On November 24, 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper (later known as D.B. Cooper) boarded a Northwest Orient flight from Portland to Seattle. He told the flight attendant that he had a bomb and demanded $200,000 in cash and 4 parachutes. His demands were met. Over a dense forest in a rainstorm, he parachuted out of the plane with the money, was never seen again, and became a legend.

Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press. The mass production of books and other printed texts revolutionized the world. Gutenberg created a transformation in knowledge acquisition and communication. This kicked off the first information age. The printing press had a bigger effect on the world than the computer or the internet.

Anne Frank is one of the most widely read authors in history, although she did not live to see the publication of her book. Anne was a German teenager who happened to be Jewish as well. She and her family spent 2 years in seclusion in Amsterdam during World War II. Anne's diary describes the horrors of hiding from the Nazis - before eventually being sent to concentration camps. The Wannsee Conference was a clandestine meeting of Nazi leaders in 1942 to outline the systematic murder of Jews in Europe which became known as the Holocaust.