Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, all early employees of PayPal, founded YouTube. Hurley studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, while Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It was founded on February 15, 2005. In November 2006, YouTube, LLC, was bought by Google Inc. for $1.65 billion, and is now …

The Red Cross was founded by a Swiss, Jean Henri Dunant, after he had witnessed the terrible plight of the wounded at the Battle of Solferino in 1859. Five years later, in 1864, the first Geneva convention was called to establish a code of conduct for nations at war, and Dunant obtained the convention’s agreement that both wounded soldiers and …

The Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto was, in 1541, the first white man to see the Mississippi, but it was not until June 1673 that two Frenchmen, Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette, actually explored the river in canoes. They travelled far enough south to prove that it emptied into the Gulf of Mexico and could not, therefore, be the hoped-for …

Henry Stanley is usually remembered as the American newspaperman who, on first meeting the Scottish explorer, Livingstone, deep in the African interior, greeted him with ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ Yet Stanley was a distinguished explorer in his own right. In 1874 he returned to Africa to explore the Luabala River which Livingstone believed formed the headwaters of the Nile. He …

Mort Walker — Without question, Mort Walker of Beetle Bailey fame is one of the most popular and most successful cartoonists who ever lifted a pen. He has a golden reputation for being one of the busiest and friendliest people in the business. Mort is the original creator of Hi & Lois and Boner’s Ark and the founder and chairman …

In 1819, Edward Parry, a young navel officer, was given command of two ships, the Hecla and Gripper, with instructions to find a sea route to the Pole. He was defeated by the ice but his ships, nevertheless, were the first to sail north of the Magnetic Pole – then 71°N. 96°W. As they did so Parry was delighted to …

In 1497, Vasco da Gama, a young Portuguese sea captain, was summoned to the court of King Manuel I. The king informed him that, as one of the most notable navigators of his day, he had been chosen to lead an expedition in an attempt to find a sea route from Portugal to the Indies, round the southern tip of …

As early as 1897, the first attempt was made to reach the North Pole by aircraft, when a Swedish explorer and three other set off in a balloon had crashed. By then the North Pole had been crossed by a three-engined Fokker monoplane, the Josephine Ford. It carried Lt. Commander (later Rear-Admiral) R.E. Byrd with Floyd Bennett as pilot. The …

Men began to explore the Arctic as early as 1553, but it was not until 6 April 1909 that the Pole itself was reached. Three and a half centuries of effort and courage ended with an American, Robert E. Peary ‘nailing the Stars and Stripes to the North Pole’. The quest for the South Pole began much later, the first …

The year was 1919. On 14 and 15 June the first non-stop trans-Atlantic flight was made by John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown. Alcock was the pilot, Whitten Brown the navigator. Their aircraft was an adapted Vickers Vimy bomber fitted with two Rolls-Royce Eagle VIII engines. They took off from St John’s, Newfoundland, and landed, sixteen hours, twenty-seven minutes later, …