Albert Gunter, a completely ordinary London bus driver, successfully jumped his double-decker bus over a three-foot gap in Tower Bridge in 1952 when the bridge began opening while he was driving across it.

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Albert Gunter, a completely ordinary London bus driver, successfully jumped his double-decker bus over a three-foot gap in Tower Bridge in 1952 when the bridge began opening while he was driving across it. Instead of slamming on the brakes and potentially falling into the River Thames, Gunter violently accelerated his number 78 bus, launching the massive multi-ton vehicle carrying twenty passengers onto the other descending bascule. For his heroic, Hollywood-style stunt, he was awarded a ten-pound bonus from the transport authority and given a single day off, which seems like remarkably terrible compensation for literally defying physics and preventing a mass casualty event. This proves that public transit operators have always been underpaid action heroes dealing with wildly unpredictable infrastructure failures. It also completely ruins modern action movies, because if a bored British guy in the fifties could jump a double-decker bus, modern car stunts suddenly look a lot less impressive