May 10th: Golden Spikes & Turning Points—A Day That Changed the World

On May tenth, eighteen sixty-nine, a single golden spike was driven into a wooden railroad tie at a place called Promontory Summit, in the Utah Territory. With that one final hammer blow, a journey across America that once took months of perilous travel was suddenly reduced to about a week. The world got smaller, and faster, all at once. And looking back, you can see that this day, May tenth, seems to have a habit of doing that. It’s a day for connections, for revolutions, for things that change the very rhythm of how we live. And sometimes, those revolutions come in very, very small packages.

History isn’t always tidy with its dates. Just the day before, on May ninth, nineteen-sixty, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a tiny pill called Enovid-10. The first oral contraceptive. And with that quiet, bureaucratic approval, the private lives of millions of people were given a new kind of freedom, a new kind of control. The twentieth century’s social landscape was about to be completely redrawn. We’ll come back to that. But first, let's look at what else this day holds. It’s absolutely packed. Go back to seventeen seventy-four. On this day, Louis the sixteenth and a young Marie Antoinette ascend to the French throne.

It’s all pomp and circumstance. Versailles is glittering. But we, with our hindsight, can feel the chill. We know this is the beginning of the end. We know the story doesn’t end with a crown, but with a guillotine. It’s a moment of peak splendor, right on the edge of the abyss. Fast forward. A lot. To nineteen ninety-four. The band Weezer releases their debut album, The Blue Album. And suddenly, the sound of suburban angst gets a new, brilliant, power-pop anthem. “Undone - The Sweater Song,” “Buddy Holly,” “Say It Ain't So.” For a whole generation, this was the soundtrack.

And here’s a delightful detail: to get their vocal harmonies just right, the band practiced singing barbershop quartet songs. That’s how you get that perfect, clean, crunchy sound. By going back to the 1890s to create the sound of the 1990s. On this day in two thousand thirteen, a spire was carefully hoisted into place atop One World Trade Center in Manhattan. It brought the building’s total height to a deeply symbolic one thousand, seven hundred and seventy-six feet. It made it the tallest building in the United States. But more than that, it was an act of resilience made steel and glass.

A statement that you can knock something down, but you can’t erase the sky. A much quieter, but no less profound, beginning happened on this day in nineteen-oh-eight. In Grafton, West Virginia, the first official observance of Mother’s Day took place. It was the work of a woman named Anna Jarvis, who simply wanted to honor her own mother and, by extension, all mothers. A simple, beautiful idea that has since become a global tradition. And this day also gave us some true originals. In eighteen ninety-nine, Fred Astaire was born. The man who made dancing look as natural as breathing, who could make a tuxedo and top hat seem like the most effortless clothes in the world.

And in nineteen-sixty—the very same year the pill was approved—Bono was born. The frontman of U2, a rock star who decided his job wasn’t just to fill stadiums, but to try and change the world. Two completely different kinds of performers, both with a kind of gravity you just can't ignore. So you have a railroad connecting a continent. A pill creating a new kind of personal freedom. A king taking a throne he’s destined to lose. A band capturing the sound of a moment. A skyscraper reclaiming a skyline. It’s an incredible collection. But I want to go back. Back to that railroad, and back to that pill.

Because they are two sides of the same coin. They are about redrawing the map—one of a nation, and one of a life. Let’s start with the railroad. It’s almost impossible for us to imagine what the world was like before it. To get from New York to California was a four-to-six-month ordeal. You could take a wagon train, facing disease, weather, and exhaustion. Or you could sail all the way around the tip of South America—a terrifying journey. The country was, in a practical sense, two separate places divided by a massive, dangerous wilderness. The Transcontinental Railroad was the moonshot of its day.

An audacious, almost insane idea to lay over one thousand, seven hundred miles of track across plains, deserts, and the formidable Sierra Nevada mountains. Two companies, the Union Pacific building west from Nebraska, and the Central Pacific building east from California, were in a frantic race, paid by the mile. And on May tenth, eighteen sixty-nine, they met. The ceremony at Promontory Summit was a piece of classic American theater. There were dignitaries, champagne, and four precious spikes to be driven for the final tie. Two gold, one silver, one a mix of gold, silver, and iron.

The final one, the famous Golden Spike, was gently tapped into a pre-drilled hole by the railroad presidents. A telegraph wire was attached to the hammer, so the entire nation could "hear" the final blow. Click. Click. Click. The country was united. It’s a glorious story. A story of ambition and engineering. But looking back, we see the parts of the story that weren’t celebrated that day. The Union Pacific was built largely by Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans. The Central Pacific… that was a different story. They faced the terrifying granite walls of the Sierra Nevada.

And the brutal, back-breaking work of blasting tunnels and laying track on sheer cliffs was done by thousands of Chinese laborers, who were paid less and treated as disposable. Their contribution was absolutely essential, and almost entirely erased from the official story for a century. And, of course, the railroad tracks were laid directly across lands that had been home to Native American tribes for millennia. The railroad brought settlers, it brought soldiers, it brought the near-extinction of the bison. For them, that golden spike wasn't a symbol of unity.

It was the sound of their world ending. So looking back, we see it for what it was: a moment of incredible, nation-defining triumph, built on a foundation of exploitation and conquest. It’s messy. It’s complicated. And that’s why it’s so important. It reminds us that progress is never a clean, straight line. It’s a tangled, human story. And then there's the pill. If the railroad changed the physical landscape, the pill changed the internal one. The biological one. For all of human history, for women, sex was inextricably linked to the possibility of pregnancy. That was just a fact of life, as solid as a mountain range.

It dictated education, career, marriage… everything. The approval of Enovid-10 on May ninth, nineteen-sixty, was the culmination of a fight waged for decades. It was driven by the fierce advocacy of Margaret Sanger, and funded by the fortune of Katherine McCormick, an heiress and biologist who believed in the science. They faced immense opposition—legal, religious, and social. The very idea was seen as scandalous. When the FDA gave its approval, it was initially only for "severe menstrual distress." Not as a contraceptive. That was still too controversial. But doctors and women knew exactly what it was.

And within a few years, millions of American women were using it. And this is where we can see the long arc. The approval of the pill didn't just prevent pregnancies. It allowed women to plan their lives. To pursue higher education in record numbers. To enter the workforce and build careers. It fundamentally altered the power dynamics within relationships and within society as a whole. It decoupled sex from procreation in the popular imagination for the first time. It was the chemical engine of the sexual revolution. Of course, just like the railroad, it wasn't a simple, clean victory.

There were concerns about side effects, which were initially downplayed. Access was not equal. And the debate it ignited about bodily autonomy, morality, and reproductive freedom… well, that conversation is as loud and as urgent today as it has ever been. We are still living in the world that pill created, still grappling with the questions it forced us to ask. So when we look back at this one day in May, we see these incredible, explosive moments. One is a story of public spectacle, of hammering gold into the earth to connect a nation. The other is a quiet, private story, a revolution that took place inside millions of individual bodies, giving them a new kind of freedom.

One was about conquering distance. The other, about conquering destiny. And maybe that’s the thread that ties it all together. The railroad, the pill, a skyscraper, even a perfect pop song. They are all expressions of the same deep, human impulse. The refusal to accept the world as it is. The drive to build a bridge, write a new rule, sing a new song. The belief that we can, in fact, change the map of our world, and the map of our lives.