Life in weeks
One square is one week. Eighty rows is a long life. The coloured squares are 82 things other people are remembered for, sitting on the week of their life they actually happened — from Anne Frank at 13 to Barbara McClintock at 81. Put your birthday in and see which ones are already behind you.
One row is one year of your life, one square is one week of it. Grey is spent, the bright square is the week you are in, coloured squares are somebody else’s milestone at that age. Hover one, or tap it for the story.
Anne Frank — Started her diary
It was a birthday present, a red-checked autograph book, and she began writing in it that day. The family went into hiding three weeks later.
Greta Thunberg — Sat down outside parliament alone
Fifteen, skipping school, with a hand-painted sign, on her own for the first day. Within fifteen months millions of people in over a hundred countries had joined the strikes.
Beyoncé — Released her first album with Destiny’s Child
She was sixteen, and had been performing with the group in various line-ups since she was nine. The solo career did not start for another five years.
Simone Biles — Won her first world all-around title
At sixteen, in her first year as a senior. She has since had four skills named after her, because nobody else was doing them.
Malala Yousafzai — Won the Nobel Peace Prize at 17
She had been blogging anonymously about girls’ schooling at eleven and was shot on her school bus at fifteen. She sat school exams in Birmingham the same year she collected the prize.
Lionel Messi — Made his first-team debut for Barcelona
He was seventeen. The club had paid for his growth-hormone treatment since he was thirteen, after his family moved continents so he could keep playing.
Serena Williams — Won her first Grand Slam title
The US Open, two weeks before her eighteenth birthday, beating the world number one in the final. Twenty-two more followed over the next eighteen years.
Frida Kahlo — Survived the crash that changed her life
A tram hit the bus she was riding home from school; she spent months in a full body cast. Her mother rigged a mirror above the bed and she started painting herself, because she was the subject she knew best.
Bill Gates — Founded Microsoft
He and Paul Allen had already sold a BASIC interpreter for the Altair before they had a machine to run it on — they wrote it against a simulator and tested it for real on the day of the demo.
Mary Shelley — Published Frankenstein
She was eighteen when she started it, on a wet holiday where the group challenged each other to write a ghost story. It appeared anonymously, and reviewers assumed her husband had written it.
Steve Jobs — Founded Apple in a garage
Three founders, one of whom sold his stake for $800 within two weeks. The first product was a bare circuit board that customers had to supply a case and a keyboard for.
Paul McCartney — Played The Ed Sullivan Show
Roughly seventy-three million people watched, about a third of the United States. The band had been playing eight-hour nights in Hamburg cellars three years earlier.
Linus Torvalds — Announced Linux to a newsgroup
The post described “just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu”. That kernel now runs most of the servers, phones and supercomputers on the planet.
Roger Federer — Won his first Wimbledon title
He was 21 and had a reputation for talent without temperament, having lost in the first round the year before. Nineteen more Grand Slam titles followed.
Bob Dylan — Released The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
His first album of mostly original songs, three days after his twenty-second birthday. Blowin’ in the Wind was reportedly written in about ten minutes in a café.
Muhammad Ali — Took the heavyweight title from Sonny Liston
He was a seven-to-one underdog against a fighter thought unbeatable. Liston did not come out for the seventh round.
Usain Bolt — Ran 100m in 9.58 seconds
Five days before his twenty-third birthday, taking more than a tenth of a second off his own world record — an enormous margin at that distance. It still stands.
Alan Turing — Submitted On Computable Numbers
The paper invented the idea of a universal machine that reads and writes symbols on a tape — the abstract computer, a decade before anyone built one. It also proved that some questions no such machine can ever answer.
Dwayne Johnson — Made his WWE debut as Rocky Maivia
He had been cut from a Canadian football league months earlier with seven dollars in his pocket. The crowd hated the clean-cut character so much that he rewrote himself as a villain, and that became The Rock.
James Watson — Published the structure of DNA
The Nature paper with Francis Crick ran to about a page. It leaned heavily on unpublished X-ray work by Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, credited at the time only as a vague acknowledgement.
Roger Bannister — Ran a mile in under four minutes
He was a medical student training in his lunch hours, on a cold evening with a crosswind he nearly called the attempt off for. The record he set lasted forty-six days.
David Bowie — Released Ziggy Stardust
His fifth album, after a decade of false starts, failed bands and one novelty hit. Inventing a character to sing as was what finally made the songs work.
Larry Page — Incorporated Google
The search ranking came out of his PhD work on treating links as citations. The pair had tried to sell it for a million dollars first and found no buyer.
Jane Goodall — Arrived at Gombe to live among chimpanzees
She had no degree when she started, which is exactly why Louis Leakey picked her — he wanted an observer with no theory to defend. Within months she had watched a chimpanzee strip a twig to fish for termites, which broke the definition of humans as the only tool-makers.
Valentina Tereshkova — Became the first woman in space
A textile worker and amateur parachutist, chosen over test pilots because the descent required jumping. She spent three days in orbit — longer than all the American astronauts to that point combined.
Albert Einstein — Submitted the paper on special relativity
He was a patent clerk in Bern, third class, doing physics in the evenings. In that one year he published on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity and mass-energy equivalence — four papers that each would have made a career.
Walt Disney — Released Steamboat Willie
He had just lost the rights to his previous character to a distributor, and drew a mouse on the train home. Synchronised sound was the gamble that made it land.
Yuri Gagarin — Became the first human in space
One orbit, 108 minutes, in a capsule he could not steer, ejecting to parachute down separately. He was a foundry worker’s son and 27 years old.
Hedy Lamarr — Patented frequency hopping between films
Devised with the composer George Antheil as a way to keep radio-guided torpedoes from being jammed. The Navy shelved it; the same idea underpins Wi-Fi and Bluetooth today.
Michael Jordan — Won his first NBA championship
His seventh season, after years of being told he was a scorer who could not win. He had been cut from his high-school varsity team at fifteen.
Yayoi Kusama — Moved to New York with a suitcase of drawings
She sewed money into her clothes to get out of Japan and wrote to Georgia O’Keeffe for advice before going. Recognition on her own terms took another forty years.
Freddie Mercury — Released Bohemian Rhapsody
Six minutes long with an opera section in the middle, which the record label refused to put out as a single. A DJ friend played it fourteen times over one weekend until demand settled the argument.
Michelangelo — Unveiled the David
The marble block had been abandoned as ruined by two earlier sculptors before he took it on. A committee that included Leonardo da Vinci argued for weeks about where to put the finished statue.
Jeff Bezos — Founded Amazon as a bookshop
He left a comfortable Wall Street job after reading how fast web usage was growing, and picked books because they were the easiest thing to ship in every variant. The desks in the first office were made from doors.
Elon Musk — Founded SpaceX
He went to Russia to buy refurbished missiles, found them too expensive, and worked out on the flight home that building rockets from scratch was cheaper. The first three launches all failed.
Marie Curie — Announced the discovery of radium
Working out of a converted shed with Pierre Curie, she processed tonnes of pitchblende to isolate a new element. The announcement to the French Academy of Sciences came four years before her first Nobel Prize; the second one, in a different discipline, followed in 1911.
Rosalind Franklin — Captured Photo 51
An X-ray diffraction image of DNA, sharp enough to show the helix. It was shown to Watson without her knowledge and became the decisive evidence for the double helix; she died at 37, four years before the Nobel Prize was awarded for it.
Nikola Tesla — Patented the alternating-current motor
The patents were bought by George Westinghouse and became the technical basis of the AC power grid, over the objections of Edison, who had bet the other way on direct current.
Orville Wright — Flew the first powered aircraft
Twelve seconds, thirty-seven metres, with his brother running alongside the wing. They were bicycle mechanics who had built their own wind tunnel because the published lift tables were wrong.
Oprah Winfrey — Took her talk show national
She had been demoted off a news desk years earlier for getting too involved in the stories. She later bought the rights to the show outright, which is where most of the fortune actually came from.
Tim Berners-Lee — Wrote the proposal for the World Wide Web
A memo to his manager at CERN about linking documents across machines. It came back with the note “vague but exciting”, and he built it anyway — then gave the whole thing away royalty-free.
Florence Nightingale — Arrived at the military hospital in Scutari
She found more soldiers dying of infection than of wounds and rebuilt the sanitation. Her later case for reform was made in statistics and diagrams, which is as much her legacy as the lamp.
Martin Luther King Jr. — Gave the “I Have a Dream” speech
The most quoted passage was not in the prepared text — Mahalia Jackson called out for him to tell them about the dream and he set the pages aside. He was 34, and was assassinated at 39.
Amelia Earhart — Flew the Atlantic solo
Fifteen hours from Newfoundland to a field in Northern Ireland, through ice and a cracked exhaust manifold, landing where a farmhand asked if she had come far.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — Premiered The Magic Flute
Written for a suburban popular theatre rather than the court, and a hit immediately. He was dead nine weeks later, at 35, with the Requiem unfinished.
Emmy Noether — Published Noether’s theorem
It ties every symmetry in a physical system to a conservation law — the reason energy and momentum are conserved at all. She was lecturing at Göttingen unpaid at the time, under a male colleague’s name, because the faculty would not hire a woman.
Walt Disney — Premiered Snow White
The industry called it Disney’s Folly — a feature-length cartoon nobody would sit through. He mortgaged his house to finish it, and it became the highest-grossing film to that date.
Vincent van Gogh — Painted The Starry Night
The view was from the barred window of the asylum at Saint-Rémy, where he had committed himself. He sold almost nothing in his lifetime and had been painting for less than a decade when he died the following year.
Coco Chanel — Launched Chanel No. 5
The first perfume to lead with synthetic aldehydes rather than imitate a single flower, and the first sold under a couturier’s own name. She picked the fifth sample the chemist offered and kept its number.
Stan Lee — Co-created the Fantastic Four
He was 38, disillusioned, and about to leave comics when his wife suggested writing one book the way he actually wanted to. Heroes who argued and paid rent turned out to be the whole idea.
Toni Morrison — Published The Bluest Eye
She wrote it in the early mornings before her editing job, as a single mother of two, because it was the book she wanted to read and no one had written it. The Nobel Prize came twenty-three years later.
Neil Armstrong — Walked on the Moon
He took manual control to fly past a boulder field and landed with about twenty-five seconds of fuel left. He was a civilian test pilot who barely spoke about it afterwards.
Vera Wang — Opened her first bridal salon
She had been a competitive figure skater who missed the Olympic team, then spent sixteen years as a Vogue editor. She started designing at 40 because she could not find a wedding dress she liked.
Rosa Parks — Refused to give up her seat
She was 42, a seamstress, and secretary of her local NAACP chapter — not a tired passenger acting on impulse, as the story is usually told. The bus boycott that followed lasted 381 days.
Le Corbusier — Completed the Villa Savoye
A white box on thin columns outside Paris, built as the demonstration of his five points of architecture. The roof leaked so badly the owners threatened to sue.
Katherine Johnson — Checked the orbit that carried John Glenn
NASA had the trajectory from an electronic computer, and Glenn did not trust it. He asked for the numbers to be run by hand by her specifically, and would not fly until she confirmed them.
Isaac Newton — Published the Principia
Three books laying out the laws of motion and universal gravitation, written largely in an eighteen-month burst after Edmond Halley asked him a question about planetary orbits — and then paid for the printing himself.
Grace Hopper — Built the first working compiler
Her A-0 system translated written notation into machine code, at a time when the accepted wisdom was that computers could only do arithmetic. She spent the rest of her career arguing that programs should be written in something close to English.
Henry Ford — Introduced the Model T
It was his ninth design, named down the alphabet from the first. The moving assembly line came five years later and cut the build time from twelve hours to about ninety minutes.
Samuel L. Jackson — Starred in Pulp Fiction
He got sober at 43 after years of small parts and addiction, and shot his breakout role two weeks later. Pulp Fiction came three years after that, when he was 45.
Stephen Hawking — Published A Brief History of Time
Written for readers with no physics, on the theory that every equation halves the audience — so he kept exactly one. He had been given two years to live at 21 and lived another fifty-five.
Alexander Fleming — Noticed the mould that became penicillin
He came back from holiday to a messy bench and a contaminated culture plate he had not thrown away. It took another decade and a different team in Oxford to turn the observation into a usable drug.
Barack Obama — Was elected president
Four years earlier he had been a state senator from Illinois, unknown outside it. He announced his campaign 21 months before the vote.
Julia Child — Published Mastering the Art of French Cooking
She did not learn to cook until her late thirties, then spent a decade on the manuscript. One publisher rejected it as an encyclopaedia nobody would buy.
Charles Bukowski — Published his first novel
He wrote Post Office in about three weeks after quitting the postal service at 49, on a publisher’s offer of $100 a month for life. He had spent most of two decades not writing at all.
Leonardo da Vinci — Began the Mona Lisa
He kept working on it for years, carried it with him to France and never handed it over to the man who commissioned it. Most of his notebooks and inventions were still unpublished at his death.
Charles Darwin — Published On the Origin of Species
He had the theory in draft for twenty years and kept postponing publication. A letter from Alfred Russel Wallace outlining the same idea forced his hand; the first print run of 1,250 copies sold out on the first day.
Angela Merkel — Became chancellor of Germany
She was a quantum chemist in East Germany until she was 35, and only entered politics after the Wall fell. She held the office for sixteen years.
Steve Jobs — Introduced the iPhone
He announced three products — a widescreen iPod, a phone and an internet communicator — then repeated the list until the room worked out it was one device. The demo units were so unstable they had to be swapped between segments.
Morgan Freeman — Starred in Driving Miss Daisy
He had spent years on stage and on children’s television, and was in his fifties before film work made him famous. He has said the long stretch of being unknown is the reason the fame never rearranged him.
Ray Kroc — Opened his first McDonald’s franchise
He was a milkshake-machine salesman who drove to California to find out why one small burger stand had ordered eight of them. He was 52, with a bad back and diabetes, when he asked the brothers for the franchise rights.
Ludwig van Beethoven — Premiered the Ninth Symphony
He was by then almost completely deaf and stood beside the conductor beating time to a performance he could not hear; a singer had to turn him around to see the applause. His birth date is recorded as the day of his baptism.
Abraham Lincoln — Gave the Gettysburg Address
Two minutes and about 270 words, following a two-hour oration nobody remembers. He thought it had fallen flat.
Mahatma Gandhi — Set out on the Salt March
He was 60 and walked 385 kilometres over 24 days to pick up a lump of salt from the sea, breaking a colonial monopoly. Tens of thousands were arrested for copying him.
Harland Sanders — Franchised his fried chicken recipe
His roadside restaurant had been ruined when a new interstate bypassed it. He took the recipe on the road at 62, cooking chicken for restaurant owners in their own kitchens for a nickel a bird.
Laura Ingalls Wilder — Published her first Little House book
She was 65 and had been a farm wife and a newspaper columnist. The series ran to eight more books, written into her seventies.
Winston Churchill — Became prime minister at 65
He had spent the 1930s out of office, mistrusted and largely ignored, on the wrong side of most arguments he picked. He took the job on the day Germany invaded the Low Countries.
Frank Lloyd Wright — Completed Fallingwater
He was nearly seventy and considered finished by the profession, and he put the house over the waterfall instead of facing it. The cantilevers sagged for decades until they were finally reinforced in 2002.
Katsushika Hokusai — Printed The Great Wave
He was around seventy and wrote that nothing he had drawn before the age of seventy was worth counting. He signed later work as “the old man mad about drawing”.
Nelson Mandela — Walked out of prison after 27 years
He had gone in at 44 and came out at 71. He had turned down conditional release several times, because the conditions required renouncing the struggle.
Nelson Mandela — Was sworn in as president
Four years after release, in the country’s first election with universal suffrage. He served one term and did not run again.
Barbara McClintock — Won the Nobel Prize for jumping genes
She described transposable elements in maize in the 1940s and was largely ignored or dismissed for thirty years. The prize came at 81, unshared, after molecular biology finally caught up with what she had seen down a microscope.