Francis Harry Compton Crick OM FRS (8 June 1916 – 28 July 2004) was an English molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist. He, James Watson, Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins played crucial roles in deciphering the helical structure of the DNA molecule. Crick and Watson’s paper in Nature in 1953 laid the groundwork for understanding…
Legoland Billund Resort (also known as Legoland Denmark), the original Legoland park, opened on 7 June 1968 in Billund, Denmark. The park is located next to the original Lego factory and Billund Airport, Denmark’s second-busiest airport. Over 1.9 million guests visited the park in 2011, and 50 million guests have visited the park since…
The Orient Express was a long-distance passenger luxury train service created in 1883 by the Belgian company Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits (CIWL) that operated until 2009. The train travelled the length of continental Europe, with terminal stations in Paris in the northwest and Istanbul in the southeast, and branches extending service to Athens, Brussels,…
As a publicity stunt, the express train called the Transcontinental Express arrived in San Francisco, California, via the first transcontinental railroad on 4 June 1876, only 83 hours and 39 minutes after having left New York City. The feat was reported widely in U.S. newspapers. We celebrate this feat of engineering with an AI…
Edward Higgins White II (November 14, 1930 – January 27, 1967) was an American aeronautical engineer, United States Air Force officer, test pilot, and NASA astronaut. He was a member of the crews of Gemini 4 and Apollo 1. White was selected as one of the second group of astronauts, the so-called “Next Nine”,…
Anthony Montgomery (born June 2, 1971) is an American actor and graphic novelist. He is best known for his portrayal of Ensign Travis Mayweather on the UPN science fiction television series Star Trek: Enterprise (the fifth live-action series in the Star Trek franchise). Montgomery played Andre Maddox on the ABC daytime soap opera General…
Marilyn Monroe (born Norma Jeane Mortenson; June 1, 1926 – August 4, 1962) was an American actress and model. Known for playing comic “blonde bombshell” characters, she became one of the most popular sex symbols of the 1950s and early 1960s, as well as an emblem of the era’s sexual revolution. She was a…
Clinton Eastwood Jr. (born May 31, 1930) is an American actor and film director. After achieving success in the Western TV series Rawhide, Eastwood rose to international fame with his role as the “Man with No Name” in Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy of spaghetti Westerns during the mid-1960s and as antihero cop Harry Callahan…
Sir Edmund Hillary (20 July 1919 – 11 January 2008) was a New Zealand mountaineer, explorer, and philanthropist. On 29 May 1953, Hillary and Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers confirmed to have reached the summit of Mount Everest. They were part of the ninth British expedition to Everest, led by John…
Sally Ride (May 26, 1951 – July 23, 2012) was an American astronaut and physicist. Born in Los Angeles, she joined NASA in 1978, and in 1983 became the first American woman and the third woman to fly in space, after cosmonauts Valentina Tereshkova in 1963 and Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982. She was the…
Sir Ian McKellen (born 25 May 1939) is an English actor. He has played roles on the screen and stage in genres ranging from Shakespearean dramas and modern theatre to popular fantasy and science fiction. He is regarded as a British cultural icon and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1991. He has…
Otto Lilienthal (23 May 1848 – 10 August 1896) was a German pioneer of aviation who became known as the “flying man”. He was the first person to make well-documented, repeated, successful flights with gliders, therefore making the idea of heavier-than-air aircraft a reality. Newspapers and magazines published photographs of Lilienthal gliding, favourably influencing…
The Winchester Repeating Arms Company was a prominent American manufacturer of repeating firearms and ammunition. The firm was established in 1866 by Oliver Winchester and was in New Haven, Connecticut. The firm went into receivership in 1931 and was bought by the Western Cartridge Company, a forerunner of the Olin Corporation. The Winchester brand…
The Manchester Ship Canal is a 36-mile-long (58 km) inland waterway in the Northwest of England linking Manchester to the Irish Sea. Starting at the Mersey Estuary at Eastham, near Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, it generally follows the original routes of the rivers Mersey and Irwell through the historic counties of Cheshire and Lancashire. Several…
John Billingsley (born May 20, 1960) is an American actor best known for his role as Doctor Phlox on the television series Star Trek: Enterprise. He was cast as Professor Miles Ballard in the short-lived television series The Others; then as the Denobulan Doctor Phlox in the fifth live-action Star Trek series, Star Trek:…
Anthony Chapman (19 May 1928 – 16 December 1982) was an English design engineer, inventor, and builder in the automotive industry, and founder of the sports car company Lotus Cars. Chapman founded Lotus in 1952 and initially ran Lotus in his spare time, assisted by a group of enthusiasts. His knowledge of the latest…
Wilhelm Hofmeister (18 May 1824 – 12 January 1877) was a German biologist and botanist. He “stands as one of the true giants in the history of biology and belongs in the same pantheon as Darwin and Mendel. Largely self-taught he was the first to study and establish alternation of generations and the details…
Udo Lindenberg (born 17th May 1946) started his musical career as a drummer. In 1969, he founded his first band Free Orbit and appeared as a studio and guest musician (with Michael Naura, Knut Kiesewetter). In 1970, he collaborated as a drummer with jazz saxophonist Klaus Doldinger in Munich. In 1971 Passport, a band…
The Hubble Space Telescope’s (HST) Servicing Mission 4 (SM4), flown by the Shuttle Atlantis in May 2009, was the last scheduled shuttle mission for HST (launched 11th of May 2009, STS-125). SM4 installed the replacement data-handling unit, repaired the ACS and STIS systems, installed improved nickel hydrogen batteries, and replaced other components including all…
Howard Carter (9 May 1874 – 2 March 1939) was a British archaeologist and Egyptologist who discovered the intact tomb of the 18th Dynasty Pharaoh Tutankhamun in November 1922, the best-preserved pharaonic tomb ever found in the Valley of the Kings. In 1914, Lord Carnarvon received the concession to dig in the Valley of…
Sir David Attenborough (born 8 May 1926) is a British broadcaster, biologist, natural historian, and writer. He is best known for writing and presenting, in conjunction with the BBC Studios Natural History Unit, the nine nature documentary series forming the Life collection, a comprehensive survey of animal and plant life on Earth. Attenborough was…
Edwin Herbert Land, (May 7, 1909 – March 1, 1991) was an American scientist and inventor, best known as the co-founder of the Polaroid Corporation. He invented inexpensive filters for polarizing light, a practical system of in-camera instant photography, and the retinex theory of color vision, among other things. His Polaroid instant camera went…
The history of the Eurostar brand can be traced to the choice in 1986 of a rail tunnel to provide a cross-channel link between Britain and France. A previous attempt to construct a tunnel between the two nations had begun in 1974 but was quickly aborted. Construction began afresh in 1988. Eurotunnel was created…
Audrey Hepburn (4th of May 1929 – 20th of January 1993) was a British actress. Recognised as a film and fashion icon, she was ranked by the American Film Institute as the third-greatest female screen legend from the Classical Hollywood cinema and was inducted into the International Best Dressed Hall of Fame List. Born…
Ken Tyrrell (3 May 1924 – 25 August 2001) was a British Formula Two racing driver and the founder of the Tyrrell Formula One constructor. Realising, however, that he was not going to reach the top and recognising that his talents were better suited to team management, Tyrrell stood down as a driver in…
Sir Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (born 6 May 1953) is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007. He was Leader of the Opposition from 1994 to 1997 and held various shadow cabinet posts from 1987…
Dodge is an American brand of automobiles and a division of Stellantis North America, based in Auburn Hills, Michigan. Dodge vehicles have historically included performance cars, and for much of its existence Dodge was Chrysler’s mid-priced brand above Plymouth. Founded as the Dodge Brothers Company machine shop by brothers Horace Elgin Dodge and John…