SortStack #219 — 2027-01-14

By year · Order from earliest to most recent.

1. Qin Shi Huang unifies China and declares himself its first emperor 221 BCE

   He standardized writing, currency, and axle widths — and was buried with an estimated 8,000 life-sized terracotta soldiers, no two faces alike.

2. The Second World War ends with the surrender of Japan 1945

   The same year saw the first atomic bombs, the founding of the United Nations, and the deaths of Roosevelt, Hitler, and Mussolini within three weeks of each other.

3. Disneyland opens its gates in Anaheim, California 1955

   Opening day was a fiasco insiders called 'Black Sunday': heat melted the fresh asphalt, fountains failed, and thousands entered with counterfeit tickets.

4. Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human in space 1961

   His single orbit lasted 108 minutes, and he parachuted to the ground separately from his capsule — landing in a field where a farmer and her granddaughter stared in disbelief.

5. Christiaan Barnard performs the first human heart transplant in Cape Town 1967

   The first patient lived eighteen days. Barnard's second transplant patient lived more than eighteen months, proving the operation could work.

6. SpaceX launches its Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time 2018

   The test payload was Elon Musk's own red Tesla Roadster, with a spacesuited mannequin named Starman at the wheel — it is still orbiting the Sun.

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