1.        April Fool's Day- A day traditionally featuring jokes and pranks. Here’s a great idea for a joke; we’ll change the calendar overnight and see what happens.  Considering the difficulties the U.S Government (although, you’re right, it is the U.S government) had going from analog to digital television with years of warnings, alerts, and tutorials…………and they still couldn’t get it right!  The calendar change must have been hilarious.  

            In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII ordered a new calendar  rationally  known as the Gregorian Calendar to replace the old Julian Calendar (cleverly named after Julius Caesar). The new calendar called for New Year's Day to be celebrated Jan. 1.  Allegedly those celebrating the old date were called April Fools.  There are no really satisfactory explanation, all have holes in them and are liable to fool you but then just watch the evening news or read the newspapers – every day is Fool’s Day.  Most ancient cultures celebrated the New Year around the time of the Vernal Equinox, the first day of spring.  Seemed like a good time to bring in a new year. In 1582, France adopted the reformed calendar and shifted New Year's Day to Jan. 1. So the  popular explanation is that many people either refused to accept the new date, or did not learn about it, and continued to celebrate New Year's Day on April 1. Other people began to make fun of these traditionalists, sending them on "fool's errands" or trying to trick them into believing something false. Eventually, the practice spread throughout Europe. There are other origin theories ranging from connections to the Vernal Equinox to biblical (the crows flying after Noah’s Ark, to the weather “fooling us”.  Of course a fool by any other name: in Scotland they are gawbs, in England gobs and in France poisson d’Avril, április bolondja in Hungarian, aprile pazzo in Italian, aprīlis in Latvian, אפריל טיפש in Hebrew, 年4月ばかin Japanese, 愚人節 in traditional Chinese, and aprillinarri in Finnish, is still a fool

1578-Saturday-  Just like a romance novel ......... a pulsating, throbbing thrill.  Happy Birthday, William Harvey the English doctor who discovered the circulation of blood and the functioning of the heart. Harvey observed the action of the heart in small animals and fishes and proved that the heart receives and expels blood during each cycle. Experimentally, he also found valves in the veins, and correctly identified them as restricting the flow of blood in one direction. He developed the first complete theory of the circulation of blood, believing that it was pushed throughout the body by the heart's contractions. He was appointed “physician extraordinary” to  King James I, and in 1630 was engaged to "accompany the young Duke of Lenox in his travels beyond the Seas," In 1632, he was formally chosen physician to Charles I. We note that Charles still had his head at this point. Separation would come in 1649. He also shares with William Gilbert, investigator of the magnet, the credit for initiating accurate experimental research throughout the world.

1776 –Monday Happy Birthday, Sophie Germain, French mathematician.  Influenced by her childhood study of Archimedes, his work and his death – he was so engrossed with a geometrical configuration in sand that he ignored the orders of a Roman soldier and was speared to death- she developed a life long love (alliteration alert) of mathematics. She made major contributions to number theory, acoustics and elasticity.

1789-Wednesday- The U.S. House of Representatives held its first full meeting in New York City.  Frederick Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania was elected the first Speaker. He was also the Speaker for the Third Congress, 1793-1795. According to an Urban Legend, he was responsible for preventing German from becoming the official language of the U.S.  Probably not true but it’s a nice segue into our next item.

1792 – Sunday- Japan's greatest volcanic disaster as the volcano Unzen erupted killing over 15,000 people.  Unzen   is actually a massive volcanic complex that makes up much of the Shimabara Peninsula east of Nagasaki. There are three large stratovolcanoes with complex structures, Kinugasa on the north, Fugen-dake at the east-center, and Kusenbu on the south. Real estate sales are fluid.

1815-Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Otto von Bismarck,  the German Chancellor paved the way for the rise of the modern German state. Known as the "Iron Chancellor", Bismarck saw Germany grow from a loose confederation of states to a unified powerful empire. Under his leadership, Germany won the Austro-Prussian War, and the Franco-Prussian War and brokered a peace following the Russo-Turkish War. This peace led to the extension of German borders and the rapid growth of German industry.  Ultimately the German sense of overconfidence and empowerment would lead to WWI and WWII.  

1826 –Saturday-  Samuel Morey patented the internal combustion engine. Morey is one of the highest achieving yet among the most obscure  American inventors in history even though he secured at least 20 patents from 1793 to 1833 and was a true pioneer of steam propulsion. Yes, it was “the Morey, the merrier”. Morey’s work with engines also influenced Robert Livingston and Robert Fulton in the development of the steam boat. In fact, Fulton visited Morey’s steam boat before building his own.

1853-Friday-  Cincinnati, Ohio established the very first full time paid, professional fire department using steam fire engines pulled by horses. The plan called for full time paid city employees using a horse-drawn steam engine. The steam pumper allowed four or five men to affectively spray more water on a fire than hundreds of volunteers using hand pumpers.

1864 –Friday As the Civil War raged, J. G. Batterson, of The Travelers Insurance Company, introduced travel insurance into the United States.. Batterson with several other prominent Hartford, CT businessmen established The Travelers Insurance Company with the stated purpose to insure people while traveling. http://www.quotewright.com/weblog/category/history-of-travel-insurance/

1865-Saturday The Battle of Five Forks, dealt a death blow for Robert E. Lee’s already severely damaged Army of Northern Virginia as supply lines were now cut off (the surrender at Appomattox was  two weeks away). Five Forks was a road intersection that provided the key to Lee's supply line. Lee instructed General George Pickett (of Pickett’s Charge) to "Hold Five Forks at all hazards." He didn’t. Pickett had his force poorly positioned, and he was taking a long lunch with his staff when the Union attack occurred. Nearly 5,000 of Pickett's men were killed, wounded, or captured.

1865 –Saturday- Happy Birthday Richard Adolf Zsigmondy, Dutch chemist. He conducted pioneering research in colloid chemistry. Yes, “when worlds colloid”.  He also came up with the idea of the ultramicroscope – making visible sub microscopic particles whose linear extension is below the microscope's resolution limit. In 1913 he invented the immersion microscope. He also invented two types of filters, a membrane filter in 1918 and an ultra-fine filter in 1922. In 1925, Zsigmondy was awarded the Nobel Prize for colloid chemistry and the invention of the ultramicroscope.

1873-Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, Sergey Rachmaninoff, last of the great Russian romantic composers (other Russian romantic composers? Think Tchaikovsky).

1873 –Tuesday-  In the worst single ship disaster to occur off the Canadian Coast prior to the Titanic’s visit in 1912, the luxury steamship S.S. Atlantic, of the White Star Line, ran aground on Mar's Head, Lower Prospect, Nova Scotia.  Lifeboats were lowered by the crew but were washed away as the ship began to sink, killing 562.

1875-Thursday- Sir Francis Galton published the first newspaper weather map - in The Times, London, England.  We note that the map was of the weather for the previous day, March 31, not a prediction of coming weather. Galton was the first to describe the anti-cyclone and pioneered the introduction of weather-maps based on charting data about air pressure. His book Meteorographica, 1863, was the first systematic attempt to gather, chart and interpret weather data on a continental scale, a fundamental work of modern scientific meteorology.   

1889-Monday- The first commercial dishwashing machine was marketed for sale in Chicago, The automatic dishwasher had been invented by Josephine Garis Cochrane. She received an award for her invention at the famous 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, which featured a Women’s Exposition.  The company she founded to market the dishwasher to hotels, restaurants and other commercial groups was purchased in the 1920's by the Hobart Corporation. One could say she “cleaned up” in the deal. Hobart introduced the "Kitchen Aid" brand name that it is known as today. Dishwashers under the Kitchen Aid brand were first introduced in 1949, sixty years after Cochrane’s was sold in Chicago. 

1890-Tuesday-  The electric trolley car was patented by Belgian inventor, Charles Van Depoele. He had designed the first commercial electric railway in the US (maybe the world) for the Scranton Suburban Electric Railway which opened on Nov. 30, 1886, an intra-city line running a few miles between downtown Scranton, Pa. and Green Ridge. The line ran continuously until 1954. Scranton still calls itself the “Electric City”.

1905 –Saturday-  Paris and Berlin were linked by telephone. Of course in Paris they were speaking French and in Berlin they were speaking German and no one knew what anyone was talking about.

1924 –Tuesday They had him in jail. They had him locked away…… and they let him out. Adolf Hitler was sentenced to five years in jail for his participation in the "Beer Hall Putsch" – his almost slapstick comedic attempt to take over Bavaria. However, he spent only nine months in jail, during which he wrote the book Mein Kampf…..which may have originally be titled When Putsch Comes to Shove.  

1929 –Monday- The yo-yo was introduced in New York by Louie Marx who had already manufactured them commercially in Great Britain. In fact, American D.F Duncan is best known for being responsible for promoting the first great yo-yo fad in the United States. He started the Genuine Duncan Yo-Yo company, subsequently trademarking the name "yo-yo". Duncan was not the inventor of the yo-yo; they have been around for over twenty-five hundred years. In fact the yo-yo is considered the second oldest toy in history, the oldest being the doll.

1932 –Friday- Happy Birthday, Norman Abramson, American computer scientist who created ALOHAnet, - which sounds like a way to trap tourists in Hawaii but was really the first modern data network, and led to the development of the theory of random access ALOHA channels.  ALOHA channels created significant advancements within wireless and local area networking, and some versions are  still in use today in all major mobile telephone and wireless data standards. This influential work also developed the core concepts found today in Ethernet. It opened in 1970, operating at 9600 bits per second, using radio to provide a wireless packet-switched data network between several Hawaii islands.

1933 –Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, French physicist who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997 (with Steven Chu and William D. Phillips) for developing methods using laser light to cool gases to the micro-kelvin temperature range - nearly absolute zero to a fraction of a millionth of a degree.  This method of “trapping atoms” – sort of like tranquilizing them, was a long way from Ernest Rutherford’s early 1900’s experiments of shooting alpha particles at foil to locate the nuclei of atoms. With this technique the motion of the chilled atoms is thereby sufficiently slowed to permit their study with very great accuracy, and their inner structure can be determined.

1938- Friday- Panda kaput. Su Lin, the first panda to live in captivity outside China, died after a twig lodged in its throat. The clever keepers at Brookfield Zoo, Chicago, U.S. had added oak twigs to the panda's usual diet of bamboo even though there was no record of panda’s ever eating oak twigs…..why not just give them hamburgers????.  The panda had been brought from China to the site of its eventual demise  in 1936 by a Manhattan socialite (what, exactly is socialite?), Ruth Harkness. The zoo acquired Su Lin on February 8, 1837. Amazingly, an autopsy on the kaput panda  revealed Su-Lin was a male, not a female as had been thought.

1939 –Saturday- The end of the Spanish Civil War as Generalísimo Francisco Franco announced that the last of the Republican forces had surrendered.  The war had lasted from 1936-1939 between those loyal to the newly- established Republican government (which came power after the fall of the Spanish monarchy) and those who favored a conservative, militaristic system. The outcome of the Spanish Civil War altered the balance of power in Europe, as Germany and Italy used it to test their power and their weapons while the Communists supplanted the Republicans and it became in one sense, a proxy war.

1945-Sunday- American forces invaded the Japanese held island of Okinawa during World War II.  This was the final amphibious landing of the war.  Okinawa is the largest of the Ryukyus islands at the southern tip of Japan. It is about 60 miles long and between 2 and 18 miles wide.  It would be needed as base for the eventual attack on the mainland of Japan.

            1946 –Monday- During the early morning an earthquake of magnitude 7.4 occurred in an area of the Aleutian Trench located approximately 90 miles south of Unimak Island, part of the Aleutian Island chain. During the quake, a large section of seafloor was uplifted along the fault where the quake occurred, producing a large, Pacific-wide tectonic tsunami. The first wave of the tsunami reached the big island of Hawaii in about five hours. The destruction in the Aleutians had prevented any radio warning for Hawaii.  They were caught completely unawares. The Hilo waterfront was destroyed. Wave heights across the Islands reached an estimated maximum of 55 feet, 36 feet and 33 feet on Hawaii, O'ahu, and Maui, respectively. The tsunami inundated areas up to a half a mile inland in some locations. A total of 159 people were killed

1959  -Wednesday-  Freddy Cannons’ Tallahassee Lassie was released on an unsuspecting public. Featuring existential lyrics such as “She’s my Tallahassee Lassie, whoo”, Cannon’s record (written by his mother) would be followed by such dithyrambs as Way Down Yonder in New Orleans, the immortal Transistor Sister, and the, not bad, Palisades Park.  Cannon would become one of Dick Clark’s “pet acts” (see Fabian, Frankie Avalon, Bobby Rydell, et al) and kept making appearances long after he ran out of places to sing about.

1960-Friday- Tiros I, a two-camera weather satellite was launched.  After 2 months it had taken over 20,000 pictures of clouds.  The goal was to improve satellite applications for Earth-bound decisions, such as "should we evacuate the coast because of the hurricane?" or “Will I need my sun block SPF 30 at the beach today?”…….no, not really for the second question.  Professor Sy Yentz has his sunbathing sense of humor. TIROS proved extremely successful for weather forecasting but to this day, people are still reluctant to evacuate their homes.

1963 -Monday  Oh Dirk! Oh Audry! Oh, the awful writing. Oh the awful acting….The soap opera General Hospital, set in the fictional town of Port Charles NY, had its TV debut.

1967 - The United States Department of Transportation began operations. Well, that’s certainly worked out well. Its first secretary, Alan S. Boyd, took office on January 16, 1967 but the Department started its tradition of screwing everything up on this day

1970 –Wednesday-  Goodbye to the “Marlboro Man”, silly jingles and cigarettes as suave accessories……. when President Richard Nixon signed a measure banning cigarette advertising on radio and TV.

1976 –Thursday- Apple Computer was formed by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The first home computer with a GUI or graphical user interface was the Apple Lisa. The very first graphical user interface was developed by the Xerox Corporation at their Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Apple  hit the mother lode with the 1984 release of the Macintosh.

1979-Sunday-  Perhaps his increasingly bizarre behavior in years to come was due to exposure to radiation. President Jimmy Carter, who had trained as an engineering officer for nuclear power plants – yet continued to say “nucular”  visited the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, three days after the most serious nuclear accident in U.S history.  He toured the control room, giving a deliberate public display of confidence that the situation was under control, in order to allay the fears of the local population of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, as well as the country.  Fallout from the nuclear accident resulted in a mutated gene resulting in Blabberous Obnoxicus, a syndrome that causes people to talk loudly on their cell phones while using public transportation.

            1981 –Wednesday Always up to date with modern trends, daylight saving time was finally introduced in the USSR. This continued a tradition begun in 1709 when the calendar (the Julian calendar) was first printed in Russia, more than 127 years after the Gregorian calendar had been introduced in Europe. The Gregorian calendar was mandated by Lenin in 1918.  They were more on the ball when it came to adopting? Being inspired by? Imitating? Stealing? Western technology during the late 1940s-1980s.

            1984 –Sunday-  “What’s Going On?” On the day before his forty fifth birthday, Singer Marvin Gaye was shot to death by his father at age 44. Gaye, one of Motown’s principal artists, had a series of hits beginning with Stubborn Kind of Fellow in 1962 and continuing with hits such as I Heard it Through the Grapevine, and What’s Going On.  He also teamed with Tammi Terrell for Ain’t No Mountain High Enough. Addled by drug use, paranoia, and contentious relationship with his father, Gaye was shot point blank after a violent argument.

            1987 –Wednesday- Seeking to avoid rising air, sea and train fares,  Steve Newman became the first man to walk around the world alone. It took him 4 years, and he visited 20 countries.  He ran into a blizzard in the Pyrenees, wild boars in Algeria and narrowly escaped a flash flood in Australia. There were three life-threatening episodes, and he was arrested in Algeria, Yugoslavia and Turkey. Aside from that, everything was fine.

2001 –Sunday-  “I Bob, take you, George…….” Same-sex marriage became legal in the Netherlands, which is the first country to allow it.  And in a possibly related development…..

            2002 –Monday-  The Netherlands legalized euthanasia, becoming the first nation in the world to do so.  The legislation allowed patients experiencing unbearable suffering to request euthanasia, and doctors who carry out such a mercy killing to be free from the threat of prosecution, provided they have followed strict procedures. The most popular method appeared to be forcing the patients to watch American congressional proceedings during which they died of boredom.

Back to Calendar

2.       

742 –Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Charlemagne, King of the Franks (Duke of Weiners, Earl of Hot Dogs, and Prince of Sausage) King of the Lombards and Charles I of the Holy Roman Empire.  The greatest of medieval kings, he was born in 742, at ……well, we don’t know exactly where he was born…. As King of the Franks, Charlemagne’ goal was to strengthen his realm and to bring order to the chaos of medieval Europe so in 772 he launched a 30-year military campaign to accomplish this objective. By 800 Charlemagne was the undisputed ruler of Western Europe. His kingdom encompassed what are now France, Switzerland, Belgium, and The Netherlands. He could have introduced the Euro!  It included half of present-day Italy and Germany, and parts of Austria and Spain. By establishing a central government over Western Europe, Charlemagne restored much of the unity of the old Roman Empire and paved the way for the development of modern Europe.

             1513-Wednesday-  Juan Ponce DeLeon, born in born in Tierra de Campos Palencia, Spain.while searching for The Fountain of youth (and abeach front condo), made the first European landing on the Florida shore. He landed near the site of what is now St. Augustine, Florida. He didn't realize he landed in North America. Clever Ponce, he thought he had landed on an island. He named it Florida because he saw lots of flowers (florida in Spanish means flowers). The next day he claimed the land in the name of the King of Spain. De Leon sailed through the Florida Keys – stopping at Sloppy Joe’s in Key West, then on to Cuba for the wonderful medical care, but found no Fountain of Youth DeLeon had sailed with Christopher Columbus on his second voyage to the New World in 1493 so the territory was vaguely familiar.

            1527 –Saturday- (Gonna find her)
(Gonna find her)
(Gonna find her)
(Gonna find her)

Yeah, I've been searchin'
A-a searchin'
Oh, yeah, searchin' every which a-way
Yeah, yeah
Oh, yeah, searchin'
I'm searchin'
Searchin' every which a-way
Yeah, yeah……The Coasters………….. Happy Birthday,  Abraham Ortelius, born Abraham Ortels,  Flemish cartographer and geographer. Ortelius was a contemporary of Gerardus Mercator. He is the most famous of the 16th-century Flemish school of geography…..go ahead, name some others….see?  Ortelius traveled with Mercator in 1560 and was inspired to begin his chief work, Theatrum OrbisTerrarum (1570), the first modern atlas of the world. The first edition of this atlas contained 53 maps, in part compiled from maps of 87 cartographers; the 1587 edition had 103 maps.

            1618 –Monday-  Happy Birthday, Francesco Maria Grimaldi, Italian mathematician and physicist. Grimaldi discovered the diffraction of light and gave it the name diffraction, (although he probably called it diffrazione) which means "breaking up." He laid the groundwork for the later invention of the diffraction grating. He was one of the earliest physicists to suggest that light was wavelike in nature. Grimaldi was also responsible for the practice of naming lunar regions after astronomers and physicists.

            1647 –Tuesday- Happy Birthday- Maria Sibylla Merian, German botanist.  Merian collected, raised, and observed the living insects, rather than working from preserved specimens, as was the norm which may have made for an interesting house. Following a divorce, at age fifty two, she and her eldest daughter embarked on a  trip to the Dutch colony of Surinam, in South America. Having seen some of the dried specimens of animals and plants that were popular with European collectors, Merian wanted to study them within their natural habitat. She spent the next two years studying and drawing the indigenous flora and fauna. Merian published her book, the lavishly illustrated Metamorphosis of the Insects of Surinam in 1705.

            1725-Monday- I have always loved truth so passionately that I have often resorted to lying as a way of introducing it into the minds which were ignorant of its charms. ………Happy Birthday, Giovanni Casanova, Italian ecclesiastic, writer, soldier, spy, and diplomat but mainly remembered as the prince of Italian adventurers and as the man who made the name Casanova synonymous with “libertine.” He spent his later years (1785–98) as librarian to the Count von Waldstein in Bohemia. The word modest was unknown to him and his huge autobiography, first published in 12 volumes in 1825–38, gives an excellent picture of 18th-century Europe; it established his reputation as an extraordinary seducer of women. He also wrote a History of Venice.

Washington appointed a well known scientist, David Rittenhouse, as the first director of the U.S. Mint. A mint building was under construction but it dissolved in the rain.  The next time they used stones and it is located at Seventh and Sugar Alley (now Filbert Street).  It was a three story building and bore the familiar sign painted on the building between the second and third floors, “Ye Old Mint”.

          "He now felt glad at having suffered sorrow and trouble, because it enabled him to enjoy so much better all the pleasure and happiness around him; for the great swans swam round the new-comer, and stroked his neck with their beaks, as a welcome." …from 'The Ugly Duckling'…. International Children‘s Book  Day- marks the birthday of Hans Christian Anderson in 1805 -Tuesday.  Anderson was a Danish author and poet best known for his fairy tales of which there are over one hundred and fifty, published in numerous collections during his life and many still in print today. Two of the best known fairy tales are The Ugly Duckling  and The Little Mermaid.   

            1814 –Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Erastus Bigalow, American industrialist who is famous as the developer of the power loom for making lace and many types of carpet. Yes, he was a “loomatic”. Bigalow’s invention led to led to Alexander Smith starting what would become the world's largest rug and carpet manufacturer of the modern era in the Bronx N.Y., in 1845.

            1827-Monday-  Take out those No. 2 pencils and begin taking note…..Lead pencils, which are really graphite (plumbago) pencils,  were first manufactured by Joseph Dixon, who built his factory in Salem, Mass. Dixon was responsible for the development of the graphite industry in the U.S. Not one to let grass grow under his feet, Dixon was a printer and a photographer, he designed a mirror into a camera that was the forerunner of the viewfinder, patented a double-crank steam engine, evolved a method of printing banknotes to foil counterfeiters, and patented a new method for tunneling under water

            1834-Wednesday-  Happy Birthday, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, French sculptor of “Liberty Englightening the World”, aka The Statue of Liberty.  He launched his sculptathon  with "Lafayette arriving in America" was executed in 1872, and in 1876 was placed in Union Square in  New York. He was one of the French commissioners in 1876 to the Philadelphia centennial exhibition, and there exhibited bronze statues of "The Young Vine-Grower;"  "Genie Funebre;" "Peace;" and "Genius in the Grasp of Misery," for which he received a bronze medal.

                1840-Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Emile Zola, French novelist Emile Zola
novelist. Among Zola's most important works is his famous Rougon-Macquart cycle (1871-1893), which included such novels as L’Assommoir (1877), about the suffering of the Parisian working-class, Nana (1880), dealing with prostitution, and Germinal (1885), depicting the mining industry. Zola's open letter J'ACCUSE  in the newspaper L'Aurore on January 13, 1898, reopened the case of the Jewish Captain, Alfred Dreyfus, sentenced to Devil's Island.           

            1841 –Friday- Happy Birthday-  Clément Ader, French aviation pioneer He is most well-known, however, for his two remarkable flying machines, the Ader Eole and the Ader Avion No. 3. He claimed to have flown before the Wright Brothers but he was told to go fly a kite.

            1845-Wednesday-  "Smile."........H.L. Fizeau & J. Leon Foucault took the first photograph of the Sun. Leon Foucault is a bit more famous for his pendulum, Foucault’s Pendulum, which proved the rotation of the Earth. The image, taken with an exposure of 1/60th of a second, was about 4.7 inches (12 centimeters) in diameter and captured several sunspots.

           1865 –Sunday-  …..And I wonder--
I wah-wah-wah-wah-wonder,
Why,
Why, why, why, why, why he ran away,
Yes, and I wonder,
A-where he will stay-ay,
My little runaway,
Run, run, run, run, runaway. …..apologies to Del Shannon……With the Confederate defences breached and Robert E. Lee in retreat, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and most of his Cabinet fled the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia.

             1872-Tuesday- George B. Brayton of Boston, Mass. received a patent for a gas-powered engine (No. 125,166). It was an unsuccessful two-stroke kerosene engine (it used two external pumping cylinders). However, it was considered the first safe and practical oil engine. In 1680  Dutch physicist, Christian Huygens designed (but never built) an internal combustion engine that was to be fueled with gunpowder.

            1875-Friday – and speaking of gasoline engines,  Happy Birthday, Walter P. Chrysler,  the industrialist, inventor and manufacturer who founded the Chrysler Corporation in1925 , and developed the six-cylinder engine. We were cleverly going to list all of the car models sold by Chrysler over the years but there are 83! So you’ll find them here: http://www.ranker.com/list/full-list-of-chrysler-models/reference?page=3&format=mainlist

            1889-Tuesday-  Charles M. Hall ( Independently, Paul Héroult  in France was doing the same thing at the same time) patented the anelectrolytic process to extract aluminum from its ore. He had invented the process on Feb. 23 1886. Although aluminum is the most abundant metal in the earth's crust – about 8% by weight…hundreds of millions of times more common than gold-  it is not found naturally in pure form. It is always bonded to something…usually oxygen… and thus it must be separated from its surrounding ore.  Thanks to Hall it can be done inexpensively. We note, thanks to Sam Kean in The Disappearing Spoon that in 1884, the Washington Monument was capped with a six-pound pyramid of aluminum. Following Hall’s development, Almost immediately the price of aluminum dropped dramatically. Developments in the early 1880s had reduced the price of a pound of aluminum from 12 dollars to 4 dollars a pound. The Hall process reduced it to 2 dollars a pound, and shortly after the company’s move to Niagara Falls—the first electrochemical company in that location—to 75 cents and then 30 cents. In 1907 the company was renamed the Aluminum Company of America, and in the 1990s this name was shortened to Alcoa Inc.

            1902 –Wednesday- The movie wasn’t so hot, it didn’t have much of a plot
We fell asleep, our goose is cooked, our reputation is shot
Wake up little Susie
Wake up little Susie, well
Whatta we gonna tell your mama
Whatta we gonna tell your pa
Whatta we gonna tell our friends when they say “ooh-la-la” ….The Everly Brothers…."Electric Theatre", actually it was “Tally’s Electric Theater”  the first full-time movie theater in the United States, opened in Los Angeles, California at 262 South Main Street.  Admission was ten cents and “provided an hour's amusement in a vaudeville of moving pictures including Capture of the Biddle Brothers and New York in a Blizzard. Business was so good on the opening night that matinées started the next day. In less than twenty-five years, there were to be more than 20,000 motion picture theatres in this country.

            1917-Monday-  President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war against Germany, saying, "The world must be made safe for democracy." Plus “they drive too fast on the autobahn, “ they’re even more obnoxious than Americans as tourists”, “you can’t get a seat at OktoberFest”,  and “they have people named Fritz”… In February and March  of 1917, Germany, increased its attacks on neutral shipping in the Atlantic and offered, in the form of the so-called Zimmermann Telegram, to help Mexico regain Texas, New Mexico and Arizona if it would join Germany in a war against the United States. The public outcry against Germany resulted in this April 2 declaration of war.

            1920 –Friday-  Just the facts Ma’am…… "The story you are about to see is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent." Happy Birthday, Jack Webb, American actor, director, producer, Sgt. Joe Friday, Dragnet, Mark VII Limited ,

            1934 –Monday-  Happy Birthday, Paul Cohen, American mathematician who received the Fields Medal – the Mathematics equivalent of the Nobel Prize(1966) for his for his research on one of David Hilbert's "23 most important problems" in mathematics, proving the independence of the continuum hypothesis.  The term consistency in mathematics refers to the condition that any mathematical theorem be free from contradiction. Developing a consistency proof had been listed as number one on David Hilbert's 1900 list of the 23 most important problems in mathematics for the twentieth century (balancing a check book was number 2, figuring out the tip for a party of eight at a restaurant was number 3. Although he had no specific background in the field of logic, in which the consistency proof is particularly relevant, Cohen saw it as a way of providing convincing evidence "that set theory is based on some kind of truth," Question from Professor Sy Yentz….who checked his work?  He also worked on differential equations and harmonic analysis. We presume harmonic analysis has something to do with harmonicas.

             1935-Tuesday- Robert Watt ( brother of Say Watt?, Some Watt and Kumq Watt) was granted a patent for RADAR (Radio Detecting And Ranging) radar locating of aircraft.  Watt built on the work of German physicist, Heinrich Hertz who had calculated that an electric current swinging very rapidly back and forth in a conducting wire would radiate electromagnetic waves into the surrounding space (today we would call such a wire an "antenna"). With the wire he created (in 1886) and detected such oscillations in his lab, using an electric spark, in which the current oscillates rapidly, we call "radio waves".  Watt also coined the phrase ionosphere.

            1953 –Thursday-  The journal  Nature published a paper  from Francis Crick and James Watson, with the catchy title of  Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids:  A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid, in which they described a double helix structure for DNA. There were four basic questions: Inquiry Questions -To solve the structure of DNA four ideas had to come together.
            That the phosphate backbone was on the outside, bases on the inside.
            That the molecule was a double helix.
           That the strands were antiparallel.
           That it had a specific base pairing. Rosalind Franklin had done most of the work but she got bogged down in calculations.  Franklin came up with a a draft paper, dated March, 17,  1953, which outlined that the molecule was a double helix, had specific base pairing and the antiparallel A form, which had not been applied to the B form. But………..Watson and Crick beat her to the publishing as they submitted a final paper on March 18 to be published April 2.        

            1956 –Monday  As the World Turns and The Edge of Night premiered on CBS-TV. The two soaps become the first daytime dramas to debut in the 30-minute format. As the World Turns starred Ruth Warrick and Helen Wagner.  Edge of Night was an attempt to transfer the Perry Mason character from its cancelled nighttime venue to daytime. When the attempt failed, a "new" Perry Mason was created in the person of Mike Karr, "Edge's" first lawyer-hero, soon to be joined by Adam Drake, his younger and flashier partner. It initially starred John Larkin, radio’s Perry Mason.

            1956-Monday-  I keep a close watch on this heart of mine
I keep my eyes wide open all the time.
I keep the ends out for the tie that binds
Because you're mine, I walk the line ………The two soap opera premieres obviously prompted Johnny Cash to walk the line as he recored I Walk the Line on this day.  It is a promise to remain faithful to his first wife, Vivian, while he is on the road….well we all know how well that worked out.

            1973 –Monday-  Launch of the LexisNexis computerized legal research service. In 1967, Data Corp, an Ohio-based company who developed ink jet printing technologies, was contracted by the Ohio State Bar Association to provide a "free-text" search and retrieval system.  Mead Data Central introduces LEXIS® and NAARS services. LEXIS provides the full text of Ohio and New York codes and cases, the U.S. code, and some federal case law. NAARS is the National Automated Accounting Research Service, a tax database from the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) paves the way for reliable electronic data delivery. The following year Lexis® service pioneers online legal research by allowing attorneys to search case law database in firm via private telecommunications network. http://www.lexisnexis.com/about-us/history.aspx Four New York law firms became the first subscribers to the LEXIS legal information service

            1978 –Sunday- Vini Vedi Velcro ….I came, I saw, I stuck around….Velcro, one of the great developments of Western civilization, was released (or is it attached?).  It was developed by Swiss engineer Georges de Mestral, who had noticed how cockle burrs clung to his clothing during a hike in the mountains. The cocklebur is a maze of thin strands with burrs (or hooks) on the ends that cling to fabrics or animal fur. Using a microscope, he discovered their natural hook-like shape. Velcro uses two tapes, one with stiff "hooks" like the burrs which clings to the second tape with soft "loops" like the fabric of his pants. The trademarked name Velcro comes from "vel" or velvet and "cro" from the French word crochet which means hook.

            1979- The world’s first anthrax epidemic (an overwhelming desire to continuously listen to Indians and Antisocial by Anthrax) , began in Ekaterinburg, Russia  By the time it ended six weeks later, 62 people were dead. Another 32 survived serious illness. As people in Ekaterinburg first began reporting their illnesses, the Communist government of the “workers paradise” –famous for never telling the truth about anything- announced that the cause was tainted meat that the victims had eaten. However, the town was the home of a biological-weapons plant so much of the rest of the world was immediately skeptical of the Soviet explanation. It was not until 13 years later, in 1992, that the epidemic was finally explained: typically effician socialist workers at the Ekaterinburg weapons plant failed to replace a crucial filter, causing a release of anthrax spores into the outside air. Anthrax is an  infectious, usually fatal disease of warm-blooded animals, especially of cattle and sheep, caused by the bacterium Bacillus anthracis. The disease can be transmitted to humans through contact with contaminated animal substances, such as hair, feces, or hides, and is characterized by ulcerative skin lesions.

            1982 –Friday- Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. They had just read, “Whether you are looking for adventure or seeking quieter pleasures, the Falklands are a great place to relax and unwind. From personal encounters of the wildlife kind, to wilderness trout fishing, hiking and self-exploration to guided tours of our key cultural and historic sites - we invite you to discover all the Falklands has on offer.” 

Falkland Islands Tourist Board Team.  How could they resist?  Unfortunately, the British responded with an expeditionary force that landed seven weeks later and after fierce fighting forced an Argentine surrender on June 14,  1982.  The Falklands are are an archipelago in the South Atlantic Ocean, located approximately 250 nautical miles  from the coast of mainland South America. The archipelago, consists of East Falkland, West Falkland and 776 lesser islands. At the same latitude South as London in the United Kingdom is North, the Falkland Islands enjoy a narrow temperature range between -5ºC in July and 22ºC in January.

            1984 –Monday- Squadron Leader Rakesh Sharma was launched aboard Soyuz T-11, and becomes the first Indian in space.  Following a one day solo flight the Soyuz docked with the Salyut 7 space station on 04.04.1984 and common work with the third resident crew. The crew conducted scientific and technical studies which included 43 experimental sessions, as Earth observation program concentrating on India and silicium-fusing tests. Rakesh Sharma used Yoga techniques to combat the debilitating effects of weightlessness. His work was mainly in the fields of bio-medicine and remote sensing. The crew held a joint television news conference with officials in Moscow and Prime Minister Gandhi. Sharma also offered technical support to people having difficulty operating their Mac IIs.  He called himself “Steve”.  “Welcome John Cafarella.  How are you today John Cafarella. To provide you with excellent service today, may I have the name and phone number with your account?  Thank you for the information. May you please provide us with 2 can be reached numbers so we could use it for future account and service notifications? I’m glad to know that and I’m more than happy to assist you with a Very Satisfying service today. Please press and hold the power button on the front of your computer and while holding it down, press the OK button and the Down arrow button at the same time. Okay, just take you time Mr. John. I have all the time for you today. I am glad that I was able to resolve your issue today. You may receive a survey in the next few days. The purpose of the survey is to ensure that you were “very satisfied” with the service that I have provided you today. If you receive that survey, would you indicate you were “very satisfied” with the service I have provided?
      

            1993 –Friday- It’s only rock n roll but I like it………..The London tabloids broke the news that Rolling Stone bassist Bill Wyman's son Stephen was engaged to 46-year-old Patsy Smith, mother of Wyman's ex-wife, 22-year-old Mandy Smith.

            2002 –Tuesday-  The desecration of the Church of the Nativity (traditional birthplace of Jesus) as Muslim gunmen forced their way into the church and used it as a base of operations as they began a 39 day stand off with Israeli forces who had taken control of Bethlehem

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3.    

1043 -Monday Edward the Confessor – the last Saxon King -was crowned King of England. Of course in 1066 when Edward went kaput, his crown went to Harold Godwine….Edward’s brother-in-law.   This was disputed by William the Bastard of Normandy who invaded England, defeated Harold at the Battle of Hastings and changed history. Edward was the son of King Ethelred II the Unready…didn’t they have great names in those days? At last count, Edward the Confessor had confessed to: participating in the Kennedy assassinations, planting U.F.O evidence at Roswell, New Mexico, causing the extinction of the dinosaurs, hiding Osama bin Laden, putting the secret ingredient in Coca Cola, and watching Oprah.

            1367 –Friday- Happy Birthday, King Henry IV of England.  Made famous by Shakespeare as Bolingbroke, Henry (Lancaster) overthrew the inept Richard II in     1399.  Good old John of Gaunt was at the root of all these issues.  King Edward            III had fathered a plethora of sons; the oldest, Edward, the Black Prince,           predeceased the old king, but not before he himself had a son: Richard. When       Edward III went kaput the crown passed to Richard when he was only 10 years    old. Another of the late king's sons, John of Gaunt, served as regent to young     Richard. Henry was John of Gaunt's son. Richard II was imprisoned and      conveniently went kaput on February 14, 1400. Henry’s kingship was troubled            and relatively brief, in 1405 he suffered from an unnamed illness - some believe leprosy, and suffered recurring illnesses up to his kapution in 1413.  His son, Henry, who had been running the kingdom since 1410, became Henry V.

            1449 –Tuesday-  King Henry VI (grandson of Henry IV – see 1367 above) of England granted John of Utynam a 20-year monopoly to make stained glass. This was one of the earliest known patents. John was a master glass-maker from Flanders. The crown issued him Letters Patent, sealed with the King's Great Seal, to guarantee John's privileges. So John of Utynam received the first recorded patent in England which is home to the oldest continuous patent tradition in the world. However, John's was probably not the first patent ever issued -- Venice issued patents to glass-makers in the early 1420s. But John of Utynam's successful quest to protect his methods began the system that gave people official sanction to enjoy the economic benefits of their own inventions.

            1683 –Saturday- Happy Birthday, English naturalist, Mark Catesby. Catesby   traveled back and forth to America and between 1731 and 1743 (air fares were      quite reasonable in those days) and  published his Natural History of Carolina,         Florida and the Bahama Islands, the first published account of the flora and fauna       of North America. It included 220 pictures of birds, reptiles and amphibians, fish,      insects, and mammals. Catesby classified them as “the ones that taste like    chicken”, “the ones that bite”, “the ones that gave me a rash” and the “ones that             sneak into  your bed at night when you’re asleep and crawl up your……”.

             1715 –Wednesday-  Happy Birthday, William Watson, William Watson English physician and scientist who was born and died in London. His early work was in botany, and he helped to introduce the work of Carolus Linnaeus and his system of plant classification  into England. In 1746, he showed that the capacity of the Leyden jar could be increased by coating it inside and out with lead foil. A Leyden jar is a device that early experimenters used to help build and store electric energy. Later, he went to work on increasing the capacity of the peanut butter jar but he could never overcome the problem of crunchy peanut butter.

            1778-Friday-  Happy Birthday, Pierre-Fidèle Bretonneau, French epidemiologist who in 1825 performed the first successful tracheotomy – an incision of and entrance into the trachea through the skin and muscles of the neck.  Bretonneau was the first person to study and describe fully the symptoms of diphtheria, and gave the disease its name. He also believed there was a difference between typhoid fever and typhus, which were often mistaken as the same disease. In case you were wondering,Typhus, is caused by bacteria spreading through the bites of lice and fleas. The infection causes headache, fever and a rash of red spots. It arrived in Europe in the 15th century, and there was a fearful epidemic in 1557-59.Typhoid, on the other hand, is spread by consuming contaminated food or water and is not unrelated to salmonella. Meanwhile, back to Bretonneau who found time from his medical studies to be 25 years younger than his first wife and, at the age of 78, marry a young woman of 18. He was 84 when he died, presumably with a smile on his face.

            1783 –Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Washington Irving, American author who wrote The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Interestingly,  both Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle appear in his book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

            1798 –Tuesday- Happy Birthday, Charles Wilkes, American oceanographer, who named the continent of Antarctica. Wilks led the first major ocean expedition from1838-42, which circled the globe (the last all sail mission to do so) 1838-1840, and determined that Antarctica is a continent.  His Antarctic plans for beach front condos and a Disney Cruise Line port of call were frozen.

            1823 –Thursday-  Happy Birthday, William Marcy “Boss” Tweed, the model for felonious politicians everywhere. Tweed was the leader of the corrupt Democratic Party Tammany Hall organization in New York City. An estimated 75 to 200 million dollars were swindled from the City between 1865 and 1871. Tweed is famous for the Tweed Courthouse built in lower Manhattan.  Cost was $11 million but the city ended up $81 million in debt.  A plasterer who was a member of Tweed’s Tammany Club made over $130,000 for two days work. Today, the courthouse is the headquarters of the NYC Department of Education. No comment on that connection.  Crook that he was, Tweed also improved water supplies, sewage disposal and city streets. His influence helped to create such New York City landmarks as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History and the Brooklyn Bridge.

                1829-Friday-  James Carrington of Wallingford, Conn, patented his coffee mill.  A coffee mill grinds the coffee beans. With Carrington’s mill, beans were ground with a handle. Today most are electric…..think Mr. Coffee.

             1837-Monday- Happy Birthday, John Burroughs, American conservationist.  He was born in New York’s Catskill Mountain area and did most of his nature exploration in New York’s Hudson River Valley.  He tried to model his life after that of Henry David Thoreau except that when he built his cabin in the woods he decided he needed an asphalt parking space and he was too far from the main road so he had a two lane highway built to his cabin, and sometimes he got hungry so he encouraged the building of a Kentucky Fried Chick Franchise  by filling in the beaver pond, and he needed a phone so several trees were cut down for telephone poles, and then the house got too small and he didn’t like wood, so he expanded it and had it covered with aluminum siding and ……………….

            1860-Tuesday- Giddyup! The Pony Express was started from St. Joseph, Missouri. The riders began the trip from both St. Joseph, Missouri and San Francisco, California.  James Randall actually traveled by ferry to Sacramento and then started his riding.  Johnny Fry, the rider from St. Joseph was very late getting started as the mail he was supposed to carry was late getting to him (some things never change).  The Pony Express ran each week in each direction, with an average time of 10 days. Delivery of Lincoln's inaugural address set a new record of slightly less than eight days. The mail averaged almost 250 miles a day. In the nineteen months the Pony Express existed, only one rider was killed by hostile Indians, and only one bag of mail was lost. The riders had covered 650,000 miles by horseback. Exciting as it was, the Pony Express was never a financial success. In fact it lost $500,000.  It was never a part of the U.S. Postal service, although the galloping Pony Express rider was the official symbol on every mailman's shoulder until the invention of Mr. Zip.

1866-Tuesday-  Addressing the problem of ill fitting hats, after years of trying to invent a machine that could re-shape people’s heads, R. Eickemeyer and G. Osterheld of Yonkers NY, invented  a hat shaping machine.

1882 –Monday As the song goes, “The dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard has laid poor Jessie in his grave”.  Legendary outlaw Jesse James was shot in the back by  as he straightend a picture on his living room wall by Robert Ford, a member of his gang, some say he was just a “hanger on”,  who hoped to collect the bounty for Jesse’s capture “dead or alive”.  In case you were wondering, Jesse’s brother Frank later surrendered, was acquitted in two trials and died of old age. Jesse lives on  as he has been played in the movies by Tyrone Power (1939 – with Henry Fonda as Frank James), Robert Wagner (1957), John Lupton (1966 – Lupton was a 1950’s lead in the TV Western, Broken Arrow), Audie Murphy (1969), Robert Duvall (1972), James Keach (1980), Kris Kristofferson (1986), Rob Lowe (1994), J. D. Souther (1999), Colin Farrell (2001), and Brad Pitt (2007 – with playwright Sam Shepherd as Frank). Ford received a pardon for the murder from Missouri Governor Thomas Crittenden. On  June 8^th, 1892, Ford was sitting in a saloon when in walked a man by the name of Edward O'Kelley with a sawed off shotgun. As Ford's back was to the door, O'Kelley said "Hello, Bob," and as Ford turned around to see who had addressed him, O'Kelley shot him with both barrels, killing him instantly

1885 –Friday- Gerhard Daimler, German inventor  was  granted a German patent for his engine design. Daimler had been working on the idea for years but reliable ignition was a problem.  In 1883 Daimler finally developed and patented a reliable self-firing ignition system using an incandescent tube in the cylinder head. Later that year, he used the engine to power a bicycle.  He got around to cars in 1889. Powered by a 1.5 hp, two-cylinder gasoline engine, it had a four-speed transmission and traveled at 10 mph. 

1898 –Sunday- Happy Birthday, Katherine Esau, German-American botanist. Follow this carefully now; she was born in Yekaterinoslav, Russian Empire (now Dnipropetrovsk and equally as unspellable, Ukraine) to a family of Mennonites of German descent that then moved to the U.S.  She was famous for her research into the effects of viruses upon plant tissues, and her studies of plant tissue structures and physiology. Plant tissues are, obviously used by plants to blow or wipe their stamens when they have a cold.  She was the sixth woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1957, and in 1989 she was awarded the National Medal of Science.

 1924 –Thursday- Happy Birthday Actor (and notably strange human being), Marlon Brando born in Omaha, Neb. Brando, considered by some to be the greatest actor of his time,  starred in  On the Waterfront, The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris, the lamentable One-Eyed Jacks (which he directed) and forty other movies.

1924 –Thursday-  Born on the same day as Marlon Brando, Happy Birthday, Doris Day, perpetually virginal American actress who staved off the attentions (at least until the end of the movie) of Rock Hudson, Clark Gable, Cary Grant,  and others in a series of frothy late 1950’s early 60s movie comedies – Pillow Talk, Teacher’s Pet, Lover Come Back, and That Touch of Mink.

1926 –Saturday- Happy Birthday, Virgil Grissom – one of the original seven American astronauts. Grissom had flown 100 combat missions with the 334th Fighter Interceptor Squadron in Korea and earned both the Air Medal with cluster and the Distinguished Flying Cross.  He piloted the Liberty Bell 7 spacecraft, the second suborbital Mercury test flight, on July 21, 1961. On March 23, 1965 Grissom served as command pilot on the first manned Gemini flight, a 3-orbit mission. He was chosen to serve as command pilot for the first three-manned Apollo flight, Apollo 1 and died in a fire in the capsule, along with Edward White and Roger Chafee, on the launch pad during countdown for launch in 1967.

1934-Tuesday- Happy Birthday, Jane Goodall, British anthropologist famous for her work with chimpanzees and appetite for bananas.  Goodall became the world's foremost authority on chimpanzees, having closely observed their behavior in the jungles of the Gombe Game Reserve in Africa, living in the chimps' environment and gaining their confidence by lending them money, allowing them to use her TV and promising to get Regis Philbin’s autograph.

1934-Tuesday-  Same day as Jane Goodall was born, inventor Percy Shaw of Halifax England,  got a patent for his “cats eye” road marker.  He described it as  "Improvements relating to Blocks for Road Surface." It consisted of two pairs of reflective glass spheres set into a white rubber dome, mounted in a cast iron housing. Designed to glow in the beam of a headlight, used on a vehicle as a safety device or set in rows along a highway, it was used to mark the center of the road, with one pair of cat's eye showing in each direction.                       

1936-Friday-  Richard Bruno Hauptmann, convicted in the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the 20-month-old son of Charles A. Lindbergh, was kaputed by electrocution. On March 1, 1932, Charles Lindbergh Jr., the son of the famous American aviator who made the first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight in 1927, was kidnapped from the nursery of the Lindbergh home in Hopewell, New Jersey. A ransom note was found on the scene of the crime demanding $50,000 in payment for the return of Charles Jr.

1936 –Friday- Friday, Speaking of knockouts (see above item) we are told that on this day, Shortest boxing bout with gloves lasted only 10 seconds. The Gnus attempted to identify the combatants, or combatant.  In the xeroxographic world of the internet, all references are the same.  We did find that it is not the shortest bout, 1 Russell Rees KO1 Des Sowden 4 seconds Jr. Lightweight Nov. 3, 2000 (Rees, noted for his exceptionally bad halitosis, exhaled deeply as he moved to the center of the ring and Sowden toppled over). 2 Jose Pons KO1 Cecilio Niz 5 seconds Middleweight Mar. 26, 1952 and 3 Ever Beleno KO1 Guillermo Salcedo 5 seconds Featherweight Sep. 16, 1994 , there are quite a few more till we reach 10 seconds and none of the 10 second entrees feature a 1936 bout. http://forum.philboxing.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=107289

1942 –Friday- Happy Birthday singer, Billy Joe Royal, who had a top ten hit in 1965 (see Wooley Booley, 1965 below) with Down in the Boondocks.  Billy Joe makes the Gnus because it gave us the opportunity to explore the notion of boondocks. Boondocks are defined as  wild and dense brush; jungle. Or rural country; the backwoods.  The word is derived from the Tagalog word bundok, meaning mountain.  Tagalog is an Austronesian language spoken in the Philippines by about 22 million people. It became part of American vocabulary during the Spanish-American War. Here it is in Tagalog, Happy Birthday-aawit, Billy Joe Royal, na may isang top sampung hit sa 1965 (tingnan ang Wooley Booley, 1965 sa ibaba) na may Down sa kaparangan. Billy Joe ang Gnus dahil ito nagbigay sa amin ng pagkakataon upang galugarin ang mga kuru-kuro ng kaparangan.

1946 –Wednesday-  Lt. General Masaharu Homma, the Japanese commander responsible for the Bataan Death March, was executed in the Philippines.  After the Americans had surrendered at Bataan, the Japanese marched  their prisoners toward camps in northern Luzon, the Japanese denied food and water to the sick and starving men. When the weakest prisoners began to straggle, guards shot or bayoneted them and threw the bodies to the side of the road. Japanese guards may have killed 600 Americans and 10,000 Filipino prisoners.

1948-Saturday-  President Truman signed the Marshall Plan, which allocated more than $5 billion in aid for 16 European countries.  Eventually over $12 billion was given. The Marshall plan was able to stabilize and revitalize the economies of Western Europe in the aftermath of WWII and the Communist threats to freedom. British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin declared that it had been "a lifeline to sinking men."

1956-Tuesday- Elvis Presley performed his #1 hit Heartbreak Hotel on the Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theater. Elvis was also in a skit with Berle  with Milton playing his long lost twin brother Melvin Presley. Accompanying Elvis on his songs were his back up band,  Scotty Moore, Bill Black and D.J. Fontana. In addition to Heartbreak Hotel, they also performed Blue Suede Shoes and Shake, Rattle and Roll. Other guests were,  swimmer Esther Williams, drummer Buddy Rich, comedian Arnold Stang and the Harry James Orchestra

1965-Saturday-  SNAP 10A, the first nuclear reactor in space, was launched from Vanden berg Air Force Base, Calif. It generated 500 kilowatt-hours of  power during its life, providing electrical power for a 1 kgf ion engine ( a force equal to a kilogram weight or a one-kilogram mass times the acceleration of gravity). Unfortunately, the orbiting reactor was shut down by an electrical failure in another of the satellite's systems after 45 days in operation. This failure resulted in nuclear rays being sent to the ocean where they caused a cuttlefish to mutate into a giant Barbara Walters and it came out of the water and attacked Tokyo.  Still orbiting the earth. SNAP stands for Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power.

1965 – Saturday- Saturday- possibly related to the previous item, another moment in classical music history as Wooley Booley by Sam the Sham (Domingo Samudio) and the Pharoahs was released.  The occasionally Homeric lyrics;

Uno, dos, one, two, tres, quatro

Matty told Hatty about a thing she saw.

Had two big horns and a wooly jaw.

Wooly bully, wooly bully.

Wooly bully, wooly bully, wooly bully.

Hatty told Matty, "Let's don't take no chance.

Let's not be L-seven, come and learn to dance."

Interestingly, while the song was the number one seller of the year, it only reached number 2 on the Billboard Charts.

1966-Sunday-  Luna 10 (U.S.S.R.) became the first spacecraft to orbit the Moon.(See March 31). The scientific instruments on board included a gamma-ray spectrometer, triaxial magnetometer, a meteorite detector, and lots of those thingees that, you know, do science stuff.

1968 – Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey had its premiere in New York City. Starring Keir Dullea, Garry Lockwood, and Douglas Rain as the voice of Hal 9000, and generally recognized as one of the great (although occasionally confusing) movies of all time.  Initial reviews after previews included: "Somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring"-The New York Times, "A monumentally unimaginative movie"-Harpers, "Space Odyssey fails most gloriously"-Newsday, and "Big, Beautiful but plodding scifi epic. Superb photography major asset to confusing, long-unfolding plot."-Variety http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/ The world probably wasn’t ready for it as the first spoken word is almost a half hour into the film, and there's less than 40 minutes of dialogue in the entire film. Much of the film is in dead silence (accurately depicting the absence of sound in space), or with the sound of human breathing within a spacesuit. The movie won only one Academy Award – Special Effects- the same number as Planet of the Apes.  Best movie award went to the musical Oliver.

1969-Thursday-  Dr. Denton A. Cooley implanted the first total artificial heart (the Liotta Total Artificial Heart) at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston. The heart was implanted into 47-year-old Haskell Karp and was not intended to be permanent. It was used as a bridge until he could receive a donor heart. It worked, and three days later, the patient received a heart transplant. Unfortunately, he died of respiratory insufficiency only 14 hours later.

1973 –Tuesday A huge technological breakthrough and a curse. The first portable phone call was placed by inventor Martin Cooper. The phone was 10 inches in height, 3 inches deep and an inch-and-a-half wide and weighed 30-oz. Cooper walked down the streets of New York City using the phone. As he said, “I made numerous calls, including one where I crossed the street while talking to a New York radio reporter - probably one of the more dangerous things I have ever done in my life." No, it could not take pictures, download music or play insipid music instead of ringing.  As writer Peggy Noonan has said, “Cell phones are wonderful, they empower the obnoxious and amplify the ignorant”.   

1973-Tuesday-  And on the same day as the first portable phone was demonstrated -Francis W. Dorion patented a "dual razor blade assembly.” Now people could get twice as many cuts but they could hold their portable phones to their clean shaven faces.

            1974 –Wednesday-  The worst tornado outbreak in U.S. history with 148 tornedos touching down in 13 states. Before it was over 16 hours later, 330 people were dead and 5,484 were injured in a damage path covering more than 2,500 miles.  At one point during the outbreak, 15 twisters were on the ground at the same time. One was on the ground for more than two hours. The tornados touched down in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio (Xenia, Ohio was devastated), Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina plus their was one in southwestern New York state.  A Kansas farm was deposited in Oz and kaputed a wicked witch unleashing a series of events featuring, talking scarecrows, cowardly lions, flying monkeys, and midgets sending people to the Yellow Brick Road.

            1986 –Thursday-  IBM unleashed their first laptop computer on the world. The computer considered by most historians to be the first true portable computer was the Osborne 1. Adam Osborne founded the eponymous Osborne Computer and produced the equally eponymous Osborne 1 in 1981, a portable computer that weighed 24 pounds and cost $1795. The Osborne 1 came with a five-inch screen, modem port, two 5 1/4 floppy drives, a large collection of bundled software programs, and a battery pack.  It was a failure. http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bllaptop.htm

            2007 –Tuesday-  An official new world record for conventional-train speed of 574.8 km/h (357.2 mph) was set by a French TGV on the LGV Est high speed line east of Paris. Meanwhile, in New York City, the “D”  train traveled at a rate of .5 km/h due to switch trouble under 8^th avenue.

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4.      

186 –Tuesday- Happy Birthday, Caracalla, Roman emperor from 211 - 217. Following the kapution of his father Septimus Severus, Caracalla was proclaimed co-emperor with his brother Publius Septimius Antoninius Geta. Caracalla killed Geta. Caracalla was one of Rome’s worst emperors but he was very clean.  He built colossal baths in Rome, which still stand. He gave Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the empire  but showed extreme cruelty toward all who opposed him, and he was an equal opportunity murderer of  Germans, Parthians, and Alexandrians. He in turn was kaputed in 217  by the praetorian prefect. His  reign contributed to the empire's decay, although with the baths, it was a more sanitary decay.

1581 –Saturday- Going around in circles, Francis Drake completed a circumnavigation of the world in 1580 and on this day was knighted on board his flagship the Golden Hind by Elizabeth I. Drake was the second captain to circle the globe – the feat had already been accomplished by the expedition of Ferdinand Magellan in 1519 although since Magellan went kaput in the Philippines, Drake was the first expedition leader to do the round trip Seven years later, with the aid of a huge storm, he would save the country from the Spanish Armada.

1688 –Sunday- Happy Birthday, Joseph-Nicolas Delisle, of “Delisles of Capri”, (you can also have two seats on Delisle), French astronomer who proposed that the series of colored rings sometimes observed around the Sun is caused by diffraction of sunlight through water droplets in a cloud right here on Earth. Delisle is also remembered as the author of a method for observing the transits of Venus and Mercury by instants of contacts.

1818-Saturday-  Congress decreed that the U.S. flag would consist of 13 red and white stripes and 20 stars, with a new star to be added for every new state added to flag on the first July fourth after statehood. That did not settle an issue that began in on June 14, 1777 when the Continental Congress passed the first Flag Act, which announced, "Resolved, That the flag of the United States be made of thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new Constellation." The overall flag size, proportions, and arrangements of the stars and stripes were not fixed until President William Taft's administration in 1912. For one hundred and thirty-five years, the flag had no prescribed appearance, and many variations were designed and sewn.

1821-Wednesday- Happy Birthday, Linus Yale, American inventor born in Salisbury NY and manufacturer of locks.  Yale's lock used a flat key with serrated edges like the ones we still use today. When inserted into the lock, the key pushes the bottom pins into the right position, which allows the user to turn the key and unlock the lock. The cylinder lock perfected by Yale is based on a mechanism first employed by the ancient Egyptians over 4000 years ago. Yale also worked on permanent dial and shaft designs in many of his newer locks, such as used in what most know as "combination locks" today. In 1851, he invented the "Yale Infallible Bank Lock" for safes and vaults. He is also famous for the unique lock that required a distinctly shaped dough to open  it, the world renowned locks and bagels.

            1823-Friday- Happy Birthday, Charles Wilhelm Siemens, German/British scientist who invented a gas-heated, open-hearth furnace.  Repairs to the furnace were called "open hearth surgery."  He also did extensive work in electric telegraphy. Siemens designed the cable-laying ship Faraday for laying a new trans-Atlantic cable in 1874. He also worked on electric lighting and on the Portrush electric railway in Northern Ireland. The electrical unit of conductance, the siemens, is named in his honor as are successful sailors – we’ve all heard of able bodied Siemens.

             1828-Saturday- Casparus van Wooden, of Amsterdam, patented chocolate milk powder. He developed a system of separating the fat (cocoa butter) from the ground cocoa beans. This provided cocoa powder which tasted a lot better than the whole bean. Casparus is one of Professor Sy Yentz favorite inventors. Thanks to him a childhood of peanut butter sandwiches and chocolate milk was a continuing culinary delight.

            1841-Sunday – William Henry we hardly knew ye. Only thirty one days after assuming office (presidential inaugurations were held on March 4 in those days), William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States, went kaput from pleurisy and  pneumonia at the White House.  The sixty eight year old  "Tippicanoe" clevery gave a 3 hr. inauguration speech in a cold rain.  During the address, the new president wore no coat or hat. He followed the address with a round of receptions in his wet clothing, it resulted in, to put it mildly,  a bad chill.  Doctors were called in, but medical practices were crude: heated suction cups to supposedly draw out the disease, and the same bleeding tactics that had killed George Washington. Doctors would also later be responsible for the death of the wounded James Garfield in 1881. All this only weakened Harrison further, and three weeks after taking office, he was clearly heading to that “big White House in the Sky”. . As a last resort, a number of Native American "remedies" were tried, (ironic considering he made his name at the Battle of Tippicanoe with a victory over the Indians) including one involving the use of live snakes.

            1846-Sunday-  Happy Birthday, Raoul Pictet,  Swiss chemist who was a pioneer of cryogenics which is the production of low temperatures or the study of low-temperature phenomena. Needless to say his work was met with a chilly reception by the Scientific community.

            1859 –Monday-

 O, I wish I was in the land of cotton

Old times there are not forgotten

Look away! Look away!

Look away! Dixie Land.

In Dixie Land where I was born in

Early on one frosty mornin'

Look away! Look away!

Look away! Dixie Land.

Chorus:

O, I wish I was in Dixie!

Hooray! Hooray!

In Dixie Land I'll take my stand

To live and die in Dixie

Away, away,

The song, Dixie, made its debut in New York City (of all places). It was written by Daniel Decatur Emmett, of Mount Vernon, Ohio. "Dixie" was premiered by Emmett while performing with Bryant’s Minstrels, a blackface troop,  in New York. Interestingly, although it is best known as the song adopted by the Confederacy, Dixie was also Abraham Lincoln's favorite song, and it was played at his inauguration. The title of Dixie could have come from the fact that in New Orleans, "Dix" is a monetary unit (French for 10), or….that the title honors a kind farmer in Manhattan Island by the name of Dixy who was rumored to be connected with the Underground Railroad; "Dixy's Land" became known as a safe haven. Emmett also wrote such early American standards as Turkey in the Straw and Blue-Tail Fly.

            1866 –Wednesday- Alexander II of Russia narrowly escaped an assassination attempt in the city of St. Petersburg by one by Dmitry Karakozov. Alexander dodged a bullet, literally, again on April 20, 1879, as the tsar was walking towards the Square of the Guards Staff and met Alexander Soloviev, a 33-year-old former student. Having seen a revolver in his hands, the tsar ran away; Soloviev fired five times but missed.  Bullets didn’t seem to work so on the evening of February 5, 1880, some revolutionaries set off a charge under the dining room of the Winter Palace. The tsar was not harmed, as he was late to the supper. However, the explosion did kill or harm at least 67 other people. Alexander’s luck ran out on March 13, 1881 when as the tsar's carriage traveled along one of the central streets of St. Petersburg, near the Winter Palace, a bomb detonated, injuring several civilians. Accounts claim that when Alexander cleverly GOT OUT (emphasis is ours)  of his bulletproof carriage (a gift from Napoleon III), and was hit by another suicide bomber. He was mortally wounded by an explosion of hand-made grenades and died a few hours later.

            1902 –Friday- British financier Cecil Rhodes left $10 million in his will to provide scholarships for Americans at Oxford University in England, the Rhodes Scholarship, another of History’s ironies as at one time Rhodes dreamed of returning America to the British Empire.  Rhodes also named a country after himself, Rhodesia but now it is called Zimbabwe.

            1915 –Sunday-  Happy Birthday, Muddy Waters, American blues musician. Among his hits were; I Can't Be Satisfied, I Feel Like Going Home, Train Fare Blues but his influence on Rock & Roll is inestimable.  Waters “electrified” the blues of the Mississippi Delta, and brought it to Chicago. Over the years his band included such musicians as Otis Spann, Little Walter (aka Little Walter Jacobs), James Cotton, Junior Wells,  and Willie Dixon

            1932-Monday-   Professor Charles Glen (C.G)King isolated Vitamin C in the juice of lemons after five years of research.  Dr. King and  his colleague William Waugh were successful in obtaining a patent in 1941 for their process of isolating the vitamin, but were denied a patent for the vitamin itself by Patent Office This isolation gave C a complex but then Vitamin B already had a complex and now C was complex and.....oh, it's so confusing, and complex.

           1933-Tuesday-  Four years before the Hindenburg disaster, the Akron, a dirigible crashed in New Jersey, (also where the Hindenburg exploded and crashed), killing 73 people in one of the first air disasters in history. The Akron was the largest airship built in the United States when it took its first flight in August 1931. In its short life of less than two years, it was involved in two fatal accidents. And you thought flying on Southwest was bad……..

                1938-Monday-  Happy Birthday, Ananda Chakrabarty, Indian-American biochemist who patented the first genetically engineered life-form (which we now know as Paris Hilton). The U.S. Supreme Court, on June 16, 1980 ruled that new forms of life could be patented if they are the outcome of human ingenuity. Chakrabarty’s creation was a biology-based solution for cleaning up toxic spills using the generically engineered Pseudomonas (today classified as Burkholderia cepacia or B. cepacia). As noted, an unexpected outcome of Chakrabarty’s creation was the development of the parasite, Celebutardicus Moronicus, a species that appears to be growing faster than a fungus on week old bread.

            1963 –Thursday- The movie musical Bye Bye Birdie opened at Radio City Music Hall. The movie was based on a hit Broadway musical about a rock and roll star (think Elvis) who is drafted and comes to a small town to give "one last kiss" to a fan via the Ed Sullivan Show and has inspired thousands of High School and local theater productions through the years. Directed by George Sidney and starring Janet Leigh, Ann-Margaret, Dick Van Dyke, Paul Lynde, and even Bobby Rydell, it featured the woefully miscast Jesse Pearson in the  role of Conrad Birdie.  Pearson disappeared from filmdom after the movie, made a few television appearances and was last seen in The Guns of Will Sonnet, starring Walter Brennan and Dack Rambo. Van Dyke and Lynde had been in the 1960 Broadway production directed and choreographed by Gower Champion which won the 1961 Tony Award for Best Musical.

            1964 - The Beatles occupied the top five positions on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. - Can't Buy Me Love , Twist and Shout (cover of the Isley Brothers), She Loves You, I Want to Hold Your Hand, and Please Please Me ( a Gnus favorite).

             1968 –Monday- Martin Luther King was assassinated by James Earl Ray while standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis Tennessee. King was fatally shot just after 6 p.m. The civil rights leader was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers' strike and was on his way to dinner when a bullet struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord. King was pronounced dead after his arrival at a Memphis hospital. He was 39 years old.

            1968 –Monday NASA launched the unmanned Apollo 6.  The goals were to demonstrate structural and thermal integrity and compatibility of the launch vehicle and spacecraft, (i.e would they fall apart or burn up) confirm launch loads and dynamic characteristics and verify stage separations, propulsion, guidance and control, electrical systems, emergency detection system.  The tests were more severe than expected as two of the second stage engines shut down early. The remaining three engines fired longer than normal, but failed to achieve the speed expected. The third stage’s engine also fired longer than would have been burning. Apollo 6 was the last of the unmanned Apollo missions.

            1972-Tuesday-  The first electric power generated in the U.S. fueled by municipal solid waste was produced at the Meramec Plant of the Union Electric Company, St. Louis, Missouri. So just plug that toaster into your trash can.

            1978-Tuesday- Francisco Garcia was granted a patent "orthodontic pliers." No, no no, it’s not what you think.  They weren’t used for pulling teeth. The pliers were primarily  for bending the alignment wire end during orthodontic techniques…..think braces.

            1983-Monday-  The first flight of the shuttle, Challenger. The crew was Paul J. Weitz, Commander, Karol J. Bobko, Pilot; Donald H. Peterson, Mission Specialist; F. Story Musgrave, Mission Specialist It was named after the British Naval research vessel HMS Challenger that sailed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans during the 1870's. The first orbiter to launch and land at night on mission STS-8, Challenger also made the first Space Shuttle landing at Kennedy Space Center, concluding mission STS 41-B. Spacelabs 2 and 3 flew aboard the ship on missions STS 51-F and STS 51-B, as did the first German-dedicated Spacelab on STS 61-A. Challenger flew nine successful Space Shuttle missions in all.  On January 28, 1986, its tenth launch, the Challenger and its crew of seven were lost 73 seconds after launch when a booster failure, caused by cold weather, resulted in the breakup of the shuttle. See Judy Resnick, 4/5.

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5.       

456 -Wedneday St. Patrick returned to Ireland as a missionary bishop. When told he had missed the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, he immediately departed for New York so that he wouldn’t miss Little Italy’s San Gennaro Festival. Actually at age 16, some Irish marauders raided his village on the British mainland, and he was sold into slavery to Ireland. During his captivity he became a Christian. He escaped from slavery after six years, and went to Gaul to study in the monastery under St. Germain, bishop of Auxerre for twelve years. He was appointed second bishop to Ireland. His mission in Ireland lasted for thirty years. Subsequently, he retired to County Down. He died on March 17th in 461.

            1566 –Tuesday-  It’s……it’s………it’s…….The Spanish Inquisition! Two-hundred Dutch noblemen, led by Hendrik van Brederode, force dthemselves into the presence of Margaret of Parma (must have been a big room) and presented the Petition of Compromise, denouncing the Spanish Inquisition in the Netherlands. Then they sent it to Spain. Margaret was Duchess of Parma and regent of the Netherlands from 1559 to 1567, was a natural daughter (wink wink, nudge nudge) of Charles V. Speaking of Monty Python and the Spanish Inquisition; [The door flies open and Cardinal Ximinez of Spain [Palin] enters, flanked by two junior cardinals. Cardinal Biggles [Jones] has goggles pushed over his forehead. Cardinal Fang [Gilliam] is just Cardinal Fang]

            Ximinez: NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again.

            [The Inquisition exits]

            Chapman: I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition.

            [The cardinals burst in]

            Ximinez: NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as: fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms - Oh damn!

            [To Cardinal Biggles] I can't say it - you'll have to say it.

            Biggles: What?

            Ximinez: You'll have to say the bit about 'Our chief weapons are ...'

            Biggles: [rather horrified]: I couldn't do that...

            [Ximinez bundles the cardinals outside again]

            Chapman: I didn't expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition.

            [The cardinals enter]

            Biggles: Er.... Nobody...um....

            Ximinez: Expects...

            Biggles: Expects... Nobody expects the...um...the Spanish...um...

            Ximinez: Inquisition.

            Biggles: I know, I know! Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. In fact, those who do expect -

            Ximinez: Our chief weapons are...

            Biggles: Our chief weapons are...um...er...

            Ximinez: Surprise...

            Biggles: Surprise and --

            Ximinez: Okay, stop. Stop. Stop there - stop there. Stop. Phew! Ah! ... our chief weapons are surprise...blah blah blah. Cardinal, read the charges.

            Fang: You are hereby charged that you did on diverse dates commit heresy against the Holy Church. 'My old man said follow the--'

            http://people.csail.mit.edu/paulfitz/spanish/script.html

            1588 –Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, Thomas Hobbes English philosopher and political theorist. In his most famous work, The Leviathan, he described life in the wilderness (without rule and law) as “nasty, poor, brutish, and short.”

                1614-Friday – (We’ve also seen this date as 1613 – it probably depends on when the catering hall was available) A social note as Pocahontas, daughter of the chief of the Powhatan Indian confederacy, married English tobacco planter John Rolfe in Jamestown, Virginia. The bride, eldest daughter of the Powhatans of Virginia, was resplendent in a gown of white taffeta. The groom, eldest son of the Rolfe’s of England a graduate of Jamestown Technical H.S, was working towards a degree in tobacco growing at Greater Jamestown Community College.  The reception, held at Anthony's Pier 9, featured music by the Lawrence Welk Orchestra, and D J Injun Joe.  John Rolfe brought Pocahontas, now known as Rebecca,  their son Thomas, and several other Native Americans to England in 1616.  In England, she was seen as an example of how the Native Americans could learn to adopt English ways. Returning to Virginia in 1617, Pocahontas became ill soon after the ship left port. The ship stopped in Gravesend, England, and she went kaput at age twenty two not long after.

            1621 -Monday The Mayflower left Plymouth, Massachusetts on a return trip to Great Britain.  The Mayflower was used primarily as a cargo ship, involved in active trade of goods (often wine) between England and other European countries. After its famous voyages the Mayflower, the ship returned to England,  and  disappeared from history. She was likely dismantled for scrap lumber in Rotherhithe in 1623. It does remind us that April Showers bring May flowers…..and May flowers bring……Pilgrims.

            1649-Monday  Happy Birthday, Elihu Yale, born in Boston, educated in England and worked for the British East India Company.  Like many colonists and contemporary politicians, he  had a financially questionable but profitable tenure as an official in India and returned to the U.S a wealthy man.   In 1718, Cotton Mather, a Harvard alumnus who was in a snit at being passed over for president of his alma mater,  wrote Yale suggesting that the Collegiate School at Saybrook, Conn., might be named for him in return for financial support. Yale donated a parcel of goods, which when sold brought £562—the largest single gift to the college before 1837.The gift, three bales of goods, 417 books, a portrait of King George I ("to remind them of their duties to the king,") and a set of royal arms, which was later destroyed during the American Revolution. The bales of goods included 25 pieces of garlic (a kind of cloth), 18 pieces of calico, 17 pieces of worsted goods, 12 pieces of Spanish poplin, 5 pieces of plain muslin, and 2 pieces of black and white silk crepe……and a partridge in a pear tree. The college, which had moved to New Haven, happily, took the name of Yale as Elihu U does not have the same dignitas as Yale U

            1722  -Sunday-  Dutch Admiral Jacob Roggeveen commanding three ships arrived at Easter Island.  Of course it wasn’t Easter Island when he arrived.  Well it was Easter Island but it wasn’t named Easter Island.  Rogeveen named it Easter Island because he arrived on Easter Sunday. According to islanders oral tradition, in this first encounter of a native with the Europeans, a man that was in a canoe was invited to come on board and it was offered a glass of wine and food, the islander instead of eating or drinking took the glass of wine and poured it on his own head

            1753-Thursday- The British Museum was founded by an Act of Parliament granting £20,000 to purchase the 50,000 volume library of Sir Hans Sloane and his vast collection of 69,352 items of nature and art. The man obviously had a large attic. The museum was officially opened in 1759.

            1801-Sunday- Happy Birthday, Felix Dujardin, French zoologist. He did valuable research on bacteria and on the “Infusoria” (dirty water). In 1834  he proposed that a new group of one-celled organisms be called Rhizopoda; meaning "root-foot”. This name was later changed to Protozoa. Contemporary protozoa are also known as local television station news readers. In 1835 he described protoplasm in unicellular animals, naming it “sarcode” which was later renamed protoplasm by Hugo von Mohl.  Protoplasm includes both the substance within and the cell membrane and is the " living substance" of the cell. It can be differentiated into cytoplasm and the nucleus. He also demonstrated the role of the vacuole for evacuating waste matter and tried to invent little protozoa sized toilet paper in the interests of single celled hygiene. So, basically, he made important discoveries but someone always changed the names.

            1804 –Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Mathias Jacob Schleiden, German botanist, cofounder (with Theodor Schwann – who extended it to animals and also invented the Schwann Dive) of the cell theory, promulgated in 1839 which states that all organisms are composed of similar units of organization, called cells.

            1806 –Saturday- Isaac Quintard of Stanfield, Conn., received a U.S. patent for his apple cider and bark mill. Apples were processed to extract the juice (juice but not protestants or catholics). The fresh juice was known as sweet apple cider. It was preserved in wooden barrels where it fermented, transforming it into hard cider, an alcoholic drink. Hard cider was a very popular drink for the first colonists in the U.S. It was comparable in popularity to beer up until the time of prohibition. When prohibition ended in 1933, peoples' tastes had changed, and cider popularity faded.

            1815-Wednesday-  The volcano Tambora, a stratovolcano, on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia, began to erupt.  Within two days it ejected 149 cubic km. of matter. In comparison, the famous Krakatoa, (named after the foot injury sustained by an early explorer ) ejected only 17 cubic km. In fact Tambora ejected so much ash into the upper atmosphere that, at least in the northern hemisphere, there was a cooling of the atmosphere, which resulted in snow in Boston in July and a famine across parts of Europe. In 1816, the overall temperature on Earth, specifically in the Northern Hemisphere, lowered so drastically that it became known as the year without a summer. Weather was disturbed all over, with problems in Western Europe and the United States, as well as Asia. Monsoon season was affected, which is thought to also be tied to a cholera epidemic that year. The summer temperatures in 1816 averaged just a few degrees below normal, but as we said, it frosted and even snowed throughout the summer. The highs were still close to 100 degreed Fahrenheit on some days. However, the cold spells, especially at night, cause massive crop failure, and, as a result, even more famine.  By all standards, the eruption was a pain in the ash.

            1827-Thursday Happy Birthday, Joseph Lister, (Listerine?) English surgeon and founder of modern antiseptic surgery.  Doctors had believed that infections were due to “bad air”. When, In 1865, Louis Pasteur suggested that decay was caused by living organisms in the air, which on entering matter caused it to ferment, Lister made the connection with wound sepsis. Combining his work with the work of Pasteur, he began cleaning wounds with carbolic acid. His basic surgical principle - that bacteria must never gain entry to an operation wound - remains the basis of surgery to this day.

            1856-Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Booker T. Washington, born a slave so the birthday is really an estimate, an educator and reformer who became an important spokesperson for black Americans at the turn of the 20th century. He had dedicated himself to the idea that education would raise his people to equality in this country, Washington became a teacher. He first taught in his home town, then at the Hampton Institute, and then in 1881, he founded the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama.

            1858-Monday- Happy Birthday, Washington Atlee Burpee. Burpee (named after a gastric event) was the American seeds-man who founded the world's largest mail-order seed company. Always a seedy operation, the Burpee company was founded in Philadelphia in 1876 when his mother loaned in $1,000 in "seed money", the company  grew roots and eventually blossomed.

            1869 –Monday-  Daniel Bakeman kaput. Bakeman was the last surviving veteran of the American Revolution. Mr. Bakeman entered the service when he was about seventeen years of age and served as a private with the New York militia during the last four years of the war. His pension required an act of congress since he had no documentation proving he served in the war. After the war he cast his first presidential vote for George Washington and his last, in 1868 for Ulysses S. Grant.

            1879 –Saturday-  Chile declared war on Bolivia and Peru, starting the War of the Pacific. Chile gained substantial mineral-rich territory in the war, annexing both the Peruvian provinces of Tarapacá and Arica and the Bolivian province of Litoral, and making beach-front property in Bolivia an oxymoron as Bolivia was left a landlocked country.         

            1892 –Tuesday- Walter H. Coe of  Providence Rhode Island patented gold leaf in rolls. Later, he tried for gold leaf in bagels, bialys, muffins and torts. The patent was for a machine designed for winding up on a supporting strip of paper and into a package roll a continuous strip of gold leaf or similar metallic film entirely by mechanical action.  W.H. Coe Mfg. Co. manufactured the gold leaf in rolls 67 feet in length in widths between 1/16 to 3-1/4 inches

            1893-Wednesday-  As we all know, Thomas Corwin Mendenhall, then Superintendent of Weights and Measures, with the approval of the Secretary of the Treasury, decided that the International Meter and Kilogram would in the future be regarded as the fundamental standards of length and mass in the United States, both for metric and customary weights and measures. Well, that idea certainly caught on quickly.

            1894-Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Lawrence Bell, U.S. aircraft designer and  founder of Bell Aircraft Co. Bell’s experimental X-1 rocket-propelled airplane (nicknamed the “Glamorous Glennis”) piloted by Chuck Yeager (when he landed he was “ground chuck”) in 1947 was the first to break the sound barrier in level flight. The company also produced the nation's first jet propelled airplane, the world's first commercial helicopter, the world's fastest and highest flying airplane, the Bell X-1A, and the first jet vertical take-off and landing plane. 

            1895 –Friday-  Irish playwright and wit Oscar Wilde lost his criminal libel case against the Marquess of Queensberry, who had accused the writer of being a homosexual. Wilde (married with two children) had engaged in an affair with Queensbury’s son.  Queensberry was also famous for instituting the “Marquess of Queensberry Rules” that standardized boxing matches. Queensberry was also considered to be a bit unhinged.  He had stalked Wilde for months.  Wilde thought it would be a simple show trial in which he could show off his wit.  In losing the case, he was brought up on sodomy charges and received two years in prison effectively ending his career.

            1896 –Sunday- Sunday- After a hiatus of a few centuries, actually it was about 1,500 years, the Olympic games resumed. The ancient Olympic Games continued to be played every four years for nearly 1200 years until in 393 AD, the Roman emperor Theodosius I, a Christian, abolished the Games because of their pagan influences. On this day, the first of the modern Olympic Games opened in Athens. It attracted athletes, well sort of, from 14 nations.  Since the Games were not well publicized internationally, contestants were not nationally chosen but rather came individually and at their own expense. Some contestants were tourists who happened to be in the area during the Games.  The largest delegations came from Greece, (surprise!), Germany, France and Great Britain. On  April 6 1896, an American James Connolly, won the triple jump (he was being chased by customs officers at the time) to become the first Olympic champion in more than 1,500 years. Winners were awarded a silver medal and an olive branch. Greek Spyridon Louis won the most popular event, the marathon. 

            1909 –Monday-  Nerves were frayed as The Neurological Institute of New York (NI) was founded.  While the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases at Queens Square and the Salpêtrière were well known in Europe, there were no similar institutions in the United States.  At that time the U.S had special wards for patients with neurological disorders.  They were know as the House of Representatives and the New York City Council. The NI was established as the first specialty hospital in the nation devoted entirely to the study and treatment of disorders of the nervous system.

            1918-Friday-  Happy Birthday, Joseph Sobek, American inventor of racquetball. Sobek developed the sport in 1950 to play at the Greenwich, Connecticut, YMCA. He had been a squash and tennis professional for seven years but  he invented racquetball as an alternative indoor racquet sport. He drafted rules and drew a racquet design, which was created in 1951 by Magnan Racket Manufacturing Company. To promote his invention, he founded the Paddle Rackets Association with a group of players. There are now millions of players, and it is an Olympic sport. It’s quite a racket.

            1949-Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, Judith Resnick, American astronaut killed aboard the Challenger, January, 1986.  In 1984, Resnik, one of only seven Jewish astronauts, became the second American woman to travel in space. Dr. Sally K. Ride flew a mission in 1983. On her first trip into space, Resnick was a mission specialist on the maiden voyage of the space shuttle Discovery. Resnik had logged 144 hours and 57 minutes in space.

            1951 –Thursday-  Spies, and avowed Communist Party members, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death for conspiring to commit espionage in the form of sending U.S atomic bomb secrets, for the Soviet Union.  For many years there was public hand wringing by the usual  apologists and Lenin’s “useful idiots” over their innocence or guilt, a guilt finally proven through the opening in 1995, of the spy code decryption process known as the Venona Project.  In his memoirs, published posthumously in 1990, Nikita Khrushchev praised the pair for their "very significant help in accelerating the production of our atomic bomb."

            1951 –Thursday-  Cinematic masterpiece, Bedtime for Bonzo premiered in New York City.  Starring future President Ronald Reagan , a chimpanzee, Walter Slezak, Diana Lynn and Jesse White (who went on to fame as the Maytag repairman decades later) and directed by Fred de Cordova (who would later produce the Tonight Show with Johnny), the theatrical exemplar featured the tag line “The funniest new idea on film since "FRANCIS!" We note Francis was a talking mule but Bonzo didn’t speak.

            1964, 1975, 1976, 1992, 1997 – A series of kaputions as General Douglas MacArthur, Nationalist Chinese Leader Chang Kai Shek,  Billionaire weirdo, Howard Hughes, Walmart founder Sam Walmart, and Beat Poet Allan Ginsberg  all died on this day.

            1964 –Sunday- The Beatles launched the British Invasion.  Ed Sullivan supplied the landing craft.  The next group up after the Beatles was……The Searchers, somewhat lower in the Brit Rock pantheon, but hey, who knew?  The Searchers sang, Needles and Pins and Ain't That Just Like Me.  Also appearing on the show were Señor Wences, Topo Gigio (Gasp! Señor Wences and his hand puppets PLUS Togo Gigio on the same show!!!), singer Theresa Brewer, comedian Nipsey Russell, and tenor Franco Corelli.

            1973-Thursday- Washington: Scientists produced human blood cells in a living mouse. The mouse, which then donned white gloves and could talk, immediately opened a theme park, married another talking mouse named Minnie, and grew rich on the sales of memorabilia.

            1987 –Sunday-  The first launching of a television network in almost 40 years as the FOX Broadcasting Company, under the direction of Rupert Murdoch, started with two Sunday night shows, Married......With Children and The Tracey Ullman Show. They were the beginnings of the FOX lineup. And now all the airwaves are infested with reality shows providing ongoing opportunities for publicity seekers to demonstrate their lack of talent, brains, and class.  

            1994 – Tuesday- Lead singer of Nirvana, rock star and icon, Kurt Cobain committed suicide in his home in Seattle Washington. Kobain thus joined the “Twenty Seven” club with fellow members,  Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison, all of whom went kaput at age 27.

            1998 –Sunday- The  Akashi-Kaikyo Bridge linking Shikoku with Honshū in Japan opened to traffic. At 6,527 feet  for the single span, it was the largest suspension bridge in the world.  The bridge was originally designed to be 12,825 feet. But on January 17, 1995, the Great Hanshin Earthquake stretched the bridge an additional three feet. The bridge holds three records: it is the longest, tallest, and most expensive suspension bridge ever built (so far).  The toll is ¥2,300 (~£11, ~ or $20.00) and is used by approximately 23,000 cars/day.

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             6.       

 648 B.C.- Thursday- The earliest total solar eclipse chronicled by the Greeks was observed. Archilochus, Greek poet said, "Nothing can be surprising any more or impossible or miraculous, now that Zeus, father of the Olympians has made night out of noonday, hiding the bright sunlight, and . . . fear has come upon mankind. After this, men can believe anything, expect anything. Don't any of you be surprised in future if land beasts change places with dolphins and go to live in their salty pastures, and get to like the sounding waves of the sea more than the land, while the dolphins prefer the mountains." http://uk.geocities.com/solareclipsewebpages@btopenworld.com/SECalendar.html#_April

 “ And Melina Mercouri will win an Academy Award for Never on Sunday and then get elected to Parliament.”

            1199 –Tuesday - Richard the Lion Heart kaput.  The English king who between running around on Crusade, being captured and held in  dungeon  and attacking cities and towns in France, seemingly did everything he could to avoid being in England.  During his reign from 1189-1199, he spent a total of six months in England. On this particular occasion, having finally returned from captivity Germany, the Lion Heart, after a brief hero’s welcome in England, charged off to France to attack some more castles and cities. In Chalus, Aquitaine, a  feudal lord claimed the treasure from a vassal, Richard in turn claimed the treasure from the lord, who refused. This prompted Richard to siege the village. During the siege Richard was cleverly riding close to the castle without the protection of full armor. He spotted an archer with bow in hand on the wall aiming a shot at him. It is said that the idiot paused to applaud the Bowman. He was struck in the shoulder with the arrow and then, to compound his foolishness,  refused treatment for his wound. Infection set in and Richard the Lionheart went kaput.

            1327 –Sunday- Love at first sight.  The Italian poet  and scholar Petrarch (often called the “first humanist”) , born in Arezzo, Italy, first saw his ideal love and muse, Laura (possibly Laure de Noves, married in 1325 to Hugo de Sade), at the Church of St. Clare in Avignon, France, who inspired him with a passion which has become distinctive for its constancy and purity. He really had a crush on her. His Canzoniere (Song Book) was inspired Laura, chronicling his first encounter with her at the age of 23. However, his love appears to have been unrequited. There is no definite information concerning Laura, except that she was lovely to look at, with golden hair, and her bearing was modest and dignified…..and she had a nice tan, a buffed body, good caps on her teeth, a botoxed forehead, chewed gun, used the word “like” in like every like sentence, and went to the mall twice a week.

            1483-Friday-  Happy Birthday, Rafael (Raffaello Sanzi or Santi), Italian painter and architect of the Italian Renaissance, student and then rival of Michelangelo (who, interestingly, was born on one month and eight years earlier on March 6 ). Raphael is best known for his Madonnas and for his large figure paintings in the Vatican in Rome- a cycle of frescoes in a suite of medium-sized rooms in the Vatican papal apartments in which Pope Julius II himself lived and worked; these rooms are known simply as the Stanze. The Stanza della Segnatura (1508-11) and Stanza d'Eliodoro (1512-14) were decorated practically entirely by Raphael himself. The murals in the Stanza dell'Incendio (1514-17), though designed by Raphael, were largely executed by his seemingly multitudinous assistants and pupils.  The four main fresco walls in the Stanza della Segnatura are occupied by the Disputa and the School of Athens (look for Michelangelo in the middle towards the left) on the larger walls and the Parnassus and Cardinal Virtues on the smaller walls.       A true Renaissance Man, Raphael was also a student of archaeology and of ancient Greco-Roman sculpture.  In 1515 Leo X put him in charge of the supervision of the preservation of marbles bearing valuable Latin inscriptions; two years later he was appointed commissioner of antiquities for the city, and he drew up an archaeological map of Rome. Raphael had by this time been put in charge of virtually all of the papacy's various artistic projects in Rome, involving architecture, paintings and decoration, and the preservation of antiquities. Unlike his contemporary, Michelangelo who lived into his eighties, Raphael developed a fever and went kaput on his thirty seventh birthday.

            1652 –Saturday-  Dutch sailor Jan van Riebeeck established a re-supply camp at the Cape of Good Hope, which eventually became Cape Town, South Africa.  He built a fort (the castle) and gardens were established at the foot of what is now known as Table Mountain. A viticulture industry was initiated but there was no whining allowed and land was granted to settlers to grow crops. The Cape had probably received its name from in 1487, from the Portuguese sailor Bartholomeus Dias who had set out to find a sea route to the East It was Dias who named the peninsula Cabo Tormentosa (Cape of Storms). This name was later changed to Cabo da Boa Esperanca (Cape of Good Hope) to signify that the rounding of the Cape brought hope that a sea route to the East was possible. Ten years later, Vasco Da Gama completed the sea route from Portugal around the Cape to India, thus finally opening up the trade route between Europe and the East.

            1748-Saturday  The Roman city of Pompeii was buried by ash from an eruption of the volcano Vesuvius in 79A.D.  On this day excavations began at Pompeii to uncover the city. This was found to be a comparatively easy task, because the debris, which had been a pain in the ash and  had caused such death and destruction was light and not compacted. During the first phase, the excavation was carried out essentially in order to find art objects. Many artifacts considered suitable for the private collection of the Bourbon king Charles III who reigned 1759-88 were removed, and transported to Naples - where they remain to this day, displayed in the Museo Nazionale. 

            1830-Tuesday-  Fayette Township, New York, Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon religion, organized the Church of Christ of the Latter-day Saints during a meeting with a small group of fifty five  believers.

                1841-Tuesday- John Tyler was sworn in as the new president. Tyler was elected as William Harrison’s vice president in the fall of 1840.He was suddenly thrust into the role of president when Harrison, 68, went kaput from pneumonia one month into office after his brilliant idea of delivering a 3 hr. inauguration speech in the cold rain. Tyler was the first vice president to immediately assume the role of president after a sitting president’s untimely exit and set the precedent for presidential succession.  He did not have a Vice President, because no provisions had been made in the Constitution for one. In fact, many tried to claim that Tyler was actually only "Acting President." He fought against this perception and won legitimacy.

            1852-Tuesday- Edward Sabine, Irish astronomer, scientist, ornithologist and explorer,  announced that the 11 year sunspot cycle was "absolutely identical" with the geomagnetic cycle. The geomagnetic cycle is variations in the natural magnetic field measured at the Earth's surface. The geomagnetic cycle is also responsible for the Numericallus Clueless virus that results in the bizarre behavior of people who bring massive amounts of items to the “10 or Less” express line in stores.

            1862 –Sunday- The beginning of the Battle of Shiloh as Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnson's surprise attack on the Union forces led by Ulysses S. Grant initially looked like a victory for the South. Late in the afternoon, Johnson was shot in the leg. Too involved with parries and thrusts and encircling flanks, he failed to notice the bleeding through his boot and subsequently bled to death. General Pierre Beauregard took over leadership and failed to follow up the initial successes thus giving Grant and his chief aide, William T. Sherman a chance to rally their forces. Union reinforcements arrived the next day resulting in a Confederate withdrawal. This bloody battle shocked the country (North and South) and made the human destruction by the war a reality for both sides.

            1869-Tuesday- Same month (different year) as the British Museum - The American Museum of Natural History in New York City was officially created with the signing of a bill by the Governor of New York, John Thompson Hoffman. All visitors immediately went to see the giant blue whale, then the dinosaurs, and then the gift shop, and then the restrooms.

            1869- Tuesday- Same day as the creation of the American Museum of Natural History, celluloid was the first plastic to be patented.  John Wesley Hyatt was the inventor and the initial use was for making dental plates – which didn’t last long since heat softened the celluloid and drinking tea became an adventure…plus the camphor taste tended to overshadow the tea taste.  An Englishman named Alexander Parkes had developed a "synthetic ivory" named "pyroxlin," which he marketed under the trade name "Parkesine," and which won a bronze medal at the 1862 World's Fair in London.  Parkesine was made from cellulose treated with nitric acid and a solvent.  However products made from Parkesine quickly warped and cracked after a short period of use (sort of like a contemporary rock star).  Parkes had failed due to a lack of a proper solvent, but Hyatt discovered that camphor would do the job. It made him a “happy camphor”.   Since cellulose was the main constituent used in the synthesis of his new material, Hyatt named it "celluloid."  It was introduced in 1863. Celluloid's real breakthrough products were waterproof shirt collars, cuffs, and the false shirt fronts known as "dickies," whose unmanageable nature later became a stock joke in silent-movie comedies. Speaking of movies, by 1900 Hyatt had figured out how to make celluloid into a strip for movie film.  One of the few products still made of celluloid is the  ping pong ball. Your serve.   

            1869-Tuesday – Wow! What a day! And on the same day as the two items above, the brouhaha over the invention of roller skates rolled on as Isaac Hodgson received a patent for his "roller skate." The earliest known type, using two large wheels on each skate was invented by a Belgian (there’s those Belgians again), Joseph Merlin, in 1759. In England, Robert John Tyers, patented his Volitos, in 1823 which he called an "apparatus to be attached to boots ... for the purpose of traveling or pleasure." Volitos used five small wheels in a single line. Another American inventor, James L. Plimpton of New York, had a patent for four-wheeled roller skates in 1865. Of course the best roller skate story concerns the afore mentioned, Joseph Merlin, London instrument maker and inventor.  Merlin decided to attenda masquerade party wearing one of his new inventions, metal-wheeled boots. Seeking to make a grand entrance, he added the feat of playing the violin while rolling into the ballroom.  Unfortunately, he didn’t know how to stop.  Even more unfortunate was the very expensive wall length mirror in the ballroom. Poor Merlin had no chance of stopping and……

            1870-Wednesday-  Happy Birthday, Clarence McClung, American geneticist and paleontologist who discovered the role of chromosomes in sex determination in a species of grasshopper. Of course any criticism of his work on grasshoppers made him hopping mad.  From grasshoppers to mammals, (quite a leap) he was one of the first to deduce that chromosomes determine the sex of offspring. His 1901 hypothesis stated that that an extra, or accessory, chromosome was the determiner of sex. The discovery of the sex-determining chromosome provided some of the earliest evidence that a given chromosome carries a definable set of hereditary traits. This explains why so many people that you meet are idiots. Also, if your grandparents did not have children, it is unlikely that you will have children.

            1875 –Tuesday Alexander Graham Bell was granted the patent for the multiple telegraph, which sent two signals at the same time.  This also occurs frequently when people are dating. Bell's invention of the telephone developed out of his research into ways to improve the telegraph.     

            1889-Saturday- The Kodak Camera was placed on sale by George Eastman.  Cost was $32.50.  Actually, this was the Kodak II, a more consumer friendly gadget than the Kodak I, which was actually cheaper at $25.00.  Eastman’s goal was to simplify photography and make it available to everyone, not just trained photographers. In 1883, Eastman had announced the invention of photographic film in rolls. The Kodak camera was pre-loaded with enough film for 100 exposures (no need to worry about lining up the sprockets….a lifelong problem for Professor Sy Yentz prior to the development of digital cameras). The Kodak camera could easily be carried and handheld during its operation. The development process was a bit cumbersome, after all the shots were taken, the whole camera was returned to the Kodak company in Rochester, New York, where the film was developed, prints were made, new photographic film was inserted, and then the camera and prints were returned to the customer.  Whew!

            1895-Saturday- Having lost the libel case that he thought was a sure winner,  Irish writer Oscar Wilde was arrested after losing his libel case against the Marques of Queensberry. See April 5. Homosexuality was classified as a crime in England at the time, and Wilde was arrested, found guilty, and sentenced to two years of hard labor.

            1896 –Monday-After a 1,500 year interlude, after being banned by Roman Emperor Theodosius I,  the Olympic Games, a tradition of ancient Greece, were re-started  in Athens, Greece.  The first events were held on this day. Roman Emperor Theodosius I had ended them in 393 A.D. At the opening of the Athens Games, 280 participants from 13 nations competed in 43 events, including track-and-field, swimming, gymnastics, cycling, wrestling, weightlifting, fencing, shooting, and tennis. The track-and-field events were held at the Panathenaic Stadium, which was originally built in 330B.C. Unlike the original games, athletes wore clothing this time.        

            1909-Tuesday- After 23 years of trying, Robert C. Peary and Matthew Hensen became the first men to reach the North Pole. They discovered a right jolly old elf and they laughed when they saw him in spite of themselves.  Later, one Dr. Frederick A. Cook challenged their claim of being the first to reach the North Pole. Cook claimed he had already reached the pole by dogsled the previous year. A major contretemps followed, and in 1911 the scientific geniuses of  the U.S. Congress formally recognized Peary's claim. In recent years, further studies of the conflicting claims suggest that neither expedition reached the exact North Pole, but that Peary and Henson came far closer, falling perhaps 30 miles short. On May 3, 1952, U.S. Lieutenant Colonel Joseph O. Fletcher of Oklahoma stepped out of a plane and walked to the precise location of the North Pole, the first man to undisputedly do so.

            1912-Saturday- The electric starter first appeared in cars.  Charles Kettering had invented the first practical electric automobile starter. Kettering's invention made gasoline-powered autos more user-friendly to consumers by eliminating the unwieldy hand crank starter and ultimately helped pave the way for the electric car's demise.  Considering today’s global climate crisis and energy costs, few knew the long range and ultimately devastating effects of this simple convenience.

           1920 –Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, Edmund H. Fischer, American biochemist, born in Shanghai, China who was the co-recipient with Edwin G. Krebs of the 1992 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries concerning reversible phosphorylation, (say it fast, three times)  a biochemical mechanism that governs the activities of cell proteins. The discovery was a key to unlocking how glycogen (a storage form of glucose in the body) in the body breaks down into glucose (a simple sugar that is a major energy source for all cellular and bodily functions). It fostered the techniques that prevent the body from rejecting transplanted organs.

            1928 –Friday- Happy Birthday, James D. Watson, American geneticist and biophysicist who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins – but not Rosalind Franklin) for the discovery of "the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material." Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is the substance contained in cells that controls heredity. The X-ray crystallography experiments of Franklin and Wilkins provided much information about DNA - in particular that DNA was a molecule in which two "strands" formed a tightly linked pair. Crick and Watson made the intuitive leap: in 1953, they proposed that the structure of DNA was a winding helix in which pairs of bases (adenine paired with thymine and guanine paired with cytosine) held the two strands together. Franklin died in 1958.  The Nobel is not awarded posthumously.  No more than three recipients can share the prize.  Had Franklin live, who would have been the three?

             1930-Sunday- An important date for Professor Sy Yentz and his presentations (see http://sciencegnus.com/Twinkies.pdf

             Hostess Twinkies were invented by bakery executive James Dewar. 

           1938 – Teflon was accidentally discovered by Du Pont researcher Roy J. Plunkett and his technician Jack Rebok. Actually they discovered the chemical compound polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) but polytetrafluoroethylene proved to be a bit of a tongue twister so  it was later marketed as Teflon. They  found an apparently defective cylinder of perfluoroethylene gas. Since no pressure was found when the valve was opened, even though the cyclinder weight was the same as full cylinders, they decided to saw it open to investigate. They found a slippery white powder. Plunkett found it had unusual properties, a wonderful solid lubricant in powdered form which was chemically inert and had a very high melting point (sounds a bit  like Senator Charles Schumer). Think about it the next time you use a Teflon pan to cook with.

            1947 - Named for Antoinette Perry, an actress, director, producer, and the wartime leader of the American Theatre Wing who had recently passed away, the Tony Awards made their official debut at a dinner in the Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria hotel on Easter Sunday, April 6, 1947. Originally they were only awarded to people named Tony. No, actually, the awards are for Broadway productions and performances. They are also famous for the televised awards show which is watched by no one. Since they keep coming up with new categories, it’s all very confusing but winners get a boost at the box office so they must be important. The first winners were 1947 Actors (Dramatic) Winner - José Ferrer (Cyrano de Bergerac) and Fredric March (Years Ago), actresses (Dramatic) Winner - Ingrid Bergman (Joan of Lorraine) and Helen Hayes (Happy Birthday).  There was no award for Best Play but the Director Winner was Elia Kazan (All My Sons)    

            1950 - A train fell off a bridge in Tangua, Brazil, killing 110 people. The train was filled with people vacationing over the Easter holidays. It had gone almost 60 miles when it approached the bridge over the Indios River. The river, swollen from days of torrential rains in the area, had undermined the bridge’s foundation.  There was no warning system to stop the train from attempting to cross the bridge. As it was about halfway across, the locomotive and five cars went into the river. The remaining 17 cars somehow managed to stay on the tracks despite the connected cars being dragged into the river.

            1954- Speaking of chemical food products with the Twinkies (see 1930), the TV Dinner was first put on sale by Swanson & Sons. Note; considering the size of the chemical content, some of these may still found in your local supermarket.  The first TV dinner featured turkey, corn bread dressing and gravy, buttered peas and sweet potatoes. It cost 98 cents and came in a box resembling a TV.  In 1962 they stopped calling them TV Dinners and reverted to “nuclear waste”.

            1955- It was confirmed that Jupiter emitted radio waves.  They were discovered by Bernard F. Burke and Kenneth L. Franklin, astronomers at the Carnegie Institution in Washington. The waves sounded a bit like the bombastic screeching of Mariah Carey murdering a ballad, no, no, no Professor Sy Yentz has his music critic sense of humor, actually they resembled short bursts of static, similar to the interference on home radios caused by lightning. This was the first time radio waves were detected from any planet in our solar system.

            1957 – Happy Birthday, Paolo Angelo Nespoli, Italian astronaut. On October 23, 2007 he was a member of the crew onboard STS-120, Discovery, to the International Space Station. This was  the Space Shuttle mission which delivered the Harmony module to the International Space Station.

            1957 – On the day astronaut Paolo Nespoli was born, New York City saw its final trolley car run.  The city  began phasing out trolley operations in the 1930s. Abraham Brower established New York City's first public transportation route in 1827, a 12-seat stagecoach called "Accommodation" that ran along Broadway from the Battery to Bleecker Street.  Toward the end of the century, electricity led to the development of electric trolley cars, which soon replaced horses. Trolley bus lines, also called trackless trolley coaches, used overhead lines for power. They first served Staten Island in the 1920s and were part of Brooklyn's surface transit for three decades, beginning in 1930. However, motor buses had completely replaced New York City public transit trolley cars and trolley buses by 1956 and 1960, respectively and now horses pull tourists in carriages around central park.

            1963 –Saturday-  The Kingsmen recorded their seminal version of the song Louie Louie. The original Louie Louie was written in 1955 by Richard Berry and released as a single in 1957 on Flip Records as Berry recorded it with The Pharaohs, (no, not Sam the Sham’s Pharoahs).  The Kingsmen originally hated the original recording and were equally disgusted when they discovered they had to pay the $50 recording fee. Louie Louie is legend. The mumbled lyrics made it the subject of obscenity investigations by the FBI and the FCC, culminating in an airwave ban in the state of Indiana.

With the exception of Paul McCartney's "Yesterday," it's been covered more times than any other pop song (over 1,000 versions and counting). http://www.louielouie.net/06-history.htm  

Louie Louie, oh no
Me gotta go
Aye-yi-yi-yi, I said
Louie Louie, oh baby
Me gotta go
Fine little girl waits for me
Catch a ship across the sea
Sail that ship about, all alone
Never know if I make it home

Louie Louie, oh no
Me gotta go
Aye-yi-yi-yi, I said
Louie Louie, oh baby
Me gotta go

            1965 - Launch of Early Bird, the first communications satellite to be placed in synchronous orbit. A synchronous orbit is a circular orbit around the equator, at a distance of 6.6 Earth radii. At this distance the orbital period is 24 hours, keeping the satellite "anchored" above the same spot on Earth. This makes the synchronous orbit useful for communication satellites: a satellite transmitting TV programs to the US, for instance, will always be in touch with the US if "anchored" above it, and receiving antennas will only need to point to a fixed spot in the sky.  This enables people to watch increasingly stupid and insipid television shows…….or be put to sleep by C-Span.

            1966- The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini had its world premiere. The “beach party”  movies had jumped the shark with Pajama Party.  Some say they jumped the shark with the first movie, but this one killed the franchise.  It was somewhere south of treacle.  Frankie and Annette had more common sense so the movie starred Disney reject Tommy Kirk, Deborah Walling, Nancy Sinatra – couldn’t sing and the movie proved she couldn’t act either- and featured the sadly used and fading fast, Francis X. Bushman, Boris Karloff, and Basil Rathbone. The series began in 1963 with Beach Party and then followed with, Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Beach, Pajama Party,   Beach Blanket Bingo, and this nail in the coffin.

            1973 – Pioneer 10 had been launched to explore the Solar System. On this day, Pioneer 11 was launched to explore Jupiter and Saturn.  Pioneer 11 reached Jupiter in December 1974, following Pioneer 10, which flew by the planet a year earlier. It came in under the giant planet's south pole and skimmed within 42,800 km (26,600 miles) of Jupiter's cloud tops. In 1990 Pioneer 11 became the fourth spacecraft to journey beyond the Solar System, heading in the same direction that the Sun moves through interstellar space. The last communication was received from Pioneer 11 on Nov. 30, 1995; its electric power source was exhausted, it could no longer operate any of its experiments or point its antenna toward Earth. Pioneer 11 is headed in the direction of the constellation Aquila and may pass relatively near Lambda Aquila in about 4 million years. More immediately, Pioneer 11 will achieve its first stellar encounter of sorts when it passes about 1.65 light-years (0.51 parsec) from the red dwarf AC +79° 3888 in the year 42,405 AD. We can hardly wait.

            1983 - Interior Secretary James Watt banned the Beach Boys from the 4th of July celebration on the Washington Mall, saying rock 'n' roll bands attract the "wrong element." When contacted about the wrong element, deceased Russian chemist Dimitri Mendeleev, who developed the periodic table of elements, said that it must be cadmium, which gives off a weird, yellow-colored vapor that is poisonous when it is boiled.

            1985 –Saturday- William J. Schroeder became the first artificial heart recipient to be discharged from the hospital. His health insurance coverage had run out and as he was wheeled on a gurney out of the hospital while adorned in open backed gown and attached to several machines to be sent to Prompt Care center, he took off his oxygen mask and protested that in fact he had six months worth of coverage………

             1993- In Russia, a huge radioactive cloud was released from an explosion of a tank of radioactive waste at the secret military facility at Tomsk 7 located in the Russian wilderness, 1700 miles east of Moscow, it was the worst nuclear accident, though not the only one (they do try to keep things secret over there) since the disaster at Chernobyl in Apr 1986. As a result of this radioactive cloud activity, Russia was infected with the dread disease Puttanessca in which  all Russian children will look like Vladamir Putin.

            2009 –Sunday-  3:32 AM, A 6.3-magnitude earthquake centered at  local capital L'Aquila, about 60 miles (96 kilometers) northeast of Rome killed scores of people.  Weeks before the disaster, an Italian scientist had predicted a major quake around L'Aquila, based on concentrations of radon gas around seismically active areas. Seismologist Gioacchino Giuliani was reported to police for "spreading alarm" and was forced to remove his findings from the internet. Italy's Civil Protection Agency reassured locals at the end of March that tremors being felt were "absolutely normal" for a seismic area. The quake was the latest and strongest in a series to hit the L'Aquila area. Earthquakes can be particularly dangerous in parts of Italy because so many buildings are centuries-old. About 2,700 people died in an earthquake in the south in 1980.  

Back To Calendar

7.       

529 –Thursday-  Part one of the Corpus Juris Civilis the most comprehensive code of Roman law and the basic document of all modern juris prudence ….. Dear Prudence, won't you come out to play?
Dear Prudence, greet the brand new day
The sun is up, the sky is blue
It's beautiful and so are you
Dear Prudence, won't you come out to play?..... It was compiled by order of Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Emperor Justinian I.  The first three parts appeared between 529 and 535 and they  were the work of a commission of 17 jurists presided over by the eminent jurist and questor, Tribonian. The Corpus Juris was an attempt to systematize Roman law, to reduce it to order after over 1,000 years of development.

            1770 –Saturday- Happy Birthday, William Wordsworth,  English poet from the Lake District (northwest England) and  one of the founders of the Romantic school of poetry.  Wordsworth lived with his sister Dorothy and developed a close working partnership with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Together they published Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems in 1798, and before you can say iambic pentameter,  the Romantic movement was launched. The book, included Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey.         The collaboration of the two poets was analogous to  the doo wop album The Paragons Meet the Jesters of 1959.

            1794-Monday-Chemist Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), discoverer of oxygen, although we note the ill-fated and kaput Karl Scheele of Sweden had discovered it but not published his discovery, in 1772-  left England for good and traveled to the United States and his new home in Northumberland Pa. . The previous year, on July 14, 1791, his laboratory, home and library were burned to destruction by a mob of people angry at his support of the French Revolution. His French colleague, the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, was kaputed via guillotine a week after Priestly left England. On arrival in the hot Spring Break town of Northumberland, Priestly was offered various positions, including that of the presidency of the University of Pennsylvania, lead anchor on the NBC Nightly News, and the opportunity to open for Bruce Springsteen, all of which he declined, but he did pass on much of his experimental techniques to American chemists and preached from time to time. President John Adams was among those who attended his sermons, and George Washington made him a welcome visitor to his home.

            1805 – Sunday-“ Goodbye”.  “Don’t forget to send post cards”.  “Can you get me a t shirt and a refrigerator magnet?” After a long winter, …..it was North Dakota for crying out loud! …..the Lewis and Clark expedition left its camp among the Mandan Indians, where they had built Fort Mandan and resumed the journey West along the Missouri River. The Corps of Discovery had begun its trek the previous spring.  They would spend the winter of 1805-06 along the Pacific Coast, and Lewis did not finally meet with Thomas Jefferson in Washington, D.C., until January 1, 1807.

            1805 –Sunday- Meanwhile,  the public debut of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, (Eroica) Op. 55, in E-flat Major at the Theater-an-der- in Vienna. The musical work is considered to be the end of the Classical Era and the beginning of musical Romanticism. Beethoven is currently decomposing.

            1809-Friday-  Happy Birthday, James Glaisher, English meteorologist and aeronaut. Between 1862-66, he made numerous balloon ascents. The object was to carry out scientific observations such as the variation in temperature and humidity of the atmosphere at high elevations. On September 5, 1862, ascending from Wolverhampton, England Glaisher and his companion attained the greatest height that had then been reached by a balloon carrying passengers. Unfortunately, the exact altitude at the highest point is unknown because Glaisher lost consciousness and was therefore unable to read the barometer. But Glaiser assured everyone “it was really really high, the people looked like ants”.  Actually, estimates were 7 miles which is pretty darned high.

            1827-Saturday- "Truth is stranger than friction." John Walker, an English pharmacist, recorded his first sale of the friction matches he had invented the previous year. Like many scientific discoveries, his had been accidental. While trying to produce a readily combustible material for fowling-pieces (a kind of scattergun or shotgun).  His first match was the wooden stirring stick he used in a mixture of potash and antimony (note: antimony is the opposite of unclemony) . To remove a blob on the end of the stick, he had scraped it on the stone floor, and poof, it ignited. He never patented the invention, and his production was limited to a sideline of his pharmacy business. “Matches? Matches? We don’t need no stinking matches.”  Small phosphorus matches were first marketed in Germany in 1832, but they were extremely hazardous and consequently exciting as they showed a  tendency to blow up in the person’s face. In 1836 in the United States, Alonzo D. Phillips of Springfield, Massachusetts, obtained a patent for "manufacturing of friction matches" and called them “locofocos.” The blowing up in your face problem was not resolved until the invention of amorphous (red) phosphorus in 1845. Carl Lundstrom of Sweden introduced the first red phosphorus "safety" matches in 1855. Cigar smoker, Joshua Pusey invented book matches in 1889.

            1860-Saturday- Happy Birthday to a flaky guy, W.K, Kellogg, American industrialist and philanthropist who founded the W.K. Kellogg Company to manufacture cereal products as breakfast foods. He was a serial cereal producer. Along with his brother John Harvey,  Kellogg developed and promoted eating cereal as healthy breakfast food, especially corn flakes which he invented in 1894.  In 1906 he founded the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company which later became the Kellogg Company. And thus Michigan became famous for cars and breakfast cereal.

            1866-Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Erik Fredholm, presented by Professor Sy Yentz as another of the mathematicians who were obviously very important but the Professor has no idea what any of this means. Fredholm was a Swedish mathematician who is remembered for “Fredholm integral equations” with applications in mathematical physics and actuarial science. His first paper, published in 1890, was on a special class of functions inspired by the heat equation. His 1898 doctoral dissertation involved a study of partial differential equations motivated by an equilibrium problem in elasticity. Fredhlom also had a career in actuarial science - Actuarial science applies mathematical and statistical methods to finance and insurance, particularly to risk assessment. - From 1902 on he studied various questions in this area, including an elegant formula he proposed to determine the surrender value of a life insurance policy. He built a machine to solve differential equations. He also liked to watch the daytime television judge shows because he thought they were real judges.

            1873 –Monday-  Happy Birthday, John (Mugsy) McGraw American baseball player and manager of the New York Giants from 1902 – 1932.  McGraw had also been with the Baltimore Orioles when they were in the National League and then Baltimore when it was in the American League.  In fact, in a way he contributed to the creation of the New York Yankees when  in 1902 he left Baltimore for the New York Giants and took all the best players with him.  The Baltimore team was disbanded and re-created in 1903 as the New York Highlanders, later to become the Yankees. (Can you tell that Professor Sy Yentz is a Yankee fan?)

            1906- Saturday- Mount Vesuvius erupted…..again.  The eruptive column of ash and gas reached a height of 13,000 meters. The eruption lasted through the rest of April. During this the eruption the top of Vesuvius was truncated and formed a huge crater with a diameter of approximately 500 m and a depth of 250 m. As always with volcanic eruptions, it was a pain in the ash.  Vesuvius is a composite volcano, made up of alternate layers of ash and lava. Composite volcanoes normally have two different kinds of eruptions. One kind produces mostly ash and cinders. The other kind produces lava. In Vesuvius these two types of eruption have not been seen to happen together but Vesuvius will get you either way.

           1911-Friday-  Happy Birthday, Kenneth Oakley, English physical anthropologist, geologist, and paleontologist who exposed the fraud known as the “Piltdown Man.” The Piltdown Man, “discovered” in 1912 in Piltdown, England was allegedly the “missing link” in human evolution.  Oakley had developed a method to date fossils bones (using  this process we know the correct age of Senator Robert Byrd of Virginia), by measuring their fluoride levels. With his fluoride and other tests he proved the true age of the bones to be a modern human braincase and an orangutan jawbone. So actually, the Piltdown man was actor Mickey Rourke.  The bones of the forgery had been chemically stained to appear ancient.

            1915-Wednesday-  Them that's got shall get
Them that's not shall lose
So the Bible said and it still is news
Mama may have, Papa may have
But God bless the child that's got his own
That's got his own …..Happy Birthday, Billie Holiday, “Lady Day”, born Eleanora Fagan on April in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who was one of the great American blues/jazz singers. Among her many great recordings were; God Bless' The Child, There'll Be Some Changes Made, Fine And Mellow and Strange Fruit.

                1922 – During the incompetent, scandal filled administration of Warren G. Harding (cut short by his kapution in 1923), the Teapot Dome Scandal was on of the crooked highlights.  Teddy Roosevelt had established the conservation movement in the West. One of the politicians who opposed the conservation was Senator Albert B. Fall of New Mexico, who became Warren Harding's Secretary of the Interior in 1921. On this day, Fall convinced Secretary of the Navy Edwin Denby to turn the control of the Teapot Dome oil fields in Wyoming over to him. Fall then moved to lease the Teapot Dome to Harry Sinclair's Mammoth Oil Company and the Elk Hills reserve to Edward Doheny's Pan American Petroleum Company. In return for leasing these oil fields to the respective oil magnates Fall received "gifts" from the oilmen totaling about $400,000 – an American tradition continued to this day.

            1927 –Thursday-  A precursor to television took place as the first simultaneous telecast of image and sound took place. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover (elected president the following year) read a speech in Washington, D.C., which was transmitted to Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York City, where an audience saw and heard a tiny televised image of Hoover, less than 3 inches square. How much of the “audience” was actually able to see a 3” screen is open to debate.  It would be like showing your cell phone pictures in an auditorium. Comments ranged from “gee, how did they get him in there”, to “must be PBS, there’s no commercials”.

            1933 –Friday- Another “Nanny State” failure as Prohibition in the United States came to an end. On March 23rd, Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed  the Cullen-Harrison Act which legalized the manufacture and sale of certain alcohol, 3.2% alcohol by weight, Eight months later, on December 5th, prohibition was repealed with the 21st amendment. The boom era for the gangster industry began on January 16, 1919, the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified. Exactly one year later (January 16, 1920), this Amendment went into affect, making the manufacture, sale, and transportation of liquor illegal and beginning Prohibition in the United States.  Today's historians argue the evidence from the "noble experiment" affirms sound economic theory, which predicts prohibition of any mutually beneficial exchange is doomed to fail.

            1933 – Friday – “It was beauty killed the beast”. The world premiere of King Kong……the original King Kong. Starring Faye Ray, Robert Armstrong, and Bruce Cabot (actually King Kong gets billing too as the Eighth Wonder of the World), and directed by Merion C. Cooper, the movie was a huge hit, remained a huge hit and inspired another King Kong in 1976 and yet another King Kong (Peter Jackson spending some of his Lord of the Rings money) in 2005.  We also had Mighty Joe Young, Son of Kong, and King Kong vs. Godzilla. For the original, we note that the models of King Kong built for the island scenes were only 18 inches high. When director Cooper decided Kong needed to look bigger while in New York, a new 24-inch armature was constructed, thus changing Kong's film height from 18 feet on the island to 24 feet while in New York, thanks IMBd.  The body count is 40….not counting dinosaurs.  Our favorite quote:

Captain translates Native Chief's comments on Ann Darrow (Fay Wray)

Captain Englehorn: He says, "Look at the golden woman."

Carl Denham: Yeah, blondes are scarce around here.

            1940 –Sunday-  Booker T. Washington became the first African American to be honored with a postage stamp. The ten cent stamp is one of only five in the Famous American Educator Series.  The others are: Horace Mann, Mark Hopkins, Charles Eliot and Francis Willard.

            1945-Saturday-  The Japanese battleship, Yamato, the largest battleship of all time, displacing 72,000 tons – by comparison the U.S Iowa class battleships displaced 58,000 and the German Bismarck, 45,000 tons – was sunk by US planes as it attempted to prevent the attack on Okinawa.  The sister ship of the Yamato, the Musashi, was sunk during the Battle of the Sibuyan Sea in 1944.

            1946- Sunday- The World Health Organization (WHO) was confirmed as a U.N agency. In 1945, three physicians, Drs. Szeming Sze of China, Karl Evang of Norway, and Geraldo de Paula Souza of Brazil, proposed the formulation of a single health organization that would address the health needs of the world's people. Their joint declaration to establish an international health organization was approved when the constitution of the WHO was adopted in 1946

         1949 – The Broadway premiere of Rogers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific.  It won ten Tony Awards, including all four acting awards, and many of its songs have been much acclaimed, including, Some Enchanted Evening, I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair, Happy Talk, Bali Ha'i, Younger than Springtime, and I'm in Love with a Wonderful Guy. It inspired a 1958 film adaptation and has enjoyed numerous successful revivals on  Broadway, amateur theater groups, D list theater groups (like the ones that play Pocono Playhouse) and high school productions. The original production starred Mary Martin (pre Peter Pan) and opera star Ezio Pinza. It was directed by Joshua Logan.

            1963 –Sunday-  Getting bored with running for re-election and inspired by Communist dictators all over the world, Joseph Broz Tito was proclaimed to be the leader of Yugoslavia for life. That life would end with his going kaput in 1980.  The country that he kept together did not outlive him by much more than a decade. Croatian nationalists won the first free elections in their province in April and May 1990, and the independence of Croatia was proclaimed on June 25, 1991, touching off a series of civil wars that left Yugoslavia a rump of Serbia and Montenegro.

            1969 –Monday- Not by C-Section but by the publication of the first “request for comments,” or RFC, documents gave birth to the internet. This day is often cited as a symbolic birth date of the net because the RFC memoranda contain research, proposals and methodologies applicable to internet technology. One interesting aspect of the RFC is that each document is issued a unique serial number. An individual paper cannot be overwritten; rather, updates or corrections are submitted on a separate RFC. The result is an ongoing historical record of the evolution of internet standards including a list of winners of the Nigerian Lottery. Although, in the frequently fuzzy world of the internet, when it comes to the birth of the net, Jan. 1, 1983, also has its supporters. On that date, the National Science Foundation’s university network backbone, a precursor to the World Wide Web, became operational.

            1970 –Tuesday- Fill your hand you son of a bitch….. John Wayne won his only Academy Award, Best Actor in the film, True Grit. Directed by Henry Hathaway and co-starring Kim Darby, Glen Campbell, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, Strother Martin, great western villain, John Doucette, and Alfred Ryder the film was Wayne’s last best shot at an Academy Award. Glen Campbell?  Wayne liked to stick popular singers in his movies.  See, Ricky Nelson as “Colorado” in Rio Bravo.

            1983 –Thursday-  Aboard the Challenger, STS 6, launched on April 4, Donald Peterson and Story Musgrave enjoyed the first space walk of the Shuttle program. It lasted about four hours, 17 minutes. It was scheduled to last only two hours but shuttle commander Paul Weitz and pilot Karel Bobko refused to let them back in until they remembered the secret password.

            1990 –Saturday-  Incredibly, two fatal ferry accidents occurred on the same day in two different continents.  The first took place in Burma (Myanmar) on the Gyaing River. as a  double-decker ferry traveling from Moulmein to Kyondo was carrying approximately 240 passengers and crew through a violent storm with very strong winds. The ferry capsized and many of the people on board were trapped underwater. An estimated 215 of the ferry’s 240 passengers went kaput. On the night of that same day, the Scandinavian Star, a Danish-owned vessel, was making its maiden voyage.  It was carrying 493 passengers and their cars and trucks from Oslo, Norway, to Frederikshaven, Denmark.  Fire broke out on board. Smoke detectors failed and no fire alarm was set off. The crew, most speaking only Portuguese, were not prepared for the emergency and were unable to communicate escape plans to the passengers. While some made it to lifeboats, panic ensued, and 110 died, mainly from smoke inhalation

            1994 –Thursday-  Hutus in Rwanda, having decided to kill all the Tutsis, killed 10 Belgian peacekeeping officers in a successful effort to discourage international intervention in the genocide that had begun only hours earlier. In approximately three months, the Hutus, who controlled Rwanda brutally murdered an estimated 500,000 to 1 million innocent civilian Tutsis in the worst episode of ethnic genocide since World War II.

            2000-Friday-   NASA launched the 2001 Mars Odyssey spacecraft on a Delta 2 rocket. Odyssey would travel 286 million miles before entering orbit around Mars on Oct. 24, 2001. Its primary mission was to look for water in the form of ice under the Martian surface and to create a thermal map of the planet but it actually discovered the source of the dreaded Earth disease Fastium Foodicus Fatticus and its aftereffect, Someonus Elsium Faltismo.

            2008 – Monday-  Note to the people who booed Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival when he broke out the electric guitar; Dylan was awarded an honorary Pulitzer Prize for his impact on music and culture.  There’s a bit of history at work here and the Gnus Research Department has collated the series of events; The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan saw that The Times They Are a-Changin' but it brought out Another Side of Bob Dylan and he was Bringing It All Back Home but then he packed for Highway 61 Revisited  and met a Blonde on Blonde  but lost her to John Wesley Harding on the Nashville Skyline.  He restored his self esteem with a Self Portrait on a New Morning but got dizzy watching Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid due to Planet Waves.  He left Blood on the Tracks and also on his The Basement Tapes. He was overcome with  Desire but kept it strictly Street Legal. He saw a Slow Train Coming and knew he would be Saved by a  Shot of Love  until Infidels ran amok at the Empire Burlesque and he was Knocked Out Loaded,  and toppled over backwards Down in the Groove and finally cried, Oh Mercy  while looking up Under the Red Sky . Eventually, the Pulitzer Prize folks decided that since he was as Good as I Been to You and had comforted a World Gone Wrong  since Time Out of Mind through "Love and Theft" until Modern Times, they would be Together Through Life.

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8.    

563 B.C –Friday- Happy Birthday, Buddha as Buddhists celebrate the commemoration of the birth of Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism, who lived in India from 563 B.C. to 483 B.C. Actually, the Buddhist tradition that celebrates his birthday on April 8 originally placed his birth in the 11th century B.C., and it was not until the modern era that scholars determined that he was more likely born in the sixth century B.C., and possibly in May rather than April but, hey, it’s sometime during the spring.

            217 –Tuesday-  Roman Emperor Caracalla, one of the more odious on the list of Roman emperors, was kaputed.  Caracalla had slewn his brother, Geta to capture the throne. His death was, shall we say, less than heroic when Julius Martialis, an officer in the imperial bodyguard, kaputed the emperor on a journey between Edessa and Carrhae, when, unable to find a convenient port-o-san or rest stop,  he relieved himself out of sight from the other guards. Martialis himself was killed by the emperor's mounted bodyguard. But the mastermind behind the murder was the commander of the praetorian guard, Marcus Opelius Macrinus, who became, surprise! the future emperor.

            1525 –Wednesday-  On this day, just six years after Martin Luther had instigated the Protestant Reformation, Albert of Brandenburg  grand master of the Teutonic Knights first duke of Prussia, on the advice of Martin Luther he secularized the dominions of the Teutonic Knights and became duke of the hereditary duchy of Prussia . The knights' lands had been held as a fief from the king of Poland, and the new duchy remained under Polish suzerainty and Suzie was very please.  

            1732-Tuesday- Happy Birthday, David Rittenhouse, American astronomer, instrument maker and inventor, famous for being an early observer of the atmosphere of Venus. He found the interior décor to be too cloying, the color scheme didn’t match, and the sulfuric acid burned his lungs.  He was the first one in America to put a spider web as cross-hairs (having had a haircut that morning, he had lots of hairs to cross) in the focus of his telescope .  A clockmaker by trade, he developed great skill in the making of mathematical instruments. He was called upon to determine, with his own instruments, the boundary lines of several states and also part of the boundary of the good old Mason-Dixon Line between Pennsylvania and Maryland. In 1769 he was asked by the American Philosophical Society to observe the transit of Venus. He  was the first director of the United States Mint. Rittenhouse Square, one of the five original squares (it was originally called Southeast Square) in Philadelphia was named in his honor

            1766-Tuesday-  A good day for fire safety as the first patent was granted for a fire escape. The “fire escape” consisted of  a wicker basket on a pulley and a chain designed by a London watchmaker, David Marie. In 1879, also on the 8th of April, a fire escape ladder was patented by the American inventor, J R Winters in New York.  See below.

            1778 –Saturday-  John Adams arrived in Paris, France, on this day in 1778 to replace former Continental Congress member Silas Deane as a member of the American commission representing the interests of the United States. Deane had been accused of misappropriating funds and went into exile.  The charges were not true but he became a footnote in history although he does have a highway in Connecticut named after him.  

            1779-Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Johann Schweigger, German physicist who invented the galvanometer in 1820. Since a galvanometer is a device used to measure the strength of an electric curren, Schweigger developed the galvanometer as a tool for, yes,  measuring the strength and direction of electric current. Schweigger named this instrument in honor of Italian scientist Luigi Galvani. It was the first sensitive instrument for measuring and detecting small amounts of electricity. Yes, sensitive, but also strong and manly.

            1805-Monday-  Happy Birthday, Hugo von Mohl, German botanist who was the first to propose that new cells are formed by cell division. The previous belief was based on cell addition, then later cell subtraction but cells really needed a graphing calculator to do their division.  Yes, he believed “the Mohl the merrier.” He was an expert on microscopy and laid the foundation for later work on the structure of palms and cycads. His works include Principles of the Anatomy and Physiology of the Vegetable Cell

            1820 –“Ah, it has no arms.  We’ll never be able to sell it”.  The Venus de Milo was discovered on the Aegean island of Melos, also called Milo. The statue (of Aphrodite) was found in two pieces by a peasant named Yorgos. He hid it from the authorities but was later discovered by Turkish officials, who seized the sculpture. A French naval officer, Jules Dumont d'Urville, recognized its significance and arranged for a purchase by the French ambassador to Turkey, the Marquis de Riviere. After some repair work, like putting the two pieces back together, the statue was presented to King Louis XVIII in 1821. He eventually presented it to the Louvre museum. http://www.louvre.fr/llv/oeuvres/detail_notice.jsp?CONTENT%3C%3Ecnt_id=10134198673237785&CURRENT_LLV_NOTICE%3C%3Ecnt_id=10134198673237785&FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=9852723696500817&bmLocale=en

            1850-Monday- Happy Birthday William Welch, one of the founders of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.  Welch concentrated specifically on bacteriology and became one of the earliest proponents of this science in the United States. In 1884 Welch was appointed professor of pathology at Johns Hopkins Hospital and Medical School in Baltimore, which was then under construction. When the medical school opened in 1893, Welch was appointed dean of the medical faculty.

            1862-Tuesday- The first aerosol dispenser, an "improved bottle for aerated liquids" was patented in the U.S. by John D. Lynde of Philadelphia, Pa.  An aerosol dispenser allows a liquid substance to be sprayed from a container. Aerosol dispensers use a propellant, which is a vapor or a compressed gas, to push down on the container's contents, creating pressure on the liquid. When the valve is opened, the solution is forced up and out through a spray nozzle. in 1825, Charlie Plinth invented “The Regency Portable Fountain”, the first portable dispenser for soda water to dispense carbonated beverages using the gas (carbon dioxide) pressure.  An early soda siphon incorporating a valve was invented by  a gentleman named Perpigna.  In 1899, a pair of inventors named Helbling & Pertsch developed a method of pressurized aerosol delivery using gases as propellants.  We note that none of the aerosol history sites investigated by the Gnus found mention of John D. Lynde.  He comes up repeatedly in the Xeroxographic world of search engines where everyone copies everyone else’s entry.

            1868- Wednesday- Happy Birthday, Herbert Jennings, U.S. zoologist, one of the first scientists to study the behavior of individual microorganisms.  Poorly behaved microorganisms had TV privileges taken away and could be “grounded” for up to a week.  Some even had to write “I will not mutate” hundred times on the blackboard.

            1869-Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Harvey Williams Cushing, American surgeon, who was a pioneer of neurosurgery. Among his contributions to the practice of medicine were; the use of x-rays in surgical practice, physiological saline for irrigation (replaced the backhoe) during surgery, the discovery of the pituitary as the master hormone gland, founding the clinical specialty of endocrinology, the use of blood pressure measurement in surgical practice, and the physiological consequences of increased intracranial pressure and in his spare time…… He also performed the first brain surgery in the U.S. on Feb. 21, 1902. Actually, it was the second.  The first attempt was on newswoman Paula Zahn but no brain was found.

            1873-Tuesday-  The first commercially successful margarine manufacturing process was patented by Alfred Paraf of New York.  Unsuccessful margarine manufacturing ended up with margarine that needed to be cut with a chain saw, margarine that could be used as construction material, and margarine that grew to 10,000 ft. wide and attacked Tokyo.  When the success of margarine threatened butter sales, dairy farmers lobbied the legislatures and federal and state taxes were levied on it.

             1879- Tuesday- Milk was sold in glass bottles for the first time in the U.S. They were introduced by the Echo Farms Dairy Co. of Brooklyn, New York.  Previously milk was measured from barrels carried in milk wagons into pitchers brought by housewives and serving maids. Prior to that milk was sold by vendors who walked around with a shoulder yolk and dispensed milk to home owners. The Echo Farms bottles were based on a bottle patented on January 29, 1878 by George Lester of Brooklyn, New York and used by his business, the Lester Milk Company.  Most people consider this the first glass jar specifically designed to hold milk.

            1879 –Tuesday- And, on the same day, a "Fire Escape Ladder" was patented by black American inventor, Joseph.R. Winters. It was  a wagon-mounted fire escape ladder for the city of Chambersburg, PA.

            1886-Thursday- German scientist, Dr. Carl Gassner, was issued a patent for the first "dry" cell, which used zinc as its primary ingredient. He encased the cell chemicals in a sealed zinc container for the other elements as well as for the negative electrode. The electrolyte was absorbed in a porous material and the cell was sealed across the top. This cell was easy to handle and portable. In fact,  became the prototype for the dry battery industry This 1886 battery was much like the carbon-zinc, general-purpose batteries sold today. In the U.S, in 1896, the Nation Carbide Company, later Union Carbide and Eveready, produced the first consumer dry cell battery. And since you asked……an example of a wet cell  battery would be a car battery.

            1893 –Saturday-  The first recorded college basketball game occured in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania when the Geneva College Covenanters defeated the New Brighton YMCA. Geneva College is a small, private, liberal arts located in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. The New Brighton YMCA’s starting five consisted of a construction worker, and Indian, a policeman, a cowboy and a soldier.  Play was continually disrupted as they stopped to sing and dance to

It's fun to stay at the Y-M-C-A.

It's fun to stay at the Y-M-C-A.

They have everything that you need to enjoy,

You can hang out with all the boys ...

            1899-Saturday-  Martha Place earned the dubious distinction of being the first woman to be electrocuted in the electric chair.  The electric chair had replaced hanging as a more humane method of enforcing the death penalty.  Nowadays prisoners are forced to watch 48 consecutive hours of The View and die screaming for mercy.  Martha was convicted of murdering her 17 year old step-daughter, Ida, by pouring acid in her mouth and then smothering her to death. Old Martha then attacked her husband with an axe.

            1947-Tuesday-  The largest recorded number of sunspots was observed.  A Clearasil rocket was immediately dispatched to clear up these unsightly blemishes.  Typically, a big sunspot can be two or three times the size of the entire surface area of the Earth. A sunspot is a cooler darker spot appearing periodically on the sun's photosphere; associated with a strong magnetic field.

            1953-Wednesday-  The first 3D motion picture produced and released by a major company as Man in the Dark, directed by Lew Landers, opened at the Globe Theater in New York City, starring Edmond O'Brien. Man in the Dark was a “noir” film. In the plot a  thug (Edmond O'Brien) is convicted and undergoes experimental brain surgery to remove the criminal element in his brain. The operation wipes out all memories of his past life, including, cleverly,  where he stashed the loot. He is abducted by his gang and they try to beat the truth out of him. His memories return in the form of weird dreams, and he and his old girlfriend (Audrey Totter) track down the clues to find the money. The next 3D feature movie, The House of Wax, (a horror film) was the first from a major company in color and it opened only two days later, at the Paramount Theater in NYC.

            1974-Monday-  Hank Aaron of the Atlanta Braves hit his 715th career home run, breaking New York Yankee Babe Ruth's legendary record of 714 homers. Aaron’s home run came off former Yankee, Al Downing. While a great hitter, Aaron’s record, like Pete Rose’s record for hits, was more a tribute to longevity than prowess. His season high was forty seven but he hit over forty home runs in eight seasons, and in  the thirties in seven seasons. He accomplished all of this without the assistance of performance enhancing drugs that could have turned him into a Michelin man with a gigantic head.

            1975 – Tuesday- Frank Robinson managed the Cleveland Indians in his first game as major league baseball's first African American manager. A Yankee killer as a player, Robinson continued as manager, a playing manager to boot, he homered in his first at bat as the Indians beat the Yankees 5-3.

            1983 –Friday-  Danny and the Juniors kaput. Lead singer Danny Rapp was found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. He was 41. Danny and the Junior had one of the greatest of all rock n roll records, At the Hop in 1957.  They followed it up with Rock and Roll is Here to Stay – great title but basically At the Hop including piano intro all over again.  The kapution of Danny did not deter the Juniors as they continue to perform as Danny and the Juniors featuring Joe Terry.

            2008 –Tuesday-  The completion of the Bharain World Trace Center, the world's first building to integrate wind turbines.  Three wind turbine blades were successfully installed on the twin skyscraper complex. This was the first time that a commercial development has integrated large-scale wind turbines within its design to harness the power of the wind….although it did blow a lot of sand around but they’re used to that in Bahrain.

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9.        

193 –Tuesday-  Oh, it's a long, long while from May to December
But the days grow short when you reach Septimus…………Septimius Severus was proclaimed Roman Emperor by the army in Illyricum (in the Balkans). Not one of the prouder periods of Roman history as The assassination of Commodus, followed by the short reign of Pertinax and the auction of the empire to Didius Julianus, led to civil war (again)  and the rise of Septimius Severus. He was succeeded by his two sons, Geta and the rather hygienic Caracalla (see Baths of Caracalla).  Septimius is reported to have given his sons three pieces of advice: "Get along; pay off the soldiers; and disregard everyone else." The first piece of advice would not be heeded. Caracalla slew Geta and was in turn slewn himself while visiting the loo (actually some bushes) while travelling from Edessa to Carhhae in 217. Severus died in York on  February 4, 211 at the age of 65.

            1336 –Monday-  Happy Birthday, Tamerlane, Turkic ruler and conqueror, one of the greatest military campaigners in history, and the most influential Central Asian military leader of the Middle Ages. Tamerlane’s far-flung expeditions carried him from southern Russia to India, and from Central Asia to Turkey. He returned as a back up singer in 1963 on Barry and the Tamerlanes hit, I Wonder What She’s Doing Tonight

            1413 –Friday-  Henry V was crowned King of England. The House of Lancaster via John of Gaunt, one of the sons of Edward III begat Henry IV who usurped  and probably kaputed the hapless Richard II produced Henry’s son, Shakespeare’s “Prince Hal”. As victor of the Battle of Agincourt (1415, in the Hundred Years' War with France), he made England one of the strongest kingdoms in Europe. Henry V conquered most of Normandy from  the conspicuously inept French king Charles IV and was named heir to the French throne and regent of France in 1420 (under the Treaty of Troyes). He married Charles's daughter, Catherine de Valois (1421), and they had a son (the future Henry VI) before Henry went kaput of dysentery at age 34. He is buried in Westminster Abbey.

            1626-Thursday-  In an event too strange for even the Gnus to make up, Francis Bacon, English philosopher and scientist went kaput as a result of a chill he caught while trying to invent frozen food.  He stuffed a dead chicken with snow to see if cold would preserve its flesh.  He couldn’t chill the chicken but he ended up as frozen Bacon.  This was truly a fowl deed.          

            1682 –Thursday-  French explorer Rene Robert La Salle reached the Mississippi River.  LaSalle traveled down the Illinois River to the Mississippi and continued all the way south to the Gulf of Mexico. On this day La Salle claimed all of the Mississippi River Basin for France. That was a huge chunk of real estate because it included all the rivers and streams that feed into the Mississippi, and all of the land between including golf courses, country clubs, malls and waterfront condos.  In fact it includes much of the western part of North America. He named this area Louisiana in honor of the king. Later, in 1803, France sold this land to the United States as the Louisiana Purchase and that led to the explorations of Lewis and Clark and then the westward expansion of America.  Sadly, LaSalle was slewn in Texas in 1687 by three of his own men. 

            1770-Monday-  Happy Birthday Thomas Johan Seebeck, German physicist who discovered that an electric current flows between different conductive materials that are kept at different temperatures, known as the Seebeck effect.  Seebeck also made investigations into photoluminescence (the luminescent emission from certain materials excited by light…..aren’t we all excited by light?......Especially when they have those two for one sales of fluorescents), the heating and chemical effects of different parts of the solar spectrum, polarization, and the magnetic character of electric currents as well as the magnetic character of Regis Philbin.

            1794 – Happy Birthday- Theobald Boehm, Bavarian goldsmith, flutist, composer, and industrialist who invented the type of flute that became the basis for the modern instrument.  In  London in 1831 he constructed an experimental flute that gave the fingers new mechanical means to control holes placed beyond their reach. He refined the concept of his new flute in the following year, and the "ring-key" flute of 1832 was taken up by a few prominent performers in Paris and later officially adopted at the Brussels Conservatoire. Boehm devised a metal flute with a new cylindrical bore in 1847. Upon leaving home he flute the coop. http://www.flutehistory.com/Players/Theobald_Boehm/index.php3

            1806-Wednesday-  Happy Birthday, Isambard K. Brunel, English civil (he was very polite) and mechanical engineer. Brunel  designed the first transatlantic steamer, the Great Western.  In addition to ships, he designed and built bridges, dockyards, and viaducts. As Groucho Marx would say, “Viaduct?”

            1859 –Saturday-  Twenty three year-old Samuel Langhorne Clemens received his steamboat pilot's license. Clemens went on to greater fame as a writer known as Mark Twain. If you can’t fathom why he  took the name Mark twain, it means  the mark of two fathoms used when sounding river shallows. If you can’t fathom what a fathom is, it’s a unit of length equal to 6 feet (1.83 meters), used principally in the measurement and specification of marine depths.

                1860 –Monday- Au clair de la lune,
Mon ami, Pierrot,
Prete-moi ta plume
Pour ecrire un mot!
Ma chandelle est morte,
Je n'ai plus de feu;
Ouvre-moi ta porte,
Pour l'amour de Dieu. .....Jean Baptiste Lully………The oldest recording of the human voice - made 17 years before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph.  The 10-second recording is of a person singing a snippet of a French folk song, Au clair de la lune' and was recorded on by Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville.  Scott de Martinville used a device he he called a "phonautograph" that scratched sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp. However, unlike Edison, whose great achievement was to not only record but also play back the recording, Scott de Martinville was never able to hear what was traced on the smoked paper.  In 2008, record historian David Giovannoni of Derwood, Md., and an informal group of researchers known as First Sounds, uncovered the first cache of the recordings. In 2009  he played that recording of a young girl singing a 10-second snippet of the French folksong.  The B-side  was Play That Funky Music White Boy by Wild Cherry. They have since found some phonautograms dating to 1857 http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/44267/title/Earliest_known_sound_recordings_revealed

            1865 –Sunday- Won’t you please surrender to me
            Your lips, your arms, your heart, dear
            Be mine forever
            Be mine tonight  - Elvis
            The great Confederate General Robert E. Lee, surrounded by Grant’s forces and having had his supply line cut after the defeat at Five Forks, surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia and its remaining 28,000 soldiers to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, Appomattox, Virginia, effectively ending the Civil War.  The Gnus highly recommends, April 1865, The Month that Saved America by Jay Winik. The surrender took place in the parlor of William McClean's home. Grant allowed Rebel officers to keep their sidearms and permitted soldiers to keep their horses and mules. Though there were still Confederate armies in the field, the war was officially over. The four years of fighting had killed 360,000 Union troops and 260,000 Confederate troops. Ironically, the first Battle of Bull Run Because the first Battle of Bull Run, also known as the First Manassas, took place on July 21 1861……..and it was fought  on McLean’s farm. McLean

            1867 –Friday-  Passing by a vote of 37-2,  the United States Senate ratified a treaty with Russia for the purchase of Alaska.  Secretary of State William Seward of New York, had negotiated its purchase for $7.2 million, (plus an autographed picture of Mariah Carey, two season tickets for Seattle Mariners games, and a gift certificate to Crate and Barrel)  or about two cents per acre. Critics labeled the purchase "Seward's Folly." Congressional opposition delayed the appropriation until 1868, when extensive lobbying and bribes by the Russian minister to the U.S. secured the required votes.  Gee, some things never change do they?

            1872-Tuesday-  Dried milk was patented by Samuel R. Percy. He called it "Improvement in Drying and Concentrating Liquid Substances by Atomizing".  This must have sounded very appetizing on the container.  Actually, Marco Polo arrived in Mongolia in 1275 and stayed in Kublai Khan's court for 17 years. During this time, he made written records of how the Mongols used powdered milk.

            1881-Saturday-  I'll sing you a true song of Billy the Kid,
I'll sing of the desperate deeds that he did,
Way out in New Mexico, long long ago
When a man's only chance was his own 44.
When Billy the Kid was a very young lad
In the old Silver City he went to the bad
Way out in the West with a gun in his hand
At the age of twelve years he first killed his man…….Woody Guthrie…….After a one day trial, William H. Bonney, “Billy the Kid” was convicted of the murder of sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico.  The Kidster was sentenced to hang.  However, on April 28, in a scene right out of the movies, except there were no movies in 1881, Billy escaped after asking his two guards if he could use the outhouse.  A friend had probably hidden a gun there (see Michael Corleone in the Godfather) and Billy shot and killed both deputies.  He escaped but was slewn in June by Sheriff Pat Garrett (an old friend).

            1895-Tuesday- A spectrogram (a spectrogram is a graphic or photographic representation of the spectrum) made by American astronomer James Keeler proved that the rings of Saturn were indeed composed of meteoric particles, as predicted  in 1859 by James Maxwell in his riveting read,  On the Stability of the Motion of Saturn's Rings. Competing theories regarding the structure of the rings involved Play Doh, gefilte fish.  and  borax.

            1901-Tuesday-  If you’ve ever undergone physical therapy thank - Happy Birthday, Howard Rusk, American physician and founder of the science of rehabilitation medicine -physical therapy- which he established through efforts to rehabilitate wounded soldiers during and after WW II.  During his career he was variously, a consultant on rehabilitation to the Veterans Administration, the United Nations Secretariat, and the New York City Department of Hospitals, a member of the city's Board of Hospitals and president of the International Society for the Welfare of Cripples. Broken Bodies and Spirits and an advisor to nine Presidents, although Gerald Ford probably doesn’t count because he would have no idea what Rusk was talking about but he would have needed him because he fell down a lot.

            1903-Thursday-  Happy Birthday- Gregory Pincus, the American scientist whose discoveries led to the development of the first birth-control pills. In 1953, when Margaret Sanger (also famous or infamous for her belief in Eugenics) and Katharine McCormick went looking for a scientist to develop a birth control pill, they turned to Pincus for his expertise. . In 1955 two drug companies, Syntex and Searle, had each developed a form of synthetic progesterone. They allowed Pincus to explore use of this female hormone in his work and invent the birth control pill. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Searle's drug for contraceptive use in 1960.

            1905 –Sunday- In a trip that must have been a delight in February…..in Minnesota….., the first aerial car ferry was put in operation over the ship canal from Lake Avenue, Duluth, Minnesota, to Minnesota Point, Minnesota.  Lots of people wanted to visit Duluth. The car ferry  was suspended in the air from a superstructure that was 135 feet over Lake Superior. The aerial ferry spanned 393 feet in length and could accommodate six cars (probably the entire population of Minnesota at that point) and two glassed-in passenger cabins with a carrying capacity of 125,000 pounds. A round trip on the aerial car ferry from Duluth to Minnesota Point lasted 10 alarming, daunting minutes.

            1913 –Wednesday-  Ebbet’s field, at 55 Sullivan Place, Brooklyn New York,   home of the lamented and defunct Brooklyn Dodgers had it’s official opening. It    was built by Dodgers owner Charlie Ebbetts  who had risen through the organization from ticket seller to business manager.  He became the owner in     1902, buying the team from Harry von der Horst.  Built on the site of the Pigtown garbage dump at a cost of $750,000, approximately 11,000 fans who watched as the Philadelphia Phillies defeated the hometown Brooklyn Dodgers 1-0. Baseball's first televised baseball game was played on the field by the Dodgers on  August 26, 1939 against the Reds.  Jackie Robinson became the first black man in    the 20th century to play in Major League Baseball at Ebbet’s  on April 15, 1947.   http://www.baseball-statistics.com/Ballparks/LA/Ebbetts.htm

            1930 –Sunday- Happy Birthday-F. Albert Cotton, American chemist who  conducted important research into metal-metal-bonding. He found numerous compounds containing metal atom clusters with single bonds, and discovered the existence of double, triple and quadruple metal-metal bonds as well as James Bond. At one count there were there were 1,070 people in the U.S. named James Bond.

            1932 –Saturday-  Well, it's one for the money, two for the show
Three to get ready now go cat go
But don't you, step on my blue suede shoes
You Can do anything
But lay off of my blue suede shoes
You can knock me down, step on my face
Slander my name all over the place
Do anything that you wanna do
But uh uh honey lay off of my shoes
You can do anything

But lay off of my blue suede shoes Happy Birthday, Carl Perkins American singer who virtually defined and established rockabilly music in the rock and roll cannon. IMBd sourced the following anecdote, Perkins and good friend Johnny Cash gave each other the ideas for two of their biggest songs. Perkins got the inspiration to write his best known song, Blue Suede Shoes from Cash, who told Perkins stories of soldiers on leave while Cash was in the military who would start a fight with anyone who got near their blue suede shoes. Cash got the idea for I Walk the Line when Perkins commented on all the groupies that they had access to now that they were famous and Cash countered, "Not me, brother, I walk the line." Perkins immediately responded, "Hey, I walk the line...that would be a great title for a song."

            1939- Sunday- African American singer Marian Anderson performed at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C..  She had been s denied the use of Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution because of her race. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR in protest of its discriminatory leasing policies. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, at the instigation of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt offered her the Lincoln Memorial as the stage for her concert. On this  Easter Sunday,  the contralto stood at the feet of the statue of Abraham Lincoln and sang to an interracial crowd of over 75,000 people, the largest open-air assembly yet held in the nation's capital. Millions more heard her over a radio broadcast. Some featured songs included; Inna Gadda Da Vida, Don’t Worry Be Happy, Never Gonna Give You Up, and Who Let the Dogs Out?

            1940 –Tuesday-  In an invasion that may have occurred sooner except that they couldn’t figure out where Norway was…..after all, everyone gets the order of Norway, Sweden and Finland mixed up, Nazi Germany now invaded neutral Norway, a move that completely surprised the Norwegian and British defenders of the country.  The Nazis immediately captured several strategic points along the Norwegian coast. It was during the invasion's preliminary phase, that the term “Fifth Column” came into use as Norwegian Fascists under Vidkun Quisling (now a the eponymous synonym for traitorous weasel) acted as a so-called fifth column for the German invaders, seizing Norway's nerve centers, spreading false rumors, and occupying military bases and other locations. In June, Norway fell to the Nazis. Quisling would be executed in October 1945.

            1942 –Thursday-  The beginning of the Bataan Death March as Major General Edward P. King Jr. surrendered at Bataan, a province of the Philippines occupying the whole of Bataan Peninsula on Luzon------s--against General Douglas MacArthur's orders--and 78,000 troops (66,000 Filipinos and 12,000 Americans), the largest contingent of U.S. soldiers ever to surrender, were taken captive by the warm, cuddly, Japanese. The prisoners were immediately forced to walk 55 miles from Mariveles, on the southern end of the Bataan peninsula, to San Fernando, on what is now  known as the "Bataan Death March." At least 600 Americans and 5,000 Filipinos died because of the extreme brutality of the Japanese, who starved, beat, and kicked them. Those those who became too weak to walk were bayoneted. Those who survived were taken by rail from San Fernando to POW camps, where another 16,000 Filipinos and at least 1,000 Americans died from disease, torture mistreatment, and starvation.

            1952 –Wednesday-  The Los Angeles premiere of Singin’ in the Rain ( it premiered in New York on March 29 and nationally on April 11). Gene Kelly may still be post mortem soggy from the famous Singin in the Rain singing/dancing number. Generally recognized as one of the greatest movies of all time, directed by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, “the Singin' Swingin' Glorious Feelin' Technicolor Musical” starred Kelly, Donald O’Connor (it was customary to cast  Donald O’Connor in all late 40’s/early 50’s musicals), Debbie Reynolds, Cyd Charise, and a young Rita Moreno. The title song was originally created by lyricist Arthur Freed and composer Nacio Herb Brown for MGM's Hollywood Revue of 1929.. The general storyline of the film was derived from Once in a Lifetime, an adaptation of the Moss Hart-George S. Kaufman play also set during the time of panic surrounding Hollywood's transition to talkies.]

            1959-Thursday-  NASA announced the selection of America's first seven astronauts for project Mercury: Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard and Donald Slayton. Not, Doc, Sneezy, Happy, etc. The seven men had all served as military test pilots and were carefully selected from a group of 32 candidates to take part in Project Mercury, America's first manned space program. NASA planned to begin manned orbital flights in 1961.  This was the only astronaut group with members that flew on all classes of NASA manned spacecraft of the 20th century, from Mercury, through Gemini and Apollo, and ending with John Glenn's flight on the STS-95 Space Shuttle mission.

           1970 –Thursday- Paul McCartney quit the Beatles. In a case of “I quit, no you             quit, no….”, in September 1969, John Lennon told the band that he was leaving.    The others persuaded him not to go public until they made one more effort to get       an acceptable version of their final album, Let It Be, which had been recorded   several months before Abbey Road but put on hold after two attempts by producer     George Martin to put it in final form.  Phil Spector, who had produced Lennon's       Instant Karma single was enlisted to make a last ditch effort at producing Let It           Be (originally titled Get Back.) McCartney, unhappy with the way several of the     songs were produced, tried without success to stop the album's release, not a bad    idea since it would have prevented The Long and Winding Road from being             inflicted on the public. The band's breakup was announced on  April 10, 1970, a           month before Let It Be was released.           http://classicrock.about.com/od/beatles/a/beatles_history_5.htm

            1974 –Tuesday-  "The surrey with the syringe on top" - African American, Phil             Brooks was issued a U.S. patent for a disposable syringe.  Though Arthur E.         Smith received eight U.S. patents for a disposable syringe from 1949-1950 it was         Becton, Dickinson and Company (BD) who eventually mass produced the         first       glass disposable syringes in 1954, called the BD Hypak. Syringically speaking,           Charles Gabriel Pravaz (1791-1853), French surgeon, and Alexander Wood (1817-1884),   Scottish physician, independently invented the hypodermic             syringe. It was first used to inject morphine as a painkiller

           1977 –Saturday-  In one of the darkest days of rock history, Shaun Cassidy lip synched his version of Da Doo Ron Ron on "American Bandstand." The Crystals, Darlene Love and Phil Specter must have been mortified as would most music lovers with an I.Q above 70.  They may have never recovered.  In fact, if Phil Spector cited it as a reason for his dementia when he shot the starlet, he might not have even been arrested.

             1981-Thursday-  For next year's spelling bee - Nature published the longest scientific name in history. With 16,569 nucleotides, the systematic name for human mitochondrial DNA is 207,000 letters long. Try it and see if your spell check works. You can find it at [PDF]   Nature Vol. 290 9 April 1981
 

            1986 –Wednesday-  Life after death, it was announced that Patrick Duffy's      character, Bobby Ewing, on the TV show Dallas would be returning after being        kaputed.  This involved making the whole of season 7 into a  dream.  You can do that on television. Really. It’s allowed. It’s even in the bylaws.  Bobby had been             slewn by Pam's crazed half-sister Katherine Wentworth. So Pam Ewing opened      the shower and poof there was Bobby instead of the dead body of another             character (Mark Graison).

            1991 –Tuesday-  Georgia voted to secede from the U.S.S.R.  This completely mystified the leaders of the U.S.S.R who thought Georgia had seceded from the United States in 1860 but was now back in the fold.  However, after considering that Georgia is the home state of Jimmy Carter, Atlanta, CNN, a terrible hockey team, and rhinoceros sized palmetto bugs, they decided to let it go.

            1998 –Thursday-  Engaging in one of their favorite cultural  pastimes,  the stampede, more than 150 Muslims died in stampede in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, on last day of the Haj pilgrimage.

            2005- Saturday- In an event that rendered gossip columnists, gossip television shows and paparazzi orgasmic with delight, Prince Charles, the addlepated, purblind, offspring of Queen Elizabeth II, married long time lover, the morally challenged, debased, conspicuously ugly Camilla Parker Bowles who was now Camilla Parker Bowles Windsor.  Windsor was created from the British branch of the German House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha by George V by a royal proclamation in 1917.  Having a German name while the country was fighting Germany wasn’t particularly helpful for the monarchy so they changed it to Windsor.

            2008 - After all the excitement about the successful docking of the European ATV "Jules Verne", it's time to spare a thought for its Russian predecessor. The Progress 28 module was filled with rubbish and unneeded equipment, quietly severed from its docking bay and steered toward Earth. On Monday at 0850 GMT, the selfless module dropped through the atmosphere, burned and eventually reached the Pacific Ocean, sinking into the satellite graveyard 3000 km east of the New Zealand coast…

10.    

879 –Monday – The editorial staff of the Gnus, never resting in the quest  for strange names for rulers, could not pass up the opportunity to note the kaputing of Louis the Stammerer,  eldest son of Charles the Bald and Ermentrude of Orléans.  In 878, he gave the counties of Barcelona, Gerona, and Besalú to Wilfred the Hairy…..we don’t make this up……really. Louis stammered his way to his demise in a battle against the Vikings on this day in 879.  

            1389 –Friday-  Happy Birthday, Cosimo de' Medici, ruler of Florence.  Financier, statesman, and philanthropist, born in Florence, NC Italy and known posthumously as ‘father of his country’, he began the long and celebrated epoch of the Medici family. As ruler of Florence he procured for Florence (nominally still republican) security abroad and peace from civil dissensions. He was influential in the establishment of Humanism and at the dawn of  the Renaissance as he used his wealth to encourage art and literature. He built the Medici library, the first public library in Europe, as well as many other magnificent buildings, and made the city the center of the new learning. He help old ladies to cross the street, he never played loud music after 10 p.m, and kept a “green” house.

            1633 –Sunday-  Going Bananas - Bananas appeared on sale in Great Britain for the first time. They were exhibited in the shop window of herbologist Thomas Johnson of London.The debuting fruit were brought back from Bermuda and  were hung up to ripen and be admired in Johnson’s  shop. However!!!! Excavations by the Museum of London at a building site on the south bank of the Thames River have pushed back banana- tasting by about 175 years. A skin found preserved in the waterlogged remains of a 15th-century fish farm has been identified as banana by the museum's archaeobotanists, (experts in relic plant material). It has been dated to about 1460. This banana probably came from West Africa. Unappealing as it may sound, we shall keep at work at peeling this enigma..  

            1710 –Thursday- The first law regulating copyright in the world was issued in Great Britain. Known as the British Statute of Anne (after Queen Anne), The Statute replaced the monopoly of the Stationer's Company granted in 1557 during the reign of Mary (Bloody Mary) Tudor which expired in 1695 and gave authors rather than printers the monopoly on the reproduction of their works. http://www.copyrighthistory.com/anne.html

            1755 – Thursday- Happy Birthday, Samuel Hahnemann, German physician and founder of the system of therapeutics known as homeopathy. Hahnemann was the first physician to prepare medicines in a specialized way; proving them on healthy human beings, to determine how the medicines acted to cure diseases. Before Hahnemann, medicines were given on speculative indications, mainly on the basis of authority without experimental verification. Homeopathy is also the walkway to the house of a homosexual.

            1766-Thursday-   Happy Birthday, Sir John Leslie, Scottish physicist, meteorologist and mathematician who first created artificial ice. He also gave the first correct description of capillary action in 1802 and invented many instruments, most notably an accurate differential air thermometer, and also a hygrometer, a photometer, the pyroscope (An instrument for measuring the intensity of heat radiating from a fire, or the cooling influence of bodies), an atmometer (an instrument measuring rate of evaporation into atmosphere), and aethrioscope (of course you knew that a aethrioscope is an instrument consisting in part of a differential thermometer. It is used for measuring changes of temperature produced by different conditions of the sky, such as clear or cloudy). He was a busy guy who this thing for scopes. When not busy scoping out things he found the time to write, An Experimental Inquiry into the Nature and Propagation of Heat (1804) The ice came about in 1810 when he developed a method of obtaining very low temperatures, by evaporating water in a receiver emptied  with an air-pump but containing a drying agent. This produced a considerable degree of refrigeration on the principle of exposing in the exhausted receiver of an air-pump sulfuric acid, a substance rapidly absorbing vapor

            1790 –Saturday- Same day, 80 years later than The Statute of Ann, creating copyrights,  President George Washington established the United States Patent system. For the first time in history the intrinsic right of an inventor to profit from his invention was recognized by law. Previously, privileges granted to an inventor were dependent upon the prerogative of a monarch or upon a special act of a legislature.

            1814 –Sunday-  Like the Battle of New Orleans, fought the first week of 1815, two weeks after a peace treaty had been signed, the Battle of Toulouse was unnecessary. The last major battle of the Peninsular War, it was fought over the important southern French city of Toulouse and - like many of the Duke of Wellington's attacks on fortified strongholds  was  a bloody affair. Napoleon Bonaparte had abdicated four days earlier however, However, neither of the protagonists Wellington and Marshal Soult knew of the end of the war and so like Jackson at New Orleans, they went about their duties.The job of the former to push further into France, and the job of the latter was  to hold the British at bay.

 1821 –Tuesday-  Patriarch Gregory V of Constantinople  was hanged by the Muslim Turks from the main gate of the Patriarchate and his body  then heaved into the Bosphorus.  During  the Greek War of Independence Gregory V was blamed by Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II for his inability to suppress the Greek uprising. He was taken out of the Patriarchal Cathedral on this Easter Sunday, , directly after celebrating the solemn Easter Liturgy, and hanged (in full Patriarchal vestments) from the main gate of the Patriarchate compound by order of the Sultan. His body was later recovered by Greek sailors and was eventually enshrined in the Metropolitan Cathedral of Athens.

            1827 –Tuesday- Happy Birthday General Lew Wallace, Union Civil War general and author of Ben Hur - A Tale of the Christ (1880).one of the most popular novels of the 19^th century later made into at least two movies in the 20^th century both of which had exciting chariot races, the second of which featured Charlton Heston knocking  Stephen Boyd off his chariot and smushing him into the dust. At the close of the Civil War Wallace sat on the court-martial which tried the Lincoln conspirators and presided over the trial which sent Andersonville Prison chief Henry Wirz to the gallows. In later years he was governor of the New Mexico Territory and a diplomat to Turkey.

            1838-Tuesday- Happy Birthday, Frank Baldwin (not related, thankfully,  to any of the acti