History: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 24

Related subjects

Browse this subject and connected topics.

Cards are connected by subject and reading mode. Continue below or open a related subject.

DriveReading mode

StillnessReading mode

WonderReading mode

Q1987

DriveBiography

Mary Jackson petitioned the City of Hampton to attend graduate courses held at a segregated white school, then became NASA's first Black woman engineer in 1958.

Jackson entered Langley's segregated West Area Computing unit in 1951, then moved into experiments in a supersonic pressure tunnel. Her training route required after-hours mathematics and physics classes in a school she was legally barred from attending without special approval. She went on to publish research on airflow and boundary layers at supersonic speeds. Later, she accepted a lower grade to manage equal-opportunity programmes, trading personal rank for the power to widen other people's routes upward.

Mary JacksonRead card

Q1992

WonderBiography

Maryam Mirzakhani won the 2014 Fields Medal for breakthroughs in the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces, becoming its first woman recipient.

A Riemann surface can be imagined as a flexible curved world, while its moduli space records the many forms such a world can take. Mirzakhani connected geometry, topology, probability and dynamical systems to count paths and reveal order in those spaces. She was known for working across large sheets of paper, drawing and revising until the problem became a landscape. The medal marked a historic first; the mathematics changed what others could see.

Maryam MirzakhaniRead card

Q1994

WonderBiography

Karen Uhlenbeck developed foundational methods in modern geometric analysis and gauge theory—work that made her the first woman to receive the Abel Prize in 2019.

Geometric equations can behave beautifully until energy concentrates and a sequence of smooth objects develops a singular point. Uhlenbeck's compactness and regularity ideas showed how to control that failure, preserving structure away from the places where a bubble forms. Those tools crossed between partial differential equations, geometry and mathematical physics. Her work did not remove every singularity; it made the moment of breakdown precise enough to become knowledge.

Karen UhlenbeckRead card

Q1995

DriveBiography

Fe del Mundo founded the Philippines' first paediatric hospital in 1957 and built programmes that carried child healthcare, training and disease prevention beyond its walls.

Del Mundo returned from postgraduate training in the United States as war reached the Philippines and cared for sick children in an internment camp. Frustrated by the limits of public institutions, she sold property to open the Children's Memorial Hospital in Quezon City, then linked specialist care with rural health workers and rehydration teams. She researched infectious disease, trained generations of clinicians and wrote a foundational Philippine paediatrics text. Her hospital was a building; her real design was a network of care.

Fe del MundoRead card

Q1996

DriveBiography

Jane C. Wright compared patients' responses with tests on their cultured tumour tissue, helping turn chemotherapy from a last gamble into a systematic field of cancer medicine.

At Harlem Hospital's Cancer Research Foundation, Wright and her father Louis grew samples of human tumours and exposed them to candidate drugs, then compared the laboratory response with what happened in the patient. She went on to investigate drug combinations, build a cross-referenced record of cancers and treatments, and develop catheter techniques for delivering potent agents to deep tumours. In a discipline still proving that medicines could treat cancer at all, she made response something to observe, compare and learn from.

Jane C. WrightRead card

Q1999

WonderBiography

Annie Jump Cannon classified more than 350,000 stellar spectra and refined the O-B-A-F-G-K-M sequence that became the enduring framework of spectral classification.

At Harvard College Observatory, women hired as 'computers' read glass plates while men commonly received the titles and telescopes. Cannon pared a tangled set of spectral classes into a clear sequence based on recurring features in starlight; later work showed that her order also runs from hotter stars towards cooler ones. Her speed was legendary, but the achievement was not mere sorting. By making hundreds of thousands of observations comparable, she turned an archive into an instrument for asking how stars differ and evolve.

Annie Jump CannonRead card

Q2001

WonderScience

In a cloud chamber, ions left by a charged particle seed droplets in supersaturated vapour, turning an invisible passage into a bright, photographable track.

Charles Wilson began by studying how clouds form. Rapid expansion cooled moist air in his chamber until its vapour was ready to condense; a charged particle supplied a thread of ions on which droplets gathered. Magnetic fields bent the particles' paths; the resulting curved tracks let physicists infer charge and momentum from geometry. Cloud-chamber photographs helped reveal cosmic-ray events and the positron. The instrument did not photograph the particle itself. It photographed the atmosphere's exquisitely brief reply.

Cloud chamberRead card

Q2006

WonderArt

Late nineteenth-century chronophotography recorded successive phases of movement in image sequences or on one plate, making animal and human locomotion available for measurement.

Eadweard Muybridge used rows of cameras to separate a horse's stride into instants; Étienne-Jules Marey developed methods that layered regular exposures from one viewpoint, turning motion into trace and interval. The images corrected assumptions hidden in paintings, opened new study of bodies and supplied early cinema with part of its visual grammar. Before film made pictures move, photography made movement pause long enough to think.

ChronophotographyRead card

Q2013

DriveHistory

In 1823, frontiersman Hugh Glass was mauled by a grizzly bear and abandoned by the two men assigned to bury him. Broken and feverish, he crawled and rafted some 200 miles to Fort Kiowa, living on roots, berries and whatever the prairie left him.

No account from Glass himself survives; the story reached print in 1825, retold by men of the frontier, so the finer details grew in the telling. What the records support is remarkable enough: a man given up for dead who set his own broken leg and travelled for around six weeks to safety. The strangest part, as the story goes, is the ending — when Glass finally faced the men who had left him, he let them live.

Hugh GlassRead card

Q2014

DriveHistory

In 1960–61, thirteen American women pilots passed the same physical screening tests as NASA's first astronauts, in a privately run programme that was cancelled before any of them could fly. Sixty years later, Wally Funk finally reached space at 82.

Dr Randolph Lovelace, who had designed NASA's astronaut medical exams, quietly ran the same tests on accomplished women pilots — and thirteen passed. The programme lost its facilities in 1961, and Congressional hearings the next year changed nothing. The name 'Mercury 13' came from a television producer decades on. When Wally Funk rode a rocket past the edge of space in July 2021, she carried six decades of waiting with her.

Mercury 13Read card

Q2017

DriveArt

Bill Traylor was born into slavery in Alabama around 1853. In 1939, in his mid-eighties and living rough in Montgomery, he picked up a pencil — and in roughly three years produced more than a thousand drawings on scavenged cardboard.

He worked on a sidewalk by day, drawing sharp-edged mules, dogs, dancing figures and memories from plantation life, and slept in the back room of a funeral parlour. A young artist bought him poster paints and saved hundreds of the drawings. Traylor died in 1949, almost unknown. In 2018 the Smithsonian gave him a landmark retrospective — billed as its first for an artist born into slavery.

Bill TraylorRead card

Q2018

DriveHistory

Julia Child could barely cook when she married at 34. She enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris at 37, and after one publisher rejected her manuscript, 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking' appeared in 1961 — when she was 49.

The book was written with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle over nearly a decade. Houghton Mifflin turned it down, reasoning that Americans wanted something quick from a mix; Knopf took the risk. Child was 51 when her television programme began, waving knives and dropping food with cheerful honesty. The lesson she embodied was simple: appetite for learning matters more than an early start.

Julia ChildRead card

Q2019

DriveLiterature

Laura Ingalls Wilder published her first book, 'Little House in the Big Woods', in 1932 at the age of 65 — then spent her late sixties and seventies writing the pioneer childhood series that made her one of the century's best-loved authors.

She was no complete beginner — for years she had written a farm column for a Missouri paper — but the books were something new: her frontier childhood of the 1870s and 80s, recalled in her sixties with a clear, warm plainness. Readers sometimes assume a life's defining work must announce itself early. Wilder's waited until most people's careers are ending, and then outlived them all.

Laura Ingalls WilderRead card

Q2024

DriveHistory

After the credit association he chaired collapsed in 1957 and left him nearly penniless, Momofuku Ando spent a year experimenting in a backyard shed in Osaka. In 1958, at 48, he launched the world's first instant ramen.

The breakthrough came from watching his wife fry tempura: flash-frying noodles in hot oil dried them into a block that boiling water could revive in minutes. Chicken Ramen launched on 25 August 1958. Ando wasn't finished — at 61 he invented Cup Noodles after watching Americans break his noodles into paper cups. He worked into his nineties, and Japan has repeatedly voted instant ramen its proudest invention of the twentieth century.

Momofuku AndoRead card

Q2025

DriveHealth

Japanese adventurer Yuichiro Miura summited Everest at 70, at 75, and — after four heart operations, the last just months earlier — once more on 23 May 2013, aged 80 years and 223 days: the oldest person ever to stand on the summit.

Miura had been famous half a century earlier for skiing down Everest's South Col with a parachute for a brake. The 2013 climb was no tidy triumph: he was treated for heart arrhythmia that January, and after the summit he was too spent to walk all the way down, descending the final stage by helicopter — a detail he never hid. He kept a promise made to himself at 65, when he decided old age needed a project.

Yuichiro MiuraRead card

Q2026

DriveHealth

Fauja Singh, a farmer who had never raced, began running marathons at around 89 after losing his wife and son. In 2011, at a reported 100, he completed the Toronto Waterfront Marathon — celebrated worldwide as the first centenarian marathoner.

His age was never officially certified — colonial Punjab kept no birth records, so Guinness could not ratify the runs, and 'reported age' is the honest phrase. What is beyond doubt is the transformation: a grieving man in his late eighties who turned sorrow into training runs through London's Ilford, completed multiple marathons past 90, and became a global emblem of late-life vigour. He died in 2025, reportedly 114, still walking miles each day.

Fauja SinghRead card

Q2027

DriveHistory

Kathrine Switzer entered the 1967 Boston Marathon as 'K.V. Switzer' and ran with bib 261. Two miles in, a race official grabbed her, shouting at her to get out; her boyfriend shoulder-blocked him, and she finished the race.

She was the first woman to run Boston with an official number — Bobbi Gibb had run unregistered the year before — and the photographs of official Jock Semple lunging at her became one of sport's defining images. Women were not formally admitted until 1972. Fifty years after that first run, in 2017 and aged 70, Switzer ran Boston again wearing 261, and the organisers retired the number in her honour.

Kathrine SwitzerRead card

Q2028

DriveHistory

Barbara Hillary, a New York nurse who had survived cancer twice, skied the final stretch to the North Pole in 2007 at 75 — and reached the South Pole in 2011 at 79, the first African-American woman on record to stand at both.

Lung cancer surgery in her sixties had cost her about a quarter of her breathing capacity; she took up dog-sledding and photographing polar bears anyway, then decided the poles themselves were the point. She fundraised for years to afford the trips, trained with a personal trainer, and later toured as a speaker telling audiences — especially older women — that the question 'why not?' has fewer good answers than they think. She died in 2019 at 88.

Barbara HillaryRead card

Q2031

DriveHealth

In 1960, in her first month at the US drug agency, Frances Oldham Kelsey was handed a routine approval for a sedative called thalidomide. She found the safety data thin and refused — repeatedly, for over a year, under heavy company pressure.

In late 1961 the evidence arrived from Europe: thalidomide, sold there as a sleeping aid and for morning sickness, was causing severe birth defects. Kelsey's stubbornness had largely spared the United States a catastrophe, though trial samples had circulated. President Kennedy honoured her in 1962, the year Congress toughened drug-approval law. Her lesson holds far beyond medicine: sometimes the bravest available action is a patient, well-documented no.

Frances Oldham KelseyRead card

Q2034

DriveHistory

Ernest Shackleton's Endurance was crushed by pack ice and sank in 1915. After months camped on drifting floes and an 800-mile open-boat crossing to fetch help, every one of the 28 men survived. In 2022, the wreck was found — almost intact.

The escape remains a masterclass in leadership: ice camps through the polar winter, three lifeboats to Elephant Island, then Shackleton's crossing to South Georgia in the tiny James Caird and a mountain traverse to reach a whaling station; the last men were rescued in August 1916. On 5 March 2022 — a century, to the day, after Shackleton's burial — a search team found Endurance 3,008 metres down in the Weddell Sea, upright and preserved, her name still bright across the stern.

Endurance expeditionRead card

Q2036

DriveHistory

Shut out of whites-only sports facilities in segregated Georgia, Alice Coachman trained barefoot on dirt roads, jumping over knotted ropes on sticks. At London 1948 she cleared the high-jump bar on her first attempt — the first Black woman to win Olympic gold.

Her winning leap of 1.68 metres set an Olympic record, and King George VI presented the medal. She was the only American woman to take a track-and-field gold at those Games. Historians note the sharper point: her peak years had been lost to the war — the 1940 and 1944 Olympics were cancelled — so the barefoot girl from Albany won her gold at the far end of a decade of waiting.

Alice CoachmanRead card

Q2037

StillnessHistory

Before artificial light, much of Europe slept in two shifts: a 'first sleep' from nightfall, an hour or so of quiet wakefulness, then a 'second sleep' until dawn. The pattern appears in court records, prayer books and letters across languages.

Historian Roger Ekirch pieced the habit together from thousands of references — people used the waking interval to pray, talk, mend, or simply lie thinking in the dark. The rhythm faded in the nineteenth century as gaslight and industrial timetables compressed the night. Evidence suggests it ruled pre-industrial Europe rather than all humanity, so it is best read not as a prescription, but as a reminder: the eight-hour block is a recent invention, and a 3am waking was once nothing to fear.

Segmented sleepRead card

Q2038

StillnessLanguage

The English word 'noon' comes from the Latin 'nona hora' — the ninth hour of daylight, around 3pm — one of the fixed hours when monastic communities paused to pray. Over the medieval centuries, the word slid back to midday.

Before mechanical clocks, the day was sliced by bells: the canonical hours of prayer gave whole communities their shared timetable. Why 'nones' crept from mid-afternoon to midday is uncertain — historians point to shifting meal and fasting times, and to daylight hours that stretched and shrank with the seasons. Dutch made the same journey with its 'noen'. Inside one small word sits a lost world where time was something you heard, not something you checked.

Word historyRead card

Q2044

StillnessHistory

The medieval pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela had nearly died out: in 1985, the cathedral recorded about 690 arrivals on foot or bicycle. Four decades later, more than half a million pilgrims complete the Camino in a single year.

The numbers count 'compostelas' — certificates issued to those who complete the final stretch — so the true crowd is larger still. The revival began quietly: a village priest waymarking routes with yellow arrows in the 1980s, then European cultural recognition in 1987. Most modern walkers are not conventionally religious; they come for the oldest reasons anyway — to think, to grieve, to decide something, or simply to move at the speed a human life actually runs.

Camino de SantiagoRead card