If you took out a map of the United States and traced a line
beginning at New Orleans and running up the Mississippi
River to Memphis, the tip of your finger would pass through
the very birthplace of rock and roll—a region where nearly
every step in its early development took place and where
nearly every significant contributor to that development was
born. But if the foundation of rock and roll was mostly laid
down within 100 miles of the Mississippi River in the mid-
1950s, the blueprint for what would follow required the further contributions of a young man born 700 miles to the west on
this day in 1936: Charles Harden Holley. Writing and performing
under the name Buddy Holly, this Lubbock, Texas, native would
have an influence on rock and roll that would far outlast his
tragically shortened career.

WW1 British first prototype tank called Little Willie. It was an
Armored Personnel Carrier. It can be found at the Tank
Museum, Bovington, Wareham, United Kingdom.

On September 6, 1915, a prototype tank nicknamed Little Willie
rolled off the assembly line in England. Little Willie was far from
an overnight success. It weighed 14 tons, got stuck in trenches
and crawled over rough terrain at only two miles per hour.

However, improvements were made to the original prototype
and tanks eventually transformed military battlefields.

The British developed the tank in response to the trench
warfare of World War I. In 1914, a British army colonel named
Ernest  Swinton and William Hankey, secretary of the Committee
for Imperial Defence, championed the idea of an armored vehicle   
with conveyor-belt-like tracks over its wheels that could break 
through enemy lines and traverse difficult territory.        

The men appealed to British navy minister Winston Churchill,
who believed in the concept of a “land boat” and organized a
Landships Committee to begin developing a prototype. To keep
the project secret from enemies, production workers were
reportedly told the vehicles they were building would be used
to carry water on the battlefield (alternate theories suggest the
shells of the new vehicles resembled water tanks). Either  
way, the new vehicles were shipped in crates labeled “tank”
and the name stuck.

Jesse Woodson James (September 5, 1847 – April 3, 1882)

Seen by some as a vicious murderer and by others as a gallant
Robin Hood, the famous outlaw Jesse Woodson James was
born on September 5, 1847, in Clay County, Missouri.

Danish carpenter Ole Kirk Christiansen
(7 April 1891 – 11 March 1958)

In 1932, Ole founded the construction toy company The Lego
Group. He toiled away in Billund, Denmark, for decades before
creating Leg Godt, which means “play well.” His workshop was destroyed by fire twice. He endured bankruptcy and a world war
that caused a shortage of materials.

Finally, in the late 1940s, Ole Christiansen landed on the idea for
self-locking plastic bricks. By the time Ole Kirk died in 1958,
Legos was on the verge of becoming a household word.