Because It Is There: First Ascent of Everest
1953 · event
At 11:30 on the morning of 29 May 1953, a beekeeper from New Zealand and a Sherpa mountaineer from Nepal stood where no human had ever stood: 8,849 metres, the roof of the world. Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay spent fifteen minutes on the summit; Tenzing buried sweets in the snow as an offering, Hillary took the photograph.
Both men refused, for the rest of their lives, to say who had stepped up first, "we climbed as a team," was all they would allow, and the world learned something about summits from that answer too.
The news reached London on the morning of Elizabeth II's coronation, a double dawn for a tired empire. Hillary spent his remaining decades building schools and hospitals for the Sherpa people, proof that what you do after the summit is the greater climb.