SortStack #93 — 2026-09-10

By year · Order from earliest to most recent.

1. Joan of Arc is burned at the stake in Rouen 1431

   She was about nineteen years old. A retrial cleared her name 25 years later, and she was made a saint nearly five centuries after her death.

2. Galileo points a telescope at the night sky for the first time 1609

   With a telescope magnifying about twenty times, he saw mountains on the Moon and four moons of Jupiter — direct evidence that not everything orbits Earth.

3. The Wright brothers achieve the first powered airplane flight 1903

   The first flight lasted twelve seconds and covered about 37 meters — shorter than the wingspan of a modern jumbo jet.

4. The Titanic strikes an iceberg and sinks on her maiden voyage 1912

   The lookouts had no binoculars — the key to the locker holding them left the ship with a reassigned officer in Southampton.

5. Humans walk on the Moon for the first time 1969

   The Apollo guidance computer had less processing power than a modern pocket calculator — and alarms from it nearly aborted the landing.

6. IBM's Deep Blue defeats world chess champion Garry Kasparov 1997

   Kasparov was reportedly unnerved by one inexplicable move — which some engineers later suggested may have been the result of a software bug.

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