Walkin' on the Sun Trivia Quiz

1522
Juan Sebastian Elcano (c.1486-1526) was the senior survivor of the expedition led by Ferdinand Magellan, and led the other 17 survivors home to Seville after three years away, completing the first circumnavigation of the globe. Magellan himself had been killed in the Philippines, and the majority of the sailors who set sail in 1519 also did not survive. Elcano himself died on a later expedition to the Pacific, probably of scurvy.

Although the possibility of circumnavigation had been accepted for some time, until this party arrived home the feat had continued to seem as impossible as 'walking on the sun' does to modern thinking.

1875
Matthew Webb (1848-1883) began swimming as a youngster, at a time when very few people learned to swim, including those who made their living as sailors. His career as a merchant seaman was punctuated by acts of courage involving his ability to swim. He became interested in attempting long, seemingly impossible, swims, and in August 1875, at his second attempt he succeeded in swimming from Dover, England to Cap Gris Nez, France in just under 22 hours, unassisted by any form of artificial buoyancy devices.

He perished in July 1883 whilst attempting another "impossible" swim, this time of the whirlpool in the Niagara River, below the Falls. His hope had been to encourage people to learn to swim, and in that he was successful.

1903
Does anyone remember which Wright Brother made the first powered flight at Kill Devil Hill near Kitty Hawk, NC on 17 December 1903? It was, in fact, Orville, who stayed aloft for all of twelve seconds in their Wright Flyer, while Wilbur managed just under a minute later that same day. Until then, flying a heavier than air machine had seemed impossible, though not for lack of trying. By the end of the century flying was commonplace.

Wilbur (1867-1912) and Orville (1871-1948) famously had a bicycle store in Dayton, Ohio, before that historic day. They had previously experimented with kites and gliders, before moving on to powered aircraft.

1947
Charles Edward (Chuck) Yeager (1923-2020) had served in the US Army Air Force during World War II, attaining 'ace' status as a P-51 Mustang pilot. He continued to serve after the war, becoming a test pilot and flying into history on 14 October 1947, when he took his Bell X-1 aircraft to Mach 1.05, breaking the so-called sound barrier. He called the aircraft 'Glamorous Glennis', after his wife. The seemingly impossible feat was accompanied by a 'sonic boom', marking the moment of breaking the barrier.

Yeager continued to serve, rising through the ranks from army private to air force Brigadier-General, attaining the latter rank in 1969. He made a cameo appearance in the movie "The Right Stuff" (1983), in which he was portrayed by actor Sam Shepard.

1953
Before New Zealander Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa companion Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Mount Everest on 29 May 1953, many others had tried and of those, some had lost their lives in the attempt. They were the second 'summit team' of their expedition, led by Sir John Hunt, to make the attempt, succeeding where the earlier pair had failed. Hillary was knighted in June of 1953.

Edmund Percival Hillary (1919-2008) was born in New Zealand, and served as a navigator in that country's air force (RNZAF) during the Second World War. He had already become interested in mountaineering before that, and took up the occupation again in the late 1940s. In the 1960s he became involved in helping the Sherpa people to obtain schools and hospitals in Nepal. In 2003 he was made an honourary Nepalese citizen.

Tenzing Norgay (1914-1986) had been involved in mountaineering since the 1930s, and was a member of the unsuccessful Swiss attempt on Everest in 1952, reaching a then-record height. In his ghost-written autobiography he gave credit to Hillary for being first to step on the summit. Sherpa Tenzing received the George Medal for his efforts.

1954
Roger Bannister (1929-2018) was a junior doctor and Olympic runner when he set himself the task of running a mile in under four minutes, something that had been thought impossible previously. After a middling performance at the 1952 Olympics he concentrated on the mile distance, making his successful attempt on 6 May 1954 on the Iffley Road track at Oxford, paced by Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway, both very good athletes themselves. Bannister's time was 3:59.4, a record which stood for only 46 days, being broken by John Landy's 3:57.9 at a meet in Finland. Both Bannister and Landy ran under four minutes in Vancouver at the British Empire and Commonwealth Games in August, 1954 in a race won by Bannister that became known as the "Miracle Mile".

Bannister retired from athletics that same year, going on to a long and celebrated career in neurology. Amongst his many honours, for services to both sport and medicine, was the knighthood received in 1975.

1961
By 1961, the once seemingly impossible feat of sending a human being into space had become more than a possibility, with the USSR and USA vying to be first to make a successful flight. This portion of the so-called Space Race was won by the Soviet Union, when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin (1934-1968), in Vostok 1, made a single orbit of Earth in a flight taking 108 minutes on 12 April 1961. Only a few weeks later, on 5 May 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American astronaut in space, though his flight was suborbital.

Gagarin had become an immediate hero in the USSR, and though he stayed in the space program, he was eventually banned from taking part in more space flights, as the death of a hero of his status would have been detrimental to morale. Sadly, this did not save him, as he was killed on a routine training flight when his MiG-15 crashed in March 1968.

[ A word about the hint: Laika was the dog the Soviets sent into space in 1957 ].

1967
By the late 1960s, kidney transplants had proved to be a viable option for patients suffering from kidney disease, and an experimental chimpanzee to human heart transplant had been attempted in 1964, unsuccessfully. It was on 3 December 1967 that Christiaan Barnard, a South African surgeon, performed the first human to human heart transplant on a patient named Louis Washkansky. Although the operation was deemed successful, Washkansky died of pneumonia only eighteen days later. During the following year (1968) a number of heart transplants were performed worldwide, with varying results. By the first quarter of the 21st century, heart transplants had become quite common, with a good survival rate and an average post-operative life expectancy of 15 years.

Barnard (1922-2001) continued to practice medicine at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, including more transplant operations. He retired from surgery and as Head of Cardiothoracic Surgery in 1983, when rheumatoid arthritis made it impossible for him to continue to perform surgery. He was on holiday in Cyprus when he died, probably of a severe asthma attack.

1969
We return now to the Space Race, this time with the moon as the prize, with the USA winning this time. Following the Mercury and Gemini programs, NASA's Apollo program concentrated on putting men on the moon, and after some setbacks, Apollo 11 set off in July 1969, with three astronauts aboard. Of these only two, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, descended to the moon's surface while Michael Collins piloted the larger craft in its lunar orbit. It was Armstrong who descended the ladder first, uttering a somewhat garbled message about "one small step" completing yet another "impossible" journey, on 20 July 1969. Several more landings were made between then and 1972.

Neil Armstrong (1930-2012) had served as a US Naval officer and a test pilot before being chosen to become an astronaut. His ashes were scattered at sea in a naval ceremony after his death.

1996
The more well-known name associated with this accomplishment is probably Dolly, the Finn Dorset sheep, whose existence is the accomplishment. Dolly was the first mammal successfully cloned from an adult somatic cell, specifically a cell from a mammary gland. All of this happened at the Roslin Institute in Scotland, with Campbell and Wilmut part of the team that made the magic happen. Named for Dolly Parton, Dolly the sheep was born on 5 July 1996, and lived her entire life at the Roslin Institute, where she eventually gave birth to six lambs. She was euthanised in February 2003 due to lung disease and severe arthritis.

Keith Campbell (1954-2012) was an English biologist, while Ian Wilmut (1924-2023) was an English embryologist. Both, along with colleague Shinya Yamanaka received the Shaw Prize for Medicine and Life Sciences in 2008. Wilmut was knighted in the same year.