Three guys in the 1940s couldn't sell their products—Russian vodka Americans hated, ginger beer nobody ordered, and copper mugs gathering dust in a warehouse—so they combined all three failures into one drink and called it the Moscow Mule. The real genius move was buying a Polaroid camera and photographing bartenders across America holding the copper mug, creating fake social proof that made every bar think everyone else was serving it. Within a decade, vodka went from under one percent of US spirits sales to outselling everything else, and it all happened because three desperate businessmen wrapped their disasters in shiny metal and exotic marketing.