Freud, Eiffel, the Four Minute Mile

It was also on this day, in 1954 that a 25 year-old medical student from Oxford University ran the first mile in under four minutes. His name was Roger Bannister. His record lasted less than a month before it was broken by an Australian whose name nobody remembers. Bannister retired from running within the year, but he will always be the first to break this arbitrary barrier, just as Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had been the first to climb Everest a year earlier.

It was on May 6, 1889 that E