Wilbur And Orville Wright (1909)
Known as the fathers of modern aviation, Orville and Wilbur Wright made history as the first people to sustain a flight with an aircraft. The first successful flight took place at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on December 17, 1903. Forty years later, Orville was asked about his feelings about the evolution of the aircraft and how it was used in the Second World War. He replied, “We dared to hope we had invented something that would bring lasting peace to the Earth. But we were wrong. We underestimated man’s capacity to hate and to corrupt good means for an evil end…. No, I don’t have any regrets about my part in the invention of the airplane, though no one could deplore more than I the destruction it has caused.”
M. Lefebre, One Of The Last Surviving Veterans Of Napoleon’s Army (1858)
There is scant information about Monsieur Lefebre. However, we do know that he served as a sergeant in the 2nd Regiment of Engineers under Napoleon in 1815. Brown University said, “Some of the earliest photographs of veterans are a series of 15 original sepia views of members of Napoleon’s army taken when these old soldiers were well into their 70s and 80s. […] These remarkable photographs provide probably the only surviving images of veterans of the Grande Armée and the Guard actually wearing their original uniforms and insignia, although some of the uniforms have obviously been recut by tailors of the 1850s.” Their photos were believed to have been taken on May 5, 1858. This was the anniversary of the death of Napoleon.