SortStack #2151 — 2032-04-29

By year · Order from earliest to most recent.

1. Mount Vesuvius erupts and buries the Roman city of Pompeii 79

   The famous 'bodies' of Pompeii are plaster casts: excavators poured plaster into hollows left in the ash where victims' bodies had decayed.

2. 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.

3. The American colonies declare independence from Britain 1776

   Most delegates didn't sign the Declaration until August. John Adams predicted Americans would forever celebrate the second of July.

4. 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.

5. Larry Page and Sergey Brin found Google 1998

   The company started in Susan Wojcicki's garage, and its name is a misspelling of 'googol' — the number one followed by a hundred zeros.

6. The World Health Organization declares COVID a global pandemic 2020

   Within weeks, roughly half of humanity was living under some form of lockdown — the largest coordinated shutdown of public life in history.

← All puzzles · Play today’s SortStack