On 15 September 1981, the John Bull, a steam locomotive built in 1831, ran under its own power outside Washington DC, making it the oldest operable steam locomotive in the world. One hundred and fifty years after its construction, it proved that some engineering simply refuses to be retired. We also look at the 1813 attack on Beijing’s Forbidden City by the Eight Trigram Sect, a religious uprising that briefly breached the walls of imperial power. In 1994, Swiss astronomer Didier Queloz detected the wobble that would confirm the first exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star, forcing scientists to rethink how solar systems form. And on this date in 2017, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft completed its thirteen-year mission by diving into Saturn’s atmosphere, transmitting data until the very last second. Four stories about persistence, vulnerability, discovery, and knowing when to bow out gracefully.
