When the Little Guy Wins + OZY’s Top 10

Look, we’ll be honest: Usually, the little guy doesn’t win. But we human beings really love stories where they do. It’s not just the surprise factor, it’s the feeling that we could one day ourselves win an outlandish victory (if we were as brave as the people and animals about whom you’ll soon be reading).

Our series on David and Goliath leaps from politics to sports to science, but they all have a unifying theme: The little guy won.

A hand-thrown aircraft made of balsa wood, which rose high enough for aerial surveillance, was the culmination of Neha Satak’s two years of research at the Indian Institute of Science.

Eleven inches across with electronics stuffed into it, her master’s thesis project had an egg-shaped wing and a front propeller. The wing also had its own ailerons — a word derived from the French for little fins — that we see in modern aircraft “to give it that roll and pitch and yaw” as Satak puts it. She had to go back to the drawing board to make it work, given the unique design.

In 1958, Mao Tse-tung was one of the most powerful men in the world, founder and leader of the People’s Republic of China, with his eyes fixed on the future of his country.

Sometimes that meant keeping his eyes fixed both in the air and on the ground. Specifically at animals that flew and crawled: 1958 was the year Mao launched the Four Pests Campaign, one of the earliest salvos in his Great Leap Forward, a push to transform China from a predominantly agrarian society to an industrial powerhouse. The four pests? Rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows. The objective was their systematic extermination.