SortStack #1297 — 2029-12-27

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. Isaac Newton publishes the Principia, laying out his laws of motion 1687

   The Royal Society couldn't afford to print it — it had blown its budget on a lavish history of fish — so astronomer Edmond Halley paid out of his own pocket.

3. Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone 1876

   Bell's lawyer filed at the patent office mere hours before rival Elisha Gray filed a notice for a similar device — one of history's closest patent races.

4. Reactor four explodes at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant 1986

   The Soviet Union stayed silent until radiation set off alarms at a Swedish plant over 1,000 km away — workers' shoes triggered the detectors.

5. Dolly the sheep becomes the first cloned mammal 1996

   She was cloned from a mammary gland cell, so the scientists named her after Dolly Parton.

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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