On June 23, 1784, the skies over Baltimore, Maryland saw something brand new — the first recorded balloon flight in the United States. The flight was made by Edward Warren, a 13-year-old boy who volunteered to pilot a hot air balloon built by Peter Carnes, a lawyer and early experimenter with ballooning. Inspired by the Montgolfier brothers’ flights in France just a year earlier, Carnes had constructed the balloon as part of a public demonstration.

Carnes had intended to fly the balloon himself, but local officials reportedly wouldn’t allow it — they considered it too risky. So young Warren stepped up. The balloon was about 35 feet in diameter, made of taffeta and paper, and lifted into the air using heated air from a fire. Warren didn’t stay airborne long, and it wasn’t a free flight — he was tethered to the ground — but it was enough to mark a historic first in American aviation.

News of the event spread quickly, and it sparked interest in ballooning across the early United States. Just a few weeks later, Jean-Pierre Blanchard, a French aeronaut, would begin planning America’s first untethered balloon flight, which he would eventually complete in 1793 in Philadelphia — with George Washington in attendance. But it was Warren’s short flight in 1784 that proved the idea had real lift.

So on June 23, 1784, a teenager from Baltimore became the first person to ride a balloon in America. It wasn’t flashy, and it didn’t travel far, but it was a start — and it opened the door to centuries of American aviation, from balloons to spaceflight.

On June 23, 1868, Christopher Latham Sholes, along with his partners Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soulé, received a patent for the typewriter — and with it, the now-familiar QWERTY keyboard layout was born. The machine looked nothing like modern keyboards — it was bulky, printed letters one at a time, and was nicknamed the “literary piano.” Still, it laid the groundwork for how we’d write for the next century and beyond.

The story goes that Sholes developed the QWERTY layout not for speed, but to slow typists down. Early models jammed easily when fast fingers hit neighboring keys in quick succession, so the keys were rearranged to space out commonly used letter combinations. That’s why we have the strange QWERTY order instead of a more intuitive A-to-Z system — it was designed to keep the machine from breaking.

Sholes and his team eventually sold their rights to the typewriter to Remington & Sons, a gun manufacturer looking to expand into office equipment. In 1873, Remington released the Remington No. 1, the first commercially successful typewriter. It used the QWERTY layout, and thanks to its popularity, that setup became the default — even after jamming was no longer an issue on later machines.

So on June 23, 1868, a new way of writing took shape — one that would dominate offices, newsrooms, and classrooms well into the digital age. And even now, every time you type an email or tap out a text, you’re still using the same system Sholes designed over 150 years ago.

A Muddy Fall🛖
In 1933, a man named Ernest DeLong miraculously survived a fall from a U.S. Navy blimp during a flight over Akron, Ohio. While performing maintenance, DeLong lost his grip and plummeted several stories, but instead of a fatal landing, he struck a mud-covered rooftop, which cushioned the impact just enough to save his life. He suffered only minor injuries, stunning witnesses and making headlines as the man who quite literally bounced back from disaster. It’s one of those rare moments where luck, mud, and physics came together to pull off the impossible. 🎈💥🏚️

Bread Revolution🥖
According to revolutionary legend, a 14-year-old girl named Louise Rémy helped ignite the spark of the French Revolution when she yelled at a guard in 1789 over the soaring price of bread. Furious that her family couldn’t afford to eat, she reportedly confronted armed soldiers near a bakery, shouting, “We want bread!” Her bold defiance inspired a growing crowd of hungry, angry Parisians — many of them women — which helped lead to the famous Women’s March on Versailles and growing unrest in the streets. Whether myth or truth, her story symbolizes how ordinary voices can trigger extraordinary change. 🥖🔥🇫🇷

Comb Knife🔪
In the 1920s, an American inventor patented a curious self-defense tool: a “combination comb and weapon” that secretly housed a tiny knife inside. It looked like a normal grooming comb, but hidden in the handle was a slender blade that could be quickly drawn in an emergency. Marketed as both practical and protective, it was one of many quirky inventions from the era reflecting a mix of personal style and paranoia. Whether it was ever widely used is unclear, but it certainly gave new meaning to the phrase “sharp dresser.” 💈🗡️💼

Napoleons Fear🐈
Napoleon Bonaparte, despite his fearsome reputation on the battlefield, was said to suffer from ailurophobia — an intense fear of cats. Though details are scarce and debated among historians, several accounts claim he would visibly panic or become uneasy in the presence of a cat. The irony of one of history’s greatest military minds being rattled by a feline wasn’t lost on later writers, and the story became part of Napoleon’s long list of quirks. Whether legend or truth, it adds a strange and oddly human footnote to the life of the would-be emperor of Europe. 🐱⚔️👑

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