1.        April Fool's Day- A day traditionally featuring jokes and pranks.  1582, Pope Gregory XIII ordered a new calendar  cleverly 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 explanations, all have holes in them, 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, is still a fool

1578- 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 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 also shares with William Gilbert, investigator of the magnet, the credit for initiating accurate experimental research throughout the world.

1789- 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.

1815- Happy Birthday, Otto von Bismarck, 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 weak 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. His 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 - Samuel Morey patented the internal combustion engine. Morey is one of the highest achieving yet least-known 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.

1853- Cincinnati, Ohio established the very first full time paid, professional fire department using steam fire engines pulled by horses.

1865- The Battle of Five Forks, dealt a death blow for Robert E. Lee’s 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." 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.

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

1873 – 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- Sir Francis Galton published the first newspaper weather map - in The Times, London, England.  Galton was the first to describe the anti-cyclone and pioneered the introduction of weather-maps based on charting data about air pressure. 

1890- 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”.

1889- 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. 

1924 – They had him in jail and they let him out. Adolf Hitler was sentenced to five years in jail for his participation in the "Beer Hall Putsch" – his almost 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 - The yo-yo was introduced in New York by Louie Marx who had 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 – 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 to the development of the theory of random access ALOHA channels.  ALOHA channels yielded significant advancements within wireless and local area networking, with versions 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 – 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 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- 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 its doom 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 – 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 tested the military power of Germany and Italy used it to test their power and their weapons while the Communists supplanted the Republicans .

1945- 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. Okinawa is about 60 miles long and between 2 and 18 miles wide.  It would be needed as part of the U.S strategy for attacking the mainland of Japan.

            1946 - 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

1960- 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 -  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.

1970 – 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 - Apple Computer is 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). They hit the mother lode with the 1984 release of the Macintosh.

1979- 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 by Carter 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 that causes people to talk loudly on their cell phones while using public transportation.

            1981 – 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 – “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.

            2001 - Same-sex marriage became legal in the Netherlands, which is the first country to allow it.  And in a possibly related development…..

            2002 - The Netherlands legalized euthanasia, becoming the first nation in the world to do so.  

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2.        742 – Happy Birthday, Charlemagne, King of the Franks, King of the Lombards and Charles I of the Holy Roman Empire.  The greatest of medieval kings was born in 742, at a place unknown. As King of the Franks, Charlemagne was determined to strengthen his realm and to bring order to 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 vast realm encompassed what are now France, Switzerland, Belgium, and The Netherlands. 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.

                International Children‘s Book  Day- marks the birthday of Hans Christian Anderson in 1805.  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.   

             1513- Juan Ponce DeLeon, while searching for a beach front condo, made the first European landing on the Florida shore.

            1725- Happy Birthday, Giovanni Casanova, Italian ecclesiastic, writer, soldier, spy, and diplomatist, chiefly remembered as the prince of Italian adventurers and as the man who made the name Casanova synonymous with “libertine.” His autobiography, which perhaps exaggerates some of his escapades, is an excellent description of 18th-century society. He also wrote a History of Venice.

                1792- The U.S Mint was established in Philadelphia.  Mint was evidently a tastier name than the original suggestion of "U.S Jawbreaker."

            1814 – 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”.

            1827- Lead pencils, which are really graphite 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

            1834- Happy Birthday, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, French sculptor of Statue of Liberty

                1840- 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 on January 13, 1898, reopened the case of the Jewish Captain, Alfred Dreyfus, sentenced to Devil's Island.        

            1845- "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.

            1875- Happy Birthday, Walter P. Chrysler,  the industrialist, inventor and manufacturer who founded the Chrysler Corporation in1925 , and developed the six-cylinder engine.

            1889- Charles M. Hall 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, it is not found naturally in pure form, and thus it must be separated from its surrounding ore.  Thanks to Hall it can be done inexpensively.

            1917- President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war against Germany, saying, "The world must be made safe for democracy." 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.

            1934 – Happy Birthday, Paul Cohen, American mathematician who received the Fields Medal (1966) for his fundamental work on the foundations of set theory. Cohen invented a technique called "forcing" to prove the independence in set theory of the axiom of choice and of the generalized continuum hypothesis. The continuum hypothesis problem was the first of Hilbert's famous 23 problems delivered to the Second International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris in 1900. Hilbert's famous speech The Problems of Mathematics challenged (then and now) mathematicians to solve these fundamental questions and Cohen has the distinction of solving Problem 1. Question from Professor Sy Yentz….who checked it?  He also worked on differential equations and harmonic analysis. We presume harmonic analysis has something to do with harmonicas.

             1935- William Watt ( brother of Say Watt?, Some Watt and Kumq Watt) was granted a patent for RADAR (Radio Detecting And Ranging).

            1953 - 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

            1978 -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 thistle burrs clung to his clothing during a hike in the mountains. 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 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: workers at the Ekaterinburg weapons plant failed to replace a crucial filter, causing a release of anthrax spores into the outside air.

            2002 – The desecration of the Church of the Nativity (tradition 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 - 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?

            1367 – Happy Birthday, King Henry IV of England.  Made famous by Shakespeare as Bolingbroke, Henry (Lancaster) overthrew the inept Richard II in 1399 setting the stage for the Wars of the Roses with the House of York.

            1449 -  King Henry VI 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 – Happy Birthday, English naturalist, Mark Catesby. Catesby traveled to America and between 1731 and 1743 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……”.

             1778- 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.

            1783 – 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 -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 – Happy Birthday, William Marcy “Boss” Tweed, the model for corrupt 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- 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- 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.

            1860- Giddyup! The Pony Express was started             from St. Joseph, Missouri. The riders started  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- 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 – As the song goes, “The dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard has laid poor Jessie in his grave”.  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 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).

1898 -Happy Birthday, Katherine Esau, German-American botanist. Follow this carefully now, she was born in Yekaterinoslav, Russian Empire (now Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine) to a family of Mennonites of German descent but 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.  No, no, no Professor Sy Yentz has his phloem sense of humor. 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 – Happy Birthday Actor (and 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 – Born on the same day as Marlon Brando, Happy Birthday, Doris Day, 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 – 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- 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- 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. It was used to mark the center of the road, with one pair of cat's eye showing in each direction.                       

1936- Richard Bruno Hauptmann, convicted in the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the 20-month-old son of Charles A. Lindbergh, was executed 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.

1946 - 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 (the Bataan Death March) 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- 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 Cold War threat. British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin declared that it had been "a lifeline to sinking men."

1956- Elvis Presley performed his #1 hit Heartbreak Hotel on the Milton Berle TV show. Elvis was also in a skit with  Milton Berle 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

1965- 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 1,000 ft. giant  and it came out of the water and attacked Tokyo.  Still orbiting the earth. SNAP stands for Systems for Nuclear Auxiliary Power.

1966- 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.

1969- 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. Three days later, the patient received a heart transplant, but died of respiratory insufficiency only 14 hours later

1973 – A huge technological breakthrough and a curse. As Peggy Noonan said, “Cell phones are wonderful, they empower the obnoxious and amplify the ignorant”.  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

1973- 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 plus they could hold their portable phones to their clean shaven faces.

            1974 – 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.

            2007 - 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.        1688 – Happy Birthday, Joseph-Nicolas Delisle, of “Delisles of Capri”, 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.  

1818- 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.

1821-Happy Birthday, Linus Yale, American inventor 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.

            1823- Happy Birthday, Charles Wilhelm Siemens, yes, he was an Able Bodied Siemens, German/British scientist who invented a gas-heated, open-hearth furnace.  Repairs to the furnace were called "open hearth surgery."

            1841-Only 31 days after assuming office (presidential inaugurations were held on March 4 in those days), William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States, died of pneumonia at the White House.  Old "Tippicanoe" gave a 3 hr. inauguration speech in the rain.  

            1846- 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.

            1902 - British financier Cecil Rhodes left $10 million in his will to provide scholarships for Americans at Oxford University in England, the Rhodes Scholarship.  Rhodes also named a country after himself, Rhodesia but now it is called Zimbabwe.

            1915 - 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.

            1932-  Professor C.G King ( brother of Chicken Alla King, B.B King and

Vi King) isolated Vitamin C after 5 years of research.  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.

           1933- 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-  Happy Birthday, Ananda Chakrabarty, Indian-American biochemist who patented the first genetically engineered life-form (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.

            1968 - 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.

            1972- 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- 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 f for bending the alignment wire end during orthodontic techniques…..think braces.

            1983- The first flight of the shuttle, Challenger.  It was named after the British Naval research vessel HMS Challenger that sailed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans during the 1870's. Challenger flew nine successful Space Shuttle missions. 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 - 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 s