Just before midnight on March 12, 1928, a sound like thunder ripped through San Francisquito Canyon in California. Residents, jolted from their sleep, thought it was an earthquake.

On the morning of August 7, 1974, crowds in lower Manhattan looked up and saw what seemed impossible: a man walking on a thin steel cable stretched between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, a quarter mile above the ground.

Every year on March 14, math enthusiasts around the globe celebrate Pi Day. The date, written as 3/14 in the American format, reflects the first three digits of π, the mathematical constant representing the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.

Around 30,000 land mines were laid across the Falkland Islands by Argentine forces during their 1982 invasion. While intended to stop British troops, the fenced-off areas instead became accidental sanctuaries for penguins and native plants, untouched by humans.

Dr. Samuel Mudd, sentenced to life for aiding Lincoln’s assassin, would face a yellow fever epidemic in 1867 that turned a Union military prison into a scene of desperation.

On September 2, 2016, 71-year-old Lawrence John Ripple walked into the Bank of Labor in Kansas City, Kansas. Carrying no weapon, he handed a teller a note that read, “I have a gun, give me money.”

In the fall of 1872, a virus swept through North America—not among people, but horses. First identified outside Toronto in September, the disease spread rapidly across Canada and into the United States.

On the morning of May 26, 2013, Harrison Okene, a 29-year-old cook on the Jascon-4 tugboat, was using the bathroom when a massive wave struck the vessel off the Nigerian coast.

In 1993, inside a quiet gym in Orange County, California, 71-year-old retired podiatrist Tom Amberry made 2,750 consecutive free throws.

In 1996, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured an image that stunned astronomers: a vibrant, hourglass-shaped nebula, pierced with arcs and swirls, unlike anything seen before.