As we’ve discussed in a previous list, there are actors out there who literally only took on major film roles because their kids wanted them to. Today we wanted to continue on that theme and discuss ten awesome stories of husbands going to ridiculous extremes, just to do something nice for their wife. For example, consider the story of the man who:
10. Made the ATM Require Four Numbers (because his wife could only remember that many numbers)
Automated Teller Machines, or ATMs as they’re known to normal people without a crippling fear of acronyms, are a ubiquitous aspect of modern life. One thing that has annoyed and frustrated people in equal measures for years though is the fact that a machine that can access all of your money only requires you to enter a simple 4 number combination before it gives up the goods. Well you can thank John Shepherd for that, or more specifically you can thank his wife.
Shepherd is noted as being the man who invented the ATM and according to him, he initially toyed with making the machines require a much more robust 6 number combination to access. Shepherd came to this conclusion when he realised that he could still remember his own (6 number) army number.
However, when he ran the idea past his wife she explained that she couldn’t remember that many numbers, he scrapped his idea and instead made the machines only require a 4 number code. An idea that would later be implemented into virtually every ATM in the entire world. Thanks, Mrs Shepherd.
9. The man who built an entire road (so his wife would stop yelling at him)
When a landslip closed a road near his house in the quaint village of Kelston, Englishman and possible hero, Mike Watts found that his usual 10 minute commute to work now took him over an hour, something that annoyed his wife to no end.
According to an interview with Watts, his wife would bitterly complain about the delays and detours they were being forced to endure which would often result in her yelling at him to fix it. In this situation, most men would grit their teeth, realise that their wife isn’t annoyed at them but at the situation, and just wait it out. But for Mike Watts, waiting wasn’t an option. After hearing his wife tell him to fix the problem for what must have felt like the thousandth time, Mike decided to go out and fix the problem.
A few weeks and £150,000 later, Mike had built an entire road that cut their morning commute from an hour to just a few minutes. Since he’s a nice guy, Mike decided to open up his new road to the public for a nominal fee to cover his costs. And in case you’re wondering, yes, Mike’s wife stopped shouting at him.
8. The man who built the Taj Mahal (no, not that one)
As you’re probably aware, along with being an utter genius when it came to getting rid of the materials scaffolding surrounding the Taj Mahal, Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal as a testament to how much he loved his wife. But we’re not here to talk about that Taj Mahal, we’re here to talk about a much smaller version built by one man.
That man is Faizul Hasan Quadri, a retired government official from India who made a pretty ballsy promise to his wife. Basically, though Faizul and his wife, Tajammuli, had a long and happy marriage, it never bore any children. This saddened Tajammuli because she felt that after the pair passed on, nobody would remember them. In response Faizul told his wife that if she passed before him he’d build a mausoleum so kick-ass “that people would remember her for ages”.
When his wife sadly passed in 2011, Faizul decided to begin delivering on that promise, by constructing a miniature replica of the Taj Mahal in his backyard. Faizul has funded the project entirely with his own money, refusing to take donations and has insisted that regardless of how long it takes him, he will finish the project, even if it kills him.
7. The man who invented a new custard, so his wife could eat it
Since a man building a big-ass grief-mausoleum so that his wife’s name will be forever punched into the world’s collective memory is a little bittersweet, let’s move onto a topic that’s just sweet: custard.
In terms of sheer volume sold, the most popular brand of custard is arguably Bird’s named for its creator, Sir Alfred Bird, a chemist and all round cool dude who lived during the 19th century. One of the reasons Bird’s Custard is so popular is that if you buy the powdered kind, it literally only requires one additional ingredient to become edible (hot milk, if you were wondering), making it the ideal for the custard-loving person on the go.
Despite its immense popularity today, with millions of pints being sold every year, Bird only invented it for his wife, who was allergic to egg. You see, prior to Bird, you couldn’t make custard without egg, which sucked for his wife because she really wanted to douse her food in gloopy yellow slime for some reason. So, using his skills as chemist, Bird created a recipe that would allow him to make custard without egg, just so his wife could enjoy it. The subsequent empire that he built around the product was just a happy byproduct of being nice to his wife.
As if that wasn’t enough, a few years later he did the exact same thing by inventing yeast-less baking powder, another substance his presumably sick-of-custard wife was allergic to.
6. Henry the VIII defied the Pope, for his (second) wife
Including Henry VIII on a list of awesome husbands is like including <insert celebrity you don’t like here> on a list of people who changed the world in 2014, but we have to include the famously lard-assed King purely for his sheer gall.
As you probably know, King Henry VIII, along with being so fat his bloated corpse exploded after he died, had 6 wives over the course of his stint as king. To marry his second wife, Anne Boleyn, Henry had to appeal to the Pope himself to grant him a divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Since the church tended to look down on that sort of thing in those days, the Pope soundly refused the King’s plea for a divorce. That was when it suddenly dawned on Henry that as king, he could do whatever he wanted, regardless of what a man in a stupid hat in Rome said.
So, despite being explicitly told by God’s representative on Earth that he couldn’t get a divorce, Henry declared himself the head of the church in England and granted himself a divorce anyway. Okay so yes, Henry was a world-class ass to his wives, but you have to admire the balls of a man who openly defied God just to that he could get busy with his wife.
5. Albert Göring was just an all-round swell dude
Albert Göring is mostly famous for two things, being Hermann Göring’s brother and saving just tons of Jewish people from almost certain death through nothing more than a combination of savvy and a total inability to give a crap. During WW2, Göring used his status as the brother of the guy who was essentially second-in-command to Hitler to undermine the Nazis every chance he got. We honestly can’t do the work this man did justice in a single entry and implore you to read about his exploits for yourself, because damn.
Although he’d spent practically the entire war standing against everything the Nazis stood for, when it ended, Göring’s unfortunate last name saw him ostracized because people simply didn’t know the extent of the good he’d done. As such, Göring was forced to live a quiet, lonely life subsisting on only a meagre government pension. Even then, Göring still managed to prove he was infinitely better than his sibling by marrying his housekeeper the week before he died. Why? So that she could continue to collect his pension as his wife.
4. The man who built a model of Cliff Richard, to protect his wife
One of the best things about being part of a couple is the sense of security you get knowing that somebody has your back and that if you were suddenly attacked by a tiger, they’d be morally obligated to help you punch it to death. That’s basically what marriage is, right?
Anyway, when David Stolworthy’s wife told him that she didn’t feel safe driving around on her own at night, David took her concerns to heart and decided to build her something that would make her a feel a little more secure. He built a life-sized model of Cliff Richard out of cushions and wood.
Although this sounds like the most elaborate way of not having to drive your wife to the store ever, Stolworthy’s wife was apparently overjoyed with the, present (we guess that’s a present). Apparently, it made her feel much safer, which makes sense because we can’t imagine there are many thieves out there who’d be willing to steal a car if it also meant looking stupid while awkwardly tackling a dummy out of the passenger seat.
3. The man who built an entire church, because his wife didn’t like crowds
Even if you don’t personally ascribe to the notion of religion, you have to at least appreciate the amount of effort and detail that goes into constructing places of worship because more often than not, those things are fricking beautiful. However, they can get quite crowded which can’t be nice for people who simply want to quietly pray or contemplate just how many members of the Justice League God could beat in a fight.
When Jon Richards’ wife complained to him that their local church was especially busy when she just wanted a few minutes of quiet reflection in 2007, he decided that the only option was to just build their own, better church. So, over the course of next 2 and half years, Richards and wife gathered scavenged materials from across the UK and built themselves a small, 12 person chapel in their backyard. What makes this story so great is that after building the chapel, locals were so taken with the idea of a wicked-awesome mini-church that they were immediately offered the Richards money to host weddings in it. They turned the money down, because the church wasn’t built on consecrated ground and also presumably because they didn’t want to.
2. Stephen King has dedicated every copy of Carrie ever published to his wife
As we’ve discussed before, pretty much the only reason Stephen King decided to write Carrie, the novel lauded as the one that launched his career, is because someone sent him a taunting letter saying he couldn’t write from the perspective of a woman.
An aspect of that story we didn’t give a lot of attention to was just how much of a key role King’s wife, Tabitha, played in getting that story published. After writing the first three pages of what would later become Carrie, it’s noted that King, in a fit of self-loathing, threw them all into the trash. It was Tabitha who pulled those pages out of the trash, brushed them off and urged King to keep writing the story. When he got stuck writing from a female perspective, she gave him a gentle nudge in the right direction and coached him on how a woman’s mind worked. When King was offered a better paying job that would have stopped him from writing, she told him not to take it because it would stop him doing what he loved. When King received rejection letter after rejection letter about Carrie, Tabitha stopped him from getting discouraged.
No doubt as thanks for his wife’s unwavering loyalty and faith during one of his darkest periods of self-doubt, literally every copy of Carrie ever published, has contained the exact same dedication. This is for Tabby.
1. The man who split a mountain in half
When they’re getting married a lot of men like to brag in their vows that they’d move mountains for their wife. For most men this is a hyperbolic claim meant to show the (metaphorical) lengths they’d go to for their wives. For Dashrath Manjhi it was a challenge.
When Manjhi’s wife died in 1959 due to the nearest doctor being separated from his location by a mountain, he vowed that nobody would ever lose someone for that reason ever again. With his goal decided, Manjhi spent every single day of the next 22 years hacking away at the mountain with the physical manifestation of his rage-hate and a hammer until he literally split it in half.
According to Manjhi, when he first declared that he was going to tear down the mountain that claimed his wife with his bare hands, people understandably called him a fool, which only made him want to do it that much harder. In the end, Manhji turned what was once an impassable mountain into a 400 foot long, 30 foot wide road. What was once a 70 KM journey had become a 1KM jaunt, all thanks to Manjhi.
He died in 2007 and will be remembered as the first man in history to kill a mountain with his bare hands.
2 Comments
Great stories, except Henry the 8th…
Bad ass guys