TITLE: May 22 in History: Earthquakes, Patents, and Pizza
1. 1455 – The First Battle of St Albans Ignites the Wars of the Roses
On a spring morning in the Hertfordshire town of St Albans, England's long-simmering dynastic feud erupted into open civil war. Richard, Duke of York, led roughly 3,000 men against the smaller royal army of King Henry VI, breaking through barricaded streets in a chaotic urban battle that lasted less than an hour. The casualties were modest in number but immense in consequence. Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset — York's chief rival — was killed outside an inn, along with the Earl of Northumberland and Lord Clifford. King Henry himself was wounded in the neck by an arrow and taken into York's custody, a stunning humiliation for the Lancastrian crown. This short, sharp engagement is generally considered the opening battle of the Wars of the Roses, a generation-long struggle between the houses of York and Lancaster that would ultimately end the Plantagenet dynasty and bring the Tudors to power.
2. 1849 – Abraham Lincoln Becomes the Only President with a Patent
Before he was president, Abraham Lincoln was a riverboat man, and the memory of getting stuck on shoals stayed with him. On this day he received U.S. Patent No. 6,469 for "A Device for Buoying Vessels Over Shoals" — a system of inflatable air chambers that could be lowered along a ship's sides to lift it over obstacles. The invention was never built or commercialized, and engineers have generally agreed it wouldn't have worked well in practice. The added weight of the bellows mechanism may have made vessels more likely to run aground in the first place. What matters is the distinction: Lincoln remains the only person ever to hold a U.S. patent and the presidency. The original wooden model he carved sits in the Smithsonian, a reminder that the man who held the Union together was also a tinkerer fascinated by mechanical problems.
3. 1859 – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Is Born in Edinburgh
Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle came into the world in a comfortable middle-class home in Edinburgh, Scotland. Trained as a physician, he began writing fiction to fill the long, patient-free hours of a struggling medical practice — a side hustle that would soon eclipse his day job entirely. In 1887 he published "A Study in Scarlet," introducing a brilliant, eccentric consulting detective named Sherlock Holmes and his loyal companion Dr. Watson. The character was modeled in part on Joseph Bell, one of Doyle's medical professors who astonished students with diagnostic deductions from minute observation. Doyle wrote 60 Holmes stories in total, and the character became so popular that when Doyle tried to kill him off at the Reichenbach Falls, public outrage forced a resurrection. Holmes essentially invented the template for the modern detective story and remains, by some measures, the most-portrayed fictional character in film and television history.
4. 1906 – The Wright Brothers Patent the Airplane
Two and a half years after their famous flight at Kitty Hawk, Orville and Wilbur Wright finally received U.S. Patent No. 821,393 for their "Flying Machine." Crucially, the patent did not cover the engine or propeller — it covered their breakthrough system of three-axis control using wing-warping for roll, a movable rudder for yaw, and an elevator for pitch. This control system was the Wrights' real invention. Powered flight without it had been attempted for decades and had killed several would-be aviators. The Wrights' insight was that an aircraft, like a bicycle, had to be actively balanced and steered in three dimensions by its pilot. The patent would touch off a decade of bitter litigation as the Wrights tried to enforce their claims against rivals like Glenn Curtiss. The "patent wars" arguably slowed American aviation development so severely that by the time the U.S. entered World War I, its pilots had to fly European-built aircraft.
5. 1960 – The Great Chilean Earthquake, the Strongest Ever Recorded
At 3:11 PM local time, the seafloor off the coast of south-central Chile ruptured along a fault line nearly 1,000 kilometers long. The resulting magnitude 9.5 earthquake — known as the Valdivia earthquake — remains the most powerful seismic event ever recorded by instruments, releasing energy roughly equivalent to 178 gigatons of TNT. The shaking lasted approximately ten minutes and devastated southern Chile, but the deadlier consequences traveled outward across the Pacific. A tsunami slammed Hawaii fifteen hours later, killing 61 in Hilo. Another twenty-two hours after that, waves up to ten meters high struck Japan, killing more than 140 people on the other side of the world. The total death toll is uncertain but is estimated between 1,000 and 6,000. The disaster fundamentally reshaped scientific understanding of subduction zone earthquakes and led directly to the establishment of the Pacific Tsunami Warning System, which now protects coastlines across the entire ocean basin.
6. 1980 – Pac-Man Arrives in Japanese Arcades
Designer Toru Iwatani and a small team at Namco released a yellow, pizza-shaped character into arcades across Japan with a deceptively simple premise: eat dots, avoid ghosts. Iwatani had deliberately designed the game to appeal to women and couples, breaking with the violent space-shooter conventions that dominated the era. Pac-Man became a phenomenon unlike anything the young video game industry had seen. Within a few years it had earned billions of dollars in quarters, spawned a hit pop song ("Pac-Man Fever"), an animated TV series, lunchboxes, breakfast cereal, and — for better or worse — established the template for video-game merchandising and tie-ins. More importantly, Pac-Man proved that video games could appeal to a broad audience, not just teenage boys. The four ghosts — Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde — were among the first video game characters with distinct personalities and AI behaviors, a small but radical step toward the character-driven games that dominate the medium today.
7. 2010 – Bitcoin Buys Pizza for the First Time
Florida-based programmer Laszlo Hanyecz posted on a Bitcoin forum offering 10,000 BTC to anyone who would order him two pizzas. Another user, Jeremy Sturdivant, took him up on it, paid Papa John's about $25 with a credit card, and had two large pies delivered to Hanyecz's home in Jacksonville. It was, as far as anyone knows, the first time Bitcoin was used to purchase a real-world good or service. At the time, the entire transaction was a curiosity — Bitcoin was barely a year old, had no established exchange rate, and was traded almost exclusively as an experiment among cryptography enthusiasts. The Bitcoin community now celebrates May 22 each year as "Bitcoin Pizza Day." At various market peaks since then, those 10,000 bitcoins have been worth hundreds of millions and even more than a billion dollars — a punchline that has come to symbolize both the breathtaking appreciation of cryptocurrency and the difficulty of recognizing transformative technology in its early, awkward, pizza-shaped days. These seven moments — a medieval battle, a future president's patent, the birth of a literary giant, the legal foundation of aviation, the most violent earthquake on record, the dawn of arcade culture, and a programmer hungry for pizza — share a single calendar date and almost nothing else. Yet that is precisely what makes a day in history fascinating: the threads of human invention, ambition, catastrophe, and ordinary appetite all running side by side across the centuries, intersecting only in our remembering of them.