One of the peculiarities of For Want of a Nail... is Sobel's occasional use of people from our own history who were born years or decades after his point of divergence in 1777. While a British victory at the Battle of Saratoga might not have prevented the births of Martin van Buren in 1782 and Winfield Scott in 1786, it almost certainly would have altered the lives of Henry Gilpin's parents to such an extent that Gilpin would not have been born in 1801. It would be even more unlikely for people born decades after 1777, such as Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin (1809), Charles Dickens (1812), Karl Marx (1818), Queen Victoria and Prince Albert (1819), Alfred Russel Wallace (1823), Andrew Carnegie (1835), J.P. Morgan (1837), Thomas Edison (1847), and Serge Witte (1849) to exist. It becomes ridiculously unlikely for people born a century after Saratoga, such as William Randolph Hearst (1863), and Glenn Curtiss (1878), to exist. Nevertheless, these people do appear in For Want of a Nail, so we have this page noting their unlikely existence in this timeline.
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