Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderHistory fact

On Christmas Eve 1971, seventeen-year-old Juliane Koepcke fell about three kilometres into the Peruvian rainforest, still strapped to her seat, after lightning struck her airliner and it broke apart. She survived the fall and spent eleven days making her way through the jungle to find help.

Peru, 24 December 1971

HistoryBiography

The story behind the card

She was the only survivor of the 92 people aboard LANSA Flight 508. As many as 14 others lived through the fall but died before help came, among them her mother, the ornithologist Maria Koepcke. Juliane had a broken collarbone, a deep cut on her arm, a torn knee ligament and concussion. Her parents ran a research station in the rainforest, and she remembered her father's advice: follow water downstream, because rivers lead to people. She waded and floated along streams for eleven days until she reached a shelter used by forest workers, who took her by canoe to safety. Werner Herzog, whose own booking on that flight had been cancelled, later made the documentary Wings of Hope with her. She went on to become a biologist.

Türkçe oku
On yedi yaşındaki Juliane Koepcke, 24 Aralık 1971'de bindiği uçak Peru üzerinde yıldırım çarpıp havada parçalanınca, koltuğuna bağlı hâlde yaklaşık üç kilometre yükseklikten yağmur ormanına düştü. Düşüşten sağ kurtuldu ve yardım bulana kadar on bir gün boyunca ormanda yol aldı.
Peru, 24 Aralık 1971

LANSA'nın 508 sefer sayılı uçuşundaki 92 kişiden sağ kalan tek kişi oydu. Düşüşten sağ çıkan 14 kadar kişi daha vardı, ama yardım gelmeden öldüler; aralarında annesi, kuş bilimci Maria Koepcke de vardı. Juliane'nin köprücük kemiği kırılmış, kolu derin biçimde kesilmiş, dizindeki bir bağ kopmuş ve beyin sarsıntısı geçirmişti. Anne babası yağmur ormanında bir araştırma istasyonu işletiyordu ve babasının öğüdünü hatırladı: Suyu akış yönünde izle, çünkü akarsular insanlara götürür. On bir gün boyunca derelerde yürüyüp yüzerek ilerledi ve sonunda orman işçilerinin kullandığı bir barınağa ulaştı. İşçiler onu kanoyla güvenli bir yere götürdü. Werner Herzog'un da o uçakta yeri vardı, ama rezervasyonu son anda iptal edilmişti; Herzog yıllar sonra onunla birlikte Wings of Hope (Umudun Kanatları) belgeselini çekti. Juliane Koepcke daha sonra biyolog oldu.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Juliane Koepcke
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderHistory

Violet Jessop was aboard the Olympic when it collided with a warship in 1911, the Titanic when it sank in 1912 and the Britannic when it sank in 1916. She survived all three sister ships' disasters and kept working at sea for decades.

Jessop was born in Argentina in 1887 to Irish parents and went to sea as a stewardess in her early twenties. She was working on the Olympic in September 1911 when the cruiser HMS Hawke struck it; no one died. On the Titanic in April 1912 she was ordered into lifeboat 16, and an officer handed her a baby to look after. During the First World War she served as a nurse on the hospital ship Britannic, which hit a German mine in the Aegean Sea in November 1916. Her lifeboat was pulled towards the ship's still-turning propellers, and she jumped into the water and suffered a head injury. She went back to work on liners after the war and retired in 1950 to Great Ashfield in Suffolk.

Violet JessopRead card
WonderHistory

Poon Lim, a Chinese steward, survived 133 days alone on a raft in the South Atlantic. A German submarine had sunk his British cargo ship, the Benlomond, in November 1942; Brazilian fishermen rescued him in April 1943.

The Benlomond sank within about two minutes, and Lim was its only survivor. After some two hours in the water he climbed onto an empty 2.4-metre wooden raft stocked with food, water and a torch. When the supplies ran out after around two months, he made a fish hook from the torch's spring and a line from unravelled rope, caught fish and seabirds, and collected rain in the canvas cover of his life jacket. Passing ships and a US Navy patrol plane saw him but did not rescue him. He drifted about 1,200 kilometres west and was found 16 kilometres off the Brazilian coast, 9 kilograms lighter. King George VI awarded him the British Empire Medal, and the Royal Navy added his methods to its survival manuals.

Maritime historyRead card
DriveMusic

Sister Rosetta Tharpe, an American gospel singer and guitarist, was playing loud, virtuosic electric guitar in the 1940s, before rock and roll had a name. Her playing and showmanship inspired the first rock and roll musicians.

Tharpe grew up singing in a Pentecostal church with her mother and, from 1938, took gospel into nightclubs and onto records, which shocked some churchgoers. Her song 'Strange Things Happening Every Day', recorded in 1944, reached number two on Billboard's chart for Black music in 1945 and is often named as an early rock and roll record. In 1947 she heard a 14-year-old Little Richard singing in Macon, Georgia, and invited him to open her show, his first paid performance. Johnny Cash called her his favourite singer as a boy. In May 1964 she played in the rain on a disused railway platform in Manchester for British television. She joined the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.

Sister Rosetta TharpeRead card
DriveTrade

The Medici Bank, founded in Florence in 1397, became one of the most powerful banks in fifteenth-century Europe, and its profits paid for the Medici family's political power and its patronage of artists such as Donatello and Botticelli.

Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici founded the bank, and much of its profit came from handling the finances of the popes. The Church banned charging interest, so the bank earned money through bills of exchange: a merchant paid in one city and was repaid in another currency elsewhere, and the exchange rate hid the bank's fee. Under Giovanni's son Cosimo it had branches in cities including Rome, Venice, Milan, Geneva, Avignon, Bruges and London. Later managers lent heavily to rulers who could not repay, such as Edward IV of England and Charles the Bold of Burgundy, and branches closed one by one. The bank finally collapsed in 1494, the year the Medici were driven out of Florence.

Medici BankRead card
WonderScience

In 1956 the physicist Chien-Shiung Wu showed that some nuclear processes do not behave the same way as their mirror image. Her experiment with radioactive cobalt-60 overturned 'parity conservation', a rule physicists had long taken for granted.

Physicists had long assumed that the laws of nature work the same way in a mirror image, a principle called parity conservation. In 1956 the theorists Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang pointed out that nobody had tested this for the weak nuclear force, which drives beta decay, a kind of radioactivity in which a nucleus gives off an electron. Wu, a leading expert on beta decay at Columbia University, cooled cobalt-60 to near absolute zero at the National Bureau of Standards and lined up its nuclei with a magnetic field. The electrons came out mostly in one direction, so the mirror version of the experiment would give a different result. Lee and Yang won the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics; Wu was left out, although she received the first Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978.

Chien-Shiung WuRead card
Next card in the archiveIn 1972 the Yugoslav flight attendant Vesna Vulović survived a fall of 10,160 metres without a parachute, after a bomb blew her airliner apart over Czechoslovakia. She was trapped in a piece of the fuselage that came down on a snowy slope. Guinness World Records lists it as the highest fall ever survived without a parachute.Read next →