The Ten Commandments, the film directed by Cecil B. DeMille—his second film telling the story of Moses, the Exodus, and how Moses received the commandments—opened in theaters 60 years ago today. It was DeMille’s last film of his career and his biggest: it cost more to make than any other film up to that point, and when one accounts for inflation, it remains one of the top 10 highest grossing films of all time.

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Alonzo T. Cross received a patent (No. 232,804) for the final design of his stylographic pen on this date in 1880. It employed a spring to prevent ink inside the chamber from leaving the pen until the nib is pressed against a surface.
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Work on Mount Rushmore National Memorial began on this date in 1927. Gutzon Borglum, a sculptor from Idaho whose monumental works had made him noteworthy (a six-ton marble head of Abraham Lincoln had been exhibited in the White House during Theodore Roosevelt’s tenure), and several hundred workers started blasting granite from the the face of the mountain, where George Washington’s visage now rests.

Borglum died in May 1941 with the project unfinished—he intended to carve more than the presidents’ faces, but funding dried up after his death and his son suspended the work in its “unfinished” state at the end of that year. Over fourteen years, four-hundred workers drilled holes in the granite and exploded dynamite caps to loosen the rock face to fulfill Borglum’s monumental vision of a monument.
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