Walls of Constantinople

The eight "Chicago Black Sox"

Temperature map of the cosmic microwave background measured by the Planck spacecraft

01The pigeons roosting inside the horn antenna were trapped and relocated twice before the engineers accepted the hiss was cosmic.
02Penzias and Wilson won the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics — accidentally, while testing satellite communication equipment.
03Princeton cosmologist Robert Dicke had been building a detector specifically to find this radiation; Penzias called him first, and Dicke told his team: 'We've been scooped.'

Constantinople's triple Theodosian walls — outer wall, inner wall, and a 20-metre moat — held every attacker from 413 CE until Ottoman cannon breached them on a single night in May 1453.