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- 'Oumuamua was the first interstellar object ever detected
- 'We choose to go to the Moon' renewed a goal set in 1961
- A day on Venus is longer than its year, by one measure
- A neutron-star teaspoon weighs millions to billions of tons
- A rain of stones at L'Aigle proved rocks fall from space
- Able and Baker were the first US animals to survive space
- Alan Shepard, first American in space, nearly beat Gagarin
- Alan Shepard's Moon golf shots went 24 and 40 yards
- Alexei Leonov made the first spacewalk on March 18, 1965
- Ann Hodges, the first person known injured by a meteorite
- Apollo 1 fire: the crew died of asphyxia, not burns
- Apollo 11 launched at 9:32 a.m. on July 16, 1969
- Apollo 11 splashed down 950 miles southwest of Hawaii
- Apollo 12 landed on the Moon 538 feet from Surveyor 3
- Apollo 12's rocket triggered the lightning that struck it
- Apollo 13's launch: a crew swap and an engine cutoff
- Apollo 15 drove the first Moon car, but not the first rover
- Apollo 17 took the Blue Marble photo five hours after launch
- Apollo 7 tested the first crewed Apollo — with head colds
- Apollo 8 went to the Moon in 1968 without a lunar module
- Apollo 9 gave the lunar module its first crewed flight
- Are we made of stardust? Mostly, but not all of it
- Armstrong's 1969 Moon step and the still-missing 'a'
- Atlantis docked with Mir in 1995 on a port designed for Buran
- Belka and Strelka were the first animals to survive orbit
- Born in Toruń in 1473, Copernicus wasn't first to move Earth
- Ceres: the first asteroid, found on New Year's Day 1801
- Charon was discovered on June 22, 1978, by James Christy
- Chaucer dated his rooster tale to 3 May by the Sun
- Christiaan Huygens discovered Titan on 25 March 1655
- Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto on February 18, 1930
- Columbia flew the first shuttle mission on April 12, 1981
- Columbus used a lunar eclipse to get food in Jamaica in 1504
- Comet Hale-Bopp was found in 1995, beyond Jupiter's orbit
- Curiosity landed on Mars in 2012 and is still driving
- Curiosity launched in 2011 and is still climbing Mount Sharp
- Did monks see a lunar impact in 1178? Probably not
- Distant galaxies recede faster than light — and we see them
- Does it rain diamonds on Neptune and Uranus? Probably
- Earth's 3 trillion trees likely outnumber Milky Way stars
- Ed White made the first American spacewalk on June 3, 1965
- Enceladus's geysers spray a hidden ocean into space
- Endeavour's first flight, STS-49, caught a satellite by hand
- Enterprise first flew in 1977, riding on a 747's back
- Eugene Cernan is still the last person to walk on the Moon
- Explorer 4 measured secret 1958 nuclear blasts in space
- First Saturn V flew as Apollo 4; Apollo 2 and 3 never existed
- Galileo became the first spacecraft to orbit Jupiter in 1995
- Galileo didn't invent the telescope; he sold it to Venice
- Galileo found Jupiter's four big moons in January 1610
- Galileo was born in Pisa in 1564; the tower drop is doubtful
- Gemini 3 flew America's first two-person crew in 1965
- Gemini 4 was America's first multi-day spaceflight
- Gemini 7 kept two astronauts in orbit for nearly 14 days
- Gherman Titov was the first person to sleep in space
- Goddard's first liquid-fuel rocket flew 41 feet in 1926
- Gravitational waves were first detected on 14 September 2015
- Halley predicted the 1715 eclipse to within four minutes
- Ham the chimpanzee flew to space before any US astronaut
- HD 189733b, the blue planet where it rains glass sideways
- Herschel found Enceladus in 1789; it was named in 1847
- How Explorer 1 helped discover the Van Allen radiation belts
- How Hubble proved other galaxies exist: one star, V1
- Hubble was deployed on April 25, 1990, with a flawed mirror
- Humans have lived in space nonstop since November 2000
- Huygens is still the only landing in the outer solar system
- If Betelgeuse replaced the Sun, it would swallow Mars
- In the Pale Blue Dot photo, Earth is just 0.12 of a pixel
- John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth in 1962
- Joseph Kittinger fell 4.5 minutes from 102,800 ft in 1960
- Juno launched in 2011 and took five years to reach Jupiter
- Jupiter's Great Red Spot: a shrinking storm seen since 1831
- Kennedy set the Moon goal in 1961, not at Rice in 1962
- Kepler, born in 1571, proved planets orbit in ellipses
- Kepler's 1604 supernova: the last one seen in the Milky Way
- Laika was the first animal in orbit, but not in space
- Luna 1 missed the Moon in 1959 and orbited the Sun instead
- Luna 2 hit the Moon in 1959 on the Soviets' sixth try
- Luna 3 took the first photos of the Moon's far side in 1959
- Luna 9 proved the Moon wasn't a sea of dust in 1966
- Lunokhod 1 was the first rover to drive on another world
- Magellan reached Venus in 1990 and mapped 98% of it
- Mariner 4 launched for Mars in 1964 after its twin failed
- Mariner 4's first Mars photos showed only 1% of the planet
- Mariner 9 was the first spacecraft to orbit another planet
- Mars Global Surveyor orbited Mars for 9 years, 1997–2006
- Mars Pathfinder carried the first rover to work on Mars
- Mercury is shrinking, and its radius has lost up to 7 km
- Mir launched in 1986; its backup core still flies on the ISS
- Most stars have a partner, but most star systems are single
- NASA was created on July 29, 1958, in response to Sputnik
- NEAR Shoemaker made the first asteroid landing in 2001
- Neptune was predicted by math in 1846, with a dose of luck
- Neptune's moon Triton was found just 17 days after Neptune
- New Horizons flew 7,750 miles from Pluto on July 14, 2015
- Nixon's 1972 Space Shuttle promised cheap, routine spaceflight
- Nothing escapes a black hole's event horizon, not even light
- Olympus Mons is about 22 km tall, 2.5 times Everest
- Ordinary matter is only 5% of the universe — mostly unseen
- Parker Solar Probe: fastest object ever built, at 430,000 mph
- Peekskill meteorite: the car-crushing fall caught on video
- Pioneer 10 became the first probe beyond the planets in 1983
- Pluto became a dwarf planet in 2006 for failing one test
- Pluto was closer to the Sun than Neptune from 1979 to 1999
- Pluto's discovery was kept quiet for 23 days in 1930
- Porphyrion: the largest black hole jets, 140 Milky Ways long
- Prospero is the only satellite launched by a British rocket
- Red dwarfs are about 75% of stars, yet none is visible by eye
- Royal Observatory Greenwich was founded on 10 August 1675
- Sally Ride was the third woman in space and first American
- Salyut 1, the first space station, beat Skylab by two years
- Saturn is less dense than water, but it wouldn't float
- Shuttles flew again after Challenger on Sept. 29, 1988
- Skylab fell on Australia in 1979, nearly four years early
- Skylab launched in 1973 and was crippled within 63 seconds
- Sojourner, the first Mars rover, drove only 330 feet
- Soyuz 4 and 5 made the first docking of two crewed ships
- SpaceShipOne made the first private crewed spaceflight in 2004
- Spirit rover landed on Mars in 2004 and outlived its plan 25x
- Sputnik 1 launched on October 4, 1957, opening the Space Age
- Sputnik 2 weighed 508 kg, six times Sputnik 1
- Sunlight's energy takes about 170,000 years to leave the Sun
- Surveyor 1 made the first US soft Moon landing in 1966
- The 1833 Leonid storm rained up to 100,000 meteors an hour
- The 1974 Arecibo message won't reach M13 for 25,000 years
- The 1999 total solar eclipse was the 20th century's last
- The Allende meteorite holds the solar system's oldest solids
- The CMB was found by accident in 1964 — and missed in 1941
- The Crab Nebula is the remnant of a supernova seen in 1054
- The Eclipse of Thales stopped a battle on 28 May 585 BC
- The fastest-spinning star known turns 716 times a second
- The first communications satellite was a whole Atlas rocket
- The first detailed photo of the Sun was taken in 1845
- The first photo of Earth from the Moon was taken in 1966
- The first woman in space was a textile worker, not a pilot
- The Hubble Deep Field found 3,000 galaxies in "empty" sky
- The last Moon landing was Apollo 17 in December 1972
- The last Space Shuttle mission launched on July 8, 2011
- The Mercury Seven were chosen from 508 military test pilots
- The Soyuz 11 crew are the only people to die in space
- The Sun and Jupiter orbit a point outside the Sun
- The Sun's core is 15 million °C and fuses by quantum tunnelling
- The universe has no center: the Big Bang happened everywhere
- The universe is 13.8 billion years old, to within 0.3%
- The universe's expansion is speeding up, not slowing down
- The V-2's first successful 1942 flight fell short of space
- The Whirlpool Galaxy: found in 1773, first spiral ever seen
- Time runs slower near a black hole, and we've measured it
- Tunguska 1908: an asteroid airburst that left no crater
- Tycho's 1572 'new star' proved the heavens could change
- Vanguard 1 is the oldest satellite still in orbit
- Venera 3 was the first spacecraft to hit another planet
- Venera 7 sent the first data from another planet's surface
- Venus is hotter than Mercury, though farther from the Sun
- Venus spins backwards, so the Sun rises in the west
- Viking 1 made the first fully successful Mars landing
- Viking 1, launched in 1975, made the first lasting Mars landing
- Viking 2 landed on Mars in 1976 and saw water-ice frost
- Voyager 1 launched in 1977 with 3.5 seconds of fuel to spare
- Voyager 1 left the heliosphere in 2012, not the solar system
- Voyager 2 launched in 1977 funded to visit only two planets
- Voyager 2 reached Jupiter on July 9, 1979, after Voyager 1
- Vulcan: the planet inside Mercury's orbit that never existed
- What Apollo 13 actually said: 'Houston, we've had a problem'
- What happened when Earth passed through Halley's tail in 1910
- Why Apollo 8 read Genesis from lunar orbit on Christmas Eve
- Why Apollo ended with Apollo 17's 1972 splashdown
- Why Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after launch
- Why Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart on reentry in 2003
- Why the observable universe is 93 billion light-years wide
- Why Voyager 1 skipped Pluto for Titan at Saturn in 1980
- Will Andromeda hit the Milky Way? The odds are now 50-50
- William Herschel discovered Uranus — Flamsteed saw it first
- Yuri Gagarin's 1961 flight nearly ended in a reentry spin
- Zarya, the first ISS module, launched on Nov. 20, 1998
- A year of CERN antihydrogen has the energy of a phone tap
- Anders Celsius, born 1701, put boiling water at 0 degrees
- Bakelite (1907) was the first fully synthetic plastic
- Blaise Pascal, born 1623, built the second known calculator
- Britain's first atomic bomb exploded inside a ship in 1952
- Britain's first H-bomb test in 1957 fell short of a megaton
- Carbon has no melting point at normal pressure — it sublimes
- CERN was founded in 1954, but its name dates from 1952
- Charles Goodyear patented vulcanized rubber in 1844
- Diamond is the hardest mineral — but a hammer can shatter it
- Diamonds and pencil lead are both made of pure carbon
- Einstein finished general relativity on 25 November 1915
- Einstein sent in special relativity on 30 June 1905
- Einstein was born in Ulm in 1879 — and never failed maths
- Einstein's letter to FDR pictured a bomb too heavy to fly
- Einstein's Nobel Prize was for light, not relativity
- Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction in August 1831
- Feynman's 1959 nanotech talk was barely cited for 20 years
- Fold paper 42 times and it would reach the Moon
- Galileo arrived in Rome for his trial on 13 February 1633
- Galileo recanted in 1633, likely without 'and yet it moves'
- Gallium melts in your hand: its melting point is 29.76 °C
- Giordano Bruno was burned in 1600 for more than astronomy
- Graphene is the strongest material — with a big catch
- Halley coaxed the Principia out of Newton — and paid for it
- Heat a magnet past its Curie point and it stops working
- Helium was found on the Sun 27 years before Earth
- Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity on March 1, 1896
- Hilbert's hotel: why a full infinite hotel has room for more
- How big is Graham's number? Too big for the universe
- Is every shuffled deck unique? Almost, after 7 riffles
- Is glass a liquid? No — old church windows don't flow
- Is spider silk stronger than steel? Only by weight
- Isaac Newton died in 1727, though his gravestone says 1726
- Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day 1642 (Old Style)
- Labs on Earth have made the coldest stuff in the universe
- LHC switch-on in 2008: a billion viewers, no collisions
- Lightning can turn sand into glass: how fulgurites form
- Lind's 1747 scurvy trial: why the Navy waited 48 years
- Liquid oxygen is blue and magnetic for the same reason
- LSD's effects were discovered by accident on April 16, 1943
- Marie Curie discovered radium in 1898 without a pure sample
- Marie Curie is still the only Nobel winner in two sciences
- Max Planck launched quantum theory on December 14, 1900
- Mendeleev's periodic table wasn't the first, but it won
- Michael Faraday was born in 1791 and began as a bookbinder
- Newton's birthday by today's calendar: January 4, 1643
- Newton's Principia was published in 1687, paid for by Halley
- Nobel's 1895 will took five years to become the Nobel Prizes
- Nylon was first made on 28 February 1935 at DuPont
- Nylon was patented in 1937 — before it was called nylon
- Only 39 of 100 psychology studies replicated in 2015
- Only about 30 grams of francium exist on Earth at once
- Priestley isolated oxygen in 1774 but Scheele did it first
- Quantum tunnelling lets a microscope see single atoms
- René Descartes was born in 1596 in a town now named for him
- Roman concrete heals its own cracks with lumps of lime
- Röntgen stumbled on X-rays in 1895, then tested them 7 weeks
- Röntgen, born 1845, was expelled from school over a cartoon
- Silica aerogel is 99.8% air — but not lighter than air
- Smiling Buddha: why India's 1974 nuclear test wasn't peaceful
- Superconductors carry electric current with zero resistance
- Temperatures below absolute zero are hotter than infinity
- Tennessee banned teaching human evolution from 1925 to 1967
- The 1919 eclipse really did prove Einstein right
- The 1948 streptomycin trial wasn't quite the first RCT
- The 50-megaton Tsar Bomba is still the biggest bomb ever
- The Banach–Tarski paradox turns one ball into two
- The first Nobel Prizes were awarded on 10 December 1901
- The first nuclear weapon test, Trinity, was July 16, 1945
- The first scientific journal began on 6 March 1665
- The Gregorian calendar took 341 years to reach Greece
- The Higgs boson was found in 2012 — and confirmed in 2013
- The Michelson–Morley experiment found no ether wind in 1887
- The most accurate clock yet runs on a single lutetium ion
- The pitch-drop experiment has dripped 9 times since 1927
- The Royal Society was founded by 12 men in London in 1660
- The Smithsonian was founded in 1846 after a 10-year fight
- The universe's most common ice isn't fully glassy after all
- The universe's total energy may be exactly zero
- Theodore Maiman built the first working laser in 1960
- There are more chess games than atoms — but not positions
- Vantablack absorbs 99.965% of light — but isn't the blackest
- Water boils and freezes at once at 0.01 °C and 611 Pa
- What killed Albert Einstein? A ruptured aortic aneurysm
- Who invented the equals sign? Robert Recorde, in 1557
- Who invented the integral sign? Leibniz, on 29 October 1675
- Why 23 people give a 50% chance of a shared birthday
- Why a scientific theory must be able to be proven wrong
- Why Britain skipped 11 days in September 1752
- Why helium won't freeze, even at absolute zero
- Why ice floats: fresh water is densest at 4 °C
- Why mercury is the only metal liquid at room temperature
- Why Pope Gregory XIII reformed the calendar in 1582
- Why Prince Rupert's drops survive hammers but explode
- Why Queen Anne knighted Isaac Newton in 1705
- Why the Collatz conjecture is still unsolved
- Why there are infinitely many primes: Euclid's proof
- A 10-kilometre asteroid ended the age of dinosaurs
- A Dutch cloth merchant was the first to see microbes — through homemade lenses
- A Fungus Turns Ants Into Zombies and Aims for Noon
- A honeybee's waggle dance is a map drawn in the dark
- A hummingbird's heart can beat 1,200 times a minute
- A Microbe Hangs From Cave Ceilings as Living Battery Acid
- A sperm whale's hunting dive can plunge two kilometers into the dark
- A teaspoon of healthy soil holds more microbes than there are people on Earth
- A Yellowstone hot-spring microbe made modern DNA testing possible
- A young godwit flew 13,560 km without a single stop
- An octopus tastes with its arms — and partly thinks with them too
- Argentinosaurus may be the heaviest land animal ever to walk the Earth
- Bats are the only mammals that truly fly
- Birds are living dinosaurs
- Bowhead whales may live more than 200 years
- Bristlecone pines are the oldest non-clonal living trees
- Carl Linnaeus, father of modern taxonomy, is born
- Charles Darwin is born in Shrewsbury
- Charles Darwin set sail aboard HMS Beagle
- Cicadas that count to 13 and 17 — both prime numbers
- Darwin and Wallace's theory of evolution was first read aloud
- Darwin's Beagle reached the Galapagos Islands
- Darwin's On the Origin of Species went on sale
- Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for over 150 million years
- Dogs Were the First Animal Humans Ever Domesticated
- Dragonflies catch up to 95% of the prey they chase
- Hatchling Turtles Survive Winter by Refusing to Freeze
- Hyperion, the tallest living tree, is a coast redwood
- Many famous dinosaurs were covered in feathers
- More time separates us from T. rex than separated T. rex from Stegosaurus
- Most land plants are wired into a fungal "wood wide web"
- Nearly all life shares the same genetic code
- No single monarch butterfly completes the migration
- Octopuses have three hearts
- One bacterium survives radiation that would kill a human thousands of times over
- One in every four animal species is a beetle
- Oregon's highway crew tried to blow up a whale with half a ton of dynamite
- Scientists unveil Dolly, the cloned sheep
- Sharks are older than trees, dinosaurs, and Saturn's rings
- Tardigrades can survive the open vacuum of outer space
- The "immortal jellyfish" can rewind its own life cycle
- The Arctic tern migrates farther than any other animal
- The axolotl regrows limbs, heart, and even brain
- The Beetle That Fires Boiling Chemical Spray
- The blue whale is the largest animal that has ever lived
- The box jellyfish is the most venomous animal in the sea
- The Brainless Cell That Solves Mazes
- The coelacanth, a fish thought extinct for 66 million years, turns up alive
- The colossal squid has the largest eye of any animal
- The first cultured pearl was harvested off Japan
- The first elephant arrived in the United States
- The Great Dying killed nine in ten species
- The Greenland shark may be the oldest living vertebrate
- The Komodo dragon kills with venom, not just bacteria
- The largest organism on Earth is a honey fungus in Oregon
- The last known thylacine died in a Tasmanian zoo
- The mantis shrimp's punch is so fast it boils the water around it
- The mimic octopus impersonates other sea creatures on demand
- The naked mole-rat barely ages, resists cancer, and runs cold
- The Oldest Air-Breathing Land Animal Was a Millipede
- The Oldest Known Predator on Earth
- The ostrich is the largest bird, lays the largest egg, and outruns a racehorse
- The peregrine falcon is the fastest animal on Earth
- The platypus is a venomous, egg-laying mammal that hunts by electricity
- The saltwater crocodile has the strongest bite ever measured
- The swallows return to San Juan Capistrano
- The titan arum is a giant flower that smells of rotting flesh
- The tuatara is a living fossil with a third eye
- There may be a depth limit where no fish can live
- This Bug Is the Only Animal With Real Gears
- This Tiny Animal Stole Genes From Bacteria and Plants
- Tiktaalik: the "fishapod" caught mid-step onto land
- Utah's Pando: One Tree With 40,000 Trunks
- Viruses are the most abundant biological entities on Earth
- We date dinosaur fossils using radioactive clocks in the rock
- Wood frogs freeze solid all winter, then thaw back to life
- About 8% of your DNA comes from ancient viruses
- All living humans share one African maternal-line ancestor
- Asking 'smashed', not 'hit', changes what witnesses remember
- Barney Clark got the first permanent artificial heart in 1982
- CRISPR gene editing came from a bacterial immune system
- Do bacteria outnumber human cells? Only about 1.3 to 1
- Do inner-ear hair cells grow back? Not in humans
- Does the heart have its own brain? Yes, a little one
- Dolly the sheep: first mammal cloned from an adult cell
- Dunbar's number of 150 friends is disputed, not proven
- Each eye has a blind spot the size of nine full Moons
- Elizabeth Blackwell: first U.S. woman to earn an M.D., 1849
- Ether Day 1846: the first successful public anesthetic
- Fetal cells can stay in a mother's body for decades
- Fever is your brain raising its thermostat on purpose
- Fleming found penicillin in 1928, and foresaw resistance
- Florence Nightingale, born 1820, was a statistics pioneer
- Franklin was an equal partner in the 1953 DNA double helix
- Half of viewers miss the invisible gorilla — so do experts
- How antibiotic resistance evolves, and how many it kills
- How fast do nerve signals travel? Up to 120 m/s
- How many senses do humans have? Far more than five
- How penicillin was really discovered (not via an open window)
- How sleep moves memories from the hippocampus to the cortex
- Human hearing spans 20 Hz to 20 kHz and splits 1,500 pitches
- Humans have about 20,000 genes, far fewer than expected
- Humans may tell apart a trillion smells, or far fewer
- Humans share about 99.6% of their DNA, not 99.9%
- Identical twins' fingerprints differ — but are alike
- Jenner's 1796 smallpox vaccine: why a farmer got there first
- Joseph Meister, 9, was the first person saved by rabies vaccine
- Leonard Thompson, 14, was the first person given insulin
- London cabbies' brains grow as they learn 'the Knowledge'
- Louise Brown, the first IVF baby, was born in 1978
- Lucy was found at Hadar, Ethiopia, on November 24, 1974
- Phineas Gage survived a 13-lb rod — and largely recovered
- Photo 51 didn't hand Watson and Crick the double helix
- Placebos trigger real brain chemistry, but mostly for pain
- Robert Koch identified the TB bacterium on 24 March 1882
- Röntgen announced X-rays in Dec 1895 — the press broke it
- Salk first announced his polio vaccine on the radio in 1953
- Skin is the body's largest organ — by weight, not area
- Smallpox eradication: last case 1977, certified 1979
- Smallpox is still the only human disease ever eradicated
- Stroop effect: why naming ink colors takes 74% longer
- The 1964 Surgeon General's report linked smoking to cancer
- The 2000 human genome draft was only 85% sequenced
- The brain can't feel pain — so why do headaches hurt?
- The bystander effect is real; the Kitty Genovese myth isn't
- The FDA approved the first birth control pill in May 1960
- The first AIDS cases were reported by the CDC in 1981
- The first human blood transfusion used a lamb, in 1667
- The first human-to-human heart transplant was in 1967
- The first mass polio shots: Pittsburgh, 23 February 1954
- The first surgery under ether: Crawford Long, March 30, 1842
- The gut's surface is about 30 m², not a tennis court
- The human brain has 86 billion neurons, not 100 billion
- The liver regrows lost mass, but not its original shape
- The Rotating Snakes illusion moves because your eyes twitch
- The Salk polio vaccine was declared safe on April 12, 1955
- The smallest bone in the body is the 3 mm stapes
- The tongue taste map is a myth: every area tastes all five
- The World Health Organization was founded on 7 April 1948
- Why amputees feel phantom limbs: the brain keeps the map
- Why babies have about 300 bones but adults only 206
- Why broccoli tastes bitter to some people: TAS2R38
- Why can't you tickle yourself? Your brain predicts it
- Why your brain burns 20% of your energy at 2% of your weight
- You inherit mitochondrial DNA only from your mother
- Your body makes about 2 million red blood cells a second
- Your eyes have 120 million rods but only 6 million cones
- Your stomach lining replaces itself every 3 to 6 days
- 'Bloody Sunday' marchers were beaten in Selma
- 'Kill them all' at Béziers comes from a later monk's story
- "Don't give up the ship" came from a battle the U.S. lost
- A 1995 science rocket triggered Russia's nuclear briefcase
- A German U-boat sinks the liner Lusitania off Ireland
- A night on a cold platform changed Gandhi forever
- A prince by a creek ended three centuries of colonial rule
- A Rio Grande ambush gave Polk his Mexican-American War
- A submarine sinks a warship for the first time
- Abolitionist John Brown Was Executed
- Actium: Cleopatra's flight was probably a planned breakout
- Adolf Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany
- Agincourt's odds may have been far closer than legend says
- Al-Khwarizmi gave us both 'algebra' and 'algorithm'
- Alexander Selkirk rescued after years marooned
- Algeria Gained Independence From France
- Allied Nations Celebrate V-E Day
- Amelia Earhart vanished over the Pacific Ocean
- An assassination in Sarajevo triggered World War I
- Anne Boleyn was sentenced to burn; Henry chose the sword
- Anne Frank and her family were arrested in Amsterdam
- Annie Edson Taylor survived Niagara Falls in a barrel at 63
- Apollo 11 landed on the Moon on July 20, 1969
- Are 1 in 200 men descended from Genghis Khan? Probably not
- Argentina's 1982 Falklands invasion split Reagan's cabinet
- Australia Day marks Sydney Cove, not the First Fleet's arrival
- Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, lighting the fuse of World War I
- Babylonians tracked Jupiter with a graph 1,400 years early
- Batista fled Cuba on January 1, 1959, a week before Castro
- Before sacking Rome in 410, Alaric was bought off with pepper
- Blackbeard was killed in 1718, five months after a pardon
- Bligh's open boat crossed 3,618 nautical miles after mutiny
- Bosworth made Henry VII king, but the wars ended in 1487
- Botticelli probably didn't burn his art in the 1497 bonfire
- Breaking the Enigma code may have shortened WWII by years
- Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807 — but not slavery itself
- Britain and France Declared War on Germany
- Britain and France declared war on Russia
- Britain declared war on Germany, entering World War I
- Britain gave royal assent to the Stamp Act on the colonies
- Britain took Hong Kong under a treaty both sides rejected
- British forces surrendered at Yorktown
- British troops burned Washington, D.C., on 24 August 1814
- Bush and Gorbachev signed a deal to slash chemical weapons
- Cabral reached Brazil in 1500, but Pinzón likely got there first
- Caesar was stabbed 23 times, but only one wound was fatal
- Caligula was killed by his own guards in AD 41
- Canada was nearly named the Kingdom of Canada in 1867
- Captain Cook becomes the first European to reach Hawaii
- Captain Cook's ship first crosses the Antarctic Circle
- Caracalla was stabbed in 217 in a plot by his own prefect
- Caral, Peru: America's oldest city predates the Great Pyramid
- Carter wrote "Yes, it is wonderful", not "wonderful things"
- Castle Bravo hit 15 megatons because of one wrong assumption
- Çatalhöyük: the 9,000-year-old town with no streets
- Charlemagne was crowned emperor in 800, but not 'Holy Roman'
- Che Guevara was captured in the Bolivian highlands
- Che Guevara was executed in a Bolivian schoolhouse
- Chemical weapons saw their first large-scale use at the Second Battle of Ypres
- Chicago's Haymarket affair turns deadly
- China's 1911 revolution began with an accidental bomb
- Churchill used "iron curtain" ten months before Fulton
- Claudette Colvin Refused to Give Up Her Bus Seat
- Cleopatra lived closer to the Moon landing than the pyramids
- Colonel Blood stole the Crown Jewels in 1671 and was pardoned
- Colonists dumped 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor
- Columbus made landfall in the Bahamas
- Columbus reached South America in 1498, on his third voyage
- Columbus set sail on his first voyage
- Congress fixed the US flag at 13 stripes and a star for every state
- Constantine the Great was born on 27 February — year unknown
- Constantinople fell in 1453; a forgery shaped its legend
- Construction of the Berlin Wall began
- Coordinated attacks struck the U.S. on September 11
- Custer's command was wiped out at the Little Bighorn
- Cyprus wins independence from Britain
- D-Day was the largest seaborne invasion in history
- Darwin's Origin of Species had 1,250 copies and no 'evolution'
- Delegates Began Signing the Declaration of Independence
- Did Moctezuma think Cortés was a god? The 1519 meeting
- Did the Black Death kill half of Europe? It depends where
- Drake sailed round the world second, but first as captain
- Dresden's 1945 firestorm killed up to 25,000 people
- Edward IV was proclaimed king in 1461, weeks before Towton
- Egypt's 3,000-year-old wooden toe is a working prosthetic
- Egyptian blue is the oldest known synthetic pigment
- Elizabeth I became queen on 17 Nov 1558, not at her coronation
- Elizabeth I died in 1603, though her tomb says 1602
- Elizabeth II's was the first coronation service shown on TV
- Enemy soldiers stopped fighting to share Christmas in 1914
- English settlers establish Jamestown, Virginia
- Eratosthenes sized the Earth from a single noon shadow
- Fidel Castro becomes prime minister of Cuba
- Fort Sumter's first Civil War shot wasn't Edmund Ruffin's
- France abolished its monarchy
- France gave up Canada to keep its sugar islands in 1763
- Gandhi began the Salt March
- George Mallory and Andrew Irvine vanish near the summit of Everest
- George VI Is Crowned King of the United Kingdom
- George Washington born in Virginia
- George Washington was sworn in as the first US President
- Germans reached Jamestown in 1608, 75 years before Germantown
- Germany launched its massive invasion of the Soviet Union
- Germany reunified in 1990; its final treaty took effect in 1991
- Germany signs its unconditional surrender, ending WWII in Europe
- Germany's V-1 flying bombs first struck London
- Göbekli Tepe is 6,000 years older than Stonehenge
- Gold is discovered at Sutter's Mill, sparking the Gold Rush
- Granada fell in 1492, but Spain's Moriscos stayed until 1614
- Greece's 1973 coup ousted Papadopoulos for liberalising
- Greensboro sit-ins begin
- Henry V died in 1422, leaving a king under nine months old
- Henry V's 1413 coronation snowstorm was probably just rain
- Henry VI died in the Tower in 1471, almost certainly murdered
- Herostratus burned the Temple of Artemis in 356 BC for fame
- How did Nero die? Suicide in June AD 68 ended a dynasty
- How many Gutenberg Bibles survive? About 49 of maybe 180
- How the Inca ran a 24,000-mile road with knotted cords
- In 1983, one Soviet officer's hunch may have stopped a nuclear war
- India awoke to independence at the stroke of midnight
- India's last Viceroy beat Britain's deadline by ten months
- Iraq invaded Kuwait
- Israel declared independence on 14 May 1948 in Tel Aviv
- Israeli agents capture Nazi fugitive Adolf Eichmann in Argentina
- James Cook came ashore at Botany Bay on Australia's east coast
- Jamestown colonists go ashore and begin building in Virginia
- Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, pulling the U.S. into World War II
- Japan's surrender was announced, ending World War II
- Joan of Arc was burned in Rouen in 1431 as a relapsed heretic
- Joan of Arc was captured at Compiègne on 23 May 1430
- Juneteenth didn't end US slavery — the 13th Amendment did
- Kennedy revealed the Cuban Missile Crisis to the world
- Khomeini Returns to Iran
- Khrushchev denounces Stalin in the 'Secret Speech'
- King Edward VIII Abdicated the British Throne
- King John sealed Magna Carta on 15 June 1215 — it lasted 10 weeks
- King Umberto I was shot dead at Monza on 29 July 1900
- Korea's Jikji (1377) is the oldest surviving metal-type book
- Lady Jane Grey was beheaded at 17, seven months after her reign
- Laika wasn't the first dog in space; the 1951 dogs came home
- Lascaux was found by four teens in 1940 — the dog is legend
- Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, ending the war in Virginia
- Lincoln dedicated a battlefield in about two minutes
- Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation
- Lincoln set the national Thanksgiving holiday
- Lincoln won in 1860 with 40% — and the split field didn't matter
- Louis XVI was condemned by one vote — on one of four counts
- MacArthur said "I shall return" in Australia, not Corregidor
- Machu Picchu wasn't lost: farmers led Bingham there in 1911
- Madrid's rebels are executed by Napoleon's troops, immortalized by Goya
- Magellan died in the Philippines, never finishing his voyage
- Magellan sighted the Philippines on 16 March, landed the 17th
- Mahatma Gandhi is assassinated
- Mahatma Gandhi was born
- Malcolm X assassinated in Harlem
- Mandela's 27 years in prison: where he spent them
- Mansa Musa's gold cut Cairo's gold price by 12% or more
- Mao Proclaimed the People's Republic of China
- Marie Antoinette was guillotined during the French Revolution
- Marines raise the flag on Iwo Jima
- Martin Luther King Jr. Was Assassinated
- Martin Luther King Jr. Won the Nobel Peace Prize
- Mary, Queen of Scots Is Defeated at the Battle of Langside
- Mary, Queen of Scots was beheaded at Fotheringhay in 1587
- Mary, Queen of Scots was forced to abdicate at 24 in 1567
- Mesopotamia's first writing was bookkeeping, not poetry
- Mexican forces defeat the French at the Battle of Puebla
- Mexico's war of independence began with the Grito de Dolores
- Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leader
- Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as the Soviet Union dissolved
- Mongol Empire: largest contiguous empire, but not the largest
- Mother Teresa Arrives in Calcutta
- Mussolini Executed by Italian Partisans
- Mussolini's March on Rome handed fascism a country
- Napoleon Bonaparte dies in exile on Saint Helena
- Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French
- Napoleon Escapes from Elba
- Napoleon met his final defeat at Waterloo
- Napoleon reached Saint Helena on 15 October 1815
- Napoleon's 1814 exile to Elba: what the treaty gave him
- Napoleon's army entered a burning Moscow
- Napoleon's Grande Armee crossed the Niemen into Russia
- Nat Turner's Rebellion Began in Virginia
- Nelson won Trafalgar and lost his life in the same afternoon
- Nero didn't fiddle while Rome burned in AD 64
- New Zealand gave women the vote first, in 1893
- Not every Gothic cathedral took centuries to build
- Octavian was named Augustus on 16 January 27 BC
- Olof Palme's 1986 murder is officially unsolved again
- Oregon's 1843 wagon train was huge, but not the first
- Orléans was freed nine days after Joan of Arc arrived
- Ötzi the Iceman was found by hikers on 19 September 1991
- Ötzi the Iceman was likely bald, dark-skinned and murdered
- Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire
- Pakistan's independence: 14 or 15 August 1947?
- Pan Am Flight 103 was bombed over Lockerbie
- Panama declared independence, clearing the way for the canal
- Paris Was Liberated From German Occupation
- Parisians stormed the Bastille, igniting the French Revolution
- Patrick Henry demanded liberty, or death
- Paul Revere made his midnight ride to warn of British troops
- Pedro Alvares Cabral set sail toward an accidental Brazil
- People Power Revolution ousts Marcos
- Persia's nine-day Royal Road courier isn't in Herodotus
- Peter Fechter Was Shot at the Berlin Wall
- Peter Stuyvesant Arrives to Lead New Amsterdam
- Philip IV arrested the Templars on Friday 13 October 1307
- Pizarro's capture of Atahualpa was an ambush, not a battle
- Pocahontas married John Rolfe and bought Virginia a fragile peace
- Pompeii's '11,000 graffiti' is a catalogue, not a wall count
- Pompeii's body casts are plaster that still holds real bones
- Ponce de León sighted and named Florida on April 2, 1513
- Pope John Paul II is shot in St. Peter's Square
- Portugal Broke Free of Spain in a Single Morning
- President Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre
- Queen Victoria was proclaimed 'Alexandrina Victoria' in 1837
- Queen Victoria wore black for 40 years but chose a white funeral
- Radiocarbon dates aren't calendar dates until calibrated
- Reagan and Gorbachev Met Face to Face in Geneva
- Reagan's own advisers fought to cut 'tear down this wall'
- Robert F. Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles
- Roger Williams arrives in America
- Roman hypocausts: underfloor heating 2,000 years ago
- Romania's dictator Ceausescu fled Bucharest by helicopter
- Rome's last Western emperor was deposed in 476 — or 480
- Rorke's Drift: about 150 men held off 4,000 Zulus
- Ruth Carol Taylor becomes the first Black flight attendant
- Saddam Hussein was captured in Iraq
- Saddam Hussein was executed
- Saladin took Jerusalem in 1187 for a ransom, not a massacre
- San Marcos in Lima claims the Americas' oldest university
- Serum run to Nome reaches Alaska
- Singapore Became a British Crown Colony
- Singapore's guns didn't face the wrong way in 1942
- Solomon Northup walks free after twelve stolen years
- South Carolina seceded from the Union
- Soviet Forces Complete the Capture of Berlin
- Soviet troops liberate the Auschwitz concentration camp
- Spain recognised Portugal's independence only in 1668
- Spain's Pinzón probably reached Brazil before Cabral
- Stalin Expelled Trotsky From the Communist Party
- Stanislav Petrov was reprimanded, not rewarded, in 1983
- Stirling Bridge: how a narrow crossing beat England in 1297
- Strasbourg burned its Jews on Valentine's Day 1349
- Tajikistan's 1991 independence led straight into civil war
- Tank Man stood before a column of tanks in Beijing
- Tanks first fought on 15 Sept 1916 — only 18 of 49 made it
- Tarim Basin mummies: DNA shows locals, not Western migrants
- Tenochtitlan fell in 1521 to an army less than 1% Spanish
- Texas Won Independence at the Battle of San Jacinto
- The 1139 'crossbow ban' covered archers too, and failed
- The 1861 telegraph ended the Pony Express in two days
- The 1918 flu killed more people than the First World War
- The 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia: four armies, not five
- The Acts of Union create the Kingdom of Great Britain
- The American Revolutionary War began at Lexington and Concord
- The Amritsar massacre killed at least 379 — likely far more
- The Antikythera mechanism was a Greek gear-driven computer
- The atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima
- The atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki
- The Battle of Antietam became the bloodiest day in U.S. history
- The Battle of Hastings wasn't fought at Hastings
- The Battle of Jutland: WWI's Largest Naval Clash Begins
- The Battle of Lepanto broke the myth of Ottoman invincibility
- The Battle of Midway turned the tide in the Pacific
- The Battle of Naseby Broke the King's Army
- The Battle of New Orleans was not fought after the war ended
- The Battle of the Alamo fell after a 13-day siege
- The Battle of the Bulge began in the Ardennes
- The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba began
- The Beer Hall Putsch ended in a gunfight, not a beer hall
- The Berlin Airlift grew from 268 to 12,940 tons a day
- The Berlin Wall fell after a garbled press conference in 1989
- The Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution
- The bombardment that inspired the U.S. anthem began
- The Boston Massacre inflamed colonial anger
- The Bridge of Spies Swap That Freed Gary Powers
- The British Empire was the largest empire by land area
- The Christmas Truce Spread Across the Western Front
- The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence
- The Cuban Missile Crisis Formally Ended
- The Decembrist revolt of 1825 was crushed within a day
- The Dunkirk evacuation begins, a flotilla rescues a trapped army
- The Easter Rising Began in Dublin
- The Fall of Saigon Ended the Vietnam War
- The first 1,000-bomber air raid strikes Cologne
- The first battle between ironclad warships was fought
- The first hydrogen bomb test erased a Pacific island
- The Flagstaff War began in New Zealand
- The German battleship Bismarck is sunk in the North Atlantic
- The German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was founded
- The German invasion of Poland began World War II
- The German Sixth Army Surrenders at Stalingrad
- The Great Exhibition opens at London's Crystal Palace
- The Great Fire of London began in a bakery
- The Gulf War ground war ends in 100 hours
- The Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament was foiled
- The Haitian Revolution began
- The Hundred Years' War actually lasted 116 years
- The Hundred Years' War ended with Bordeaux's fall in 1453
- The Iran-Iraq War began
- The Jamestown Massacre took place
- The Knights Templar got their Rule at Troyes in 1129
- The Korean War armistice silenced the guns
- The Korean War began with an invasion from the north
- The last US combat troops left Vietnam
- The Library of Alexandria wasn't destroyed in one fire
- The lost Tybee H-bomb is still buried off Georgia
- The Marchfeld battle of 1278 put the Habsburgs in Austria
- The Mayflower departed Plymouth for America
- The Mayflower finally left England — on its third attempt
- The Mayflower reached the New World
- The My Lai massacre occurred in Vietnam
- The Mysterious Kaspar Hauser Appears in Nuremberg
- The NAACP is founded on Lincoln's centennial
- The Nanjing Massacre began
- The Nazi massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane
- The oldest surviving peace treaty has a replica at the UN
- The Paris Peace Conference met in Paris, not Versailles
- The Purple Heart began as Washington's 1782 cloth badge
- The Reichstag burns, and German democracy with it
- The Rosetta Stone alone couldn't crack hieroglyphs
- The Rosetta Stone was found built into a wall in 1799
- The Selma to Montgomery march set off under federal protection
- The Senate proclaims Napoleon Bonaparte Emperor of the French
- The Seneca Falls Convention launched the women's rights movement
- The shortest war in history lasted under 40 minutes
- The siege of Sarajevo began, the longest of any capital in modern war
- The Siege of the Alamo Begins
- The Soviet Union invaded Finland, starting the Winter War
- The Soviet Union lifts the Berlin Blockade
- The Soviet Union Tested Its First Atomic Bomb
- The Soviet Union was officially established
- The Soweto Uprising Erupted in South Africa
- The Stars and Stripes became the U.S. flag
- The Tennis Court Oath launched the French Revolution
- The Terracotta Army was found by seven well diggers in 1974
- The Treaty of Paris recognized American independence
- The Treaty of Versailles formally ended World War I
- The Treaty of Waitangi Founds a Nation
- The U.S. Air Force broke free of the Army
- The U.S. and USSR signed the INF nuclear arms treaty
- The U.S. embassy in Tehran was seized, starting a 444-day hostage crisis
- The U.S. Invaded Panama to Remove Manuel Noriega
- The U.S. Naval Academy opened at Annapolis
- The U.S. won the Battle of Lake Erie
- The UN General Assembly creates UNICEF
- The United States Declared War on Britain
- The United States Entered World War I
- The US re-established its Navy with six frigates
- The US took over Louisiana on 20 December 1803
- The War of the Bucket: Modena's 1325 trophy wasn't the cause
- The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began against Nazi occupation
- The Warsaw Uprising began
- The world's oldest customer complaint is about bad copper
- The Wounded Knee Massacre took place
- The Yalta Conference Begins
- The Yom Kippur War triggered a U.S. nuclear alert in 1973
- The Yugoslav wars began with fighting in Slovenia
- Thomas Becket's murder in 1170 had a wounded eyewitness
- Thomas More was executed in England
- Thor Heyerdahl set sail on the Kon-Tiki raft across the Pacific
- Three Ships Set Sail to Found Jamestown
- Tiananmen Square crackdown began in Beijing
- Treaty of Tordesillas: Spain and Portugal moved the Pope's line
- Tut's burial chamber was likely peeked into before it opened
- Tutankhamun's 'intact' tomb had been robbed twice
- Two million people formed the Baltic Way human chain
- Uganda won independence on 9 October 1962 via a ballot deal
- USS Maine explodes in Havana Harbor
- Vasco da Gama set sail to find a sea route to India
- Venezuela Was the First Spanish Colony in the Americas to Declare Absolute Independence
- Vikings reached America 500 years before Columbus
- Virginia Dare was born in the Roanoke Colony
- Wallis Simpson's 1936 divorce didn't free her to marry
- Wars of the Roses began at St Albans in 1455 with few dead
- What Columbus got for returning to Spain in March 1493
- What happened on Kristallnacht, 9–10 November 1938
- Who crowned Elizabeth I? Not the Archbishop of Canterbury
- Why is the Parthenon a ruin? A gunpowder blast in 1687
- Why Iwo Jima's strategic value is still debated
- Why Rome's founding date is 21 April 753 BC
- Why Stauffenberg's July 1944 bomb failed to kill Hitler
- Why the Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602
- Wiley Post became the first person to fly solo around the world
- William Penn was granted the charter for Pennsylvania
- William Tell's 1307 apple shot is legend, not history
- William the Conqueror landed in England
- William Wallace was executed in London on 23 August 1305
- World War I ended at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day
- World War II formally ended aboard the USS Missouri
- World War II is the deadliest conflict in human history
- Abel Tasman became the first European to sight New Zealand
- About 85% of Australians live within 50 km of the coast
- Africa is larger than the US, China, India, and most of Europe combined
- Alabama Became the 22nd U.S. State
- Alaska becomes the 49th U.S. state
- Amerigo Vespucci was born
- Angkor Wat is the largest religious monument on Earth
- Arkansas Became the 25th U.S. State
- Azerbaijan declared the restoration of its independence
- Big Ben's Great Bell Rang for the First Time
- Bir Tawil is a patch of land no country wants
- Britain leased Hong Kong's New Territories for 99 years
- Burma Chose Its Own Path Out of Empire
- Byrd Claims the First Flight Over the North Pole
- California became the 31st U.S. state
- Canada raises the maple leaf flag
- Canada's coastline is the longest in the world
- Cape Cod is sighted and named by Bartholomew Gosnold
- Chimborazo, not Everest, is the point farthest from Earth's center
- Cologne Cathedral Was Completed After Six Centuries
- Columbus reached Puerto Rico on his second voyage
- Constantinople was officially renamed Istanbul
- Construction Began on the Leaning Tower of Pisa
- Damascus may be the oldest continuously inhabited city
- Florida Became the 27th US State
- Franklin's Doomed Expedition Departs to Find the Northwest Passage
- Global life expectancy has more than doubled in a century
- Greenland looks as big as Africa, but it's 14x smaller
- Greenwich was voted the world's prime meridian
- Hawaii became the 50th US state
- Henry Hudson entered Hudson Bay
- Henry Hudson Reached Delaware Bay
- Humanity passed 8 billion people in 2022
- Iceland declared full independence from Denmark
- Illinois Joins the Union as the 21st State
- Indiana became the 19th U.S. state
- Istanbul straddles two continents
- Jacob Roggeveen sighted Easter Island on Easter Sunday
- Kiribati Gained Independence
- Kuwait Gained Independence From Britain
- La Paz is the world's highest capital city
- London's Big Ben bell was cast at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
- Magellan sailed off to circle the Earth
- Magellan's fleet emerged from its strait into the Pacific Ocean
- Magellan's Fleet Set Off to Circumnavigate the Globe
- Maine Became the 23rd US State
- Mississippi became the 20th U.S. state
- Monaco is the most densely populated country on Earth
- Mont Blanc Was First Summited
- More than half of humanity now lives in cities
- Mount Rushmore was declared complete
- New Amsterdam Becomes a City
- One battered ship closed the first lap around the world
- One town is split into dozens of national fragments
- Only two countries are landlocked inside landlocked countries
- Over half of humanity lives inside one circle in Asia
- Point Nemo: the spot in the ocean so remote the nearest humans are usually astronauts
- Reno, Nevada sits farther west than Los Angeles
- Reporter Nellie Bly set off to beat Around the World in 80 Days
- Richard Byrd's team made the first flight over the South Pole
- Rio de Janeiro Was Founded
- Roald Amundsen's team became the first to reach the South Pole
- Robert Peary's expedition claimed to reach the North Pole
- Russia and the United States are less than 4 km apart
- Russia is so wide it spans eleven time zones
- Several countries have no permanent rivers at all
- Singapore became an independent nation
- St. Augustine, the oldest US city, was founded
- Tennessee became the 16th U.S. state
- Texas became the 28th U.S. state
- The Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, opens in Dubai
- The Day a Line of Latitude Became the US-Canada Border
- The Eiffel Tower grows up to 15 cm taller in summer
- The Eiffel Tower opens to the public at the Paris World's Fair
- The Eiffel Tower was completed
- The First Person to Sail Alone Around the World
- The Gateway Arch Was Completed in St. Louis
- The Great Pyramid stood as the tallest structure on Earth for nearly 4,000 years
- The International Date Line zigzags to keep countries whole
- The Irish Free State Came Into Existence
- The Kon-Tiki Raft Crossed the Pacific on Balsa Logs
- The Lateran Treaty creates Vatican City
- The Lincoln Memorial is dedicated in Washington, D.C.
- The Louisiana Purchase nearly doubled the size of the United States
- The National Geographic Society is founded
- The Pacific Ocean is bigger than all of Earth's land combined
- The Seattle World's Fair opened, debuting the Space Needle
- The Statue of Liberty arrived in New York Harbor
- The Statue of Liberty was dedicated
- The Sydney Opera House officially opened
- The U.S. formally took possession of Alaska
- The U.S. handed control of the Panama Canal to Panama
- The U.S. signed the Gadsden Purchase treaty with Mexico
- The United Arab Emirates was formed
- The US agreed to buy Alaska from Russia
- The USA–Canada border is the longest in the world
- The Washington Monument Opened to the Public
- The whole world's longitude is measured from one line in London
- The world has roughly half as many babies per woman as in 1950
- The world's smallest country fits inside a single city
- There's one spot where you can stand in four US states at once
- Tokyo is the world's largest urban agglomeration
- Tsar Peter the Great founds the city of St. Petersburg
- Twelve nations signed the Antarctic Treaty
- Two countries tie for the most neighbours: fourteen each
- Vasco da Gama reaches India by sea around Africa
- Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope toward India
- Vatican City Became an Independent State
- Venice stands on millions of wooden piles
- Victoria Falls is the largest single sheet of falling water on Earth
- Western Samoa: the first Pacific island nation to break free
- World Population Reached Seven Billion
- World Population Reached Six Billion
- Yellowstone became the world's first national park
- You cannot see the Great Wall of China from space with the naked eye
- A blackout plunged New York City into darkness
- A car broke the sound barrier on land for the first time
- A cascading failure left 30 million people in the dark
- A computer beats the world chess champion
- A Gutenberg Bible was first dated complete
- A human first rose into the sky in a hot-air balloon
- A jet engine works by squeezing air, setting it on fire, and shoving it backward
- A Kilowatt-Hour Is the Unit on Your Electricity Bill
- A massive blackout hit the northeastern US and Canada
- A reactor in the Idaho desert lit four light bulbs with atomic power
- A single Google search runs across thousands of servers in a fraction of a second
- A steel box cut shipping costs more than thirtyfold
- About 99% of international internet traffic travels through cables on the seafloor
- Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer program — for a machine that was never built
- Alan Turing, who imagined the modern computer, was born
- Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone
- Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo
- America's first roller coaster opened at Coney Island
- America's first vacuum cleaner needed a hand crank
- Apple Computer was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak
- Apple introduced the iPod
- Apple's first iPhone went on sale
- Apple's Lisa pioneers the mouse-driven personal computer
- Atari released Pong, helping launch the video game industry
- Bell files his telephone patent
- Brunel's SS Great Britain, the first great iron screw steamer, was launched
- CERN gave the World Wide Web away to everyone, for free
- Charles Babbage unveiled the Difference Engine
- Charles Babbage, father of the computer, was born
- Charles Lindbergh lands in Paris, conquering the Atlantic alone
- Charles Lindbergh takes off on the first solo nonstop transatlantic flight
- Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier
- Concorde began scheduled supersonic service between London and New York
- Concorde crossed the Atlantic in under three hours
- Concorde made its first test flight
- Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge begins
- Construction of the Suez Canal officially began
- Daimler Patents the World's First Motorcycle
- Data Centers Use as Much Electricity as a Mid-Sized Country
- Earhart Solos the Pacific, Hawaii to California
- Eastman's 1885 Film Helped Movies Move
- Edison gave the first public demonstration of his light bulb
- Edison Patents the Light Bulb
- Edison Patents the Phonograph
- Edison switched on the first commercial power station
- Edison's Phonograph Captures the First Recorded Voice
- Edwin Land demonstrates the instant camera
- Einstein Patented a Refrigerator With No Moving Parts
- Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin
- Elias Howe patented the lockstitch sewing machine
- Emma Nutt, the first female telephone operator
- Facebook launches
- First aircraft landing on a ship
- First flight across the English Channel by balloon
- First manned balloon flight in the Americas
- First U.S. 911 Emergency Call
- Ford unveiled the Mustang, launching the 'pony car' era
- Ford's Model T went on sale
- France Bolted On the World's First Car Number Plates
- Fulton's Steamboat Conquers the Hudson
- George Washington signed America's first patent
- George Westinghouse patented the air brake
- Georges Claude patents the neon discharge tube for lighting
- Gideon Sundback patents the modern zipper
- Google launched Gmail with a then-staggering 1 GB of storage
- Gordon Moore published the observation that became Moore's Law
- GPS Would Fail Without Einstein's Relativity
- Hedy Lamarr Patented the Idea Behind Wireless
- Henri Giffard flew the first powered airship
- Henry Ford patents a plastic car body
- Herman Hollerith patents the punched-card tabulating machine
- HMS Dreadnought makes every battleship obsolete
- Howard Hughes flew the giant Spruce Goose on its one and only flight
- Humans first flew free in a Montgolfier balloon over Paris
- IBM launched its first personal computer
- IBM's Deep Blue defeats world chess champion Garry Kasparov
- Intel's 4004 Put a Whole Computer Brain on One Chip
- Inventor Nikola Tesla was born
- Isaac Singer Patented the Sewing Machine That Reached Every Home
- James Puckle patents the Puckle gun, an early machine gun
- Johannes Gutenberg dies
- John Logie Baird, television pioneer, was born
- John Walker sold the first friction matches he invented
- Karl Benz patents the first practical automobile
- Karl Benz publicly drove the first practical automobile
- László Bíró patents the modern ballpoint pen
- LEDs Turn Almost All Their Energy Into Light, Not Heat
- Leonardo's flying machines never left the page
- Louis Bleriot made the first airplane flight across the English Channel
- Marconi Filed the First Wireless Telegraphy Patent
- Microsoft Announced Windows
- Microsoft Released Windows XP
- Microsoft shipped the first version of Windows
- Moore's Law: a 1965 magazine prediction that ran the digital age
- Nintendo released the Game Boy handheld console in Japan
- One Dish in Australia Is Earth's Only Link to Voyager 2
- One lightning bolt carries enough energy to power a house for over a week
- Pac-Man makes its debut in a Tokyo arcade
- Pan Am Launched the First Transatlantic Jet Service
- Post-it Notes came from a glue that was too weak to work
- Pumped Hydro Is the World's Largest Battery
- Queen Victoria sent the first transatlantic telegraph message
- Radar gets its first proof in a field near Daventry
- Railroads gave America "the Day of Two Noons"
- RFC 1 launched the internet's collaborative rulebook
- Roman concrete heals its own cracks — and we only just learned how
- Samuel Morse demonstrates the telegraph
- Samuel Morse patented the electric telegraph
- Scott Fahlman proposes the first emoticon :-) on a Carnegie Mellon bulletin board
- Shanghai's maglev floated commuters along at 431 km/h
- Solar Power Is the Cheapest Electricity in History
- Sony launched the Walkman and made music portable
- Steve Jobs unveils the first iPhone
- Super Mario Bros. was released in Japan
- Sweden switched to driving on the right overnight
- Tandy Released the TRS-80 Home Computer
- Telstar Beams Live TV Across the Atlantic
- Tetris was created by a Soviet computer scientist
- The @ symbol was a near-forgotten character rescued by the first email
- The airship Hindenburg bursts into flames at Lakehurst, New Jersey
- The barcode was first sketched as lines in Florida beach sand
- The BBC broadcasts the Greenwich "pips" for the first time
- The Boeing 747 makes its maiden flight
- The Boeing Company Was Founded
- The Brooklyn Bridge opens in New York City
- The Burj Khalifa Is Shaped to Confuse the Wind
- The Channel Tunnel Has the World's Longest Undersea Stretch
- The Channel Tunnel linking Britain and France opens
- The chip-maker Intel was founded
- The daguerreotype was given freely to the world
- The daguerreotype: photography's public debut
- The day a doll's head became television
- The Day the Internet Switched On
- The dishwasher was patented
- The earliest known recording of the human voice was captured
- The Empire State Building opens in New York City
- The Falkirk Wheel Lifts Boats Using No Net Weight
- The first .com domain name was registered
- The first airplane passenger fatality occurred
- The first Apple Macintosh goes on sale
- The First Bitcoin Block Is Mined
- The first car was given a number plate
- The first commercial adding machine was patented
- The First Commercial Electric Telegraph Was Demonstrated
- The first commercial oil well struck oil in Pennsylvania
- The first computer "bug" was a real moth
- The first computer mouse was a wooden box with two metal wheels
- The first crewed transatlantic balloon flight succeeded
- The first electrically lit Christmas tree glowed in New York
- The first flight around the world landed back in Seattle
- The first handheld mobile phone call was made on a Motorola prototype
- The first intelligible telephone call summoned an assistant
- The first licensed female pilot earned her wings
- The First Moving Assembly Line Began Producing Ford Cars
- The first nonstop flight around the world was completed
- The First Nuclear Chain Reaction Happened Under a Football Stadium
- The first nuclear-powered submarine, USS Nautilus, is launched
- The first nylon-bristle toothbrush goes on sale
- The First Orient Express Departed Paris
- The first Otis passenger elevator was installed
- The first permanent ARPANET link, the internet's ancestor, went live
- The first photocopy was made
- The first powered flight lasted just 12 seconds
- The first public steam railway opened in England
- The First Railway Journey Hauled Iron, Not Passengers
- The first recorded parachute jump took place
- The first steamship crossed the Atlantic
- The first stored-program computer ran its first software
- The First Transatlantic Phone Call
- The First Transatlantic Telegraph Cable
- The first U.S. patent for a gasoline-driven automobile was granted
- The first U.S. patent for an electric motor
- The first video was uploaded to YouTube
- The First VR Headset Hung From the Ceiling
- The Golden Gate Bridge opens, the world's longest suspension span
- The Gossamer Albatross Pedaled Across the English Channel
- The Gutenberg Bible is finished
- The Hawker Hurricane took to the air for the first time
- The implantable pacemaker was born when an engineer grabbed the wrong resistor
- The Internet and the Web are not the same thing
- The internet's first message was meant to be "login" — but it crashed at "lo"
- The Largest Machine Ever Built Is Colder Than Space
- The London Underground opens, the world's first subway
- The microwave oven was invented after a candy bar melted in an engineer's pocket
- The Miracle on the Hudson river landing
- The Montgolfier brothers flew the first public hot-air balloon
- The Morris Worm became one of the first internet worms
- The Mother of All Demos unveiled the computer mouse
- The New York City subway opened
- The Panama Canal lifts ships 26 meters uphill to cross a continent
- The Panama Canal opened to traffic
- The Patent That Riveted the World Into Blue Jeans
- The pencil with an attached eraser was patented
- The RMS Titanic is launched in Belfast
- The RMS Titanic set sail from Southampton on its only voyage
- The Spindletop gusher launches the Texas oil boom
- The SR-71's speed record has stood since 1976
- The Suez Canal opened, linking the Mediterranean and Red Seas
- The supersonic Concorde enters commercial service
- The Tacoma Narrows Bridge twisted apart in the wind
- The Tay Bridge collapsed during a storm
- The Three Mile Island nuclear accident began
- The transcontinental railroad is completed at Promontory, Utah
- The transistor — the device that built the modern world — debuted in 1947
- The transistor was first demonstrated at Bell Labs
- The Turing test asks not whether machines think, but whether they can fool us
- The two ends of the Channel Tunnel were connected beneath the sea
- The typewriter that gave us QWERTY was patented
- The U.S. Interstate Highway System was born
- The US Navy Bought Its First Submarine, USS Holland
- The World Wide Web was invented at a physics lab to help scientists share documents
- The world's first cash machine opened for business in London
- The world's first commercial nuclear power station opened
- The World's First Hybrid Car Ran in 1900
- The world's first hydroelectric central station switched on
- The world's first webcam was invented to watch a coffee pot
- The Wright brothers patent the secret of controlled flight
- Thomas Edison is born in Milan, Ohio
- Tim Berners-Lee formalized his proposal for the World Wide Web
- Tim Berners-Lee opened the World Wide Web to the public
- Titan I takes its first flight
- USS Enterprise, the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, was launched
- USS Nautilus crossed the North Pole beneath the ice
- Velcro was invented by copying the burrs that stuck to a dog's fur
- Voyager flew nonstop around the world without refueling
- VW Beetle overtakes the Ford Model T
- Wi-Fi was born from a failed search for exploding black holes
- Wikipedia goes online
- William Burt patented the typographer, an early forerunner of the typewriter
- Willis Carrier invented modern air conditioning
- Without Cooling Pipes, Hoover Dam Would Still Be Curing
- Your phone dwarfs the computer that landed Apollo 11
- "Huh?" may be the closest thing to a universal word
- "Nice" once meant ignorant and foolish
- "OK" started as a deliberately misspelled joke in 1839
- "Quarantine" literally means "forty days"
- "Robot" was coined for a 1920 play and means "forced labor"
- "Salary" comes from the Latin word for salt — but Roman soldiers weren't paid in it
- A Language That Gets By on Just Twelve Letters
- Across languages, basic color words appear in a near-universal order — and red comes first after black and white
- America's first multi-page newspaper lasted one issue
- An Illiterate Man Invented an Entire Writing System
- Australia's Secret Initiation Language Had Clicks
- Aymara Speakers Put the Future Behind Them
- Basque is a language with no living relatives on Earth
- Boustrophedon: ancient Greeks wrote alternating lines in opposite directions
- Braille fits an entire alphabet under one fingertip
- Champollion announced he had decoded hieroglyphs
- Chinese has ~40,000 characters; you need a tenth to read
- CNN launched the era of 24-hour cable news
- Easter Island May Have Invented Writing From Scratch
- English has the most speakers, but Chinese has the most native speakers
- Esperanto was invented by one eye doctor to be a neutral world language
- First part of the Oxford English Dictionary published
- Korea's alphabet was invented on purpose, by a king
- Meet the Press, the Longest-Running TV Show, Debuted
- Most Western alphabets descend from 22 Phoenician letters
- Noah Webster published his American Dictionary of the English Language
- Not all scripts are alphabets — there are four basic kinds
- On average, a language dies about every two weeks
- On one Canary island, a whole language is whistled
- Orson Welles aired War of the Worlds as fake news bulletins
- Papua New Guinea speaks more languages than any country on Earth
- Pirahã, an Amazonian language, appears to have no exact numbers
- Samuel Johnson published his Dictionary of the English Language
- Sign languages aren't English on the hands — they have their own grammar
- Some languages use clicks as everyday consonants
- Strong Sunlight May Erase the Word Blue
- Telstar, the first communications satellite, launched
- The 'Great Moon Hoax' began in a New York newspaper
- The "mare" in nightmare is a demon, not a horse
- The @ symbol has wildly different names — many of them animals
- The abbreviation 'OK' first appeared in print
- The BBC began its first daily radio broadcasts
- The BBC First Broadcast the Chimes of Big Ben
- The BBC launched the world's first regular high-definition TV service
- The BBC was founded
- The first issue of Life magazine appeared
- The first radio signal across the Atlantic was a single letter S
- The first telegraph message asked: What hath God wrought?
- The first televised White House address aired
- The first text message ever sent read: Merry Christmas
- The first transcontinental phone call is made in the U.S.
- The liner Slavonia sent one of the first SOS calls
- The McGurk effect: what you see can change what you hear
- The Moscow-Washington hotline went into operation
- The New York Times published its first edition
- The Observer, the world's oldest Sunday newspaper, was founded
- The oldest surviving photograph took hours of sunlight to make
- The QWERTY keyboard was designed for a machine that no longer exists
- The window to learn a language's grammar stays open until about 17
- The word "avocado" comes from a Nahuatl word that also meant "testicle"
- The word "goodbye" is a contraction of "God be with you"
- There is a language with no words for left and right — only north and south
- Two deaf communities spontaneously invented brand-new sign languages from scratch
- When Western Union Wired the Coasts Together
- Why Babies Worldwide Say Mama and Papa
- 'The Day the Music Died' plane crash
- "A Visit from St. Nicholas" First Appeared in a Small-Town Newspaper
- "Mary Had a Little Lamb" Goes to Print
- "Tragedy" literally means "goat song"
- A cable channel bet that fans wanted sports around the clock
- A Charlie Brown Christmas first aired on television
- A Christmas Carol went on sale just before Christmas
- A galloping horse settled a question in 1878 — and helped invent the movies
- A John Cage piece is being played so slowly it will take 639 years
- A Simple Tennis Game Launched the Arcade Era
- Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time
- Agatha Christie, the best-selling novelist, leaves a record legacy
- Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap" is the longest-running play ever
- American Bandstand goes national on ABC
- Andy Warhol exhibited his Campbell's Soup Cans
- Anne Frank got the diary that would move the world
- Anne Frank's diary was first published
- Antonio Stradivari, master violin maker, died
- Apple's '1984' Super Bowl ad debuts the Macintosh
- Ballet speaks French because a king codified it
- Beethoven Premiered His Fifth and Sixth Symphonies in One Marathon Night
- Beethoven was profoundly deaf when he composed the Ninth Symphony
- Beethoven's Ninth Symphony premieres in Vienna
- Billboard published its first Hot 100 chart
- Bizet's Carmen flopped at its Paris premiere
- Buckingham Palace Announces the Charles-Diana Engagement
- Bugs Bunny Made His Debut
- Carnegie Hall opens in New York City
- Charles and Diana married at St Paul's Cathedral
- Cinema was born in a Paris basement on 28 December 1895
- Composer Frédéric Chopin Was Born
- Composer Johann Sebastian Bach was born in Eisenach
- Disney's Fantasia premiered with pioneering stereo sound
- Disneyland opened its gates in California
- Doc Brown dreamed up the flux capacitor (in fiction)
- Doctor Who began its record-breaking run on the BBC
- Donald Duck made his screen debut
- Early movie film could catch fire — and burn underwater
- Elvis Presley Died at Graceland
- Elvis Presley Was Inducted Into the US Army
- Elvis Presley's Aloha from Hawaii reaches a global audience
- Epidaurus' ancient seats are a built-in acoustic filter
- For decades, American readers got A Clockwork Orange without its redemptive final chapter
- Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral museum opened months after his death
- Frank Sinatra was born in Hoboken
- Frankenstein Was Published Anonymously
- George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949
- Gone with the Wind premiered in a segregated Atlanta
- Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier of Monaco
- Handel completed his oratorio Messiah
- Handel's Messiah premiered in Dublin
- Hattie McDaniel becomes the first Black Oscar winner
- Herman Melville's Moby-Dick was first published
- Huckleberry Finn reaches American readers — and gets banned
- Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is published
- Johann Christoph Denner Invented the Clarinet Around 1700
- John Lennon and Paul McCartney met for the first time
- John Lennon was shot dead outside his New York home
- John Wayne, the face of the Hollywood Western, died at 72
- Johnny Carson Took Over The Tonight Show
- King Kong premiered in New York
- Leave It to Beaver premiered on American TV
- Leonardo da Vinci dies at Amboise in France
- Leonardo da Vinci was born near Vinci, Italy
- Live Aid linked two stadiums for famine relief
- Lolita Published in America
- Ludwig van Beethoven was most likely born
- Magician Harry Houdini died on Halloween
- Marilyn Monroe Marries Joe DiMaggio
- Marilyn Monroe sings 'Happy Birthday' to President Kennedy
- Marilyn Monroe was found dead at 36
- Mary Shelley dreamed up Frankenstein at 18, trapped indoors by a volcanic summer
- Mary Shelley, Author of Frankenstein, Is Born
- Metropolitan Museum of Art opens
- Michelangelo dies in Rome at 88
- Michelangelo signed only one sculpture in his life — the Pietà
- Michelangelo unveiled the Sistine Chapel ceiling on All Saints' Day
- Michelangelo Was Born
- Michelangelo's David was unveiled in Florence
- Mickey Mouse whistled his way onstage in Steamboat Willie
- Milton Sold Paradise Lost for Five Pounds
- Moby-Dick Reached America in 1851
- Modern tuning splits the octave into 12 equal steps — using the 12th root of 2
- Monty Python's Flying Circus First Aired
- Mozart conducted the premiere of The Magic Flute in Vienna
- Mozart wrote his first symphony at age eight
- Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro Premieres in Vienna
- MTV Launched and Rewired How Pop Music Was Sold
- New York's Met is the largest opera house in the world
- Pablo Picasso was born
- Paul McCartney announced the breakup of the Beatles
- Philippe Petit walked a wire between the Twin Towers
- Picasso and Braque made Cubist works so alike that experts still can't always tell them apart
- Poe's "The Raven" Takes Flight
- Popeye the Sailor First Appears in a Comic Strip
- Radio City Music Hall Opened in New York
- Saturday Night Live premiered on NBC
- Sesame Street premiered and rewrote children's television
- Shakespeare died in Stratford in 1616
- Shakespeare gave us the first record of 1,700-plus words
- Shakespeare's baptism, written in a borrowed Latin line
- Shakespeare's Globe Theatre burned to the ground
- Shakespeare's Marriage Bond
- Shakespeare's Othello Was First Performed
- Snow White, the first full-length animated feature, opens widely
- Snow White, the first full-length animated feature, premiered
- Star Trek beamed onto American television
- Stravinsky's Rite of Spring sparks a riot at its Paris premiere
- Tchaikovsky's '1812 Overture' Premiered in Moscow
- The Beatles give their final public performance on a London rooftop
- The Beatles land in America
- The Beatles meet America on Ed Sullivan
- The Beatles released Abbey Road
- The Beatles released their first single, "Love Me Do"
- The carol Silent Night was performed for the first time
- The first Academy Awards ceremony is held in Hollywood
- The First Actress Appeared on the English Stage
- The first author in history signed her own name
- The first commercial Christmas card
- The First Commercial Kinetoscope Parlor Opened
- The first drive-in movie theater opened in New Jersey
- The first feature-length "talkie" had barely two minutes of talking
- The first Guinness Book of Records was published
- The first James Bond film, Dr. No, premiered
- The first New Year's Eve ball drop was held in Times Square
- The First Permanent Movie Theater in the US Opened in Los Angeles
- The Flintstones premieres as the first primetime animated TV series
- The Frisbee Toy Is First Sold
- The Ghent Altarpiece is the most-stolen artwork in history
- The highest-grossing film ever isn't Avatar — it's from 1939
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was published
- The Hobbit was first published
- The Last Original Peanuts Strip
- The Lego Brick Is Patented in Its Modern Form
- The Library of Congress was established
- The Lumiere brothers held the first projected film screening
- The Mikado premiered in London
- The Mona Lisa became the world's most famous painting after it was stolen in 1911
- The Mona Lisa Crosses the Atlantic for Its American Debut
- The most expensive painting ever sold went for $450 million
- The Nutcracker Premiered in St. Petersburg
- The oldest complete song we can still play is carved on a Greek tombstone
- The oldest great story we still read is 4,000 years old
- The oldest known figurative artwork is a 45,500-year-old pig painted in an Indonesian cave
- The oldest known musical instrument is a 40,000-year-old bird-bone flute
- The original Star Wars film premieres in theaters
- The Peanuts comic strip first appeared
- The Pied Piper legend traces to a real lost-children event in Hamelin
- The rainbow Pride flag was first flown
- The Rolling Stones played their first concert
- The same recorded scream has been hidden in hundreds of movies as a sound-designer in-joke
- The Simpsons premiered as a half-hour series
- The Venus de Milo was unearthed on the Greek island of Milos
- The Woodstock festival opened
- The world's first novel was written by a woman around 1010
- Thomas Edison was granted a patent for the Kinetographic Camera
- Thomas Paine Publishes Common Sense
- Ultramarine blue once cost more than gold, so painters saved it for the Virgin Mary
- Uncle Tom's Cabin sold out its first run in a single week
- Van Gogh sold only one painting during his lifetime
- Vincent van Gogh cut off part of his own ear
- Walt Disney World opened in Florida
- Why an octave sounds 'the same' note: it's a perfect 2:1 frequency ratio
- A great-flood story appears in cultures around the world
- A kosher Torah scroll is handwritten by a scribe - all 304,805 letters
- Anansi, the West African spider, is one of myth's great tricksters
- Ancient Egyptians weighed the heart against a feather to judge the dead
- Archbishop Ussher dated the creation of the world
- Baptism reenacts a symbolic death and rebirth in water
- Buddhism began in India yet has its fewest followers there today
- China's oldest writing was carved to ask the dead and the gods questions
- Christianity and Islam together claim more than half of humanity
- Constantine Made Sunday a Roman Day of Rest
- Devout Jain monks sweep the ground and veil their mouths to spare tiny life
- Dia de Muertos welcomes the dead home each November
- Diwali, the festival of lights, is celebrated by over a billion people
- Egyptian mummification preserved the body as a home for the soul
- Four English weekday names come from Norse gods
- Islam was the fastest-growing major religion of the 2010s
- Luther Stands Before the Diet of Worms
- Martin Luther married a former nun
- Martin Luther's 95 Theses sparked the Reformation
- Mithraism was a secret Roman cult that worshipped in cave-like temples
- Mormon founder Joseph Smith was killed by a mob in Illinois
- Muslims pause five times a day to pray toward a single building
- Norse myth has its own apocalypse, and the gods themselves die in it
- Over 1.6 million pilgrims perform the Hajj each year
- Pope John Paul II's Pilgrimage to Poland
- Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council
- Pope Pius IX defined the Immaculate Conception as dogma
- Saint Patrick, patron of Ireland, is traditionally said to have died
- Shinto's 'eight million gods' is a number that really means 'countless'
- Sikhism is widely ranked the world's fifth-largest organized religion
- The Baha'i faith's holiest place is where its founder was a prisoner
- The Bible is the most translated and most printed book in history
- The Book of Mormon was published
- The Dalai Lama fled Tibet into exile
- The Dead Sea Scrolls are about a thousand years older than the next-oldest Hebrew Bibles
- The Greek underworld river Lethe made the dead forget their whole lives
- The Hebrew Bible was copied so carefully that scribes counted every letter
- The Islamic calendar drifts 11 days earlier every year
- The Islamic Calendar's Year One Began on July 16, 622
- The King James Bible Is First Published
- The Kumbh Mela is the largest peaceful gathering on Earth
- The Maya Long Count calendar's start date
- The Millerites awaited the Great Disappointment
- The Nazca Lines may have been giant pathways walked in ritual
- The Oldest Beer Recipe Is a Hymn to a Goddess
- The planets are named after Roman gods
- The Prophet Muhammad Died in Medina
- The Quran was first compiled from memory and scattered scraps
- The Quran's 114 chapters are arranged by length, not by date
- The religiously unaffiliated are the world's third-largest group
- The world's oldest dated printed book is a Buddhist scroll from 868 CE
- Westminster Abbey Was Consecrated
- Yggdrasil is the great ash tree at the centre of the Norse cosmos
- Zoroastrianism is among the world's oldest enduring monotheistic faiths
- A pilot's 'flying saucers' sparked the modern UFO era
- A small sea snail's shell was money across three continents
- A van bomb tears a crater under the World Trade Center
- Alcoholics Anonymous Was Founded in Ohio
- America's First Federal Department Was Born on July 27
- American Express began life hauling freight, not charge cards
- American women won the constitutional right to vote
- Barack Obama was elected the first Black U.S. president
- Black Monday triggered a global stock market crash
- Black Thursday began the Wall Street Crash
- Black Tuesday crashed Wall Street into the Great Depression
- Bonnie and Clyde are killed in a Louisiana ambush
- Boston Latin School, the oldest US public school, was founded
- Brazil abolishes slavery with the Golden Law
- Britain Abolished the Death Penalty for Murder
- Britain issues the Penny Black, the world's first adhesive postage stamp
- Charles Ponzi promised to double your money in 90 days
- China's first treaty-port concession was carved out of Shanghai in 1845
- Churchill Steps Down at Number 10
- Clara Barton founds the American Red Cross
- Coca-Cola launched 'New Coke', a famous marketing misstep
- Comparative advantage: even a worse producer profits from trade
- Compound interest turned Franklin's tiny bequest into millions over 200 years
- Congress passed the women's suffrage amendment
- Congress sent twelve amendments to the states
- Coordinated bombings struck London's transit system
- D.B. Cooper Parachuted Away and Vanished
- Delaware became the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution
- Egypt and Israel signed a peace treaty
- Egypt Nationalized the Suez Canal
- England's First Elected Parliament Meets
- FDR signs Japanese American internment order
- FDR was inaugurated amid the Great Depression
- Fingerprints solved their first murder in 1892
- Firestone founds the tire company that helped put America on wheels
- Ford Motor Company sold its first car
- Ford Motor Company was incorporated
- France adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man
- GDP measures output, not how well people are doing
- George Washington is unanimously elected first U.S. president
- Georgia ratifies the U.S. Constitution as the fourth state
- Gerald Ford Was Sworn In as US President
- Golda Meir became Israel's first female prime minister
- Government under the U.S. Constitution began
- Gresham's Law: bad money drives out good
- Habeas corpus: the writ that forces the state to justify a detention
- Half a million people marched against the Vietnam War in Washington
- Hitler Became Führer of Germany via Plebiscite
- How a Civil War prayer put "In God We Trust" on American coins
- Iceland's Althing began in 930 - but Tynwald is the oldest still running without a break
- In 1971, the US dollar stopped being convertible to gold
- International Women's Day Was First Observed
- Interpol has 196 members - but makes no arrests
- Jack the Ripper's first canonical victim was murdered
- James Earl Ray Pleaded Guilty to Killing Martin Luther King Jr.
- John Scopes is indicted in Tennessee for teaching evolution
- John Wilkes is expelled from Parliament over press freedom
- Lech Walesa won Poland's first direct presidential election
- Lincoln Signs the Thirteenth Amendment
- London transit bombings killed dozens
- London's Big Bang rewired global finance in one day
- London's new Metropolitan Police walked their first beat
- Manhattan was bought for trade goods worth about 60 guilders
- Margaret Thatcher becomes Britain's first female prime minister
- Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech
- Marx and Engels publish The Communist Manifesto
- Massachusetts ratifies the U.S. Constitution
- Microsoft went public
- Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation sparked the Arab Spring
- Native Americans were granted U.S. citizenship
- Nellie Tayloe Ross becomes the first woman U.S. governor
- Nelson Mandela is inaugurated as South Africa's first Black president
- Nevada legalized wide-open gambling in the depths of the Depression
- New Hampshire's vote put the U.S. Constitution into effect
- Nintendo was founded as a playing-card company
- Nixon insisted to editors: "I am not a crook"
- Oliver Cromwell Dissolved England's Rump Parliament
- One 1918 law gave America its time zones and daylight saving
- OPEC Turned Oil Into a Weapon
- Oscar Wilde Is Convicted of Gross Indecency in London
- Outlaw Jesse James Was Killed in Missouri
- Pennsylvania ratified the U.S. Constitution
- Pirate Captain Kidd is hanged in London
- Poland adopts Europe's first modern written national constitution
- President Bill Clinton was impeached by the House
- President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas
- President Polk confirmed the California gold strike to Congress
- President Reagan Was Shot and Survived
- President Truman signed the Marshall Plan to rebuild postwar Europe
- Princess Diana died in a Paris car crash
- Prohibition ended in the United States
- Richard Nixon Announced His Resignation
- Rome's Twelve Tables were the first written Roman law
- Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in Montgomery
- Russia's October Manifesto Promised Civil Liberties
- San Marino's constitution dates from 1600 - the oldest still in force
- Scotland voted to establish its own parliament
- Slavery abolished across the British Empire
- South Africa held its first fully democratic, multiracial election
- Spices were once so precious they launched the Age of Exploration
- Susan B. Anthony voted illegally and was arrested
- The 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States
- The 13th Amendment was officially proclaimed in effect
- The 1963 Great Train Robbery stole millions in untraceable banknotes
- The 19th Amendment Was Certified Into Law
- The 2008 U.S. election drew the highest turnout in decades
- The 33 Trapped Chilean Miners Were Rescued
- The accounting system behind modern business was first printed in 1494
- The Barbie doll made its debut
- The Boy Scouts of America is incorporated
- The Brink's-Mat gold robbery stunned Britain
- The British North America Act created Canada
- The Buttonwood Agreement plants the seed of the New York Stock Exchange
- The Code of Hammurabi set out 282 laws carved in stone
- The Day Harvard Got Its Name
- The day the West unveiled NATO's founding treaty
- The Dow Jones Industrial Average is first published
- The Dreyfus Affair conviction shook France
- The Dutch East India Company may be the most valuable company in history
- The empty frames of the world's biggest art heist
- The Erie Canal opened, transforming American trade
- The euro launched as an electronic currency for 11 nations
- The first coins were minted in Lydia around 600 BCE
- The first Geneva Convention was adopted
- The first impeachment of a U.S. president
- The first Labor Day parade was held in New York City
- The first modern stock exchange opened in Amsterdam in 1602
- The first murder solved by DNA cleared an innocent man first
- The first national Thanksgiving under the Constitution was held
- The First Parliament of Great Britain Met
- The First Recorded Labor Strike Was in Ancient Egypt
- The First Salem Witch Trial Arrest Warrants
- The First U.S. Execution by Gas Chamber
- The first U.S. federal Martin Luther King Jr. Day is observed
- The first UN General Assembly convenes in London
- The first Walmart store opened in Arkansas
- The first woman ran for president before women could vote
- The First Woolworth Five-and-Dime Opens
- The Ford Edsel's $250 Million Flop
- The Great Train Robbery struck in England
- The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral took place
- The Hanseatic League was a medieval trade network of nearly 200 towns
- The House finally picks a president on the 36th ballot
- The House Picks a President
- The Hudson's Bay Company is chartered in London
- The impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson ends in acquittal
- The Jonestown Mass Deaths Shocked the World
- The Judiciary Act of 1789 built the federal court system
- The Los Angeles riots erupted after the Rodney King verdict
- The Maastricht Treaty creates the EU
- The Marshall Plan Was Proposed at Harvard
- The Mayflower Compact set up self-government for the Pilgrims
- The Miranda warning was born from a Supreme Court ruling
- The New York Stock Exchange was formally organized
- The Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders began
- The Pony Express began carrying mail across the American West
- The Rome Statute Created the World's First Permanent War-Crimes Court
- The Rule of 72 tells you when your money doubles
- The Scopes 'Monkey Trial' verdict was reached
- The Silk Road was a web of routes, and silk was only part of it
- The South Sea Bubble ruined fortunes — including Isaac Newton's
- The St. Valentine's Day Massacre
- The Standard Oil monopoly was broken into 34 companies in 1911
- The Star-Spangled Banner became the US national anthem
- The Stonewall uprising sparked the gay rights movement
- The Stono Rebellion ignites colonial Carolina
- The Supreme Court found a right to privacy in birth control
- The Supreme Court struck down bans on interracial marriage
- The Tokyo subway sarin attack struck the morning rush hour
- The Treaty of Rome created the European Economic Community
- The trial of Adolf Eichmann opened in Jerusalem
- The trial of Warren Hastings ran seven years - one of history's longest political trials
- The Triangle factory fire killed 146 workers
- The Truman Doctrine Was Announced
- The U.S. Bill of Rights came into force
- The U.S. Congress passes the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery
- The U.S. Constitution was signed in Philadelphia
- The UN adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
- The UN voted to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states
- The UN was founded in 1945 by 51 nations - and now has 193 members
- The United Nations Charter Was Signed
- The US adopted the gold standard
- The US and USSR signed the START nuclear arms treaty
- The US Civil Rights Act Was Signed Into Law
- The US dollar is on one side of nearly 9 in 10 currency trades
- The US issued its first national paper money
- The US Postal Service introduced ZIP codes
- The US postal system was established with Franklin as first Postmaster
- The US Supreme Court rules school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board
- The Victoria Cross, Britain's highest military honor, is established
- The Wall Street Journal published its first issue
- The Walt Disney Company was founded with a four-page contract
- The Watergate break-in set a presidency unraveling
- The Watts riots erupted in Los Angeles
- The World Bank and IMF came into existence
- The World's First Paper Money Came From Medieval China
- The world's oldest company built Buddhist temples for over 1,400 years
- The YMCA was founded in London
- Three men escaped Alcatraz with dummy heads - and vanished
- Tulip mania was history's first recorded speculative bubble
- Twelve nations signed the treaty creating NATO
- UNESCO Was Founded to Build Peace Through Education and Culture
- Volkswagen Is Founded in Germany
- West Point: America's First Military Academy
- Zimbabwe once printed a 100-trillion-dollar banknote
- A royal wedding sparked the first Oktoberfest
- A single mutation made almonds safe to eat
- Adding iodine to salt may be the cheapest brain-saving measure in history
- After water, tea is the most consumed drink on Earth
- All Arabica Coffee Descends From One Plant
- Almonds need a near-nationwide migration of bees
- Almonds, peaches and apricots are close cousins - and some kernels carry cyanide
- Almost every banana you eat is a clone of the same plant
- Apples don't grow true from seed — every variety is a graft of one original tree
- Before refrigeration, an ice trade shipped frozen lakes around the world
- Canning was invented to feed Napoleon's armies
- Carbonated water was invented while trying to copy natural mineral springs
- Carrots were purple, yellow and white long before they were orange
- Cashews Are Kin to Poison Ivy and Must Be Heated
- Champagne is bottled at car-tyre pressure - and the bubbles are a second fermentation
- Chili peppers feel "hot" because capsaicin hijacks a heat-and-pain sensor
- Chocolate began as a bitter drink - and the beans were money
- Coca-Cola began in 1886 as a pharmacist's cure-all - minus the wine
- Coca-Cola is first sold at an Atlanta pharmacy
- Coca-Cola was first sold in bottles
- Coffee was discovered, by legend, when a goatherd saw his goats dancing
- Corn was bred from a scraggly grass with a handful of hard kernels
- Dietary fibre is the part of food your body is built not to digest
- Durian's Stench Is Written Into Its Genes
- Farming began about 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent
- Honey never spoils - jars from ancient Egyptian tombs are still edible
- Ketchup started out as a fermented fish sauce
- Machine-sliced bread first went on sale
- Most animals make their own vitamin C - humans carry a broken copy of the gene
- MSG is the same glutamate that's naturally in tomatoes, cheese and breast milk
- Nutmeg once grew on just one tiny cluster of islands
- Of the 20 amino acids that build you, nine must come from food
- One agronomist's wheat is credited with saving a billion lives
- Prohibition begins in the United States
- Saffron is the world's most expensive spice - and it's all hand-picked
- The Day Legal Beer Came Back to America
- The first written record of Scotch whisky
- The Ice Cream Cone Mold Gets a Patent
- The legend dates Dom Pérignon's 'invention' of champagne
- The London Beer Flood drowned several people
- The Maillard reaction is the chemistry behind almost every "cooked" flavour
- The oldest known fermented drink was brewed in China around 7000 BCE
- The Peanut Is a Legume That Ripens Underground
- The potato, tomato and maize all crossed the Atlantic after 1492
- The Three Sisters Feed the Soil While They Grow
- The Tomato Was Publicly Proven Safe to Eat
- The World's First Cheese Factory
- The world's hottest pepper scores 2.69 million on the Scoville scale
- Three out of four leading food crops depend on pollinators
- Umami, the fifth basic taste, was pinned down in 1908 from a bowl of kelp broth
- Vanilla is the second-priciest spice because every flower is pollinated by hand
- Why a single gene variant makes alcohol flush hundreds of millions red
- Without vitamin C, the body literally can't hold itself together
- Worcestershire Sauce Was an Abandoned Mistake
- 'Miracle on Ice' at the Lake Placid Olympics
- "Soccer" is a British word, born from Oxford student slang
- A basketball's bounce returns only about 75% of its drop height
- A cricket ball swings because one side is polished and one is rough
- A daredevil walked a tightrope across Niagara Falls
- A French baron revived the Olympics after 1,500 years
- A knockout is your brain twisting inside your skull
- A perfect 147 break is snooker's flawless maximum
- A skydiver once broke the sound barrier with his own body
- A soccer ball's curve comes from a spinning air-pressure trick
- A stopwatch and a stripe reinvented basketball
- A Test match can last five days - and one in 1939 ran twelve
- Alex Honnold climbed 3,000 feet of El Capitan with no rope
- Ali shocked Foreman in the "Rumble in the Jungle"
- An 'over' in cricket is six balls - and the ball barely changed in 400 years
- An F1 car makes so much downforce it could, in theory, drive on the ceiling
- Aristides Wins the Inaugural Kentucky Derby
- At Le Mans, the winner is whoever drives furthest in 24 hours
- Athletes Raised Fists in Protest at the Mexico City Olympics
- BASE jumping is named after the four things you leap from
- Basketball was invented in 1891 with two peach baskets
- Billie Jean King won the 'Battle of the Sexes'
- Cal Ripken Jr. played 2,632 straight games
- Cassius Clay beats Sonny Liston for the heavyweight title
- Cricket has Laws, not rules - kept by one club at Lord's
- Cy Young's 511 Wins: Baseball's Most Unbreakable Record
- Dick Fosbury cleared the bar backwards and rewrote the high jump
- Don Bradman's Test average was 99.94 - a duck from 100
- Edwin Moses won 122 races in a row over nearly a decade
- F1 brakes glow over 1,000C and stop a car in seconds
- Football's offside rule is as old as the game's first written laws
- Gertrude Ederle Became the First Woman to Swim the English Channel
- Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's career home run record
- Jackie Robinson breaks baseball's color barrier
- Jahangir Khan went 555 matches without losing
- Joe DiMaggio hit safely in 56 straight games
- Kano Jigoro founded judo in 1882 from older jujitsu schools
- Mark Spitz won a then-record seven golds at Munich 1972
- Maurice Garin won the first Tour de France
- No two football pitches have to be the same size
- Nobody is sure why the chequered flag means "finish"
- Olympic gold medals are mostly silver
- Pankration was the ancient Olympics' near no-holds-barred sport
- Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile when many thought it impossible
- Secretariat Won the Triple Crown by 31 Lengths
- Sumo grew out of Shinto ritual - and still performs it
- Tennis counts 15, 30, 40 - and calls zero "love"
- Tennis went from wooden rackets to graphite in a single decade
- The 1867 Queensberry rules turned prizefighting into modern boxing
- The ancient Olympic Games ran for nearly twelve centuries
- The Ashes is a four-inch urn that has never been a trophy
- The Athens Summer Olympics Opened
- The basketball hoop has been 10 feet high since 1891 - by accident
- The Beijing Summer Olympics opened
- The biggest crowd ever at a football match packed the Maracana in 1950
- The fastest F1 pit stop changed four tyres in 1.80 seconds
- The fastest tennis serve ever clocked at 263 km/h
- The first basketball hoops had no hole in the bottom
- The first English Football League matches were played
- The First FIFA World Cup Match Was Played
- The first football World Cup was held in Uruguay in 1930
- The first Indianapolis 500 motor race is run
- The first intercollegiate football game was played
- The first Kentucky Derby is run, and Aristides gallops into history
- The first modern Olympic Games opened in Athens
- The first official international soccer match was played
- The first organized baseball match under the Knickerbocker rules
- The first organized indoor hockey game was played in Montreal
- The First Race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway
- The first Winter Olympic Games open in Chamonix
- The four Grand Slams are played on three different surfaces
- The javelin was redesigned because throwers got too good
- The largest wave ever surfed towered 86 feet at Nazare
- The Le Mans disaster killed more than 80 spectators
- The longest boxing match lasted 110 rounds over 7 hours
- The longest tennis match ran 11 hours over three days
- The Maracanazo silenced 200,000 fans - and changed Brazil's jersey
- The marathon is 42.195 km because of a royal viewing box
- The Modern Olympic Movement Was Founded in Paris
- The Munich Olympics Massacre Began
- The Olympic motto came from a priest's school sports day
- The Olympic rings hide the colours of every national flag
- The Olympic torch relay was invented for the 1936 Berlin Games
- The scoreboard couldn't show Nadia Comaneci's perfect 10
- The US announced a boycott of the Moscow Olympics
- The winner of the Indianapolis 500 celebrates by drinking milk
- The yellow tennis ball changed color for television
- Two climbers reached Everest's summit on lungs alone
- Usain Bolt's 9.58 seconds is the fastest 100m ever run
- Wembley Stadium opened with the chaotic 'White Horse' FA Cup Final
- What limits human sprint speed isn't muscle power - it's time
- Wilt Chamberlain once scored 100 points in a single NBA game
- Yankee Stadium Opened in New York
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