In January 897, Pope Stephen VI ordered the body of his predecessor, Pope Formosus, to be exhumed from its tomb. Formosus, dead for several months, was brought to the papal court in Rome, dressed in papal robes, and placed on a throne.

In 1982, Atari rushed to release a game adaptation of Steven Spielberg’s hit film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Developer Howard Scott Warshaw was given only five weeks to create the game, an unusually tight deadline for a project of its size.

Born in 1611 in Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland), Johannes Hevelius began his career as a brewer but soon turned his passion to astronomy. He built his own observatory in his home and started his work on mapping the lunar surface, becoming one of the earliest to do so with great precision.

On June 4, 2013, a strange “blob” appeared on Huntsville, Alabama’s weather radar. What seemed like a rogue thunderstorm was actually radar chaff from a military test at nearby Redstone Arsenal. This chaff, used to confuse radar, was the invention of Joan Curran, a physicist who developed the technology during World War II.

In 1868, London installed the world’s first traffic light near Parliament, a 20-foot contraption with semaphore arms and gas lamps to manage congestion. Designed by John Peake Knight, a railway manager, the signal aimed to protect pedestrians and regulate carriage traffic.

On January 19, 1919, Lt. Harry Mead’s platoon faced extreme cold and a deadly enemy near Ust Padenga, Russia. At 45 degrees below zero, his 47-man platoon was surrounded by Bolshevik forces. After a fierce battle, only seven soldiers survived; 25 were killed, and 15 were injured.

Anaxagoras, born around 500 BCE in Clazomenae, Ionia, moved to Athens, where he introduced new ideas about the cosmos. He proposed that the Sun was not a deity but a fiery, hot rock, much larger than the Peloponnese, and that the Moon reflected the Sun’s light.

In May 1876, France’s first indoor ice rink opened in Paris, drawing throngs of wealthy spectators eager to see ice in summer. Within minutes, crowds swarmed the building, scaling scaffolding and leaping through windows to enter. The chaos caused injuries and fainting, all for a glimpse of the ice.

In February 1862, two Confederate agents, Henry Myers and Thomas Tunstall, arrived in Tangier, Morocco. U.S. Consul James DeLong, a staunch abolitionist, swiftly moved to arrest them, enlisting Moroccan soldiers and locking the men in chains within the American Legation.

In January 1945, as the Soviet Union advanced on Germany’s eastern front, thousands of German civilians fled to the port city of Gotenhafen, seeking escape from the Red Army. The ocean liner Wilhelm Gustloff, overcrowded with over 10,000 passengers—far beyond its intended capacity—became a symbol of hope in the chaos.