SortStack #688 — 2028-04-27

By year · Order from earliest to most recent.

1. The Parthenon is completed atop the Acropolis in Athens 432 BCE

   It contains almost no perfectly straight lines: the columns bulge and the base curves slightly upward, optical tricks that make it look flawless.

2. Magellan's expedition sets sail to circle the globe 1519

   Five ships and about 270 men left Spain; one ship and 18 men returned three years later. Magellan himself was killed in the Philippines along the way.

3. An armistice ends the fighting of the First World War 1918

   It took effect at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The last soldier killed, Henry Gunther, died one minute before it began.

4. Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay become the first to summit Everest 1953

   News of the climb reached London on the morning of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation — billed by the press as a double celebration.

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. Lehman Brothers collapses, deepening the global financial crisis 2008

   With over $600 billion in assets, it remains the largest bankruptcy filing in American history.

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