Quick note — I’m launching Next Question by Life Story Magic tomorrow! (If you’re taking notes, I’d hoped to do it today but ran into an issue. It happens!)

If you’d like to try it out, sign up here.

See you there — and here — tomorrow!

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One thing led to another

This is a newsletter about how you can spend your entire life devoted to something really great — and never come to learn the positive results of what you’ve done.

On the one hand, that’s kind of sad, right? Never knowing how it mattered?

But on the other hand — I find it inspirational.

With that, meet Daniel Davis.

Well, meet him via history, since he’s been dead almost a century and a half.

Daniel Davis

Born in 1813 in Princeton, Massachusetts, Davis was a manufacturer of electrical apparatus in Boston.

He was known in his day as a self-taught craftsman with great understanding, and worked as a consultant for Samuel Morse on the telegraph and Elias Howe on the sewing machine.

In 1842, he published a catalog with the wonderfully 19th-century title:

Davis’s Manual of Magnetism, Including Also Electro-Magnetism, Magneto-Electricity, and Thermo-Electricity, With a Description of the Electrotype Process

It included descriptions of all of the things he was building and selling out of his electrical products lab at the time, but with the breadth of the era’s understanding of electricity and magnetism interspersed.

The book quite influential, and if you’d been alive back then and into electricity, you probably would have bought a copy — 75 cents, maybe the equivalent of $25 today.

Davis retired six years later, in 1848 — age 35! — and apparently moved back out to the country and spent the rest of his life farming. When he died in 1887, he was obscure enough that his obituary in Scientific American noted he’d died “comparatively unknown.”

Thomas Watson

Here’s the twist. About six years after Davis retired, Thomas Watson was born in Salem, Massachusetts.

If you don’t know who Thomas Watson is yet, I love how this is going to turn out.

Thomas’s family was poor enough that he had to drop out of school at age 13 and find work.

“I realize now what a lucky boy I was,” Watson later said, “although I didn’t think so at that time.”

He tried a number of trades — bookkeeper, carpenter — but he eventually found a job in 1872 as an apprentice in a machine shop owned by a man named Charles Williams for $5 a week.

“There was no specializing in these shops at that time,” he explained years later. “Each workman built everything there was in the shop to build, and an apprentice also had a great variety of jobs, which kept him interested all the time, for his tools were poor and simple and it required lots of thought to get a job done right.”

Charles Williams

A great perk of working for Charles Williams was that he kept copies of most of the books on electricity published at the time in his showcase, and his young workers would read them at lunch.

Once more from Watson’s later account (and you might guess that Watson is in fact an important person in history, since people wanted to hear his life story during his life and we still have access to it):

“The book that interested me most was Davis’ Manual of Magnetism, published in 1847, a copy of which I made mine for 25 cents.

If you want to get a good idea of the state of the electrical art at that time, you should read that book.

I found it very stimulating and that same old copy in all the dignity of its dilapidation has a place of honor on my book shelves to-day.”

OK, let’s solve the puzzle. “To-day,” when Watson wrote and delivered this account, was October 17, 1913, as he addressed the Third Annual Convention of the Telephone Pioneers of America in Chicago.

And Thomas Watson was Watson, as in Alexander Graham Bell’s famous “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you” — the first words ever spoken over an experimental telephone.

Mighty Lucky

Watson was seven years younger than Bell. The two met in the winter of 1874, when Bell came into Williams’s shop to have Watson fix a part for a prototype of what he thought might be his greatest invention: a “harmonic telegraph” that would allow multiple Morse code signals to be sent over the same telegraph line at the same time.

“All this was, as I have said, theoretical,” Watson wrote, “and it was mighty lucky for Graham Bell that it was, for had his harmonic telegraph been a well behaved apparatus that always did what its parent wanted it to do, the speaking telephone might never have emerged …”

Watson became Bell’s right-hand man on the harmonic telegraph, which was also how he happened to be the skilled craftsman at the ready when Bell decided to pivot, and try to send voice over wire.

The idea behind the harmonic telegraph was that each Morse operator’s transmitter would hum at its own pitch, and the receiver on the other end would have a steel spring tuned to that same pitch, so it would respond only to its own signal — no matter what other noise was also coming down the line.

The telephone grew out of a happy accident with those instruments.

On June 2, 1875, a spring on one of Watson’s transmitters got stuck, and when he plucked it, Bell heard the twang on a receiver in the next room.

Bell realized the vibrating spring was creating an electric current that rose and fell exactly the way the sound did — which meant a current could carry not just one pitch, but any sound at all, including a human voice.

Three hours on the phone

I think we all learn in school about the first brief phone call: March 10, 1876, when Bell, in one room of their Boston lab, said, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you,” and Watson heard him in another.

But it was Oct. 9, 1876 — 150 years ago this week — that they had the first actual real-world phone call, talking between Boston and Cambridgeport — across the Charles River — using telegraph wires.

The two men talked for three hours.

Remarkable, though, that this was just two and a half years after Bell and Watson first met — and only about four years after Watson started working for Williams and was introduced to Daniel Davis’s book, which sparked his entire career and specialization in 19th-century electrical applications.

Maybe even wilder: by 1881, Watson was out of the telephone business altogether, although he’d become rich as a result of having been there at the beginning.

He went on to build a massive shipyard.

If you’d like to go further down a rabbit hole, he was apparently a very amusing and self-effacing speaker; the speech from which I got a lot of this info is online right here.

Back in August, I wrote about a new study on loneliness and mental health — and how the simplest thing any of us can probably do, both for other people and for ourselves, is to pick up the phone and make a call you’ve been putting off.

If you do that today, you have Bell, Watson — and Davis — to thank!

Also: I’ll bet you’ve done something that led to a tremendous result for other people, and you might not even be aware of it.

If not … there’s still time!

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7 other moments from history this week

• Sunday, October 4: “No more war, war never again.” — Pope Paul VI, addressing the United Nations General Assembly on this day in 1965, the first pope ever to visit and speak at the U.N. He spent about 13 and a half hours in New York, becoming the first pope to set foot in the Western Hemisphere.

• Monday, October 5: “Good evening, liberated Serbia.” — Vojislav Koštunica, speaking from the balcony of Belgrade City Hall on this day in 2000, after protesters stormed parliament and ended Slobodan Milošević’s 13-year rule. The uprising is called the “Bulldozer Revolution” because a heavy-equipment operator named Ljubisav Đokić drove his wheel loader at the state television building.

• Tuesday, October 6: “It’s been my life, for 13 years, I’ve put everything into this.” — Jason Lewis, after pushing his pedal boat across the Prime Meridian at Greenwich on this day in 2007, completing the first circumnavigation of the Earth by human power alone. Along the 46,505-mile route he walked, cycled, roller-bladed, kayaked, swam and pedaled, surviving a collision with a car in Colorado and a crocodile attack in Australia.

• Wednesday, October 7: “This is a palpable tremor of delight for me.” — Toni Morrison, after learning on this day in 1993 that she had won the Nobel Prize in Literature, making her the first Black woman to win a Nobel in any category. She was also the first American to win the literature prize since John Steinbeck in 1962.

• Thursday, October 8: “No sir. I got only 132.” — Cpl. Alvin York, after Brig. Gen. Julian Lindsey joked that he had captured the whole German army, following York’s fight in the Argonne Forest on this day in 1918. The Tennessee farmer and former conscientious objector received the Medal of Honor, and Marshal Ferdinand Foch called it the greatest feat by any private soldier in the armies of Europe.

• Friday, October 9: "This morning I came, I saw and I was conquered, as everyone would be who sees for the first time this great feat of mankind." — President Franklin D. Roosevelt, at the dedication of Boulder Dam, later called the Hoover Dam, which on this day in 1936 first transmitted power 266 miles across the world's highest-voltage transmission line to Los Angeles.

• Saturday, October 10: “The exploration and use of outer space … shall be the province of all mankind.” — From Article I of the Outer Space Treaty, which entered into force on this day in 1967 after the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain signed it that January. The treaty bars any nation from claiming the moon or other celestial bodies and directs countries to treat astronauts as envoys of all humanity.

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I have an idea and I’m going to give it a try, to see if there’s interest.

After about nine months and nearly 100 Life Story Magic interviews, I’d like to use what I’ve learned to launch a free, weekly, do-it-yourself life story newsletter.

I’m calling it Next Question by Life Story Magic. The idea:

➡️ 💭 Each week, I’ll ask you one question.

➡️ 📝 Answer it. Save it somewhere. Share it if you want.

➡️ 🧩 Bit by bit, we’ll build your life story.

Better yet, forward the email to someone you care about and invite them to sign up and build their story, too.

I’m going to launch with a 13-week schedule, based on top questions I find that prompt great, colorful answers almost every time. From there — well, we’ll see how it goes.

I went back and forth on whether just to use one day a week on Understandably for this project, but I think it makes sense to keep it separate.

If you’d like to try it out, sign up here. The first edition is set to go out Monday, October 5.

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747

In the 1920s and 1930s a boy named Joe was growing up in Seattle, and one thing about Joe was that he really loved airplanes.

Fortunately for him, he lived on a hill overlooking Boeing, the airplane manufacturer.

“On summer days,” he later recalled, “my brothers and I would walk down ... There we’d watch technicians working ... Occasionally a leather-clad test pilot would climb into a Boeing military biplane like a knight mounting his steed.”

His heroes: those aviators, and of course Charles Lindbergh, who made his solo transatlantic flight when Joe was 6.

Joe paid for his aeronautical engineering degree at the University of Washington partly by working at Boeing. Then World War II came, and Joe — a Navy ROTC cadet — got sent to a destroyer escort instead of getting the pilot training he asked for.

Toward the end of the war, while he was stationed on a remote Pacific island, two job offers arrived: one from Douglas in California, and one from Boeing, back home in Seattle.

Newly married and with a child on the way, he took the job closer to home. He rose through the ranks, even though he was surrounded by graduates of Caltech, MIT, and Michigan, who looked down on his degree from Washington.

He worked on many of Boeing’s top commercial airplane projects of the 1950s and ‘60s, like the Dash 80, the 707, 727, and 737. But he wasn’t part of the sexiest project of all: a supersonic passenger jet, which almost everyone in aviation assumed was the future.

Which is why, in 1965, he was available to run a massive new Boeing project.

That project? The 747. And the engineer put in charge of it was Joe Sutter.

The story goes that Pan Am CEO Juan Trippe and Boeing president Bill Allen agreed to build it while on a salmon fishing trip together, and sealed the deal with a handshake. Pan Am’s formal order, for 25 planes worth more than half a billion dollars, followed in 1966.

Sutter’s assignment: 28 months (about 2/3 the regular time) to design and build a jet 2.5 times as large as anything else in the air.

His team grew to 4,500 engineers. At one point Boeing ordered him to lay off 1,000 of them. Sutter refused, and walked out of the meeting certain he’d be fired. He kept his job, and so did his engineers.

Then came a tussle with Trippe, who wanted a double-decker — basically two 707 fuselages stacked one above the other. But evacuating that plane quickly in an emergency would be very difficult.

Also, everyone assumed the 747 would have a short life as a passenger jet once supersonics took over, so it needed to be easy to turn into a cargo plane.

That’s how Sutter and his team came up with the wide-body jet: one wide deck, two aisles, 10 seats across. It also explains the 747’s famous hump. To load cargo straight in through a nose that swung up, the cockpit had to sit above the main deck.

Now they had to sell it to Trippe.

Boeing’s team met with Pan Am in a New York conference room exactly as wide as the planned cabin, and unrolled a 20-foot clothesline across it. Then Boeing built full-size mockups of both designs so Trippe could walk through them.

Inside the wide-body mockup, Trippe asked what the space up in the hump would be used for. Sutter said it could be a rest area for the crew.

No, Trippe said. That would be for passengers.

That’s when Sutter knew he’d won.

Rollout of the 747 was September 30, 1968: 58 years ago this week.

Charles Lindbergh saw it, too.

“You know, this is one of the great ones,” he said.

The 747 made long-haul flying affordable for ordinary people, and it stayed in production for 54 years.

Sutter later served on the Rogers Commission investigating the Challenger disaster. He stayed on at Boeing as senior adviser emeritus for a quarter-century, and was still going to his office once a week in May 2016, at 95. He died that August.

“The world was a very wide place when I was born,” Joe Sutter wrote in his book, 747. “Then along came Lindbergh.”

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7 other moments from history this week

• Sunday, September 27: "Je tiens l'affaire!" ("I've got it!") — Jean-François Champollion, to his brother when he cracked the phonetic key to hieroglyphs, shortly before he fainted from excitement. On this day in 1822, he presented his findings to a packed room at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris.

• Monday, September 28: "I certainly didn't plan to revolutionize all medicine." — Alexander Fleming, recalling the morning of this day in 1928, when he noticed that a mold growing in a petri dish had killed the bacteria around it. The mold's "juice" became penicillin, which earned Fleming a share of the 1945 Nobel Prize.

• Tuesday, September 29: "Godspeed the work begun this noon." — President Theodore Roosevelt, laying the foundation stone of the Washington National Cathedral on this day in 1907. The final stone was set on the same date in 1990, exactly 83 years later, with President George H. W. Bush in attendance.

• Wednesday, September 30: "I came, I saw, and I was conquered, as everyone would be who sees for the first time this great feat of mankind." — President Franklin D. Roosevelt, dedicating Hoover Dam on this day in 1935. It was the tallest dam in the world when it was completed.

• Thursday, October 1: "The children of California shall be our children." — Leland Stanford, after the death of his only son, whose memory he and his wife Jane honored by founding Stanford University, which opened on this day in 1891. Tuition was free for the university's first students.

• Friday, October 2: "I cross this forbidden line as a president... The wall will fall." — South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, moments before walking across the military demarcation line into North Korea on this day in 2007. He was the first South Korean president to cross the line, on his way to an inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang.

• Saturday, October 3: "Now what belongs together will grow together." — Former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, speaking the day after the Berlin Wall opened in November 1989; Germany formally reunified at midnight on this day in 1990. East and West had been divided for 45 years.

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Today’s story will meander, so bear with me.

It starts in 1956, when Soviet forces crushed the Hungarian Revolution—an uprising against the country’s Soviet-backed Communist government—and drove roughly 200,000 people into exile.

Among them were a Hungarian couple who fled with their nine children and eventually landed in a refugee camp in Montbéliard, France. There, in 1959, they had one more child—a boy they named Ferenc Árpád.

Soon afterward, the Darabont family emigrated to the United States, and Ferenc grew up first in Chicago and then in Los Angeles. He became a typical American kid in most ways—and maybe especially a Hollywood kid.

Years later, he’d say he found his life’s ambition after seeing George Lucas’s first feature film, THX 1138, released in 1971. Ferenc—who now went by Frank—graduated from Hollywood High School in 1977.

Instead of college, he got a job at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, working the concession stand and as an usher, watching movies over and over for free, and spending “endless hours” writing.

Around the same time, he read Stephen King’s The Shining and fell in love.

“I became a fan of his work from that moment on,” he later recalled. “I have read every word that the man’s published and some that he hasn’t.”

Frank had no formal training, but he wanted to try directing a film. Around the same time, King had created what became known as the Dollar Baby program, under which he allowed students and other aspiring filmmakers to adapt certain short stories for $1, under two main conditions:

First, the film couldn’t be released commercially without King’s approval.

Second, the filmmaker had to send King a copy so he could see what they’d done with it.

Frank wrote to King asking for permission to make a film from a short story called “The Woman in the Room.” King said yes. Price: $1.

Frank was about 20 when he started, and it took him three years to finish the film. But after he sent King a copy, King called it “clearly the best” of the short films based on his work.

Fast-forward. Frank started building a career. He found work as a production assistant and set dresser on low-budget Hollywood movies—basically, working with the art department to make sure whatever appeared on camera looked right.

He wrote an original screenplay called Black Cat Run that a studio bought, although it wasn’t produced until more than a decade later. He also wrote a spec script for the TV show M*A*S*H.

That one caught the attention of a producer named Chuck Russell, who invited Frank to become his writing partner—and gave him a real, working Hollywood career as a writer, mostly rewriting other people’s scripts when problems appeared after studios bought them. One of their biggest successes was A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.

And then Frank got the idea to adapt another Stephen King work for the screen: the novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.

Again, we’re going to compress time here. King sold him the rights for $5,000—although, to fast-forward again, he never cashed the check. But Frank was so busy as a working writer by then that five years passed before he took time away from paying gigs to write the screenplay.

From there, however, things moved fast. It took him about eight weeks to write the script, and within two weeks of showing it to Castle Rock, he had a $25 million budget—but only after turning down an offer of roughly $2.5 million to step aside and let Rob Reiner direct, with Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford in the lead roles.

And on September 23, 1994—so, my God, 32 years ago this week—The Shawshank Redemption began its U.S. theatrical release.

The funny thing about this movie is that I am 100% confident I don’t have to explain the plot, identify Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman as the stars, or tell you that it’s now considered one of the greatest movies of all time.

And yet it bombed at the box office.

Bad timing, I guess. It was competing for attention in the same year as Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction, and it earned only $16 million during its initial domestic run against that $25 million budget.

Then came word of mouth, seven Oscar nominations, huge VHS rentals, and repeated showings on TNT after Ted Turner bought Castle Rock. All of it expanded the movie’s reach and built its reputation.

Writers and even directors tend to stay behind the scenes, so if you don’t know how things turned out for Frank Darabont, he went on to even more success: The Green Mile, The Mist, The Walking Dead on television, and, most recently, two episodes of the final season of Netflix’s Stranger Things.

Overall, I think his is a story about the value of letting the path meander—as long as you don’t lose sight of where you hope it will lead.

And there’s a great quote, by the way, about why he decided not to take Rob Reiner’s money back in the early 1990s, long before he had achieved the kind of success that eventually followed.

“You can continue to defer your dreams in exchange for money,” he told Vanity Fair. “… and die without ever having done the thing you set out to do.”

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7 other moments from history this week

• Sunday, September 20: “The world threw itself into this first festival in a state of near-intoxication.” — Philippe Erlanger, the French diplomat and historian behind the Cannes Film Festival, describing its opening on this day in 1946, a year after the war ended. The festival had originally been scheduled for September 1939.

• Monday, September 21: “I was thinking about women. The other half of the viewing audience.” — Roone Arledge, the ABC Sports executive, in his memoir on the broadcast he created, Monday Night Football, which debuted on this day in 1970 when the Browns beat the Jets 31–21 in Cleveland. A crowd of 85,703 attended, and advertisers paid $65,000 a minute.

• Tuesday, September 22: “Farmers need us, and we will always need them.” — Willie Nelson, who organized the first Farm Aid concert with Neil Young and John Mellencamp on this day in 1985 at Memorial Stadium in Champaign, Illinois. About 80,000 people attended a show put together in six weeks, after Bob Dylan suggested at Live Aid that some of the money go to American farmers.

• Wednesday, September 23: “We were met by all the village and received a harty welcom.” — William Clark, in his journal entry on the day the Lewis and Clark expedition returned to St. Louis on this day in 1806. Sergeant John Ordway wrote that the party fired three rounds as it approached the town and the crowd on shore answered with three cheers.

• Thursday, September 24: “Success is 99 percent failure.” — Soichiro Honda, founder of the Honda Motor Company, which was incorporated in Hamamatsu, Japan, on this day in 1948. The company grew out of his idea of fitting surplus wartime generator engines to bicycles.

• Friday, September 25: “If this was that big a deal, I want to see it through.” — Ernest Green, one of the Little Rock Nine, recalling when he walked into Little Rock Central High School past soldiers with bayonets, on this day in 1957. The students entered escorted by the 101st Airborne Division, and Green became the school’s first Black graduate in May 1958.

• Saturday, September 26: “My friend and colleague M. Besso steadfastly stood by me in my work.” — Albert Einstein, in the closing line of “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” his special relativity paper, published in Annalen der Physik on this day in 1905. Einstein, then 26 and working at the Swiss patent office in Bern, thanked no one else in the paper.

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Today’s story is about a man named Philippe Croizon.

He was born in France in 1968, and by his own admission there was very little in the first 26 years of his life that would have led anyone to think he would one day be the kind of person other people in other countries would write about.

Raised mostly by his grandmother, he grew up in Oyré, a small town northeast of Châtellerault, which is itself maybe three hours southwest of Paris. He did rather poorly in school, and later said he left without really knowing how to read, write, or do arithmetic.

He wasn’t a bad kid, but he was mischievous, by his way of telling. Actually as he put it in his autobiography years later: he grew up “dans la bêtise,” or “in foolishness.”

“Dès qu’il y a une connerie à faire, je ne suis pas loin.” (”Whenever there’s foolishness to be done, I’m not far away.”)

So, he took night classes as an adult, and did his military service in the French army, and worked as a butcher and in a factory. He got married and had a child, and eventually got a steadier, better job, working as a metalworker or metallurgist.

His wife was pregnant with their second child in 1994, and they planned to move to a bigger house. As part of the packing, he climbed a ladder so he could fix the rooftop television antenna he’d installed.

Then, his whole life changed.

Philippe somehow came in contact with a high-voltage power line. What happened next was gruesome: The current grounded through him, and Philippe was literally fused to the ladder.

The utility company apparently assumed a branch had fallen across the high-voltage line, and turned the power back on three times. Philippe was engulfed in flames, while people watched in horror.

Finally, a neighbor put on rubber boots, grabbed a fire extinguisher, climbed the ladder himself and dragged Philippe off. When he woke up in the hospital, he found that doctors had been forced to amputate both of his arms and one of his legs.

“The doctors tried to save my left leg,” he later recalled. “Psychologically, I clung to that leg, a symbol of the little life I had left. But, we had to face the facts. My last limb could not be saved. Amputated below the knee. I sank into despair.”

Two things saved him, Philippe explained.

The first was an uncle by marriage who told Philippe that he had lost his father when he was about Philippe’s son’s age. It had been the defining experience of his life.

“Your children need you,” he said.

The second was a documentary he watched while still in the hospital about a woman swimmer who had just crossed the English Channel.

Philippe had never been much of a swimmer, but something about the idea spoke to him — heck, mesmerized him.

And sixteen years later, he in fact became the first quadruple amputee to swim the English Channel.

Obviously, there were intermediate steps. He tried skydiving first as a way to test his post-traumatic ability to handle extreme excitement.

And of course, he started swimming constantly. He experimented with prosthetic limbs for swimming, including legs that end in fins and cost €12,000, and ratcheted his preparation up to five hours a day for the two years leading up to his attempt, with the Maritime Gendarmerie.

He made it across the Channel on September 18, 2010, making it in just under 14 hours — which is an average time for a 100% able-bodied swimmer.

I mentioned his autobiography: He wrote it using speech-to-text software (long before it was anywhere near as good as it is now), and it’s called “J’ai décidé de vivre” (”I Decided to Live”).

“If I had to do it over, I would keep my disability,” he said in an interview earlier this year. “Everything is possible.”

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7 other moments from history this week

• Sunday, September 13: “I woke up one morning with a tune in my head and I thought, ‘Hey, I don’t know this tune — or do I?’” — Paul McCartney, from the Beatles Anthology, on writing “Yesterday,” released as a single in the U.S. on this day in 1965. He tested the melody on friends and bandmates for weeks, convinced he must have unconsciously copied it from somewhere, before accepting it was his own.

• Monday, September 14: “It was not, in my opinion, very honorable for England to remain in a gross and avowed error, especially in such company.” — Lord Chesterfield, on why he championed the “calendar reform bill” through Parliament — which took effect on this day in 1752, when Britain and its colonies skipped straight from September 2 to September 14.

• Tuesday, September 15: “What other reserves have we?” — Winston Churchill on this day in 1940, at the height of the Luftwaffe’s largest daylight raid on London. Air Vice Marshal Keith Park’s answer was: “There are none” — and the RAF held anyway, a turning point that led Hitler to postpone the invasion of Britain.

• Wednesday, September 16: “I merely combined a set of facts in a new way.” — Chester Carlson, the inventor behind the process Xerox built into the 914, the first successful plain-paper office copier, introduced on this day in 1959.

• Thursday, September 17: “I looked at my hands, to see if I was the same person now I was free. There was such a glory over everything, the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in heaven.” — Harriet Tubman, recalling the moment she crossed into free territory on this day in 1849. She would return to the South roughly 13 times to lead about 70 more people to freedom.

• Friday, September 18: “The Oslo negotiations gave the world a treaty … remarkably free of loopholes and exceptions.” — Jody Williams, on the treaty banning antipersonnel landmines text adopted in Oslo on this day in 1997.

• Saturday, September 19: “I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways.” — Scott Fahlman, in a Carnegie Mellon bulletin-board post at 11:44 a.m. on this day in 1982. It’s the first documented use of the emoticon, born out of a campus message board where jokes kept being mistaken for serious posts.

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There are six names that will come up prominently in today’s edition of Big Optimism—heroes, victims, and villains.

The hero comes first: the man who invented DNA fingerprinting. Then, the first criminal case it solved.

His name: Alec Jeffreys, born January 9, 1950, in Oxford, England. He was a scientist by nature long before he became one by training.

As a child, his father gave him a chemistry set. He expanded it by foraging for chemicals like sulfuric acid, which led to an accident and a permanent scar on his chin.

As an adult, he wore a beard to cover it up.

Jeffreys won a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, and studied biochemistry. After graduating in 1971, he spent four years earning a doctorate studying mitochondria in cultured mammalian cells at Oxford.

From there, he moved on to a fellowship at the University of Amsterdam and, eventually, the University of Leicester’s Department of Genetics.

Now, the second name, and the first victim: Lynda Mann, who was 15 when she was murdered on November 21, 1983, in Narborough, Leicestershire.

The details were every bit as horrible as you can imagine. But the case quickly went cold.

Just six miles from the crime scene, at the University of Leicester, Jeffreys was studying deoxyribonucleic acid—DNA.

On September 10, 1984—42 years ago this week—he spent 30 minutes examining an X-ray film from a DNA experiment involving his technician and her family. He had what he later called his “eureka moment.”

As he stared at the film, he realized that everyone on the planet has a unique DNA pattern, with the exception of identical twins.

DNA fingerprinting was born.

Within six months, a lawyer used it to establish a family relationship for a boy seeking legal immigration status.

The third name: Dawn Ashworth, who was 15 when she was murdered on July 31, 1986, in Enderby—about as close to the University of Leicester as the place where Lynda Mann was killed.

Again, all the same horrible details were present—details that I frankly don’t want to go into here.

Police quickly realized that Lynda and Dawn had been killed by the same monster.

But they couldn’t find him.

The fourth name: Richard Buckland. He was 17 years old, and police knew for sure that he knew Dawn Ashworth.

They arrested him, interrogated him, and he confessed.

Case closed, right?

Except that while Buckland confessed to killing Dawn Ashworth, he vehemently denied killing Lynda Mann—and the police were absolutely convinced that one murderer had killed both girls.

They persuaded a judge to keep Buckland locked up for several months. In the meantime, they reached out to Jeffreys, hoping he could examine the DNA evidence and prove that Buckland was the killer in both cases.

Jeffreys came back with some good news and some bad news, from an investigative perspective:

The police were absolutely right that the same man had killed both girls.

But it also absolutely wasn’t Buckland.

In retrospective accounts, Buckland is described again and again as “a youth with learning disabilities,” and the suggestion is that he confessed to something he didn’t do under intense questioning.

It happens more often than people like to admit.

But now the police were left with two murders, a panicked population, and no leads.

This was where things went in a direction that I’m not sure they could go today: The police mounted a pressure campaign for every single man in the area to submit voluntarily to a blood test, so that his DNA could be profiled and compared with DNA recovered from the crime scenes.

Yet after obtaining DNA from almost every man who could possibly have committed the heinous crimes, they came up short.

No DNA match.

Now, the fifth name: Colin Pitchfork, a married father of two.

He was the murderer.

At first, he escaped even this region-wide DNA dragnet by paying “a mate” £200 to use a forged passport, pose as Pitchfork, and submit a blood sample in his place.

But Pitchfork’s “mate”—the sixth name, Ian Kelly—got drunk in a pub and told all about it.

A woman who heard the story told the police, and both Kelly and Pitchfork were quickly arrested.

I feel like a brief explanation is necessary here: Why would anyone give a fake DNA sample in a case involving two murders and sexual assault?

The most charitable explanation is that the story Pitchfork had given Kelly was the kind of thing that might have sounded convincing only to someone who was drunk in a pub.

Pitchfork said he had prior convictions for indecent exposure and thought the police would unduly harass him.

Kelly received two years in prison for the DNA fraud.

Pitchfork pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison for the rapes and murders.

England is England, so life didn’t quite mean life. He was released in 2021, but 11 weeks later, at age 61, he was returned to custody for violating the terms of his release by approaching a lone woman. His latest request for release was denied in 2025.

As for Jeffreys, he’s now Sir Alec John Jeffreys.

Lynda Mann and Dawn Ashworth are, I hope and pray, resting in peace. At least we can say there was some modicum of justice.

Richard Buckland disappeared into obscurity. Believe me, I spent a lot of time trying to find out what happened.

Colin Pitchfork is right where he belongs.

Meanwhile, millions of people of his ilk have been convicted as a result of Jeffreys’s discovery.

And at least thousands of innocent people have been exonerated—many after serving years in prison for crimes they did not commit.

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7 other moments from history this week

• Sunday, September 6: “I wanted my freedom.” — Martina Navratilova, requesting political asylum in the United States on this day in 1975, at 18, during a trip to the U.S. Open. She defected from Czechoslovakia for good and went on to win 18 Grand Slam singles titles.

• Monday, September 7: “Nobody else was offering to do anything to save me.” — Beth Allen, born three months premature in Brooklyn, on the incubator care that saved her life on this day in 1888, created by Dr. Martin Couney. Couney would go on to run incubator exhibits for decades, saving thousands of premature infants who had nowhere else to go.

• Tuesday, September 8: “The Kennedy Center exists not for Washington alone. It exists for the entire nation.” — Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, in her dedication for the Kennedy Center’s opening-night program on this day in 1971. The evening’s premiere was the world premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass,” commissioned in honor of the president for whom the center is named.

• Wednesday, September 9: “We are going to cut down this senseless loss of lives. We are going to cut down the pointless injury. We are going to cut down the heartbreak.” — President Lyndon B. Johnson, signing the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act into law on this day in 1966. The act created the federal vehicle safety standards and the agency that became the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

• Thursday, September 10: “I do not fear anyone. I do not have to know the names and the faces of those I will exceed.” — Abebe Bikila, in a 1965 Sports Illustrated interview with John Usherwood, reflecting on the mindset behind his gold medal in the Rome Olympic marathon on this day in 1960. He ran the 26.2 miles barefoot, becoming the first sub-Saharan African Olympic champion, and won it again four years later in Tokyo — this time in shoes, six weeks after an appendectomy.

• Friday, September 11: “Naturally I did not know at that time that with this step we began the road toward the unification of the two states and with it a new chapter in the history of Europe.” — Gyula Horn, the Hungarian foreign minister who announced the border opening, reflecting in his memoir on the decision made on this day in 1989. Tens of thousands of East Germans crossed into Austria within weeks, a crack in the Iron Curtain that preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall by two months.

• Saturday, September 12: “Easy, kid, I already lost.” — Abimael Guzmán, to the officer who cornered him during his capture in Lima on this day in 1992, according to that officer’s own account. The arrest of the Shining Path’s founder, whose insurgency had killed an estimated 30,000 people over twelve years, effectively ended the group’s campaign of violence.

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This week marks the 188th anniversary of the day Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery.

Interestingly, Douglass refused to reveal the details of his escape for 43 years—first because he didn’t want to give away any secrets, and later because he didn’t think his story involved anything “very heroic or thrilling.”

That was just a bit humble.

“My means of escape were provided for me by the very men who were making laws to hold and bind me more securely in slavery,” Douglass later wrote.

Explanation: Maryland required free Black people to carry “free papers” documenting their status. Obviously, this was before photo ID, and so the papers simply carried a description of the bearer.

As Douglass put it, “since more than one man could be found to answer the same general description,” an enslaved person could sometimes borrow or rent another man’s papers, use them to escape and then mail them back after reaching the North.

This was extremely risky. But on September 3, 1838, when he was 20 years old, Douglass borrowed a seaman’s protection from a free Black sailor, dressed himself in a sailor’s uniform and headed for the train station.

His problem: the description on the protection papers didn’t match what Douglass looked like.

“Indeed, it called for a man much darker than myself, and close examination of it would have caused my arrest at the start,” he wrote. “Had I gone into the station and offered to purchase a ticket, I should have been instantly and carefully examined, and undoubtedly arrested.”

Instead, he boarded the train at the last possible moment, hoping that the crowd and the conductor’s haste would prevent a close examination.

“I was well on the way to Havre de Grace before the conductor came into the negro car to collect tickets and examine the papers of his black passengers,” Douglass wrote. “This was a critical moment in the drama. My whole future depended upon the decision of this conductor.”

Douglass handed over his protection:

“The merest glance at the paper satisfied him. This moment of time was one of the most anxious I ever experienced.

Had the conductor looked closely at the paper, he could not have failed to discover that it called for a very different-looking person from myself, and in that case it would have been his duty to arrest me on the instant and send me back to Baltimore from the first station.”

Douglass still had to travel by train, ferry and steamboat through Maryland and then Delaware, both slave states.

As he later told the story in his autobiography, it’s almost comical how many fellow travelers Douglass encountered whom he had known from working on the docks in Baltimore, only to have them either fail to recognize him or keep quiet.

Decades after the escape, he still remembered the name of a Black “hand” on the ferry traveling across the Susquehanna River—Nichols—who was friendly and talkative, and who asked so many questions that Douglass feared he might reveal himself by answering incorrectly.

Of course, Douglass made it to Philadelphia, and freedom, and continued directly on to New York City.

“I have often been asked how I felt when first I found myself on free soil,” he wrote. “A new world had opened upon me. … I lived more in one day than in a year of my slave life. It was a time of joyous excitement which words can but tamely describe.”

He went on to become one of the most influential abolitionists in American history—a celebrated orator, writer, newspaper publisher and statesman.

He helped to shape public opinion against slavery, recruited Black soldiers for the Union Army and pressed Abraham Lincoln to make emancipation a central purpose of the Civil War.

American history would look a lot different today, if not for a borrowed protection document—and a conductor who barely looked at it.

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7 other moments from history this week

• Sunday, August 30: “All safe, all well!” — Frank Wild, Ernest Shackleton’s second-in-command, shouting back when Shackleton called out “Are you all well?” as the rescue ship Yelcho reached Elephant Island on this day in 1916. Shackleton had failed three previous attempts to reach the 22 men he’d left behind, who’d survived more than four months on seal meat and penguin under two overturned lifeboats.

• Monday, August 31: “All we can say is that the paintings are in the possession of the police.” — Jørn Jørgensen, Oslo police spokesman, confirming on this day in 2006 that Edvard Munch’s The Scream and Madonna had been recovered, two years after they were stolen at gunpoint from the Munch Museum in broad daylight. The paintings, damaged by moisture and light, were restored and returned to public display.

• Tuesday, September 1: “We are obviously very pleased and excited to have found the Titanic. But we are also very aware of the significance of the Titanic as a maritime disaster.” — Robert Ballard, radioing from the research vessel Knorr after his team located the wreck on this day in 1985, 73 years after it sank and more than two miles down in the North Atlantic. Ballard’s public mission was finding the Titanic; the trip’s classified purpose, kept secret for decades, was a Navy survey of two lost nuclear submarines.

• Wednesday, September 2: “You had the honor of being the first Eagle Scout of the Boy Scouts of America.” — James E. West, the Boy Scouts’ first Chief Scout Executive, notifying 17-year-old Arthur Eldred of Oceanside, New York, who received his badge on Labor Day, this day in 1912. No local review board for the rank existed yet, so Eldred had to travel to Manhattan and defend his qualifications in person before a skeptical national committee.

• Thursday, September 3 : "All acts of hostility against the Anglo-American force by Italian forces must cease everywhere." — Marshal Pietro Badoglio, announcing on Italian radio the armistice Italy had secretly signed with the Allies on this day in 1943. British and Canadian troops landed on the Italian mainland the same day; the announcement was held for five days until Allied forces were in position.

• Friday, September 4: “A glass globe about four inches long, and the shape of a dropping tear . . . in which is inclosed the carbon horseshoe that gives the light.” — The New York Times, describing Thomas Edison’s new incandescent lamps as his Pearl Street Station began supplying electricity on this day in 1882. The plant lit just 400 lamps for 85 customers on its first day; within a year it was powering 10,000 lamps for more than 500.

• Saturday, September 5: “This is no time for maneuvers and worn-out ideas. It is a time for magnanimity and reason.” — Anwar Sadat, arriving at Camp David on this day in 1978 to begin 13 days of negotiations with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, hosted by President Jimmy Carter. The talks produced the Camp David Accords, the framework for the first peace treaty ever signed between Israel and an Arab nation.

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Michael Korenblit was born in Ponca City, Oklahoma on July 30, 1951. His parents, Meyer and Matl Korenblit, were Holocaust survivors: Jewish teenagers from Hrubieszów, Poland, who fell in love before World War II, survived the Nazi occupation in separate camps, and found each other again afterward against odds that are almost impossible to calculate.

Their families — parents, siblings, cousins — were almost entirely murdered. They married in Germany in 1946, arrived in America in 1950 with $100 and one suitcase each, and wound up in Oklahoma after a small Jewish community agreed to sponsor them.

Michael grew up working at the family’s Dixie Dog Drive-In restaurant. He and his wife Joan — whom he met in Hebrew class at the University of Oklahoma — eventually founded the Respect Diversity Foundation, through which they have shared his parents’ story and reached nearly 450,000 students, teachers, and community members.

Joan also pushed Michael to sit down with his parents and record their full story, which became a New York Times-bestselling book called *Until We Meet Again.*

I met Michael because he’s a Life Story Magic customer. After our interview, he asked if we could work together to share his story more widely. This is part of that effort.

As you’ll see, our jumping-off point is sort of a different angle on the story I wrote about her last week: Clara Luper’s students and the Oklahoma City sit-in.

Here’s Michael in his own words.

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Respect Diversity

by Michael Korenblit, as told to Bill Murphy Jr.

I was 6 years old, sitting in the living room with my parents, when I first noticed a K and an L tattooed on each of their wrists. On the inside of my mother’s forearm was the letter A, followed by the number 27327.

I asked them what those were, and they tried to explain, in the least horrifying and simplest terms, that they were both survivors of the Holocaust.

What I understood — even at age 6 — was that this was why I didn’t have any grandparents, or lots of aunts and uncles and cousins. That was in 1957.

The next date that affected my life was in August of 1958. My dad came home from work, sat down in his favorite chair, and watched the news. There was a story that really bothered him. He didn’t have a day off until about five days later.

I was playing in the backyard when he said, “Mike, come take a ride with me and your mom.”

We drove to a park in Ponca City, and my dad walked me up to a water fountain and asked me to take a drink. This was August 23rd or 24th, 1958.

He said, “How did that taste?” I said, “Great.”

He asked me to read the sign on the water fountain. It said: WHITES ONLY.

My dad and mom then walked me to another water fountain, not ten feet away, and asked me to take a drink.

“How did that taste?”

I said the same as the other one. This sign said: COLORED ONLY.

We drove down to the bus station. We went in — hot August day, ceiling fans going, nice benches where people waited for the buses. They asked me to read the sign: WHITE WAITING AREA.

My parents then walked me to the back of the bus station — not so nice, broken chairs, no ceiling fans. There was a sign tacked up on the wall. Again, they asked me to read it: COLORED WAITING AREA.

My dad looked at me — his seven-year-old son — and said: “I want you to always remember what I’ve shown you here today. Because that’s the reason you don’t have any grandparents, or lots of aunts and uncles and cousins. It’s because people look at them as being different and inferior human beings.”

What my dad had seen on the news that day was thirteen Black kids, aged seven to sixteen, who walked into a drugstore in downtown Oklahoma City, sat down at the counter, and ordered thirteen Coca-Colas — and were refused service because of the color of their skin.

That started the sit-in movement, which spread across the country and eventually led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But it was those thirteen kids that so bothered him. He wanted to make sure his son understood what was going on.

A year later, in 1959, we drove to Tulsa to visit a family friend — a Holocaust survivor. After lunch, the man looked at my dad and said, “You ready to go now?”

We all got in the car and drove to a place in Tulsa called Greenwood. That’s where the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre took place. It was a Holocaust survivor who taught me what had happened in Oklahoma before people in Oklahoma were even talking about it or studying it.

Those three things — those three dates — are the reason for what we do today.

I would say my life’s work is telling my parents’ story, because of the ramifications and what that means for the world today. The fact that people are learning about the Holocaust — as much as we can teach about it — because the lessons are there for us to learn. Unfortunately we’re still not learning them.

The reason we started the foundation was because of my parents and their story. We built a whole speakers bureau. The first four people on it were my mother, my father, myself, and Joan — who was a writing instructor, teaching poetry and short stories.

The fifth person — the very first outside person we asked to be on the speakers bureau — was someone we had become very good friends with: Clara Luper.

She is considered the mother of civil rights in Oklahoma, and she was the one who took those students to that drugstore counter and started the sit-in movement across this country, before Greensboro ever thought about it.

Somebody asked me once if I was ever going to retire. I said: how do you retire from telling your parents’ story? The answer is no. I will keep telling the story because of how it relates to the issues of today — whether it’s Ukraine, whether it’s taking away the vote from people who are different from us. It’s still going on.

And we will continue fighting it for as long as we have breath in our bodies.

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7 other moments from history this week

• Sunday, August 23: “I stood in the chain; we were no longer afraid.” — Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid, recalling August 23, 1989, when two million people linked hands across Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in a roughly 400-mile human chain demanding freedom from Soviet rule. The protest, known as the Baltic Way, helped set all three nations on the path to independence within two years.

• Monday, August 24: “In a glider, you learn to read the air.” — Captain Robert Piché, whose training as a glider pilot let him land Air Transat Flight 236 safely in the Azores on August 24, 2001, after both engines failed and the plane ran out of fuel over the Atlantic. All 306 people on board walked away.

• Tuesday, August 25: “We can now answer the question we’ve all been asking — are we there yet? Yes, we are.” — Voyager project scientist Ed Stone, on NASA’s determination that Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space on August 25, 2012, the first spacecraft in history to leave the solar system. The probe, launched in 1977, was still sending data back 35 years later.

• Wednesday, August 26: “One of the great days in the history of the women of the world.” — Suffragist Alice Paul, on August 26, 1920, the day the 19th Amendment was certified and took effect, guaranteeing American women the right to vote after more than 70 years of organized struggle. The certification happened without ceremony, signed by the Secretary of State in his own home before dawn.

• Thursday, August 27: “Did you see it, Butch? I did it! I did it!” — Tiger Woods, 19, shouting to his swing coach Butch Harmon after making the winning putt to capture the 1995 U.S. Amateur Championship at Newport Country Club on August 27, 1995, his second of three straight national amateur titles. He dedicated the trophy to his caddie’s father, who had died a month earlier.

• Friday, August 28: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” — Martin Luther King Jr., speaking to more than 200,000 people at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. The speech became the defining moment of the civil rights movement and helped build momentum toward the Civil Rights Act the following year.

• Saturday, August 29: “We hit bottom at 40 miles an hour — we hit like a major road crash.” — Roger Mallinson, describing the moment the submersible Pisces III sank to the ocean floor off Ireland on August 29, 1973. He and co-pilot Roger Chapman were rescued three days later from 1,575 feet down, still the deepest successful submarine rescue in history.

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I can’t begin to tell you how many times he’s caught mistakes, saved my bacon, and made really good suggestions.

Sunday was Tom’s birthday. He’s the real unsung hero of this effort. So if you have a minute, please wish him well in the comments.

I’ll go first. Happy birthday Tom! You rock, brother!

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‘What would change in Oklahoma’

Today’s story is about a piece of American history I never knew or understood until a Life Story Magic customer explained it to me. As soon as he did, I realized it would be my entry in the Big Optimism series this week.

It starts for our purposes on November 16, 1907, when Oklahoma became a state. Within weeks, the new state legislature passed Senate Bill One, mandating racial segregation on public transportation.

The state constitution already required separate schools for “white and colored children.” Similar laws followed: a strict ban on interracial marriage and, in 1910, a “grandfather clause” requiring people whose ancestors had not been eligible to vote in 1866 to pass a literacy test before voting.

Born into this version of Oklahoma in 1923 was Clara Mae Shepard, who was Black and whose father, Ezell, was a wounded World War I veteran who came home to work as a bricklayer. Her mother, Isabell, ultimately shared her deepest, most troubling memory with her daughter.

This quote from Clara in an interview many years later sets the stage for her early life as well as anything I could dream up:

I was born in a segregated area. I went to a segregated school. ...

I have had the experience of going to the back of the bus, not being able to go to libraries, public accommodations and what have you. I’ve always hated segregation with a passion. ...

My mother was from Texas and she saw a black person burned in Paris, Texas and she was afraid that would happen to anyone who spoke out against segregation.

When I would say, ‘Why do we have to go to the back of the bus?’ my mother would say, ‘Shut up’; my dad would say, ‘Someday you’ll be able to ride anywhere on the bus.’

He had a lot of faith in what would happen and what would change in Oklahoma.

There was another formative experience: When her brother got sick, the local whites-only hospital refused to treat him.

Clara grew up, graduated from Langston University in 1944 and became the first Black student admitted to the graduate history program at the University of Oklahoma, where she earned a master’s degree in 1951.

She married, had children, became a teacher at a segregated Oklahoma City-area high school and served as adviser to the Oklahoma City NAACP Youth Council.

Each year, she wrote plays for her students to perform during what was then called Negro History Week. Her 1957 play, Brother President, about Martin Luther King Jr., attracted enough attention that she was invited to take a group of her students to New York City to perform it the following year.

That trip—and the students’ experience of being served at the same restaurants as white people for the first time—led to a chain of events.

On August 19, 1958—68 years ago this week—Clara Shepard Luper led 13 of her students to the segregated lunch counter at Katz Drug Store in Oklahoma City, where they ordered 13 Cokes, endured vitriol and worse, and kept returning for three full days until the chain agreed to end segregation—not only in Oklahoma City, but at all 38 of its locations.

It was Clara’s young daughter Marilyn who came up with the idea. Clara trained the children in tactics of nonviolence beforehand and reached out to the people who ran the drugstore, to no avail.

This was nearly 18 months before the Greensboro sit-ins, which I’ve written about here before.

Clara led many more similar protests at other restaurants, cafeterias, theaters and hotels over the next six years.

She marched in Selma, was beaten by a state trooper and was arrested 26 times. By one account, the strain of her activism eventually ended her marriage.

Clara Shepard Luper died in 2011. Last year, the Clara Luper National Sit-In Plaza was dedicated on the former Katz Drug Store site in Oklahoma City, at the corner of Robinson and Main.

The $3.6 million bronze monument depicts Luper and her students at a lunch counter, with one open stool for visitors to sit on.

Honestly, let me confess my historical ignorance: If I had ever heard of the earlier Oklahoma City movement, I’d forgotten it.

But we all know it now.

Next week, if all goes well, I’ll tell the Life Story Magic story of how I learned it.

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7 other moments from history this week

• Sunday, August 16: “I am just happy I won. 9.58 seconds is definitely a big thing. I am proud of myself because I’m the first man to do that.” — Usain Bolt, after breaking his own 100-meter world record at the World Championships in Berlin on this day in 2009, running 9.58 seconds, a jump statisticians called decades ahead of the event’s usual pace of improvement.

• Monday, August 17: "I had a light breeze against me the whole way ..." — Robert Fulton, writing about his North River Steamboat's round trip from New York City to Albany on this day in 1807, proving steam power could beat wind and current on a commercial route, not just in a demonstration.

• Tuesday, August 18: "It marked the end of this particular stage of my struggle to break the system of 'White Supremacy.'" — James Meredith, on this day in 1963, when he became the first Black student to graduate from the University of Mississippi.

• Wednesday, August 19: “A gift free to the world” — how the French government described Louis Daguerre’s new photographic process when it publicly unveiled the daguerreotype to the French Academy of Sciences on this day in 1839.

• Thursday, August 20: “So far, we have only good news from the front. The official ceasefire … is holding.” — Col. Yrjo Helanen, the Finnish UN observer a UN-brokered ceasefire took effect ending the eight-year Iran-Iraq War in 1988.

• Friday, August 21: “It’s a visceral reaction. You feel something in the pit of your stomach like something is wrong in the day, something is not right.” — Fred Espenak, retired NASA astrophysicist, describing totality during the “Great American Eclipse” on this day in 2017, the first total solar eclipse to cross the entire continental United States coast-to-coast since 1918.

• Saturday, August 22: "Your Majesty, there is no second." — reply given to Queen Victoria, watching from the Royal Yacht as the schooner America won the £100 Cup around the Isle of Wight on this day in 1851, so far ahead of the British fleet that no other boat was in sight when she finished. The trophy was later renamed the America's Cup.

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Let’s talk today about someone who became a hero to his country — but since it probably isn’t your country, you might not remember.

Joseph Schooling was born in Singapore in 1994, and he also was a born swimmer.

In 2004, when Schooling had just turned 10 years old, he watched as Michael Phelps won six gold medals at the Athens Olympics. Two years later he watched as Phelps walked away with five more golds at the Pan Pacific Championships.

Phelps became Schooling’s hero, and he looked forward to the 2008 Games in Beijing. The question at the time: did Phelps have a chance of breaking Mark Spitz’s 1972 record of seven gold medals in a single Games?

Phelps’s own idol, Ian Thorpe of Australia, said it wasn’t possible — which Phelps said he used as extra motivation to try and pull it off.

All of which leads us to the first time Joseph Schooling actually got to meet Michael Phelps — in the leadup to the 2008 Games, when the U.S. Olympic swim team did a training camp in Singapore.

“They came to the country club that I trained at,” Schooling later recalled. “Everyone just rushed up and was like, ‘It’s Michael Phelps! It’s Michael Phelps!’ and I really wanted a picture.”

Sure enough, Schooling, then 13 years old and barely coming up to Phelps’s chin, got his photo. “It was very early in the morning,” he remembered, “and I was so shell shocked, I couldn’t really open my mouth.”

Phelps went on to win his eight Olympic gold medals in Beijing, and then another four medals at the 2012 Games in London. Meanwhile, Schooling kept swimming, rising through the ranks in Singapore as a teenager, and then coming to the U.S. to attend high school in Florida.

He was good enough to earn a scholarship to the University of Texas at Austin, ultimately setting collegiate records in the butterfly — the same stroke Phelps had won at every Olympics since 2004.

Singapore, meanwhile, had a birthday coming up. On August 9, 1965, the country hadn’t so much declared independence as had it forced on it — expelled from the Malaysian Federation, cut loose with no natural resources and no real plan.

Lee Kuan Yew announced the split on live TV and broke down crying while he did it.

Fifty-one years later, Singapore had built one of the fastest-growing economies on earth. One thing it hadn’t done, however, in all that time, in any sport, was win an Olympic gold medal.

Three days after that anniversary — August 12, 2016 — Schooling was in the pool in Rio, in Lane 4, next to Phelps, in what Phelps had already announced would be his last individual Olympic race.

Schooling got out fast and just never let Phelps back in. 50.39 seconds. An Olympic record.

Phelps touched three-quarters of a second later, tied for silver with Chad le Clos and László Cseh, the kid from the photo having just beaten his own idol.

Schooling’s reaction:

“That’s pretty crazy, what happens in eight years. I’m just honored and privileged to have the chance to race alongside him.

If it wasn’t for Michael, I don’t think I could have gotten to this point. I wanted to be like him as a kid. … He is the reason why I wanted to be a better swimmer.”

Phelps’s reaction—on what turned out to be his last-ever competitive race:

“I’m not happy, obviously, nobody likes to lose. But I’m proud of Joe.

I wanted to change the sport of swimming. With the people we have in the sport now I think you are seeing it.”

Singapore lost its mind, by the way.

Schooling flew back to the city-state for an open-top bus parade with people packed along the route. Parliament gave him a standing ovation.

For a stretch there he was about as famous as it’s possible to be in a country of six million people. There’s a life-sized cardboard cutout of him from a 2015 meet-and-greet that still sits in his parents’ office — he’s asked his mom to get rid of it more than once, and she won’t.

For what it’s worth, the Rio Olympics were the pinnacle of his career. He picked up plenty of gold at the SEA Games, and did well at the 2018 Asian Games, but never reached an Olympic podium never happened again.

At Tokyo in 2021 he didn’t even get out of his heat, and some of the same country that had carried him through the streets five years earlier turned on him online. It got bad enough that President Halimah Yacob wrote a public post defending him, saying people were quick to put someone on a pedestal and just as quick to “thrash them to the ground” the moment they didn’t deliver.

In 2022 Schooling admitted he’d used cannabis while on leave from Singapore’s mandatory military service in Vietnam, which was a big deal under the country’s strict drug laws — and apologized for it publicly. He retired in 2024, at 28.

Still, he’s still the only person from Singapore who’s ever won an Olympic gold medal In the post-Schooling era, enrollment in kids’ swim classes have spiked.

I’m kind of curious to see what aspiring teenaged swimmers might have managed to get a photo with him, much like he got with his hero, Phelps. And even more curious if we’ll see one of them on the podium in Los Angeles in two years.

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7 other moments from history this week

• Sunday, August 9: “I want to encourage women: Don’t be afraid. Pursue and have dreams. This is my dream.” — Shannon Eastin, on the eve of becoming the first woman to officiate an NFL game, in a preseason matchup between the Green Bay Packers and San Diego Chargers on this day in 2012. She’d spent 16 years officiating college and high school football before getting the call.

• Monday, August 10: “Today’s permit marks the true beginning of our commercial operations in San Francisco.” — Tekedra Mawakana, co-CEO of Waymo, after California regulators voted to let Waymo and Cruise operate driverless taxis throughout San Francisco at any hour on this day in 2023. It made San Francisco the first major U.S. city with two competing fleets of fully autonomous vehicles.

• Tuesday, August 11: “Have we been listening to a thing, a piece of property, or a man?” — William Lloyd Garrison, addressing the crowd after Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, gave his first public speech to a mostly white audience at an antislavery convention on Nantucket on this day in 1841. The crowd roared back “A man!”—and Douglass was recruited on the spot to become a paid lecturer for the abolitionist movement.

• Wednesday, August 12: “This is the computer for just about everyone who has ever wanted a personal system at the office, on the university campus or at home.” — C.B. Rogers Jr., IBM vice president, introducing the IBM Personal Computer at a press conference at New York’s Waldorf Astoria on this day in 1981. It sold for $1,565 and legitimized the entire personal computer industry almost overnight.

• Thursday, August 13: “This isn’t for me, this is for them.” — Monica Puig, after upsetting world No. 2 Angelique Kerber to win Puerto Rico’s first-ever Olympic gold medal, in women’s tennis singles at the Rio Games on this day in 2016. She was unseeded and ranked 34th in the world going in.

• Friday, August 14: “Today a hope of many years’ standing is in large part fulfilled.” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt, on signing the Social Security Act into law on this day in 1935. It established old-age pensions and unemployment insurance for millions of Americans during the depths of the Great Depression.

• Saturday, August 15: “I am going to make the dirt fly.” — President Theodore Roosevelt, on his determination to finish the Panama Canal, which officially opened to global shipping on this day in 1914 with the passage of the SS Ancon. The canal cut nearly 8,000 miles off the sea route between the Atlantic and Pacific, reshaping global trade almost overnight.

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This is a story about a man named Brandon Fisher, who ran a small manufacturing business in Pennsylvania and wound up saving 33 people half a world away.

At around 2 p.m. on August 5, 2010 — sixteen years ago this week — roughly 700,000 tons of rock collapsed inside the San Jose copper and gold mine in Chile’s Atacama Desert, sealing off the only way in or out.

Thirty-three miners were trapped nearly half a mile down. A second collapse two days later blocked the ventilation shafts that might have doubled as an escape route.

For seventeen days, nobody on the surface knew if any of the men were still alive.

Fisher had faced a version of this problem before — and much closer to home.

He was the founder of Center Rock Inc., a drill-bit manufacturer in Berlin, Pennsylvania, with about 75 employees. In 2002, nine coal miners had become trapped in the flooded Quecreek Mine, in the same corner of Somerset County as Center Rock’s headquarters, and it was Fisher and his company who built the custom bit that carved the rescue shaft. All nine men came out alive.

It was the kind of job almost nobody else in the industry had ever had reason to practice. And it was exactly why, soon after the Chilean disaster, a drill distributor who carried Center Rock’s equipment thought to put Fisher in touch with the Chilean government.

Fisher designed a rescue plan that became known as Plan B — one of three separate drilling efforts racing to reach the trapped men by three different routes, on the theory that at least one had to work.

His employees back in Berlin worked around the clock manufacturing the equipment he’d need. Fisher flew to Chile.

The work was closer to surgery than drilling. Rescuers had located the miners’ refuge with a narrow, five-inch borehole; Fisher’s job was to widen that same hole, following it down through 2,000 feet of hard, fractured rock and old, unmapped mine workings, at an angle just off vertical.

Plan B broke through in early October. On October 13, 2010 — 69 days after the collapse — the first miner rode a steel capsule called the Fénix to the surface, and over the next twenty-two hours, all 33 came up alive.

Four months later, Fisher was a guest at President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address. Obama told the country what had happened in Chile, then added this:

Working three or four days at a time without any sleep. Thirty-seven days later, Plan B succeeded, and the miners were rescued.

But because he didn’t want all of the attention, Brandon wasn’t there when the miners emerged. He’d already gone back home, back to work on his next project.

One of his employees said of the rescue, “We proved that Center Rock is a little company, but we do big things.”

We do big things.

Fisher was 26 when he started Center Rock in 1998 — just four years before Quecreek. In his part of the country, as he put it, “everyone in our community was either a miner or a farmer.”

If his career had unfolded even slightly differently, 33 people in another country might never have had the chance to survive.

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7 other moments from history this week

• Sunday, August 2: The Tower Subway, the world’s first underground tube railway, opened this day in 1870, carrying passengers beneath the Thames in a cable-hauled carriage. “It is not advisable to attempt the passage in high-heeled boots,” wrote Charles Dickens Jr., son of the novelist, describing the cramped tunnel in an 1879 London guidebook.

• Monday, August 3: Mary Lou Retton, 16 and competing weeks after knee surgery, scored consecutive 10s on vault to become the first American woman to win Olympic all-around gymnastics gold. “I knew from the takeoff, I knew from the run — I just knew it,” she recalled to the Los Angeles Times a decade later.

• Tuesday, August 4: A jury acquitted printer John Peter Zenger of seditious libel in minutes, a verdict later credited as a founding moment for freedom of the press in America. “It is not the cause of one poor printer, but the cause of liberty,” his lawyer, Andrew Hamilton, told the jury in his closing argument.

• Wednesday, August 5: Cyrus Field’s transatlantic telegraph cable briefly connected North America and Europe by wire, cutting communication time from ten days to minutes before it failed weeks later. “Newspapers vie with each other in gas and grandiloquence,” wrote George Templeton Strong, a New York diarist, describing the public celebration once the cable went live.

• Thursday, August 6: Gertrude Ederle, 20, became the first woman to swim the English Channel, beating the existing men’s record by nearly two hours. “I knew it could be done, it had to be done, and I did it,” she told The New York Times after finishing her swim.

• Friday, August 7: George Washington established the Badge of Military Merit, the first military honor created for common soldiers rather than officers, and the direct ancestor of today’s Purple Heart. “The road to glory in a patriot army and a free country is open to all,” he wrote in the general order that created it.

• Saturday, August 8: Wilbur Wright’s brief public flight at Le Mans silenced years of European skepticism that the Wright brothers had ever flown at all. “Gentlemen, I’m going to fly,” he said quietly, turning his cap backward before taking off.

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It’s the anniversary of the failed attempt to land on the moon, July 20, 1969, and we all know the story:

• On July 16, 1969, a Saturn V rocket carrying Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins left Earth for the moon.

• Three days later, Armstrong and Aldrin climbed into the lunar module and began their descent toward the surface, leaving Collins orbiting alone in the command ship.

• At around 30,000 feet, the guidance computer running that descent became overwhelmed with more tasks than it could process in time, and Mission Control aborted eight-year, $25 billion mission.

O.K., back to reality — the moon landing was a big success, 57 years ago this week. But if not for a series of small decisions and more than a bit of luck, the three-point story above might actually have been how things turned out.

This is that story. Its protagonist is a woman named Margaret Hamilton.

Born in Indiana in 1936, she studied math (with a minor in philosophy), then got married and had a daughter, and then moved to Boston so her husband could attend Harvard Law school. Hamilton planned on graduate school herself, but she detoured, getting a job to support her family writing software in the meteorology department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Later, MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory won the contract to write the flight software for NASA’s new Apollo program, and Hamilton moved over to that project. Within a few years, she was directing the team that wrote the code for the descent of the lunar module.

I’ll let her explain a key insight she had, in her own words:

Often in the evening or at weekends I would bring my young daughter, Lauren, into work with me.

One day, she was with me when I was doing a simulation of a mission to the moon. She liked to imitate me – playing astronaut. She started hitting keys and all of a sudden, the simulation started. Then she pressed other keys and the simulation crashed. She had selected a program which was supposed to be run prior to launch – when she was already “on the way” to the moon.

The computer had so little space, it had wiped the navigation data taking her to the moon. I thought: my God – this could inadvertently happen in a real mission.

I suggested a program change to prevent a prelaunch program being selected during flight. But the higher-ups at MIT and Nasa said the astronauts were too well trained to make such a mistake.

Midcourse on the very next mission – Apollo 8 – one of the astronauts on board accidentally did exactly what Lauren had done. The Lauren bug! It created much havoc and required the mission to be reconfigured.

After that, they let me put the program change in, all right.

All of which brings us to July 20, 1969 — and what actually happened with the moon landing.

Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins made it to the moon; Armstrong and Aldrin began their descent toward the surface.

But at 30,000 feet, the computer running software that Hamilton’s team had designed gave a warning code. Here’s the radio transcript:

Armstrong: “Program alarm. It’s a 1202.”

Aldrin: “1202.”

Armstrong: “Give us a reading on the 1202 program alarm.”

Much as Hamilton had predicted — and at the most inopportune moment — the computer had in fact been overwhelmed; later NASA would figure out that a rendezvous radar switch had been left in the wrong position, flooding the computer with data it didn’t need for landing.

One of the engineers back in the control room, 24-year-old Jack Garman, had handwritten a list of every alarm the Apollo Guidance Computer could throw; he told his bosses they were O.K., and word was relayed up the chain.

Duke (CAPCOM): “Roger. We got you... we’re go on that alarm.”

Ready for the irony in this story?

The MIT job Hamilton took in order to put her husband through law school was in the research group of a meteorologist named Edward Lorenz, writing weather-prediction code. This was at the exact moment Lorenz was working out what would become chaos theory — often known now as the butterfly effect.

It’s the idea a small, easily-dismissed variable in a complex system can determine everything downstream of it.

Like:

1. If Hamilton’s husband hadn’t gone to Harvard …

2. And she hadn’t taken the job at MIT and wound up ultimately working on Apollo …

3. And if she hadn’t brought her young daughter into the office, and her daughter hadn’t played with the computers …

4. And if the error little Lauren created hadn’t led to Hamilton’s insight and insistence…

5. The Apollo lunar landing software might actually have shut down when it was flooded with data on July 20, 1969.

And the fiction at the start of this newsletter might have been fact.

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7 other moments to know from history this week

• Sunday, July 19: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal.” — From the Declaration of Sentiments, adopted at the first women’s rights convention organized by women, held in Seneca Falls, New York, on this day in 1848. Drafted primarily by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and modeled on the Declaration of Independence, it’s now regarded as the launching point of the organized women’s suffrage movement in America.

• Monday, July 20: “We were sitting there and watching the first picture develop of the surface of another planet — from that surface of the other planet.” — Joel Levine, NASA research scientist, on Viking 1’s first transmitted image from Mars on this day in 1976. It was the first U.S. spacecraft to land successfully on another planet, after mission managers scrapped a symbolic July 4th touchdown date in favor of a safer landing site.

• Tuesday, July 21: “It is the greatest Egyptian project since the time of the pharaohs.” — Abbas Sharaky, Cairo University water resources professor, on the Aswan High Dam, completed on this day in 1970. A decade in the building, it tamed the Nile’s flood-and-drought cycle for the first time in history and created Lake Nasser, one of the largest artificial lakes on Earth.

• Wednesday, July 22: “I’ve got to get going; I’m in a hurry.” — Wiley Post, readying for the final leg of the solo around-the-world flight he completed on this day in 1933. Flying alone by autopilot and radio direction finder, he circled the globe in 7 days, 18 hours, and 49 minutes, beating his own two-man record from two years earlier by nearly a full day.

• Thursday, July 23: “Of course, as you know now, that didn’t stop all those other people in St. Louis from claiming it was their invention.” — Author Elaine Greenstein, on the tangle of rival claims to the ice cream cone, said to have debuted at the St. Louis World’s Fair on this day in 1904. Confectioner Charles E. Menches is the most commonly credited inventor, one of at least half a dozen vendors who staked a claim.

• Friday, July 24: “Suddenly I found myself confronted with the walls of ruined houses built of the finest quality of Inca stone work.” — Hiram Bingham, on first encountering Machu Picchu on this day in 1911. The Yale historian had been searching for a different lost Inca city entirely, guided there by local farmers who already knew the site well.

• Saturday, July 25: “The American folk song has grown up.” — Joni Mitchell, on Bob Dylan’s electric set at the Newport Folk Festival on this day in 1965. The short, loud performance split the crowd between boos and cheers, and is now remembered as the moment folk gave way to rock.

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Yesterday was the 64th anniversary of the time a band at a club on Oxford Street in London met a very mixed reception — straight down the middle: Blues and rock fans cheered; jazz purists booed.

Honestly, this was a barely put-together band, and it was their first-ever gig. They had no regular drummer, and a bassist and pianist who everyone agreed were each only there for the short-term, if the band survived past the short-term at all.

Heck, they almost didn’t even have a name, except that their founder had to come up with one on the spot when he booked the gig. He glanced at an LP on the floor: The Best of Muddy Waters.

The title of track five on the first side caught his eye: “Rollin’ Stone Blues.”

We’re the Rolling Stones, he told the manager, coining a name that I’ll bet every single one of the 120,000 subscribers of this newsletter recognized, nearly six and a half decades later.

More about the gig:

• The Stones were a bit less than three months old at this point; formed after guitarist Brian Jones ran an ad in Jazz News. Mick Jagger saw it (he’d known Jones casually from playing in the same circles), and he brought his childhood friend Keith Richards along.

• The gig itself was a last-minute replacement opportunity because a band called Blues Incorporated that had a weekly residency at the club — the Marquee Club — got called to do a BBC Radio slot. Jones managed to squeeze in to take over.

• The lineup that night: Jagger on vocals, Jones and Keith Richards on guitars, Ian Stewart on piano, Dick Taylor on bass, and a drummer whose identity remains disputed to this day — probably Tony Chapman, possibly Mick Avory, who would later become a founding member of the Kinks.

• Charlie Watts, who would become one of the most respected drummers in rock history, had already been asked to join and kept saying no — he had a steady job and wasn’t convinced the band would last. Bill Wyman, who would anchor the band on bass for the next three decades, wasn’t there yet either.

• “I hope they don’t think we’re a Rock ‘n Roll outfit,” Jagger had told a Jazz News writer who did a report ahead of the gig.

I have to say there are a few things happening this week that could well have been the subject of the “big essay” for Big Optimism. You’ll see at the end of this newsletter.

But on Saturday, England beat Norway in the World Cup quarterfinals. I was rooting for Norway, but I was struck when the cameras lingered on one of the luxury boxes, where 82-year-old England fan Mick Jagger was watching the game.

I said to my wife: “Want to know what’s wild? Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones were already popular the last time England won the World Cup — and here we are six decades later, and he’s still famous and touring.”

Then I made the connection, and I realized we were just one day away from the anniversary of their first gig.

Here’s to longevity, last-minute replacements, and the Muddy Waters LP that gave the band its name.

Way back then the Marquee Club was a small ground-floor venue that could fit 300 people officially; maybe a few more if you crammed them in. But I’ll bet there were thousands who later claimed to have been there on July 12, 1962.

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7 other moments to know from history this week

• July 12: “Relax, you are in Paris!” — The opening line of a seven-minute French television program broadcast on this day in 1962 via the Telstar satellite — the first transatlantic television transmission in history. Telstar had been launched just two days earlier by NASA, weighed 170 pounds, and could relay a signal for only 18 minutes per orbit.

• July 13: “His easy phrasing is especially commendable.” — Metronome magazine’s George Simon, reviewing a young vocalist performing with the Harry James Orchestra at the Roseland Ballroom in New York this day in 1939 — one of the first published notices of any kind for a 23-year-old singer named Frank Sinatra.

• July 14: “Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are nought without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime.” — Edward Whymper, from his account of the first ascent of the Matterhorn, completed on this day in 1865. It took him nine tries; four of his fellow climbers died during the descent afterward.

• July 15: “Come in here and shake hands.” — American commander Thomas Stafford, on this day in 1975, opening the hatch between the Apollo spacecraft and the Soviet Soyuz capsule. Soviet commander Alexei Leonov later joked that three languages had been spoken on the mission — Russian, English, and “Oklahomski,” a reference to Stafford’s pronounced drawl when attempting Russian. He and Stafford remained close friends until Leonov’s death in 2019.

• July 16: “Within the first few days, I knew this was going to be huge” — Jeff Bezos, recalling the launch of Amazon.com on this day in 1995, when the site went live as an online bookstore operating out of the garage of his rented house in Bellevue, Washington. “

• July 17: “To all who come to this happy place, welcome.” — Walt Disney, at the opening of Disneyland in Anaheim, California, on this day in 1955 — words he read from a bronze plaque at the park’s entrance as it opened to the public for the first time. Within its first year, Disneyland had more visitors than the Statue of Liberty, the Washington Monument, and the Grand Canyon combined.

• July 18: “The Tour is an ordeal, and it is the courage to endure and to complete it that makes the champions.” — Henri Desgrange, founder and editor of the French newspaper L’Auto, who created the Tour de France as a publicity stunt to boost circulation — and whose race was completed for the first time on this day in 1903. The Tour has been held every year since, except during the two world wars.

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Let’s talk about Althea Gibson.

Sometimes I tend to hide the name of the person we’re talking about, because as soon as you see the name you’ll know the story. But honestly, I wonder how many people today will know who she was, or why we’re writing about her?

Althea Gibson was born August 25, 1927, on a sharecropper’s farm in Silver, South Carolina.

Three years old when her family joined the Great Migration north, settling in Harlem at the start of the Depression. She skipped school constantly, dropped out at 13, and was, by most accounts, heading in the wrong direction.

What saved her: a paddle tennis court on 143rd Street, set up by the Police Athletic League to keep troubled kids off the streets. Althea was immediately, obviously, preternaturally good.

A musician and PAL coach named Buddy Walker noticed her, bought her a secondhand racket, and brought her to the Cosmopolitan Club in Harlem, where members pooled money to give her a junior membership and lessons from the club professional.

She won her first junior ATA title at 15. She won it again at 16.

For the next seven years she was the top-ranked player on the African American tennis circuit — which existed because the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association ran its events at whites-only clubs and excluded Black players from competition.

Sugar Ray Robinson and his wife befriended her and introduced her to two Black physicians who had made it their project to develop Black tennis players: Dr. Hubert Eaton of Wilmington, North Carolina, and Dr. Robert Johnson of Lynchburg, Virginia. Each took her into their home, coached her, insisted she finish high school. She did, graduating at 22, then won a scholarship to Florida A&M, graduating in 1953.

But the USLTA remained closed to her. Tournament players were required to qualify through sanctioned events held at clubs where Black people were not permitted.

In 1950, Alice Marble — a four-time U.S. champion — wrote an editorial in American Lawn Tennis magazine calling the tennis establishment “unwilling to give an opportunity to a potential champion simply because of race.”

She said she was ashamed of her sport. The USLTA relented.

In August 1950, Althea became the first Black player to compete at the U.S. Nationals at Forest Hills, losing narrowly in the second round to the reigning Wimbledon champion.

A journalist wrote: “In many ways, it is even a tougher personal Jim Crow-busting assignment than was Jackie Robinson’s when he first stepped out of the Brooklyn Dodgers dugout.”

She struggled for the next several years — inconsistent, fading, by 1955 considering quitting entirely and joining the Army. Instead, the State Department recruited her for a goodwill tennis tour of Southeast Asia.

She came back transformed.

In 1956 she won the French Open.

In 1957, 69 years ago today, she walked onto Centre Court at Wimbledon as the top seed — the first Wimbledon final attended by Queen Elizabeth II as monarch — and defeated Darlene Hard 6-3, 6-2 in under an hour.

When the Queen handed her the trophy, Althea wept and said: “At last. At last.”

New York gave her a ticker tape parade — only the second Black American so honored, after Jesse Owens. She won Wimbledon again in 1958, and the U.S. Nationals again. The Associated Press named her Female Athlete of the Year both years.

Then she retired — not by choice.

Amateur tennis offered no prize money, and she was broke.

“The truth, to put it bluntly,” she wrote, “is that tennis doesn’t pay enough for me to eat.”

She played exhibition matches before Harlem Globetrotter games, recorded a jazz album, appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, landed a small role in a John Wayne film.

In the 1960s she became the first Black woman on the LPGA professional golf tour.

Thirty years later, she suffered strokes and debilitating health problems; in 2001 her former doubles partner Angela Buxton received a phone call: Althea was broke, sick, unable to pay her rent or medical bills, and talking about ending her life.

Buxton — one of Althea’s few close friends on tour, both of them marginalized, one for being Black, one for being Jewish — launched a public fundraising campaign.

Think of it as a GoFundMe before there was GoFundMe. The tennis world raised nearly $1 million. It was enough to get Althea through her final years.

She died in September 2003, at 76.

Billie Jean King said: “If it hadn’t been for her, it wouldn’t have been so easy for Arthur, or the ones who followed.”

Before Serena Williams won her first Grand Slam in 1999, she’d faxed Althea a letter asking for advice. Althea wrote back. What they said to each other was never made public.

But I hope this newsletter lets a few more people remember Althea Gibson.

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7 other moments to know from history this week

• July 5: “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.” — Frederick Douglass, from the speech he delivered on this day in 1852 at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society — an Independence Day address that has since been called one of the greatest speeches in American history.

• July 6: “I remember coming into the fete and seeing all the sideshows. And also hearing all this great music wafting in from this little Tannoy system. It was John and the band. I just thought, ‘Well, he looks good, he’s singing well and he seems like a great lead singer to me.’” — Paul McCartney, recalling the afternoon of this day in 1957, when he arrived by bicycle at the garden fete of St. Peter’s Church in Woolton, Liverpool, and first heard a 16-year-old named John Lennon performing with his skiffle group, the Quarrymen.

• July 7: “Dear Mr. Andropov, my name is Samantha Smith. I am ten years old... I have been worrying about Russia and the United States getting into a nuclear war. Are you going to vote to have a war or not?” — Samantha Smith, in the letter she wrote to Soviet General Secretary Yuri Andropov in November 1982. Andropov wrote back personally and invited her to visit the USSR. On this day in 1983, Samantha and her parents flew to Moscow.

• July 8: “Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the Land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” — The inscription on the Liberty Bell, rung on this day in 1776 to summon the citizens of Philadelphia to the State House yard — now Independence Square — where Colonel John Nixon read the Declaration of Independence aloud for the first time to a public audience.

• July 9: “Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.” — Bertrand Russell, from the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, released at a press conference in London on this day in 1955. The document was co-written by Russell and Albert Einstein — whose signature was his final public act before his death three months earlier — and signed by nine other leading scientists and Nobel laureates, warning that a war fought with hydrogen bombs could end the human race.

• July 10: “To be given the opportunity to make the last kick to win a World Cup is an unspeakable emotion.” — Brandi Chastain, who on this day in 1999 scored the decisive penalty in the shootout that gave the United States its second Women’s World Cup title, defeating China 5-4 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena before a crowd of 90,185 — the largest audience ever to attend a women’s sporting event.

• July 11: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.” — Note accompanying the gift of a year’s salary given to Harper Lee at Christmas 1956 by her friends Michael and Joy Brown, who wanted her to have time to write. The result: To Kill a Mockingbird, published on this day in 1960, which won the Pulitzer Prize and has sold more than 40 million copies.

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It was the summer of 1950:

• Frank Borghi was driving a hearse for his uncle’s funeral home in St. Louis.

• Joe Gaetjens, who had been born in Haiti, was washing dishes in New York — part of how he was paying his bills while studying on a scholarship at Columbia University.

• Walter Bahr had just finished the school year teaching high school in Philadelphia; Gino Pariani was working a factory job in St. Louis.

What all four of these men had in common — along with a few others who will come into the story shortly — is that at the midpoint of the last century, they were among the best players in America in a sport that almost nobody else in America cared about: soccer.

They played in semi-professional leagues — the kind where the players held day jobs and played on weekends for modest pay. They were big fish in some very small ponds, but that was enough for them to get noticed by the United States Soccer Football Association — the governing body that ran American soccer on an annual budget of less than $50,000.

And by “noticed,” we mean “recruited to play for the American team in the 1950 World Cup.”

Quick stage-setting: This was to be the first World Cup since 1938 (because: World War II), and the entire idea of the World Cup had been kind of hanging by a trans-Atlantic string even before that.

FIFA had nearly gone broke during the war years, and when peace finally came no country wanted to host the resumed tournament, until Brazil stepped up. The Jules Rimet Trophy — the actual physical cup awarded to the winner — had spent the war years hidden in a shoebox under an Italian official’s bed to keep the Nazis from melting it down.

Anyway, the U.S. needed a team — and if there’s a joke that U.S. soccer fans hate to love about how soccer is the sport of the future in the USA, and always will be — in 1950 that would have seemed wildly optimistic.

Outside of immigrant communities and a few die-hard fans, not many people cared. And faced with fielding a national team, a selection committee picked the squad from players in the semi-professional leagues.

Their coach told reporters: “We have no chance. We’re like lambs going to the slaughter.”

One promising player couldn’t make the trip at all because his employer wouldn’t give him time off. The team trained together exactly once — the day before they left for Brazil.

Arriving for their first game, they lost handily, 3-1 to Spain.

Then, on June 29, 1950, they played England.

England was making its World Cup debut; England’s Football Association had boycotted every previous tournament, considering it beneath them. Their roster included many of the best players in the world. But against the Americans, they rested Stanley Matthews, widely considered the finest footballer alive, thinking there was no chance they’d need him.

The bookmakers had England at 3-1 to win the entire tournament. The Americans were listed at 500-1.

The Daily Mirror wrote before the match that “the only unanswered question seemed to be the size of the American’s defeat.”

The next day, however, the Associated Press reported what actually happened in the game — to a U.S. audience that was largely learning about its existence for the first time:

RIO DE JANEIRO, June 30 — If the British were to organize a baseball team and defeat the New York Yankees, it wouldn’t cause much more surprise than the United States 1-0 upset of England in the world soccer championships here yesterday.

The favored British team and the spectators were stunned by the result. The lone tally was scored by Ed Souza of Fall River, Mass. at 39 minutes of the first half.

...

Brazilian fans swarmed onto the field after the United States victory and took the North Americans on their shoulders while the victors were given an ovation.

Yep, the Americans won. However, quick correction, 76 years later: It was Gaetjens, the Haitian-born dishwasher, who scored the lone goal for the United States, not Souza.

How unexpected was the U.S. victory? In London, several newspaper editors received the wire report and printed the score as England 10, United States 1, assuming it was a misprint.

As for the American players — well, they came home and returned to their day jobs. There’s also a note of tragedy we have to add here, which is that Gaetjens returned to Haiti in 1954, married, had three children — and ten years later was killed by the secret police of dictator François Duvalier.

It was another 40 years before the United States even qualified for the World Cup again; then four years later in 1994, the U.S. hosted the tournament for the first time, setting attendance records that still stand — but will likely be broken this summer.

Major League Soccer followed, and a generation of American kids grew up playing the sport.

Still, the 1950 team is arguably the high-water mark of American men’s soccer, given that it was a group of mailmen and schoolteachers and dishwashers who beat the country that had invented the game, and had essentially no tradition of American soccer success to build on.

Fun trivia about U.S. and England soccer: England has never beaten the United States in any game that mattered in any tournament — despite soccer being England’s number 1 sport. Three meetings — 1950, 2010, and 2022 — one American win, two draws.

As this newsletter goes out, both teams are still in the 2026 World Cup, both playing their Round of 32 matches on Wednesday — the US against Bosnia and Herzegovina in Santa Clara, England against the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Atlanta.

They’re on opposite sides of the bracket. The only way they meet again is in the final, on July 19 in New York.

If it happens, say a little prayer for Joe Gaetjens and his teammates. Then tell other people who he was.

All writing is autobiographical ... so by the time you read this I’ll be on my way to my second World Cup game of this tournament. I was at France’s victory over Iraq last week in Philadelphia, and today my wife and I will watch Germany take on Paraguay near Boston.

Still rooting for the U.S.A. and Canada (and psyched after Canada’s win yesterday over South Africa). It’s a beautiful game!

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7 other moments to know from history this week

• June 28: “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz.” — Janis Joplin, from the a cappella song she recorded three days before her death in October 1970, which became one of the most recognizable car references in the history of popular music. Her reference was possible only because on this day in 1926, two rival German automakers formally merged to create Daimler-Benz AG.

• June 29: “The old convoy had started me thinking about good, two-lane highways, but Germany had made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons across the land.” — Dwight D. Eisenhower, from his memoir At Ease, explaining the two experiences that shaped the most consequential domestic legislation of his presidency: his experience in 1919 crossing the country in a military convoy, and watching Allied forces move rapidly across Germany on the Autobahn in 1945. On this day in 1956, he signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act authorizing $25 billion to build 41,000 miles of interstate highway, the largest public works project in American history to that point.

• June 30: “Our wounds are too fresh and too painful still for us to drive them from our memory.” — Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of the independent Republic of the Congo, in an unscheduled speech he delivered at the independence ceremony on this day in 1960, directly in front of King Baudouin of Belgium. Lumumba was assassinated six months later; he was 35 years old.

• July 1: “We are a great country, and shall become one of the greatest in the universe if we preserve it; we shall sink into insignificance and adversity if we suffer it to be broken.” — John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first Prime Minister, sworn in on this day in 1867. Macdonald had wanted the new country to be called the Kingdom of Canada; the British government talked him out of it.

• July 2: “It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” — John Adams, writing to his wife Abigail 250 years ago, predicting to her that July 2, 1776, the day on which the Continental Congress voted to declare independence from Great Britain, would be celebrated as America’s birthday.

• July 3: “I have not had one unpleasant moment.” — Spencer Gore, the 27-year-old rackets player who won the first Wimbledon championship on this day in 1877, defeating William Marshall 6-1, 6-2, 6-4 in a final that lasted 48 minutes.

• July 4: “Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” — Lou Gehrig, speaking at Yankee Stadium on this day in 1939, two weeks after the New York Yankees first baseman had retired at 36 after being diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

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This is the story of a 19th century chemistry discovery that affects our lives in many ways today, and that most people are completely unaware of.

Let’s change that, starting our narrative in 1852, when a boy named Henri Moissan was born in Paris.

The son of a railway employee and a seamstress, Moissan became an apprentice clockmaker, but then wound up in the army during the Franco-Prussian War (1870; saved you a Google). Afterward, he switched careers, so to speak, and became a trainee chemist in a pharmacy.

He apparently received some renown after saving a patient who had been poisoned with arsenic, and had the chance to go back to school — earning a doctoral level degree at age 28, in 1880.

This background placed Moissan perfectly to take up a quest that had flummoxed European chemists for more than 70 years at the time — the attempt to isolate an element that they were convinced existed, but that had never been directly observed.

This was fluorine — the last halogen anyone hadn’t managed to isolate, and the one that kept killing the people who tried.

I don’t think it’s too much to say some parts of the chemistry world at the time were obsessed with this question, to the point that several scientists chased after it to the point of serious injury or death:

• A Belgian chemist named Paulin Louyet tried to isolate it and died of poisoning.

• A Frenchman named Jérôme Nicklès tried next, knowing exactly what had happened to Louyet, and died the same way.

• Two Irish brothers, Thomas and George Knox, both attempted it in the 1830s; Thomas nearly died, and George was disabled for three years afterward.

Chemists started calling the dead and injured the “fluorine martyrs.”

None of them knew exactly what they were dying for; they just knew something was in that rock, and it was killing the people who went looking for it.

Fluorine, once freed from its compounds, is the most reactive element on the periodic table. It corrodes glass. It ignites substances that don’t normally burn. Every 19th-century chemist who went after it was handling something that wanted to combine violently with whatever it touched, including human tissue.

Using a borrowed laboratory, Moissan took up the quest.

Moissan built a custom electrolysis apparatus out of platinum and iridium, the only materials that could resist what he was trying to produce, sealed with stoppers carved from fluorite itself. He cooled the whole system to -50°C to slow the reaction down enough to survive it.

He poisoned himself with his own apparatus more than once.

Then, on June 26, 1886, he ran an electric current through a solution of potassium fluoride dissolved in hydrofluoric acid, inside his platinum apparatus, at fifty degrees below freezing. A pale yellow-green gas collected at one electrode.

Fluorine. Isolated, alone, for the first time in human history, after roughly seventy years of failed attempts and at least four deaths along the way.

The French Academy of Sciences sent three of its most distinguished members to confirm it. It held.

Moissan spent the following years studying the element’s properties and building an electric furnace capable of reaching temperatures over 3,000°C — itself a major advance, used to produce industrial compounds that had been impossible to create at lower heat.

In 1906 he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The committee’s citation called fluorine “that savage beast among the elements” and praised the skill with which Moissan had tamed it.

He died the following February, at 54, officially of appendicitis, though some historians have wondered whether decades of fluorine and carbon monoxide exposure played a role.

None of the dead and disabled men of the 19th century actually knew what fluorine would be used for, of course. So here’s a list of some of the things their work led to:

• Roughly a fifth of modern pharmaceutical drugs — including widely prescribed antidepressants and cholesterol medications — contain fluorine atoms, added because they make the drugs more stable and effective in the body.

• Hydrofluoric acid, a fluorine compound, etches the silicon wafers inside every computer chip and smartphone on Earth.

• Teflon — chemically inert, heat-resistant, used in everything from frying pans to surgical implants to spacecraft components — exists because fluorine chemistry exists.

• Fluoride compounds in toothpaste and drinking water prevent tooth decay for billions of people.

• Uranium hexafluoride, the only stable, gaseous uranium compound, is what makes uranium enrichment for both nuclear power and nuclear weapons possible at industrial scale.

Granted, early refrigerants made from fluorine compounds were celebrated for being inert and non-toxic—but they turned out to be destroying the ozone layer. So, they were phased out worldwide starting in the late 1980s.

Very few people knew what was going on in Moissan’s borrowed lab 140 years ago this week. Heck, very few people know today! But now you’re an exception.

Thanks for reading.

Now that I’ve finished writing this newsletter on a chip-infused computer and you’re done reading it on your chip-infused smartphone, I’m off to make scrambled eggs in a nonstick pan and then brush my teeth.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• June 21: “I was singing to God and I was saying that God was the Tambourine Man and I was saying to him, ‘Hey, God, take me for a trip and I’ll follow you.’ It was a prayer of submission.” — Roger McGuinn, lead singer of the Byrds, describing the spiritual undertone behind the band’s cover of Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” the opening track of their debut album of the same name, released on this day in 1965.

• June 22: “One more of the emotionally charged and at times dramatic pages in Berlin’s post-war history has been turned.” — Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, speaking at the ceremony in Berlin on this day in 1990, when a crane lifted the guardhouse at Checkpoint Charlie off its foundation and carried it away.

• June 23: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” — The full text of Title IX, signed into law on this day in 1972. The law is best known today for transforming women’s college athletics.

• June 24: “It came spasmodically from a chain of nine circular-type aircraft way up from the vicinity of Mount Rainier... [like] “a saucer if you skip it across water.” — Kenneth Arnold, an Idaho pilot and search-and-rescue volunteer, describing what he saw on this day in 1947. Newspapers garbled his description into “flying saucers,” a phrase that didn’t exist the day before and has never left it since.

• June 25: “How proud Anne would have been if she had lived to see this.” — Otto Frank, the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust, on the publication of his daughter’s diary in the Netherlands on this day in 1947, under the title Het Achterhuis — “The Secret Annex.”

• June 26: “History will honor you for it.” — President Harry Truman, addressing the delegates of 50 nations who had just signed the United Nations Charter in San Francisco on this day in 1945, seven weeks before the war in the Pacific finally ended.

• June 27: “Captain, our adventures have been a little different.” — Theodore Roosevelt, greeting Joshua Slocum, the first person in history to sail solo around the world, who had completed his voyage on this day in 1898 after more than three years and 46,000 miles alone aboard a 37-foot rebuilt oyster boat. Slocum’s reply: “That is true, Mr. President, but I see you got here first.”

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This week’s essay opens in one of the most horrible places in the history of the world, and with a short story that two groups of people experienced very differently at the time.

The first group is very hard to have any empathy for: a group of SS guards at the main gate at Auschwitz on June 20, 1942.

Whoever they were, they were nervous and afraid: One of them looked up to see the car belonging to camp commandant Rudolf Höss idling in front of him, waiting for them to open the barrier.

An officer inside — an Untersturmführer according to his rank insignia, roughly equivalent to a lieutenant — leaned out the window and screamed at them: “Wake up, you buggers! Open up or I’ll open you up!”

The guards, rattled, scrambled to raise the barrier. The car drove through.

The second group of people? The men inside the car.

They were not in fact Nazi officers; they were four Auschwitz prisoners in the midst of one of the most daring escapes you’ll ever learn about. Their names:

• Kazik Piechowski, 22, who had been an Eagle Scout imprisoned at Auschwitz for two years. (Boy Scouts were targeted early on; apparently the Nazis feared them as young men with strong feelings of patriotism).

• a Polish priest named Józef Lempart.

• a young resistance courier named Stanisław Jaster.

• Eugeniusz Bendera, a mechanic who worked in the camp’s motor pool repairing SS vehicles, who had been placed on a list for execution — spurring the escape plan to begin with.

They had stolen the car, the uniforms, and Nazi guns and hand grenades, but they had pledged that they would not kill any Germans on the way out—out of hard-earned confidence that no matter what they might do to hurt the Nazis, the Nazis would enact far greater vengeance on their fellow prisoners.

It was Piechowski who spoke German, and who wore the lieutenant’s uniform, and who yelled at the gate guards. Had they not complied, all four men had decided to shoot each other rather than risk recapture and retribution.

Exactly 2 years

Auschwitz was the largest Nazi killing center. Of roughly 1.3 million people sent there, an estimated 1.1 million died — most of them Jews, but also Poles, Roma, and Soviet prisoners of war.

Piechowski had arrived two years before, to the day, in the second transport ever sent to the camp, when it was still being built by the people imprisoned in it, after being caught trying to escape to Hungary.

He later described the first months as a kind of total shock — the starvation, the violence, prisoners forced to eat from the same bowl they used at night if they lost their spoon.

Their escape plan took almost absurd levels of nerve.

They disguised themselves as a work detail moving a cart, which gave them relative uninspected mobility in the camp. Then, they managed to sneak into a storeroom via a coal chute Piechowski had rigged so that it didn’t latch properly, and stole the Nazi uniforms, weapons — and Höss’s Steyr 220.

Besides simply escaping, they carried an intelligence report written by Witold Pilecki — a Polish army officer who had deliberately gotten himself arrested and sent to Auschwitz to organize resistance and smuggle information to the Polish underground.

Not over for a long time afterward

The barrier went up. They drove out of Auschwitz in the commandant’s car, in German uniforms, carrying German weapons, and nobody stopped them.

Forty miles away, they abandoned the car and split up. All four men survived the escape itself, although the German reprisals were in fact brutal.

Both Piechowski’s parents and Jaster’s were arrested by the Germans afterward and died at Auschwitz.

According to multiple accounts, the camp’s policy of tattooing prisoners with identification numbers — the practice most associated with Auschwitz today — was introduced partly in response to this escape, after a furious Höss demanded to know how four prisoners could vanish in his own car, wearing his own men’s uniforms, carrying his own ammunition.

Piechowski made his way toward Ukraine, couldn’t find safe refuge there, returned to Poland under a false name, and joined the Home Army — the main Polish underground resistance — fighting the Germans until the war ended in 1945.

Then, under the new Communist government that took power in Poland after the war, he was arrested again. Membership in the Home Army — the same resistance movement that had fought the Nazis — was now treated as evidence of disloyalty to the new regime. Piechowski was sentenced to ten years in prison.

He served seven.

Witold Pilecki

Honestly, Witold Pilecki deserves his own newsletter and then some; in short, he escaped Auschwitz himself in 1943, fought in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, spent the rest of the war as a prisoner of the Germans, and then — like Piechowski — returned to Poland afterward.

He was arrested by the Communist secret police in 1947, accused of espionage, and executed in May 1948.

As for Piechowski, he lived to be 98. After Poland’s transition away from communism, he was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, the country’s highest civilian honor. For most of his life before that, almost nobody outside Poland had heard his story.

The optimism in this story isn’t that they escaped — most people who tried didn’t, and the four of them knew the odds better than anyone. It’s that faced with those odds, knowing exactly what failure would cost, they decided to try anyway. Sometimes fortune favors the bold.

Sometimes the boldness is the whole point, regardless of what fortune does.

Katy Carr

In 2009, a British singer-songwriter named Katy Carr — who has Polish roots on her mother’s side — learned about Piechowski’s escape and was struck by the details of the last 80 meters or so, the moment at the gate, the few seconds when the entire plan came down to whether four starving men in stolen uniforms could bluff their way past a single guard.

She wrote a song about it, called “Kommander’s Car,” and then traveled to Gdansk to meet Piechowski in person and play it for him. He had never had anyone do anything like that before, and Carr later made a documentary about the meeting and spent years afterward touring with the song and working to keep the story alive.

I met Katy Carr briefly years ago, when I was a reporter at Stars and Stripes, which is how I first heard about Piechowski’s story.

It wasn’t really a Stripes story, and I couldn’t write about it then. But I’m sure glad I knew it to share now.

I’ll admit I went back and forth on whether to write about something as terrible and sacred as Auschwitz in a newsletter that’s supposed to be about optimism. I’m not sure any of us is fully worthy of telling these stories.

But I think they’re worth knowing, and worth retelling, and so here we are.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• June 14: “We’ve had a terrible voyage. The wonder is we are here at all.” — Captain John Alcock,upon landing in a bog outside Clifden, Ireland, on June 15, 1919, after departing Newfoundland the previous afternoon with navigator Arthur Whitten Brown — completing the first nonstop transatlantic flight in history.

• June 15: “No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or disseised, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way destroyed... except by the lawful judgment of his peers.” — From the Magna Carta, sealed by King John at Runnymede on this day in 1215, under pressure from rebel barons who had seized London.

• June 16: “Hey sky, take off your hat, I’m on my way!” — Valentina Tereshkova, a 26-year-old former textile factory worker, as she launched aboard Vostok 6 on this day in 1963, becoming the first woman in space. She orbited the Earth 48 times over nearly three days.

• June 17: “I was just baggage, like a sack of potatoes.” — Amelia Earhart, describing her role as a passenger and logkeeper, aboard the Fokker trimotor Friendship, which on this day in 1928 became the first aircraft to carry a woman across the Atlantic. Earhart was embarrassed, since the flight made her famous, but she’d done none of the flying herself. Four years later, in 1932, she went back and did it solo.

• June 18: “I knew that women belonged there.” — Sally Ride, who on this day in 1983 became the first American woman in space, launching aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger as a mission specialist.

• June 19: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” — General Order No. 3, read aloud by Union Major General Gordon Granger and his troops on this day in 1865 — more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and more than two months after the Confederacy’s surrender.

• June 20: "This age of fast-moving events requires quick, dependable communications for use in time of emergency." — President John F. Kennedy, on this day in 1963, the day American and Soviet negotiators signed the agreement creating the Washington-Moscow hotline. The first message was a typing test: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back 1234567890.

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Little diddy ‘bout Richard and Mildred …

With apologies to John Mellencamp, it’s time we talked about Richard Perry Loving and Mildred Delores Jeter if you don’t know who they are—and why we should know them.

Richard Perry Loving was born on October 29, 1933, in Central Point, Virginia, a small farming community in Caroline County. His family was of English and Irish descent. He was a bricklayer and construction worker, quiet and taciturn, with a platinum blonde crew cut.

A man of few words.

Mildred Delores Jeter was born on June 22, 1939, in the same community. Her ancestry was African American and Native American — she identified primarily as Rappahannock — and she was shy, soft-spoken, and possessed of what people who knew her described as a quiet dignity.

She and Richard grew up as neighbors. He first came to her family’s house as a teenager to hear her siblings play music.

Central Point was, at that time — and despite Virginia’s segregation laws — a surprisingly integrated community in practice — mixed-race families had lived there for generations, and the formal rules of Jim Crow sat uneasily alongside the actual texture of daily life.

Richard and Mildred knew each other for years before they began dating, and — we’re all adults here — when they got pregnant, they decided to get married.

Only problem: mixed race marriages weren’t allowed in Virginia, so they drove to Washington D.C. — where it was legal — on June 2, 1958.

Then, they came home to Virginia and moved in with Mildred’s family. Five weeks later, 2 a.m. on July 14, 1958, Sheriff Garnett Brooks and two deputies burst into their bedroom.

The charge was violating Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which made interracial marriage a felony. On the wall above the bed was their marriage certificate from Washington D.C.; Sheriff Brooks told Richard it was no good in Virginia.

They pleaded guilty. Judge Leon Bazile sentenced them to one year in prison, then suspended the sentence on the condition that they leave Virginia and not return together for 25 years. His Honor wrote:

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents.

The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

The Lovings moved to Washington D.C. They hated it. Their whole world was in Caroline County — their families, their friends, the land Richard knew.

Mildred later said that Washington felt like a foreign country. So, they’d sneak back to Virginia, taking risks whenever they could, for family events, for the births of their children — Richard’s mother was a midwife and delivered the babies at home.

Police kept finding them and expelling them again. Caroline County is about 70 miles from Washington — just across a border they couldn’t cross.

In 1963, Mildred wrote a letter to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, asking for help. Kennedy referred her to the ACLU.

Two lawyers, Bernard Cohen and Philip Hirschbaum, took the case for free. It wound its way through the Virginia courts, and eventually to the Supreme Court.

Neither Richard nor Mildred attended the oral arguments. Richard sent a message to his lawyers:

“Tell the Court I love my wife and it is just not fair that I cannot live with her in Virginia.”

On June 12, 1967 — 58 years ago this week — the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in their favor.

Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the opinion:

“The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”

Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act was struck down, and laws banning interracial marriage in 15 other states fell with it.

The Lovings moved back home to Caroline County, where Richard built them a small concrete block house. They lived quietly, mostly out of the public eye, the way they had always wanted.

Richard was killed by a drunk driver in 1975; Mildred lost her right eye in the same accident. In a rare interview in 2007, she said:

“I am proud that Richard’s and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life.”

Mildred never remarried, and she stayed in the house Richard built until she died of pneumonia the following year.

There was a film about the Lovings released in 2016 — simply called Loving, starring Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton — that told the story well if you want more.

Honestly, could you pick a better name? Loving v. Virginia.

Quick personal note: In 1998, I spoke briefly with Mildred Loving.

I’d been thinking about writing a book about the real people behind landmark Supreme Court cases — a way to reiterate that our common law system is built on real human beings with real lives that are sometimes turned upside down in the process of making history.

I remember her as a quiet, dignified, composed woman who was a bit skeptical but very comfortable with her story and her place in history.

I set the book project aside; life intervened.

But I’m glad I get to tell the story now.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• June 7: “Only by playing with something can you find out what it is and what it can do.” — Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, managing director of the Lego Group, who on this day in 1968 opened the first Legoland park in Billund, Denmark. The park was built to accommodate the crowds of people who kept showing up at the factory wanting to see Lego models.

• June 8: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” — George Orwell, whose final novel, 1984, was published on this day in 1949.

• June 9: “Actually, I wanted to be a doctor; but instead I became the biggest quack in the world.” — Clarence “Ducky” Nash, the voice of Donald Duck, recalling his unlikely career — which began on this day in 1934 when the animated short The Wise Little Hen introduced Donald to the world.

• June 10: “He was the first living human with whom I had ever talked who knew what he was talking about in regard to alcoholism from actual experience. In other words, he talked my language.” — Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, describing his first conversation with Dr. Bob Smith, who on this day in 1935 took his last drink..

• June 11: “There will come a day in your life when you must act for others — your family, perhaps your community — and you must be ready.” — Vivian Malone Jones, speaking at the University of Alabama’s commencement ceremony in 2000, 37 years after she and James Hood became the first Black students to enroll there on this day in 1963.

• June 12: “Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” — Ronald Reagan, standing 100 yards from the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin on this day in 1987.

• June 13: “Prior to any questioning, the person must be warned that he has a right to remain silent, that any statement he does make may be used as evidence against him, and that he has a right to the presence of an attorney, either retained or appointed.” — Chief Justice Earl Warren, from the majority opinion in Miranda v. Arizona, decided on this day in 1966.

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Ever played Tetris?

• Maybe it was on a Game Boy in the back seat of a car.

• Maybe it was on a desktop computer when you were supposed to be working.

• Maybe it was on your phone last week.

It’s one of those games that requires no instruction, crosses every language barrier, and produces in almost every person who touches it the same response: one more game.

Tetris has been downloaded on mobile devices alone more than 500 million times. It has been played in more than 200 countries on more than 50 platforms. Neuroscientists have studied it and found it can reduce symptoms of PTSD and improve brain efficiency.

It is almost certainly the most widely played game in human history — certainly the most-played video game.

So it might be surprising, if you don’t know, to learn that it was created by a 29-year-old Soviet programmer in his spare time at the height of the Cold War, on a computer with no ability to create graphics, all as a way to test his machine.

His name is Alexey Pajitnov, and honestly the only less probable thing than for him to have invented an incredibly viral game long before anyone talked that way was all that had to happen in order for him to make any profit from the venture whatsoever.

If you’ve seen the 2023 Apple TV+ film about how Tetris escaped the Soviet Union and reached the world, spawning a high-stakes international licensing battle, you know that part.

But I think Pajitnov, the inventor, might be the more interesting person in the story.

Pajitnov was born on April 16, 1955, in Moscow, the son of a film critic and a woman who worked in publishing. He was a quiet, puzzle-obsessed child — the kind who could spend hours with a pentomino set, fitting differently shaped pieces into a box, turning the problem over and over until it resolved.

He studied applied mathematics at the Moscow Institute of Aviation, then joined the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, where he worked on speech recognition and artificial intelligence — yes, all the way back then.

It was serious and kind of unglamorous work at the time, but he was good at it.

In the summer of 1984 — remember this was around the time of the Los Angeles Olympics, which the Soviets boycotted, in case you want a chronological marker — the Computing Centre received a new machine: the Electronika 60, which was basically a Soviet rip-off of a DEC minicomputer.

Pajitnov’s job was to test its capabilities, so he thought back to those pentomino puzzles from his childhood, simplified the pieces from five squares to four, and added the mechanic that made everything work: the pieces falling from the top of the screen.

The player had to arrange them into complete lines before the screen filled up. It was he who came up with the name “Tetris,” combining tetra, the Greek prefix for four, and tennis, his favorite sport.

The Electronika 60 had no graphics card, so the first version of Tetris was built entirely from keyboard characters — letters and symbols arranged to suggest blocks falling down a screen. It took up 2.7 KB of storage; by way of comparison in 2026, I’m guessing this email newsletter alone will run between 40 KB and 100 KB.

Still, back then it was impressive. Pajitnov showed it to his colleagues, and within days, productivity at the Computing Centre had collapsed, as all around him comrades played Tetris instead of working.

He sometimes had to pretend to be busy when he was actually playing himself. “Magic is in it,” he said.

From there:

• A 16-year-old intern named Vadim Gerasimov built the first proper IBM-compatible version with actual graphics.

• It went viral the quasi-old-fashioned way, spreading via copies on floppy disk, hand to hand from office to office across the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and eventually into the West.

• In 1988 it reached a Las Vegas game trade show, where a Dutch-American designer named Henk Rogers first saw it and understood immediately that it was unlike anything else.

Now we get into what you might have seen in the recent film — one of the stranger legal battles in the history of entertainment.

Three people flew to Moscow simultaneously in February 1989 without knowing about each other — Rogers, a British software broker named Robert Stein of Andromeda Software, and Kevin Maxwell, son of media tycoon Robert Maxwell — all trying to negotiate rights with ELORG, the Soviet state organization that controlled software exports.

ELORG discovered that console versions of Tetris were being sold across Japan and the West without their knowledge or payment, and they were displeased. But Rogers won the handheld rights by offering ELORG a royalty per cartridge rather than the flat fee his rivals were proposing — more valuable to the Soviets in the long run, although more costly to Rogers himself.

He then convinced Nintendo to bundle Tetris with its new Game Boy rather than Mario or Donkey Kong. The Game Boy launched in 1989 and sold a million units in the United States in its first few weeks, and my little brother was playing with his in the back seat of a station wagon a few weeks later.

Throughout all of this, Pajitnov received nothing.

Because: communism.

He worked for a Soviet state institution, so the government owned what he created, and while Tetris made fortunes for publishers, console makers, and licensing bodies around the world, Pajitnov got nothing.

But then: Glasnost, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Pajitnov emigrated to the United States in 1991, and he got a job at Microsoft — and then in 1996, the ten-year license on Tetris expired.

Pajitnov teamed up with Rogers, and they founded The Tetris Company together. For the first time, Pajitnov began receiving royalties from his own game — twelve years after he built it on a machine that couldn’t display proper graphics.

Just past his 71st birthday, Pajitnov talks about all of this without apparent bitterness. Creating the game itself was its own reward, he says — although I assume he also doesn’t mind being financially rewarded.

Because: capitalism.

He’s still working in game design, although talk about a heck of a first entry into the industry.

“I never could have imagined,” he said, “anything like the history it actually had.”

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• May 31: “It is working better than expected.” — Werner von Siemens, writing to his brother Carl two weeks after demonstrating the world’s first electric locomotive on this day in 1879 at the Berlin Trade Exhibition. Every subway, tram, and electric train in the world descends from what debuted that day in Berlin.

• June 1: “A decisive moment in the history of Western civilization.” — Critic Kenneth Tynan of The Times of London, on the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on this day in 1967.

• June 2: “Throughout all my life and with all my heart I shall strive to be worthy of your trust.” — Queen Elizabeth II, in her broadcast to the nation on the evening of her coronation on this day in 1953 — the first coronation in history to be televised.

• June 3: “At 10:00 p.m. … a switch was thrown … and electricity traveled 14 miles.” — From the Willamette Falls Heritage Foundation’s account of the first long-distance transmission of electricity in the United States, on this day in 1889. Before this moment, electricity could only be generated and used in the same location.

• June 4: “I came up with the idea while waiting in a long line at a Dallas bank.” — Don Wetzel, describing the moment of inspiration that led to the invention of the ATM, which he patented in the U.S. on this day in 1973 along with engineers Tom Barnes and George Chastain.

• June 5: “The Lord himself wrote it, and I was but the humblest instrument in his hand.” — Harriet Beecher Stowe, describing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the first installment of which appeared in the National Era on this day in 1851. Published as a book in 1852, it sold 1.5 million copies worldwide.

• June 6: “We’ll start the war from right here.” — Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., son of the 26th president, on this day in 1944 at Utah Beach, Normandy, after discovering that strong tidal currents had carried his landing craft more than a mile south of the intended target. He was 56 years old, walked with a cane due to arthritis and World War I injuries, had petitioned three times for permission to lead the first wave of the assault, died of a heart attack five weeks later and was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

• June 7: “I began to think of my duty. It would be cowardice to run back to India without fulfilling my obligation.” — Mohandas Gandhi, writing in his autobiography about this day in 1893, when the then-24-year-old Indian lawyer was thrown off a train in South Africa for refusing to move from his first-class compartment — for which he held a valid ticket — to a third-class car. The movement for Indian independence from Britain began on a train platform.

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Growing up in Rhode Island as I did, and thus learning Rhode Island history in school, you hear a lot about two things:

• First, lots of comparisons about how small the smallest U.S. state actually is — like the size of the micro-country of Luxembourg, or smaller than Long Island (which is actually an island), or how Texas is 221 times bigger.

• Second, Roger Williams, the 17th century minister who basically founded the colony that would go on to become the smallest state in the United States after he was kicked out of Massachusetts.

Williams was a progressive in many ways, a solid 200 years before the word was even coined. He was a fierce advocate for religious liberty and the separation of church and state, and a strong advocate for the idea that Crown edicts allocating land in North America were suspect, because they didn’t acknowledge that Native Americans had been living here long before the first Europeans landed.

In fact, that’s a big part of what got him kicked out of Massachusetts to begin with.

The Narragansetts took him in, and Williams later wrote that he had never experienced such kindness. He spent the rest of his life learning their language, trading with them, and defending their land rights in English courts.

I could write an entire newsletter about Williams; probably should at some point if I haven’t already. (After seven years of this (!), I lose count and constantly have to look things up.)

But today, I want to talk about one of the forgotten optimistic-in-retrospect anniversaries in United States history, which intimately involves the history of the place where I grew up. And we need to cover a bit more of Roger Williams in the process.

Williams started the colony of Rhode Island on land he bought from the Narragansetts. In 1663, King Charles II granted Rhode Island a charter guaranteeing freedom of conscience, elected self-governance, and no religious test for citizenship.

This was probably the most liberal political document in the colonial world to that date, and while moral failures abound — the Great Swamp Massacre of 1675, in which English forces attacked a Narragansett winter encampment and killed hundreds of women, children, and elderly, stands as one of the darkest chapters — that independent spirit inspired later events.

Case in point: Rhode Island was the first state to declare independence from England, two full months before the Declaration.

Which brings us to 1787, when the Constitutional Convention began in Philadelphia, and Rhode Island flat-out refused to send delegates.

Like everything in history, the reasons were complicated, but two stand out today:

• A powerful central government with the ability to tax was not an abstraction to Rhode Islanders — it was exactly what they had just fought a war to escape.

• More important for today, the original Constitution contained almost none of the things we like to think of as the cornerstone of American democracy: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, freedom from unreasonable government searches and seizures, the right to avoid self-incrimination.

Thing I like to point out to people whose financial fortunes take a turn and have to consider bankruptcy: the Founding Fathers included bankruptcy in the original Constitution, but didn’t get around to freedom of speech until later, in case you ever wondered about their priorities.

Rhode Island held fast, even as other states ratified. The legislature rejected calls for a ratifying convention seven times. The state held a popular referendum in 1788 and voted the Constitution down, 2,708 to 237.

George Washington made a celebrated tour of New England in 1789, and he pointedly skipped Rhode Island in response. The state’s Federalist merchants wrote to ask whether they could secede from Rhode Island and join the Union separately.

By early 1790, Rhode Island stood entirely alone — the last state outside the Union. Congress threatened tariffs, back payment of war debts, treatment as a foreign country.

A ratifying convention finally met in March 1790 with an Anti-Federalist majority, debated for a week, then adjourned to Newport in late May. On May 29, 1790 — 236 years ago this week — the delegates voted: 34 in favor, 32 opposed.

Rhode Island became the 13th state, which completed the “United” in “United States of America.”

At the same time, the smallest state attached 18 declarations of human rights and 21 proposed amendments to its ratification — a ban on poll taxes, a ban on the draft, a ban on the importation of slaves.

Many were ignored, but when the Bill of Rights was ratified eighteen months later, much of what was included were things Rhode Island had obstinately insisted on.

There were other factors. Virginia, a much more powerful state back then, gets credit for pushing just as hard, but the fact remains that Rhode Island signed last.

This year, we celebrate the 250th birthday of the United States, and July 4, 1776 is rightfully a watershed date in history.

I’m also quite glad that our national birthday is early in the summer — can you imagine trying to hold parades and host barbecues in January in Boston or New York City?

Still, I like that annoying, ornery, contrary little Rhode Island — a place founded by exiles and troublemakers, a place that had been demanding a Bill of Rights for three years while everyone else told it to sit down and sign — played a key role in shaping much of what we celebrate about America today.

Small state, big role. At least those of us who grew up there like to think so.

I hope you have a good Memorial Day, and better weather than is forecast in Rhode Island (and New Jersey). And as every year on this date, I like to mention three U.S. veterans in particular who gave their lives for our country: Lieutenant Todd Bryant (Iraq, 2003), Captain Tim Moshier (Iraq, 2006), and Specialist Jacob Andrews (Afghanistan, 2012).

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• May 24: “It will be the work of our lives to repay him for what he has done.” — Emily Warren Roebling, speaking of her husband Washington Roebling, who directed construction of the Brooklyn Bridge from a sickbed for 11 years after being struck by caisson disease while supervising work on the underwater foundations. The bridge opened on this day in 1883. Within 24 hours, 250,000 people had walked across. The Brooklyn Eagle called it “the Eighth Wonder of the World.”

• May 25: “You can’t even believe it in a way that you’re standing up there. You’re with your team, and yeah, there might be a few tears. You hold your flag and you get your photos — but then you have to turn around and get down. You gotta get down alive.” — Erik Weihenmayer, recalling the moment on this day in 2001 when he reached the summit of Mount Everest, becoming the first blind person in history to do so.

• May 26: “It was absolutely terrifying. I thought they were going to mow me down every minute.” — Frank Clement, the Bentley driver who, during the first 24 Hours of Le Mans on this day in 1923, improvised a fuel tank repair after a stone punctured his car, then cycled back to the stricken vehicle against traffic while carrying two gas cans around his neck.

• May 27: “I’m not going to limit what I can say. I have to be true to the song.” — Bob Dylan, then 21, who on this day in 1963 released The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, his second album and first as a fully formed songwriter. The record opened with “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which would be performed at the March on Washington three months later, hours before Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.

• May 28: “We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.” — Alan Turing, the British mathematician who on this day in 1936 submitted to the London Mathematical Society a paper titled “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” which described, entirely in the abstract, the logical architecture of a programmable computer.

• May 29: “And ain’t I a woman? I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me!” — Sojourner Truth, a formerly enslaved woman who on this day in 1851 rose to speak at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, in a speech that witnesses described as turning the entire mood of the gathering.

• May 30: “Their soldier lives were the reveille of freedom to a race in chains, and their deaths the tattoo of rebellious tyranny in arms.” — General John A. Logan, Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, from General Order No. 11 designating May 30, 1868 as a national day of remembrance, when flowers were placed on the graves of Union and Confederate soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery.

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Jacob Davis was born Jacob Youphes in Riga, Latvia, in 1831. He emigrated to the United States, bounced between cities and trades, failed at a brewery in Reno, Nevada, and eventually opened a small tailor shop on Virginia Street. He made tents, horse blankets, and wagon covers for railroad workers. He bought his fabric from a dry goods merchant in San Francisco named Levi Strauss.

In 1870, a woman came into his shop. Her husband — a woodcutter known around Reno as Alkali Ike — kept destroying his pants, and she wanted a pair that would hold together. Davis had copper rivets on his workbench, left over from a horse blanket he’d been repairing. He put them at the stress points — the corners of the pockets, the base of the button fly. The pants held.

Word got around and Davis started getting more orders than he could handle. He knew he had something, and he knew he couldn’t afford the $68 patent filing fee. So in 1872, he wrote a letter to his fabric supplier in San Francisco — in the best English he could manage, which was not quite standard:

”The secrett of them Pants is the Rivits that I put in those Pockots and I found the demand so large that I cannot make them fast enough.

My nabors are getting yealouse of these success and unless I secure it by Patent Papers it will soon become to be a general thing everybody will make them up and thare will be no money in it.”

He proposed splitting the patent fee and sharing the rights. Levi Strauss wrote back immediately: Yes.

Let’s talk about Strauss. He’d been born Loeb Strauss in Buttenheim, Bavaria, in 1829. He came to New York at 18 after his father died, and in 1853 made his way to San Francisco — not to mine, but to sell to the people who were mining. By the time Davis’s letter arrived, he was prosperous, well-established, and a man who recognized a good idea when he saw one.

On May 20, 1873, 153 years ago this week, the U.S. Patent Office issued Patent No. 139,121 — officially for “an Improvement in Fastening Pocket Openings” — to Jacob Davis and Levi Strauss and Company. Davis moved to San Francisco to run the factory. He designed the double-arch stitching on the back pockets that became a registered trademark — the oldest apparel trademark still in use today. They called the pants “waist overalls.” Nobody called them jeans yet.

For the next 60 years, that’s essentially what they remained — workwear. Miners, cowboys, and railroad crews wore them. During the 1930s, jeans moved from the Sears catalogue onto the pages of Vogue. During World War II, soldiers wore them off-duty. A pair of Levi’s became one of the most coveted items American GIs could trade in occupied Europe.

Then Marlon Brando wore them in The Wild One in 1953. James Dean wore them in Rebel Without a Cause in 1955. Overnight, jeans became the unofficial uniform of juvenile delinquency — and high schools across America banned them. The ban made them irresistible. By 1958 a newspaper report estimated that 90 percent of American teenagers wore jeans everywhere except bed and church.

The civil rights movement claimed them too — not the hippies, though they came later, but the Black college students who rode south to organize protests, deliberately wearing denim as a symbol of solidarity with the Southern Black working class. By 1969, a trade publication noted: “What has happened to denim in the last decade is really a capsule of what happened to America. It has climbed the ladder of taste.”

Behind the Iron Curtain, they were contraband — a symbol of everything the Soviet state was not. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the young people dismantling the first bricks were photographed in blue jeans. When Russian citizens could finally buy Levi’s legally, one customer wrote to the company: “A man hasn’t very many happy minutes in his life, but every happy moment remains in his memory for a long time. The buying of Levi’s 501 jeans is one of such moments in my life.”

In 1995, Levi’s ran a television commercial set in Prague — black and white, no dialogue, a young man navigating city streets in a Trabant he’s clearly still getting used to, near-misses and all.

At the end he pulls up to a group of friends, gets out — he’s in his boxer shorts — and they all pile in and drive away. The announcer delivers the tagline: “Reason Number 007: In Prague, you can trade them for a car.”

It was a joke. Mostly.

(As a card-carrying member of Generation X, I remembered this commercial instantly when I realized the Levi’s anniversary this week.)

Jacob Davis worked at the factory until his death in 1908, his name largely forgotten for most of the following century.

Then in 1974 an archivist at the National Archives came across a transcript from a 100-year-old court case in which Davis testified to how it all happened. In 2006, a historical marker was placed at the site of his tailor shop on Virginia Street in Reno. Strauss, as far as anyone can tell, never set foot in the city.

Two immigrants. Between them they invented the most democratic garment in human history. The company does $6 billion in annual revenue, sells in more than 110 countries, and its name is on the stadium where the San Francisco 49ers play.

Not bad for a letter written in broken English by a tailor who couldn’t afford a filing fee.

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7 optimistic moments from history this week

• May 17: “If the red and green images had been as fully photographed as the blue, it would have been a truly-coloured image of the ribbon.” — James Clerk Maxwell, Scottish physicist, commenting on the imperfect but world-changing result of the first color photograph, demonstrated on this day in 1861 at the Royal Institution in London.

• May 18: “I’d get two chances — just two — to set my record because that’s all the fuel the plane could carry.” — Jacqueline Cochran, from her autobiography, recalling the morning of this day in 1953 when she climbed into a borrowed Canadian Air Force F-86 Sabre jet at Rogers Dry Lake, California, and became the first woman to break the sound barrier.

• May 19: “It has swept away forever the age-old barriers of time and distance.” — Juan Trippe, founder of Pan American World Airways, describing what transatlantic air service meant to the world — service he launched on this day in 1939 when the Boeing 314 Yankee Clipper departed Port Washington, New York, under Captain Arthur LaPorte on the first scheduled transatlantic airmail flight in history.

• May 20: “To afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.” — Abraham Lincoln, from his message to Congress on July 4, 1861 — words he made concrete on this day in 1862 when he signed the Homestead Act, opening 160 acres of public land to any American citizen willing to farm it for five years and pay an $18 filing fee.

• May 21: “You must never think of anything except the need, and how to meet it.” — Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross, which held its first official meeting on this day in 1881 at her apartment in Washington, D.C.

• May 22: “If we leave all the decisions to the bureaucrats, we will never achieve any progress.” — Richard Nixon, to Leonid Brezhnev at the opening of summit talks in Moscow on this day in 1972 — to which Brezhnev replied, with a laugh: “They would simply bury us in paper.” Nixon, who had built his career as America’s most fervent anti-communist, spent eight days negotiating with the Soviets and came home with the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the first Strategic Arms Limitations agreement.

• May 23: “By this means, as I wear my spectacles constantly, I have only to move my eyes up or down, as I want to see distinctly far or near, the proper glasses being always ready.” — Benjamin Franklin, writing to his friend George Whatley on this day in 1785, describing what he called his “double spectacles,” or what we now think of as bifocals.

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