and left Texas with the rest of the money after his contractual
 4y ago There was a Prussian (I can't remeber his name) who managed to make a officer uniform out of scraps of clothing. Не used it to convince a few gaurds on patrol to follow him into a goverment building, ordered the arrest of the man in charge, confiscated all the money personally, sent the arrested man to Berlin calming it was all on order of the King. Не then ditch the uniformed, got on a train to Berlin him and managed to beat the guards there. Не than sat back and watched the absolute confusion happen. The guy
JustAnotherAviatrix 4y ago This will be buried, but Sergei Korolev. The dude was getting frustrated with the Soviet government because they weren't interested in funding his space exploration projects, so he got his propaganda group to publish articles about how Russia was getting close to sending something into space. As expected, the US took the bait and started working on their satellite program, and the Soviet government freaked out when they saw the US doing that, so they funded Korolev's projects. Не and his group played them good.
apple_kicks 4y ago Benjamin Franklin vs Leeds Titan's father, Daniel Leeds, was a devout Quaker who fell out with the local Quaker community when he began publishing the almanac in 1687. Daniel Leeds turned over publication to his son, Titan, in 1716. The American Almanack pre-dated Franklin's almanac. Franklin used the first edition of his almanac to promote the hoax prediction of Leeds's death (Oct. 17, 1733, 3:29 P.M., at the very instant of the conjunction of the Sun and Mercury), and encouraged his readers to buy next year's edition of Poor Richard's Almanac to see if Franklin was right
Voicedtunic 4y ago In the 30s-40s BBC did an April fools broadcast where they told people how spaghetti was made... on trees. They literally showed fake spaghetti trees and since not many people in that time knew how spaghetti was made, lots of people believed it.
danielokane 4y ago Mozart didn't like this singer so much that he wrote a piece for her with high and low notes constantly because he noticed that when she hit low notes her chin went to her chest and when she hit high notes her head would fling back. So it was like she was bobbing like a chicken
Nuclear-Cosby 4y ago Michelangelo without a doubt. This man was hired to paint a chapel and put more dicks and asses on it than you ever did see.

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