Scholars generally date completion of the Gutenberg Bible—also called the 42-line Bible—to around February 1455, based on a letter from that time describing the finished work being shown at the Frankfurt fair. The roughly 180 copies produced revolutionized the spread of knowledge across Europe, ending the monopoly monks and scribes held over book production.

George Frideric Handel was born in Halle, in the Duchy of Magdeburg, to a barber-surgeon father who initially discouraged his musical ambitions. Handel went on to become one of the towering composers of the Baroque era, settling in London where he wrote Italian operas, English oratorios including the famous 'Messiah,' and music for royal occasions like 'Water Music' and 'Music for the Royal Fireworks.'

Roughly 1,500 Mexican troops under President-General Antonio López de Santa Anna arrived at San Antonio de Béxar and laid siege to a small garrison of Texian defenders holed up in the Alamo mission. The defenders, numbering fewer than 200, held out until March 6, when the compound was finally overrun, but their resistance bought time for Sam Houston's army and birthed the phrase "Remember the Alamo."

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, to a family with deep roots in the town's small Black community. He became the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard, authored the landmark sociological and literary work 'The Souls of Black Folk,' and helped found the NAACP in 1909, becoming one of the most influential Black intellectuals and activists of the 20th century.

Working in DuPont's experimental laboratory, chemist Wallace Carothers and his team produced the first successful batch of nylon 6,6, a polymer strong enough to be drawn into fibers rivaling silk. Announced publicly in 1938, nylon transformed everything from women's stockings to military parachutes and would become one of the most consumed synthetic materials in history.

On the fifth day of the brutal Battle of Iwo Jima, a patrol scaled the 554-foot Mount Suribachi and raised a small flag, soon replaced by a larger one. Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal captured the second raising in a single frame that won the Pulitzer Prize and became the model for the Marine Corps War Memorial in Arlington, Virginia.

Surgeon Joseph Murray led a team that transplanted a kidney from Ronald Herrick into his identical twin brother Richard, who was dying of chronic kidney disease. Because the twins were genetically identical, the transplanted organ wasn't rejected by Richard's immune system, proving organ transplantation could work and launching the modern era of transplant medicine. Murray later won the Nobel Prize for the achievement.