On July 23, 1995, in New Mexico, the astronomer Alan Hale saw an unidentified fuzzy object in the sky. He emailed the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams. In Arizona, Tom Bopp saw the same thing. He telegrammed the bureau. The comet was named Hale-Bopp the following day. Believing that a UFO was traveling behind it, thirty-eight members of The Heaven’s Gate cult committed suicide on March 26, 1997, six days before the comet reached its perihelion. 

On the future of history, Thucydides speculated that since there are no “temples or monuments of magnificence” in Sparta, “future generations would find it very difficult to believe” that it once commanded two-fifths of the Peloponnesus; while those same generations would conclude from the impressive ruins of Athens that it was “twice as powerful as it in fact was.”

To rival the 1,063-foot-tall Eiffel Tower, nearly twice the height of the Washington Monument, planners of the Chicago Exposition of 1893 presented the Ferris Wheel, which was 264 feet tall. While the wheel was slowly spinning, Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a paper in which he proclaimed the end of the frontier phase of American history.

“We don’t like their sound,” an executive at Decca Records said in 1962, rejecting The Beatles, adding, “and guitar music is on the way out.” The same year, Marshall McLuhan wrote, “The book is dead. That is to say sometime before the end of the present century, the last printed book will roll off the presses.”

“Have reserved two tickets for my first night. Come and bring a friend, if you have one,” wired George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill, referring to Pygmalion’s premiere. “Impossible to come to first night. Will come to second night, if you have one,” Churchill wired back.