An opportunist businessman with a taste for the finer things in life, Oskar Schindler seemed an unlikely candidate to become a wartime rescuer—and he was, indeed, a long way from perfect—but during World War II, he rescued more than 1,000 Jews from deportation to Auschwitz—Nazi Germany's largest camp complex.

In many ways, it is the imperfections in Oskar Schindler’s character and the nuances in the historical record that make his story even more remarkable.

Oskar Schindler was born on April 28, 1908, in Svitavy (or Zwittau), Moravia, at that time a province of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. An ethnic German and a Catholic, he remained in Svitavy during the interwar period and held Czech citizenship after Moravia was incorporated into the newly established Czechoslovak Republic in 1918.

Schindler grew up in Zwittau, Moravia, and worked in several trades.

His father was Johann "Hans" Schindler, the owner of a farm machinery business, and his mother was Franziska "Fanny" Schindler....

On This Day, April 9, 1940, the patent for the first shopping cart is granted to its inventor Sylvan Goldman, the owner of a Humpty Dumpty Grocery store in Oklahoma City. It was essentially a folding chair with wheels and baskets attached. The carts were initially a flop, as shoppers were reluctant to use them--men found them effeminate and women thought them too much like a baby carriage - so he hired models to shop with them.

Eventually, folding carts became very popular and Goldman became a multimillionaire by collecting a royalty on every folding design shopping cart in the United States.

By any measure, Goldman was an innovator. In addition to his invention of the shopping cart, early in his career as a grocer he developed many of the advertising and marketing techniques now commonly used by supermarkets.

He once said his idea for the shopping cart came from watching women carrying baskets. ''They had a tendency to stop shopping when the baskets became too full or too heavy,'...

On This Day, April 7, 1927, Herbert Eugene Ives of Bell Laboratories and the inventor of long-distance television transmission, broadcasts a picture from Washington D.C. to New York, a distance of about 200 miles over telephone lines.

It was a speech by then U.S. Secretary of Commerce and future U.S. President Herbert Hoover announcing, "Today we have, in a sense, the transmission of sight for the first time in the world's history. Human genius has now destroyed the impediment of distance in a new respect, and in a manner hitherto unknown."

Ives was born on July 31, 1882 in Philadelphia to Frederic Eugene Ives and Mary Olmstead. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania.

Just like his father, Herbert Ives became an expert in color photography. His main point of interest was aerial photography. He was also an avid coin collector.

In 1903, Ives patented the technique for the "Changeable Sign", which showed different pictures from different angles.

He continued his studies at ...

The Bird, that is. Not the Action Figure.

When their country has needed their services, carrier pigeons have answered the call of duty. Perhaps the most famous was G.I. Joe. He was an American carrier pigeon credited with saving over 100 British troops and 1000 civilians.

G.I. Joe was born (hatched) On This Day, March 24, 1943 in Algiers, North Africa.

He underwent his “basic training” for two-way homing pigeons that had been perfected at Fort Monmouth, in New Jersey. Homing pigeons were used during World War I and World War II for communication and reconnaissance purposes.

In the summer of 1917, shortly after America’s entry in World War I, the Army started a carrier pigeon service at 74 training camps and posts, including Camp Meade. (Camp Meade became a permanent fort in 1928.) The U.S. Army Pigeon Breeding and Training Center headquarters was at Fort Monmouth, NJ.

The training camps together housed over 10,000 pigeons, with another 15,000 trained birds sent to Europe for s...

On this Day, March 15, 1892, the escalator is patented, by American inventor Jesse Wilford Reno. The idea for his "inclined elevator" was originally part of his proposal to build an underground New York City subway. The subway proposal was rejected, but the inclined elevator caught on. It included a rubber-coated moving handrail and a comb of projected fingers on the ends to help prevent feet from getting caught in the mechanism. The first one was demonstrated at Coney Island, New York, and transported some 75,000 people during its two-week stay there. It was then moved to the Manhattan entrance of the Brooklyn Bridge.

In researching the life of Jesse Wilford Reno it quickly becomes apparent that not much is really published about him—and what is out there is scattered and disparate.

Here’s what we’ve been able to compile about what we do know about Jesse Reno...

Jesse W. Reno was born on August 4, 1861 in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He was the son of American Civil War notable Majo...