John Wesley Hardin

Zimbabwean banknotes ranging from 10 dollars to 100 billion dollars printed within a one-year period. The magnitude of the currency scalars signifies the extent of the hyperinflation.

Recreation of Martin Luther King Jr. 's cell in Birmingham Jail at the National Civil Rights Museum

John Wesley Hardin

John Wesley Hardin shot a stranger through a hotel wall in Abilene, 1871, because the man's snoring kept him awake. He logged roughly forty kills before age twenty-five — more than Billy the Kid ever claimed.

Sutton Hoo helmet

Dug from a Suffolk garden in 1939, the Sutton Hoo helmet's iron face-mask — with its dragon-eyebrow crest — belonged to a king whose name no one can agree on.

Simmons Bedding Company

Simmons Bedding — maker of the Beautyrest mattress — was bought, loaded with debt, and sold seven times in a single generation of private equity deals, each time leaving workers with less and investors with more. The mattress never changed.

GoldenEye 007

Rare's 1997 Nintendo 64 cartridge shipped a four-player split-screen world that hadn't existed in any home console before it — the dam, the facility, the cradle — turning a Bond film into a geography that an entire generation memorized.

Mirin Dajo

Mirin Dajo let an assistant plunge a steel rapier clean through his torso in front of audiences — organs intact, no anesthetic. He died swallowing a steel needle, not a blade.

Large Hadron Collider

The LHC accelerates protons to 99.9999991% of light speed inside a 27 km ring cooled to −271°C — colder than deep space — to smash them into the Higgs boson's first confirmed appearance.

Siege of Lamitan

In 2000, Abu Sayyaf barricaded hostages inside Lamitan's Our Lady of the Mount Hospital, Basilan, using patients and captives as shields. Philippine soldiers held the perimeter for days while the gunmen held the wards.

Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe

At its worst, Zimbabwe's inflation hit 89.7 sextillion percent annually. Workers were paid twice a day so they could spend wages before lunch erased the value.

Letter from Birmingham Jail

Written in margins of smuggled newspaper and on scraps of paper, King's letter from Birmingham Jail on April 16, 1963 answered eight clergymen by name. It circulated in millions of copies within the year.