On August 7 of years past, these historical things happened (then)!

945 – The mirror rod was invented by Scot Frederick Shaun. It was a half-inch diameter cylinder covered in reflective surface, created so Shaun’s wife could see herself sort of if she squinted and sort of rotated the rod, and was okay with seeing only little parts of herself at any one time, etc. as she prepared her face for the day’s events. Many people of the time considered the innovation to be second only to the mirror as a means to see one’s reflected image.

1891 – Dr. James Naismith gathered 10 Springfield, MA, young boys to, in two teams of five, set fires to one another’s parents’ homes. It was this game that Dr. Naismith came to refine over the next several months into the game we now know as basketball!

1947 – Crooner Frank Sinatra

Michael Jordan, a basketball player

On June 1st in years past, these awesome historical things happened!

2002: Despite several pleas by his fellow sales team members to not do so, Ronald Bransfield re-invents the wheel during a meeting RE: the quarterly sales strategy.

1985: Writer Stephen King wins the Nobel Prize in Literature for Christine, which the Nobel Committee praises as being “scary as shit.”

1938: The first issue of Action Comics, debuting the character of Superman, was published. And, in this first adventure, Superman, who would not be given the power of flight until a few issues later, could only walk or run and, instead of being invulnerable to bullets, he could be greatly harmed by them, even potentially killed.

1909: A 20-year-old Adolf Hitler applies to architectural school with his blueprint for a proposed hotel. He is rejected because, as the admissions officials of Der Arkiteture Uffenheimer wrote, “if built as designed, the structure implied by the applicant’s blueprint would resemble not as much a hotel as an army of millions of soldiers killing Jews.”