September 7th Through Time: The Day Submarines, Birthdays and Oddball Geniuses Made History

On September seventh, 1776, a man named Ezra Lee climbed into a one-man, hand-cranked wooden submarine that looked like two tortoise shells glued together, and tried to sink the flagship of the British Royal Navy. He failed, spectacularly. But in that failure, something incredible was born. Yesterday, we talked about the small, strange moments that change the world—the delightful, unexpected turns that make history feel alive. Well, today is about the people who embody that change. The ones who see the world as it is, and decide… no. Not good enough. Let’s build something else. Let's sing something new. Or let's blow something up with a submarine that looks like a barrel.

Because looking back, the moments that matter, the ones that future historians will mark as the real turning points, often look a little bit crazy at the time. They look like a farmer in a submersible, trying to attach a time bomb to the hull of HMS Eagle in the middle of New York Harbor. The bomb, called a "torpedo," floated away. The fuse fizzled. The British sailors who saw it detonate harmlessly in the distance thought it was just some kind of weird firework. They had no idea they were looking at the dawn of submarine warfare. They were looking at the future, and they just… laughed. And that’s the thing, isn’t it?

The future so often arrives looking like a joke, or a mistake, or a disaster. We only recognize it as a beginning in hindsight. And September seventh is a day just packed with these kinds of beginnings. Take a man born on this day in 1928, in Lakewood, Ohio. His name was Donald Henderson. And if you don't know his name, it’s only because he was so successful that we have the luxury of forgetting the terror he defeated. Henderson was an epidemiologist, and he was given a job that sounds like something out of mythology. He was tasked by the World Health Organization with the complete and total eradication of smallpox.

Now, let's just sit with that for a second. Not "contain" smallpox. Not "manage" it. Eradicate. To make a disease that had killed, blinded, and scarred humanity for literally thousands of years... vanish. A disease that in the 20th century alone killed an estimated 300 million people. That's more than both World Wars, combined. The task was considered, by many very smart people, to be completely impossible. The logistics were a nightmare. The funding was unstable. The politics, across the Cold War divide, were even worse. But Henderson had this… relentless, stubborn, beautiful optimism. He believed in the mission. He was a force of nature, known for being blunt, for pushing, for refusing to take no for an answer.

His team pioneered new vaccination techniques, like the bifurcated needle, which made inoculation faster and used less vaccine. They created a system of "surveillance and containment"—instead of trying to vaccinate everyone on Earth, they would find an outbreak and then vaccinate a ring around it, choking the virus off. It was brilliant. It was effective. And in 1980, the World Health Assembly officially declared that smallpox was gone. Eradicated from the planet. It is, to this day, the only human disease to have been completely wiped out. Think about that. We did that. As a species, we decided that a monster would no longer prey on our children, and we worked together—across borders, across ideologies—and we hunted that monster to extinction.

Looking back now, Henderson’s achievement feels like a message from a different time, doesn't it? A testament to what we can do when we actually decide to cooperate. In an age where we struggle with global problems that feel impossibly complex, the story of Donald Henderson is a vital reminder. The impossible has been done before. He showed us the blueprint. But systems don’t always work for us. Sometimes, they work against us, in secret. And it takes a different kind of courage to see that, and to name it. On the very same day Donald Henderson was born, September seventh, 1929, another world-changing mind entered the world.

In Fez, Morocco, a French geographer named Yves Lacoste was born. And if Henderson’s story is about using a global system for an incredible good, Lacoste’s is about exposing how those same systems can be used for incredible, hidden destruction. Lacoste wasn’t a frontline activist. He was an academic. He studied maps. He studied landscapes. And in the 1970s, he started studying maps of North Vietnam. And he noticed something. The official story of the American bombing campaign during the Vietnam War was that it targeted military infrastructure. Supply lines. Bases. But Lacoste, looking at the data, looking at the geography, saw a different pattern.

He saw a systematic, deliberate campaign to destroy the dikes and dams of the Red River Delta. This wasn't about stopping troops. This was about destroying the intricate, centuries-old irrigation system that fed millions of people. It was an attempt to use the landscape itself as a weapon. To weaponize the monsoon. To cause catastrophic flooding and famine. When he published his findings, it was explosive. He was accused of being a propagandist. But the evidence was there, written on the land itself. Lacoste’s work was a thunderclap. It revealed an uncomfortable truth: that geography isn't just a passive backdrop for history.

It can be a tool. A target. A weapon. He famously said that geography's first purpose is to make war. What a chilling thought. Ten years from now, when we look back at our own time, what hidden wars will be visible? What patterns are we missing? Lacoste’s legacy is a challenge to look at the maps of our own world—not just the physical maps, but the maps of data, of influence, of power—and ask: what are they not telling us? What is being targeted, right in front of our eyes, that we haven't learned to see yet? The work of Yves Lacoste reminds us that sometimes the most powerful act of resistance is simply to see what is there, and to have the courage to describe it.

So you have these two immense figures. One who built a system to save the world, one who exposed a system designed to break it. And on the same day, September seventh, the world also gave us the soundtrack. In 1930, in New York City, Sonny Rollins was born. A colossus of the saxophone. A titan of jazz. If you've ever seen that iconic 1958 photograph, "A Great Day in Harlem," with all the jazz legends gathered on a brownstone stoop—that's him. And until his death just this year, in 2026, he was the last surviving member from that photograph. He wasn't just a musician; he was, as one tribute put it, a "living bridge to the golden age of jazz." He carried that whole history in his lungs.

His music was this constant, searching, brilliant exploration. He’d take a simple melody and turn it inside out, stretch it, build a cathedral of sound on top of it, and then bring it all back home. It was restless and joyful and profound, all at once. And then, just six years later, on September seventh, 1936, in Lubbock, Texas, Buddy Holly was born. And if Sonny Rollins was building cathedrals of sound, Buddy Holly was lighting firecrackers. That hiccup in his voice, the thick glasses, the Fender Stratocaster. He took country and blues and pop and smashed them all together into something new, something urgent.

In less than two years of recording before his tragic death, he wrote the rulebook for rock and roll. The Beatles chose their name as a riff on his band, The Crickets. He was the spark. Isn't that just… perfect? The same day gives us one of the great architects of jazz improvisation AND the primary architect of the rock and roll song. One representing deep, complex, evolving tradition, the other a bolt of pure, revolutionary energy. It’s like history knew we’d need both. We need the music that helps us think deep, and we need the music that makes us want to jump and shout. Both are ways of saying: I am here. This is what it sounds like to be alive.

Of course, September seventh isn't just about beginnings. It’s also about endings, and turning points. On this day in 1940, the Blitz began. Three hundred German bombers appeared in the skies over London, the start of 57 consecutive nights of bombing. It was an attempt to terrorize the British people into submission. To break their spirit. But it did the opposite. It forged a spirit of resilience that became legendary. The bombing, as devastating as it was, may have actually hardened British resolve, galvanizing the country for the long war ahead. It’s a hard lesson: sometimes, the thing that is meant to break you is the very thing that makes you unbreakable.

And on this day in 1876, way out in Northfield, Minnesota, the myth of the American outlaw died a very un-mythic death. The James-Younger gang, the most famous outlaws in the country, tried to rob a bank. They expected terrified clerks and a quick getaway. What they got was a town full of citizens who were absolutely NOT having it. The townspeople grabbed their rifles, took cover in doorways, and just… opened fire. The gang was decimated. It wasn't a noble last stand. It was a bloody, chaotic, and decisive end. It was the moment the frontier legend collided with the reality of a community that was tired of being pushed around.

And for a little bit of glorious absurdity, on this day in 1911, the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire was arrested. His crime? The police suspected he had stolen the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. He hadn't, of course—though a former associate of his had stolen some lesser statues and implicated him. But for a moment, one of the leading figures of the artistic avant-garde was the prime suspect in the most famous art heist in history. It’s a beautiful, chaotic, very human footnote. A reminder that history is not always grand and tragic; sometimes it’s just… weird. And that brings us back to where we started. To that man in the wooden submarine.

Ezra Lee. His mission was a complete failure. But was it? He got away. He proved that a submersible could approach an enemy ship undetected. He planted an idea. An idea that would grow and evolve, from a hand-cranked wooden barrel into the nuclear-powered giants that patrol the deep today. Looking back, we can see the thread. The thread that connects a failed inventor, a disease hunter, a truth-telling geographer, a jazz giant, a rock and roll pioneer, and a city that refused to bow. It's a thread of defiance. A refusal to accept the limits of the world as presented. Donald Henderson refused to accept a world with smallpox.

Yves Lacoste refused to accept a government's lies. Sonny Rollins and Buddy Holly refused to accept the limits of a three-minute song or a 12-bar-blues. The people of London refused to be terrorized. The people of Northfield refused to be victims. And Ezra Lee, bless his heart, refused to accept that the most powerful navy on Earth was untouchable. That's the retrospective that matters. Not just what happened, but the spirit behind what happened. The future will look back on our time, on this very moment, and they won't be judging us for our failures. They will be looking for the same thing. They will be looking for the people who tried.

The ones who built, the ones who exposed, the ones who sang, the ones who fought back. They’re looking for the crazy ones, in their wooden submarines, paddling toward the future.