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Photograph by Olav Bjaaland. The first ever expedition to reach the geographic Southern Pole was led by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. He and four others arrived at the pole on 14 December 1911, five weeks ahead of a British party led by Robert Falcon Scott as part of the Terra Nova Expedition. -
The Wright brothers inaugurated the aerial age with the world's first successful flights of a powered heavier-than-air flying machine at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903. The historic first flight of the Wright Flyer lasted 12 seconds, traveling 36 m (120 ft), with Orville piloting. -
Italian physicist and radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi succeeds in sending the first radio transmission across the Atlantic Ocean, disproving detractors who told him that the curvature of the earth would limit transmission to 200 miles or less. The message–simply the Morse-code signal for the letter “s”–travelled more than 2,000 miles from Poldhu in Cornwall, England, to Newfoundland, Canada. -
The first stationary gasoline engine developed by Carl Benz was a one-cylinder two-stroke unit which ran for the first time on New Year’s Eve 1879. Benz had so much commercial success with this engine that he was able to devote more time to his dream of creating a lightweight car powered by a gasoline engine, in which the chassis and engine formed a single unit. -
The Berlin Conference held between November 15, 1884 and February 26, 1885 in the city of Berlin (German Empire), it was convened by France and the United Kingdom and organized by the German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, in order to to solve the problems that the colonial expansion in Africa implied and to solve its distribution. -
On October 21st, 1879, in one of the most famous scientific tests in history, Thomas Edison debuted his signature invention: a safe, affordable, and easily-reproducible incandescent lightbulb that burned for thirteen and a half hours. -
On March 7, 1876, 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell receives a patent for his revolutionary new invention: the telephone. The Scottish-born Bell worked in London with his father, Melville Bell, who developed Visible Speech, a written system used to teach speaking to the deaf. -
The Suez Canal is an artificial sea-level waterway in Egypt, connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea through the Isthmus of Suez and dividing Africa and Asia. The canal is a route of trade between Europe and Asia. The construction of the canal lasted from 1859 to 1869, It offers vessels a direct route between the North Atlantic and northern Indian oceans via the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea, avoiding the South Atlantic and southern Indian oceans. -
The Capital or also known as the ''Das Kapital'' is a foundational theoretical text in materialist philosophy, critique of political economy and politics by Karl Marx. Marx aimed to reveal the economic patterns underpinning the capitalist mode of production in contrast to classical political economists such as Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. -
On the Origin of Species is a book by Charles Darwin published on November 24, 1859, considered one of the pioneering works of scientific literature and the foundation of the theory of evolutionary biology. -
On August 16, 1858, Britain sent the United States an inaugural message via a transatlantic telegraph cable. In it, Queen Victoria congratulated President James Buchanan on their countries' mutual success at building the very cable she was using to talk to him.