SortStack #989 — 2029-02-22

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. Hannibal marches his army and war elephants across the Alps 218 BCE

   He set out with around 37 elephants; nearly all died in the crossing or soon after, yet he rampaged through Italy for fifteen years.

3. Vikings raid the island monastery of Lindisfarne, shocking Europe 793

   The raid is the conventional start of the Viking Age. The scholar Alcuin wrote that 'never before has such terror appeared in Britain.'

4. Humans fly for the first time aboard a Montgolfier hot-air balloon 1783

   The first balloon passengers, weeks earlier, were a sheep, a duck, and a rooster — sent up before King Louis XVI to test whether the air aloft was breathable.

5. 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.

6. Hijacked airliners destroy the Twin Towers in New York 2001

   The attacks grounded all civilian flights over the US for days — the first time in aviation history American skies were essentially emptied.

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