Why would people immediately forget about a big moment in history? Maybe because they never heard much about it in the first place. Modern history is written by the press because news accounts are so readily archived. It's the headlines that are talked about and remembered, and if you are unfortunate enough to get your 15 minutes of fame while something else dominates those headlines, you won't get much publicity, and you may end up as just a footnote in history. Like Harriet Quimby, who deserves to be known and remembered.  

Harriet Quimby is the kind of badass Disney princess who breaks records as easily as she breaks the mold. While her pretty face landed her a modeling gig for a soft drink company and her quick wits allowed her to write six Hollywood movies, it was her eagle eyes and quick reflexes that made her the first female American ace pilot. But while she was in the air breaking some glass ceilings, some dumb dudes were in the water smashing into an iceberg.

In 1911, the 35-year-old Quimby became the first woman in the U.S., and only the seventh in the whole world, to earn her pilot's license and she was branded "America's First Lady of the Air." But for Quimby, being part of the flyboys' club wasn't enough, she wanted to run the joint. So not even a year after getting her license, Quimby did what only a single man had done before: pilot a solo flight across the English Channel in what was pretty much a wooden hot tub with a propeller taped to it.

There's more to the story, which you should read because Quimby's astonishing accomplishment was buried under the other headlines of the day- the sinking of the Titanic. Her story and five others are at Cracked.

(Image credit: Library of Congress)

The Wright Brothers are credited with the first powered heavier-than-air flight, which took place in 1903. Their flying machine design started the evolution of the airplane, and it didn't look all that different from the biplanes that were made for a couple of decades afterward. The first plane to fly in England was another story. Horatio Phillips built what's known as the Philip’s Flying Machine, which left the ground in 1907.

Phillip’s aircraft actually had a brains-boggling 200 wings (a ducentiplane, if you’re into that)—Phillips called these airfoils “sustainers,” and technically the 1907 machine had four banks of 50 wings each.

This mass of very narrow wings and supporting hardware was dragged aloft by a 22 horsepower gasoline engine, and Phillips was able to fly it for over 500 feet—keep in mind, the very first hop by the Wright brothers was only 120 feet.

Read the story of the Philip’s Flying Machine at Jalopnik. -via Digg

The Getty Museum started a hobby anyone can take part in by recreating famous works of art with only the props at hand. Most people have to select a painting that has only one or maybe two people in it, but the staff at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris get together to work anyway, so they went for recreating The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. Brilliant! If you recall, the medical staff from MASH did this in the 1970 movie. -via reddit

Horror movies have scenes in the dark because that's scary. You never know what the darkness can be hiding! But when you're making that horror film, you have to take care to control what the audience sees. When a scene is filmed in a dark house, cave, or even outside space, controlling what is visible, half visible, or invisible is like walking a fine line. David F. Sandberg explains the quest for "good darkness." -via Laughing Squid

Me at 20- living in Malta, barely studying, have a lot of the craic pic.twitter.com/nQaCkVcgjk

— Nicola Coughlan (@nicolacoughlan) April 16, 2020

Because we’ve had so much time in our hands, and we don’t have much to do, it was only a matter of time before we got to reminiscing about the past and reflecting how we’ve been able to come this far in life. A new trend on Twitter that’s come up recently — people posting pictures of themselves at 20.

Mashable compiles what they believe were the best. See them over at the site.

How did you look when you were 20?

(Image Credit: Nicola Coughlan/ Twitter)

I can’t seem to imagine a pitch black world or a silent world like space, and I can’t help but wonder how other creatures, who are blind or deaf, manage to survive and even manage to thrive despite their handicap. There’s a creature that can also survive without oxygen.

If there’s a word that can fully describe them, the word would be “extraordinary”, because they truly are.

Intelligent Living has listed some of the creatures that are either blind or deaf, as well as their abilities that make up for their handicaps.

See them over at the site.

(Image Credit: US National Parks Service/ Wikimedia Commons)

Do you miss the sounds that you can usually hear at your office, like your colleague sneezing or eating chips loudly, or the water bottle being slowly refilled with water at your office water dispenser?

To help satisfy that longing, Kids Creative Agency put together I Miss the Office, an online plaything which emulates the ambient sounds you might hear in an office with up to 10 co-workers.

Check out the office sounds simulator here!

Via The Awesomer

(Image Credit: Kids Creative Agency)

Jeff Lyons hung a green screen in his home office and has been doing the weather report for WFIE in Evansville, Indiana, from his house. As we've seen, one of the dangers of working from home is the interference of the others who live there. In Lyons' case, it was Betty, his cat, who photobombed the forecast and the above screenshot became a viral meme. Since then, Betty has become a regular part of the weather report! She drawn quite a few fans, both locally and globally. You can see some of Betty's TV appearances at Laughing Squid. You can follow the further adventures of Betty the Weather Cat at Lyons' Facebook page.

(Image credit: Jeff Lyons) 

The Japanese artist dooo_cds, who makes eerily realistic objects that appear to be made of living human flesh, has turned his talents to tabletop gaming.

He has made a 6-sided die that blinks as you roll your fate. It appears to be a living creature with moles for number marks. If you need to make a sanity check in your game, use this die, for it has no mouth and yet must scream.

-via Super Punch

Pictured above is Katy Ayers, a college student in Nebraska in a canoe that she grew herself.

Yes, grew. It's made of mushrooms. She made a wooden frame, then, with the assistance of local mushroom grower Ash Gordon, grew a mushroom body around it. NBC News describes the process:

They first built a wooden skeleton and a hammock-like structure to suspend the boat-shaped form in the air.

They next sandwiched the boat’s skeleton with mushroom spawn and let nature take over.

For two weeks, the fledgling canoe hung inside a special growing room in Gordon’s facility, where temperatures ranged between 80 and 90 degrees and the humidity hovered between 90 to 100 percent. The last step in the process was to let the 100-pound boat dry in the Nebraska sun.

The entire project cost $500. The canoe has been on the water three times, including once with two people inside. It's in good shape and is technically still alive, spawning more mushrooms.

-via Dave Barry | Photo: Katy Ayers

Here's a reason to get breast implants that probably should not sway your decision to do so, as the odds of them ever saving your life are rather small. But one woman's implants deflected a bullet away from her heart!

According to the report, the 30-year-old woman had been walking down a street in Toronto in 2018 when all of a sudden she felt “heat and pain in her left chest.” Upon looking down, she saw blood seeping out of her body and took herself to a local emergency room. She had an obvious gunshot wound located above her left nipple and was transferred to another trauma center.

Further examination revealed that the bullet had ended up in the woman’s lower right chest wall, underneath her breast. But she was otherwise remarkably fine. Doctors removed both of her silicone breast implants and saw that the bullet had clearly traveled through the left-side implant, which deflected it over to the right implant with enough force that it flipped the right implant upside down. The bullet then traveled through breast tissue before finally becoming embedded in her right chest.

Yeah, it's kind of complicated, but it's not the first time breast implants have stopped a bullet. Read more details of this story at Gizmodo.

(Image credit: McEvenue, et al/Plastic Surgery Case Studies)

Shane Wighton harnessed the power of geometry, physics, computer programming, machining, woodworking, and welding (he's a true renaissance man) to build a parabolic basketball backboard that drives the ball into the net.

Wighton based his design on millions of hypothetical shots, then used a CNC mill to cut the board out of pine. It failed spectacularly, necessitating new calculations and technical adjustments.

It's a truly amazing feat of imagination and multiple technical capabilities that will probably never been exhibited on an NBA court, which is unfortunate.

-via Gizmodo

People who speak the same language often do it in a very different way, depending on where they are. British English is different from Australian English or American English, but if an American were to watch a lot of British movies, the accent becomes easier to follow over time. But how those accents arise in the first place is a continuing study for linguists. A mini-experiment presented itself in Antarctica with a group of people who were isolated together for just four months.

Two years ago, on a very, very cold March day in Antarctica, 11 people sat down to go over a list of simple words. Cooed. Food. Queued. Backhoe. It wasn’t free association, but rather the words are considered important markers in a larger effort among linguists to discern what happens to language when a group is separated from rest of the world—specifically, how quickly they begin to develop their own accent. Slowly, imperceptibly, the Antarctica group’s speech changed, as they all began to sound a bit more like one another and less like people on the other six continents.

Given enough time, they might have developed their own dialect. Read about the ways isolation spurs the rise of accents at Atlas Obscura. 

(Image credit: Jerzy Strzelecki)

GECKO MUSEUM! GECKO MUSEUM! The Mayor liked it so much he couldn’t help crossing the velvet rope pic.twitter.com/eMCvO8c6qR

— jill (@jillisyoung) April 7, 2020

Inspired by a post on Twitter about a tiny art gallery dedicated to a gerbil, performer Jill Young decided to also make a tiny art museum dedicated to her gecko known as The Mayor. Like a real gallery, Young’s tiny gecko museum has velvet ropes and paintings like “The Birth of Gecko”, “Gecko Scream”, “American Gecko-ic”, and the “Gecko with a Pearl Earring.”

 “The Mayor liked it so much he couldn’t help crossing the velvet rope,” young says in her post on Twitter.

(Image Credit: Jill Young/ Twitter)

With the recent release of the Final Fantasy VII remake, there could be no better time recreating the Buster Sword, which is wielded in the game by Cloud, the game’s protagonist.

The man only known as Crafty Transformer once again shows the world what he can do with cardboard, this time by making his cardboard version of the Buster Sword.

Not only is his Buster Sword just for show; he can also spin it with ease much like how Cloud spins it for his victory pose.

While the sword might not be able to make one bleed because it’s made up of cardboard, it would most likely still hurt.

Via Kotaku

(Video Credit: Crafty Transformer - Cardboard DIY/ YouTube)