Sears Tower

On May 3, 1973 Chicago's Sears Tower, the world's tallest building at the time, was finished.

The Sears Tower rises to a height to 1,450 feet and is one of the most recognizable landmarks in the Chicago skyline and in the world. The building held the record for the world’s tallest building for 25 years until the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lampur, Malaysia were built in 1998.

In 1982, the antennas added to the building increased its total height to 1,704 feet. In 2000, one of the building’s antennas was extended to 1,729 feet, making it the world’s tallest building to the tip of its antenna. The building held this title until early 2009 when Burj Dubai topped out at over 2,600 feet, making it the tallest man-made structure ever built.  Currently, Willis Tower is the tallest building in the United States and the fifth-tallest freestanding structure in the world as well as the fifth tallest building in the world to the roof.

On July 16, 2009, the Tower was renamed the Willis Tower with a great deal of controversy.  Time Magazine named it one of the Ten Worst Corporate Name Changes.

Willis Tower
Sears Tower: The Name Says It All

Cheerios

On May 1, 1941 General Mills introduced Cheerios.

When Cheerios debuted, they were called Cheerioats.  The name was changed to Cheerios due to a dispute with Quaker Oats over naming rights in 1945.

It was the first oat-based and ready-to-eat without cooking cereal sold in the United States.  Successful marketing and association with The Lone Ranger led General Mills to sell approximately 1.8 million cases of the cereal in its first year alone.  Other icons that have been prominently featured in association with Cheerios include Rocky and Bullwinkle, Scooby Doo, Star Wars characters, and NASCAR drivers.

Cheerios have been made in a variety of flavors including:

• Honey Nut Cheerios (1979)
• Apple Cinnamon Cheerios (1988)
• Multi-Grain Cheerios (1992)
• Frosted Cheerios (1995)
• Team Cheerios (formerly Team USA Cheerios) (1996)
• Purely O's (organic Cheerios, manufactured by General Mills' subsidiary Cascadian Farms) (1999)
• Berry Burst Cheerios (including variations of Strawberry, Strawberry Banana, Cherry Vanilla and Triple Berry) (2003)
• Millenios (Cheerios with 2 shaped cereal pieces, no longer available) (2000)
• Yogurt Burst Cheerios (2005) (including variations of Vanilla and Strawberry yogurt)

Cheerios
General Mills

Chernobyl

On April 26, 1986 at 1:23 a.m., reactor number four at the Chernobyl plant, near Prypia in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, suffered a massive, catastrophic power excursion (meltdown). This caused a steam explosion, followed by a second (chemical, not nuclear) explosion from the ignition of generated hydrogen mixed with air, which tore the top from the reactor and its building and exposed the reactor core.

The resulting fire sent a plume of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere and over an extensive geographical area, including the nearby town of Pripyat. The plume drifted over large parts of the western Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Northern Europe. Large areas in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia had to be evacuated, with over 336,000 people resettled.

In the aftermath of the accident, 237 people suffered from acute radiation sickness, of whom 31 died within the first three months.  Most of these were fire and rescue workers trying to bring the accident under control, who were not fully aware of how dangerous exposure to the radiation in the smoke was.

It is considered the worst nuclear power plant accident in history and is the only level 7 event on the International Nuclear Event Scale.  Four hundred times more radioactive material was released than had been by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

The Chernobyl reactor is now enclosed in a large concrete sarcophagus, which was built quickly to allow continuing operation of the other reactors at the plant.

Official Chernobyl site
IAEA
Wikipedia

New Coke

On April 23, 1985, The Coca-Cola Company introduced New Coke.

Before World War II, Coca-Cola firmly held the majority of cola sales with a 60% market share.  By 1983, their share had dropped to 24% behind Pepsi.

Coca-Cola's CEO was looking to shake things up after losing a share of the market to Pepsi, thanks in part to the Pepsi Challenge.  They began the super secret "Project Kansas" to develop a new formula and try out the new taste with blind taste tests with over 190,000 consumers.

Coca-Cola's sales numbers rose when the new version was initially introduced. Then came the backlash. Protests and anti-"New Coke" groups popped up across the country. Panicked drinkers hoarded cases of the original.

Coca-Cola brought back the original Coke, renamed Coca-Cola Classic, in July 1985.

The Coca-Cola Company
Advertising Age

1964 World's Fair

On April 22, 1964, the World's Fair opened in Flushing, NY.

The fair was held at Flushing Meadows Corona Park in the Borough of Queens.  That location held both the 1964/1965 New York World’s Fair and the 1939/1940 New York World’s Fair.

More than fifty-one million people attended the Fair which had a theme of "Peace Through Understanding," dedicated to "Man's Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe."

The most notable exhibit was General Motors Corporation whose Futurama, a show in which visitors seated in moving chairs glided past detailed scenery showing what life might be like in the "near-future," proved to be the Fair's most popular exhibit. Nearly twenty-six million people took the journey into the future during the Fair's two-year run.



New York 1964 World's Fair
Modern Ruins

Heartbreak Hotel

On April 21, 1956, Elvis Presley's first hit record, "Heartbreak Hotel" became a number one hit.

The song was inspired by the suicide of a young man who left a note with the line, "I walk a lonely street."  On November 10, 1955, Presley heard the song for the first time and said he would record it.  Mae Boren Axton, a co-writer of the song, offered Presley a third of the royalties if he made the song his first single release from his new label, RCA.

This was Elvis' first #1 hit on the US Billboard pop charts.  In 1995, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and was re-released in 1996 to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of its recording.   It was ranked #45 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 2004.

There is now a real hotel named after the song located across the street from Presley's home, Graceland, in Memphis, Tennessee. It features 128 rooms and offers 24-hour Presley videos for its guests.

Song Facts
Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel

Edgar Allan Poe

On April 20, 1841, the first detective story, "Murders in Rue Morgue" by Edgar Allan Poe, was published.

“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is a tale of a grisly double homicide investigated by Poe’s recurring recluse C. Auguste Dupin. Like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick Dr. John Watson, Dupin and his unnamed sidekick, who narrates “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” employ logic and literacy to divine the identity of the murderer — who, in patented Poe fashion, turns out to be more of a surprise than the crime itself.

Poe was born in Boston in 1809, and eventually died under mysterious circumstances in Baltimore in 1849.  Poe was orphaned by the time he was three years old.  He was adopted by John Allan, a tobacco merchant in Richmond, Virginia, and was sent to a boarding school in London.  He returned to go to the University of Virgina, but he dropped out and gambled his tuition money.

He enlisted in the Army, but was dismissed six months later for disobedience.  Poe moved in with his widowed aunt, Maria Clemm, and her teenage daughter, Virginia Eliza Clemm, whom he married before she was 14 years old.

Poe gained respect from his peers as an author and literary critic, but his career suffered from his compulsive behavior and from alcoholism.  In 1849, he was found unconscious on a street in Baltimore. Poe was taken to the Washington College Hospital where he was diagnosed with "lesions on the brain" (the doctor believed Poe was mugged). He died 4 days later, briefly coming in and out of consciousness, just to whisper his last words, "Lord, help my poor soul." The real cause of his death is still unknown and his death certificate has disappeared.

Poe Museum
Mystery Net