Inspired by middle age beheading devices, the Guillotine became a common fixture in the wake of the French Revolution, severing the heads of thousands, including King Louis the 16th and Marie Antoinette.

Wilbur and Orville Wright had early interests in flight and using money from their bicycle shop, funded early explorations in gas-powered airplanes. In 1903, Wilbur took the first flight in a powered airplane, a major stepping stone in aviation history.

The Hoover Dam is a marvel of human engineering, employing more than 21,000 men to construct with innovative concrete cooling techniques that had never been tested before at such a scale.

The Luddites were a group of textile workers that took destructive action in response to the textile industry’s recent adoption of mechanical looms, a perceived threat to their artisan livelihoods.

The great firewall of China is the monitoring, regulation and censorship of the internet by the Chinese government. It blocks access to information like Google Search and favors the country’s own internet economy.

After graduating from Yale in 1792, Eli Whitney solved a common problem faced by plantation owners harvesting cotton with the Cotton Gin which quickly separated seeds from fibers.

Sputnik was launched on October 4th, 1957 signaling Soviet dominance in rocket technology and igniting fears of nuclear war. The space race intensified after a very public launch failure by the Americans before the US pulled ahead with Explorer 1, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and more.