August is . . . . National Catfish Month, National Golf  Month, National Eye Exam Month, National Water Quality Month, Romance Awareness Month, Peach Month, and Foot Health Month. The full moon has a few names; Sturgeon Moon - Reminds Professor Sy Yentz of the Madonna hit record, Like a Sturgeon.  It is  also called the Green Corn Moon or Grain Moon. Science Gnus is an Almanacish compendium  News of Science, History, Mathematics and Items of Interest with comment and elucidation for each day of the year.  It also contains Professor Sy Yentz, answering questions, Dr. Matt Matician connecting science and mathematics, the Activity of the Month, Factorinos, Trivia Questions, Bonus Trivia Questions, Extinct Kaput animals and plants, Jokes, Obscure Questions, Scientists of the Month, and the Flower, Rock and Words of the Month

1.     1291 - Happy Switzerland Day as  a pact was made to form the Swiss Confederation. The anniversary of this founding has been celebrated as National Day in Switzerland since 1891, the 600th anniversary of the Swiss Confederation.  But why does the cheese have holes in it? Actually it is because of the flatulence of bacteria...Really......see our trivia question for July.

         1498 - On his third voyage, with six ships, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus set foot on the American mainland for the first time, at the Paria Peninsula in present-day Venezuela. Thinking it an island, he christened it Isla Santa and claimed it for Spain. Also see August 3 below.

      1770 - Happy Birthday, William Clark, American explorer of Lewis and Clark fame.

      1793- The first definition was made for the meter: 1/10 000 000 of the northern quadrant of the Paris meridian (5 132 430 toises of Paris, from the North Pole to the equator). You can figure it out because it makes no sense to Professor Sy Yentz.

        1774, Joseph Priestley, British Presbyterian minister and chemist, identified a gas which he called "dephlogisticated air" -- later known as oxygen (probably to the relief of Oprah Winfrey who would have had to name her television network, "Dephlogisticated Air" instead of Oxygen.

        1779 - Happy Birthday, Francis Scott Key author of The Star-Spangled Banner:, our national anthem

       1790 -The first American census was taken.........Presumably someone gave it back.

        1819-  Happy Birthday, Maria Mitchell, first professional woman astronomer in the United States, born Nantucket, Mass. On Oct. 1 1847, she first gained notice for the observation of a comet which she was first to report. She was also the first female member of the American Association of Arts and Sciences.

        1819- Same day as Maria Mitchell, Happy Birthday, Herman Melville, American author of Moby Dick and Billie Budd.

       1876 - Colorado entered the Union as the 38th state, the "Centennial State".

      1873-  A great day for present day San Francisco tourism. The first cable car was rolled out as British inventor Andrew Smith Hallidie revolutionized transportation methods in San Francisco when he successfully tested a cable car he had designed for the city as a solution to the problem of providing mass transit up and down San Francisco's steep hills.

   1893, -Henry D. Perky of Colorado and William Ford of Watertown, NY, patented shredded wheat. This attractive breakfast treat  is composed of whole wheat which has been boiled, partially dried, then  pressed out into thin shreds and baked. Sounds as delicious as it looks.

     1960- Chubby Checker’s  recording of "The Twist" was released for the first time. A middling success  the first time, it was released for the second time in 1962 and became a monster hit record and resulted in the dance craze of the 1960s.

   1914 - Thanks to interlocking alliances and amazing diplomatic stupidity, on June 28, 1914,   Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was shot to death Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo, Bosnia. The event is widely regarded as sparking the outbreak of World War I, On August 1, Four days after the assassination, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, Germany and Russia declared war against each other, France ordered a general mobilization, and the first German army units crossed into Luxembourg in preparation for the German invasion of France. During the next three days, Russia, France, Belgium, and Great Britain all aligned against Austria-Hungary and Germany, and the German army invaded Belgium. World War 1, at that time it was called "the Great War", ensued and was a war of unprecedented destruction and loss of life, resulting in the deaths of some 20 million soldiers and civilians as military leaders fought with the same stupidity displayed by the diplomats.

    1946 - Almost a year after World War II ended, Congress established the United States Atomic Energy Commission to foster and control the peace time development of atomic science and technology. President Harry S. Truman signed the Atomic Energy Act on  August 1 1946, transferring the control of atomic energy from military to civilian hands.

     1957- The Solar Building in Albuquerque NM, was the first commercial building to be heated by the sun's energy.

         1971- Speaking of disasters, the comedy variety show The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour debuted.  Sonny left us a while ago after skiing into a tree but Cher continues on.  She is currently on her 27th "Farewell" tour.

        1981-  " I want my MTV" -MTV (Music Television) made its debut at 12:01 a.m. The first music video shown on the rock-video cable channel was Video Killed the Radio Star, by the Buggles. Remember, this was 1981 and MTV actually played music back then.

       2000- An Israeli man become the first recipient of the Jarvik 2000, the first total artificial heart that can maintain blood flow in addition to generating a pulse.

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2.     

 338 BC –Tuesday- My my my i yi woo
My my my my Chaeronea …..almost The Knack….. The Macedonian army led by, macher, Philip II defeated the combined forces of Athens and Thebes in the Battle of Chaeronea. While he personally led the right side of his divided forces, he gave command of the left to his young son Alexander, soon to be known as “The Great”. While the defeat badly damaged Athens' forces, it effectively destroyed the Theban army.  This was Philip’s greatest victory and made him in effect the hersher (that’s Yiddish for leader) of the Peloponnese.

216 BC –Friday- During the Second Punic War in the Battle of Cannae – The Carthaginian army lead by Hannibal defeated a numerically superior Roman army under command of consuls Lucius Aemilius Paullus and Gaius Terentius Varro. It was Hannibal's finest hour.  Having famously crossed the Alps with his elephants, Hannibal descended into Italy and had a series of victories against the Roman forces. Major battles took place at Trebia and at Lake Trasimene, in both of which Hannibal emerged victorious. Elephant shmelephant, by the battle of Cannae all Hannibal's elephants had died. At Cannae the  Roman army had essentially defeated itself. Pauullus and Varro had solely relied on the superiority of its legionaries, having lined them up and told them to advance. No use had been made of the superior numbers, other than to simply add more ranks onto the back of the advancing columns. As the Carthaginian units maneuvered, nothing was done to counter their actions. One simply did what one had always done - advance.

            1610 –Monday “Ah, the Pacific.  Hawaii must be about a day away.  Just wait men, soon  we’ll be surfing, listening to Don Ho sing Tiny Bubbles….and ooh, the babes in bikinis…..” Henry Hudson sailed into what it is now known as Hudson Bay, thinking he had made it through the Northwest Passage and reached the Pacific Ocean. In November 1610,  Hudson’s ship, the Discovery became locked in ice in Hudson Bay. The crew wanted to get back to England, but Hudson would not let them leave until he got a souvenir lei.  It was a very cold winter, and the crew suffered greatly in the icy conditions. The crew was thinking of mutiny. In June 1611, they decided to put Hudson, his son, and the seven others into a small boat, and they were never heard from again.

            1754 -Friday  Happy Birthday, Pierre Charles L’Enfant, architect, engineer, Revolutionary War officer who designed the plan for city of Washington D.C.  The plan of the city is based on principles employed by Andre Le Notre in the palace and garden of Versailles, where L'Enfant's father had worked as a court painter, and on Domenico Fontana's scheme (1585) for the replanning of Rome under Pope Sixtus V. Through the use of long avenues joined at key points marked by important buildings or monuments, the city is a symbolic representation of power radiating from a central source.  On his arrival in America in 1777, L'Enfant  had joined the Revolutionary army as a volunteer during the War of Independence, and attained the rank,  in 1783, of major of engineers. In 1791 when Congress cleverly decided  to build a capital city on the Potomac. Note: Thomas Jefferson really didn’t like New York. George Washington asked L'Enfant to prepare a design for the city.  Unfortunately, L’Enfant was fired the following year because of his insistence on complete control of the project. “L”Enfant, that’s terrible”.  L'Enfant also designed the old City Hall in New York  in 1787 and the town house of the financier Robert Morris in Philadelphia.  He died  a pauper but was reinterred in Arlington National Cemetery, after his plan for the city was readopted.  This posthumously raised his self esteem.

       1776 –Friday- Delegates to the 2^nd Continental Congress began signing the United States Declaration of Independence. On July 2, by the votes of 12 of the 13 colonies, with New York  (still has the most dysfunctional legislature this side of Zimbabwe) not voting, Congress adopted the Lee Resolution and begins consideration of the Declaration of Independence, written by the Committee of Five. On July 4, late in the afternoon, church bells rang out over Philadelphia heralding the final adoption of the Declaration of Independence. On this day they signed the clearly printed or "engrossed" version of the Declaration.  The first, largest, and most famous signature is that of John Hancock, President of the Continental Congress. The youngest signer was Edward Rutledge (age 26). Benjamin Franklin (age 70) was the oldest. Two future presidents signed: John Adams (second President) and Thomas Jefferson (third President).

1790 –Monday- The first US Census was conducted.  The six inquiries in 1790 called for the name of the head of the family and the number of persons in each household of the following descriptions: Free White males of 16 years and upward (to assess the country's industrial and military potential). Free White males under 16 years. Free White females. All other free persons. Slaves Under the general direction of Thomas Jefferson, the Secretary of State, marshals took the census in the original 13 States, plus the districts of Kentucky, Maine, and Vermont, and the Southwest Territory (Tennessee). Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson expressed skepticism over the final count, expecting a number that exceeded the 3.9 million inhabitants counted in the census. It took a total of eighteen months, but the tally was finally in on March 1792. http://www.census.gov/history/www/through_the_decades/overview/1790.html

 1797-Tuesday-  Samuel Briggs and his son, Samuel Briggs, Jr. became the first father-son pair to receive a joint patent. Their invention was a nail-making machine but it also made screws and gimlets (possibly vodka gimlets).  They delivered the plans to the legislature and congress in a steel box in 1789.  Presumably it took eight years to get it open. http://books.google.com/books?id=8uYkAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA1-PA2251&lpg=RA1-PA2251&dq=Samuel+Briggs+and++Samuel+Briggs,+Jr.+nail+making+machine&source=bl&ots=6rbfq82sw8&sig=ZR9u28MIcMnXspwR1nCYBHKlOJA&hl=en&ei=6ZJVTMWxIYL-8Ab3zqGuCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CDUQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=Samuel%20Briggs%20and%20%20Samuel%20Briggs%2C%20Jr.%20nail%20making%20machine&f=false

1788 –Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Leopold Gmelin, German chemist. Descended from a line of scientists, his grandfather and father were botanists, in 1817 Gmelin published the first edition of what was to become the major chemical textbook of the first half of the 19th century, the riveting Handbuch der Chemie (Handbook of Chemistry), in three volumes. By 1843 the book was in its fourth edition and had been expanded to nine volumes. It was in the fourth edition that Gmelin introduced the terms ester and ketone and adopted the atomic theory and devoted much more space to the growing discipline of organic chemistry. He also worked on the chemistry of digestion and discovered several of the constituents of bile which he published in his book, As Time Goes Bile.  He then introduced Gmelin's test for bile pigments. In 1822 he discovered potassium ferrocyanide can be used as an alternate nitrogen source for plants.

       1798 –Thursday-  Napoleon in denial as The Battle of the Nile  concluded in a British victory.  Napoleon had invaded Egypt with the goal of threatening British possessions in India and assessing the feasibility of building a canal from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea.  The Battle of the Nile was fought in Aboukir bay near Alexandria, Egypt, on the 1st and 2nd of August 1798. The British fleet was under the command of Rear Admiral Horatio Nelson and the French fleet under Admiral Paul D'Brueys.  Nelson had barely recovered from the loss of his right arm, sustained during the unsuccessful attack on Tenerife the previous year. The victory at the Nile helped to raise Nelsons popularity further at home, and to cement his reputation in the navy, as one of the most able commanders of his generation. He was wounded again during this battle, a bullet or splinter gashed opened his forehead, blinding him with blood and at first feared he would die. He was later helped back on deck to guide the latter stages of the battle.

1820 –Wednesday-  Happy Birthday, John Tyndall, Irish physicist.  He also spent much time researching electromagnetic radiation in liquids and gases and was the founding father of this science of nephelometry , which is the basis of spectrometers and turbidimeters which measure turbidity (yes,  is a measure of the degree to which the water loses its transparency due to the presence of suspended particulates. The more total suspended solids in the water, the murkier it seems and the higher the turbidity like after you’ve sat in the bath tub for a half hour) He is best remembered for the Tyndall effect , which is the scattering of light by very small particles suspended in a medium. The discovery of this effect enabled Tyndall to explain "why the sky is blue".

  1834 -Saturday  Happy Birthday, Frederic Bartholdi, French sculptor of the Statue of Liberty – real name, "Liberty Enlightening the World", -whose face is said to be that of Bartholdi’s mother. In addition to the Statue of Liberty, there are other works of Bartholdi in America—the Bartholdi Fountain in the Botanic Garden, Washington, D. C.; the four angelic trumpeters on the four corners of the tower of the First Baptist Church, in  Boston, Massachusetts,  the Lafayette Statue, in Union Square, New York and the Lafayette and Washington Monument, at Morningside Park, also in New York City.

          1835 -Sunday Oh, you need timin'
A tick, a tick, a tick, good timin'
A tock, a tock, a tock, a tock
A timin' is the thing
It's true, ……..Jimmy Jones………O, I am fortune's fool! ….Romeo and Juliet Act 3, scene 1, 132–136.  Happy Birthday, Elisha Gray a U.S. scientist and inventor who would have been known to us as the inventor of the telephone if Alexander Graham bell hadn't got to the patent office before him earlier that day, resulting in a famous legal battle, which he lost, over who would get the patent. Bell and Eisha Gray had been working independently on the invention.  The work pace was so close that they actually got to the patent office on the same day. Bell got there before Gray.  Gray sued. Bell won……that’s history. That’s also not the whole story. Both Bell and Gray had filed on February 14, but Bell filed a patent application, with the claim that stated “I have invented.“Gray, on the other hand, filed a caveat, a document used at the time to claim “I am working on inventing.“ Priority in American patent law follows date of invention, not date of filing. So that, and filing first helped Bell avoid a possible costly and time-consuming dispute. The U.S. Patent Office issued patent #174,465 to Bell on March 7, 1876.  Gray worked as a blacksmith, a boat-builder,and a carpenter before starting a small concern to make telegraphic equipment of his own invention. His little business eventually became the Western Electric Co., and Gray's some 70 patents included one for a multiplex telegraph.

        1858 –Monday- The first street letter boxes were set up in Boston. They had a central hole for shaft of a lamp post, lids covering drop hole to exclude weather, sight hole so a letter carrier (or picker upper) could see if any letters had been deposited. A small door secured with a lock for the carrier to empty the box. Previously all letters had to be mailed at the Post Office.  

       1865 -  Wednesday- Anticipating the 20^th century Japanese soldiers who hid in caves for years and didn’t know the war was over, The captain and crew of the C.S.S. Shenandoah, still prowling the waters of the Pacific in search of Union whaling ships, was finally informed by a British vessel that the South had lost the war. Between June 22 and 28th the now-stateless warship (the Confederacy no longer existed) captured two-dozen whalingvessels, destroying all but a few. Though Shenandoah's late June assault on the whaling fleet was accompanied by many rumors of the Civil War's end, she did not receive a firm report until this day when she encountered an English sailing ship that had left San Francisco less than two weeks before. The captain, James Waddell, then disarmed his ship and set sail for England. Shenandoah rounded Cape Horn in mid-September and arrived at Liverpool in early November, becoming the only Confederate Navy ship to circumnavigate the globe. She was then turned over to the Royal Navy. In 1866 the ship was sold to the Sultan of Zanzibar and renamed El Majidi. She was variously reported lost at sea in September 1872 or in 1879. http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/sh-us-cs/csa-sh/csash-sz/shendoah.htm

            1870 –Tuesday- Don't sleep in the subway, darlin'…Petula Clark….Don't stand in the pouring rain The oxymoronically named, Tower Subway, the world's first underground tube railway, that is an underground railway constructed in a tube rather than in a brick tunnel opened in London, hence the British moniker for it “the tube”. Tower Subway.—A curious feat of engineering skill, in the shape of an iron tube seven feet in diameter driven through the bed of the Thames between Great Tower-hill and Vine-street. The original intention was to have passengers drawn backwards and forwards in a small tram omnibus. This, however, was found unremunerative, and the rails having been taken up the tunnel has since been open as a footway. Unfortunately, however, after subtracting from its diameter the amount necessary to afford a sufficient width of platform, there is not much head-room left, and it is not advisable for any but the very briefest of Her Majesty’s lieges to attempt the passage in high-heeled boots, or with a hat to which he attaches any particular value. It has, however, one admirable quality, that of having cost remarkably little in construction. NEAREST Railway Stations, Aldgate (Metrop.) and Cannon-street (S.E.); Omnibus Routes, Aldgate High-street and Fenchurch-street; Cab Rank, Great Tower-street. - Charles Dickens (Jr.), Dickens's Dictionary of London, 1879 http://www.victorianlondon.org/thames/towersubway.htm

             1876 –Wednesday-  Bang bang, he shot me down
Bang bang, I hit the ground
Bang bang, that awful sound
Bang bang, ….Cher………William H. Butler, "Wild Bill" Hickok kaput.  Hickock one of the most famous gunfighters of the American West, was slewn in Deadwood, South Dakota. Wild Bill was playing poker. He had a hand consisting of  Aces and Eights when he was shot from behind by one Jack McCall (later hanged for the crime). Hickok was 39. The hand of black Aces and Eights has come to be known as "the dead man's hand". Reported on the front page of the Traveler on August 30 - An examination showed that a pistol had been fired close to the back of the head, the bullet entering the base of the brain, a little to the right of the center, passing through in a straight line, making its exit through the right cheek between the upper and lower jaw bones, loosening several of the molar teeth in its passage, and carrying a portion of the cerebellum through the wound. From the nature of the wound, death must have been instantaneous

     1892-Tuesday-  George A. Wheeler, of New York City, patented ideas for the first practical moving staircase. It was an idea…. it was never built. However, some of the features were incorporated in the prototype built by the Otis Elevator Company in 1899. Charles D. Seeberger would coin the brand name Escalator (from scala, Latin for steps, with elevator). Seeberger and Wheeler went back and for with escalating patents until 1899. Then, Seeberger with Otis installed the first step-type escalator made for public use at the Paris Exhibition of 1900, where it won first prize. Seeberger eventually sold his patent rights to Otis in 1910. Although the idea escalated with Wheeler, on August 9, 1859, the U.S.A. Patent Office granted Nathan Ames a patent for a revolving stairway in the form of an equilateral triangle.

1916 –Wednesday- Austrian sabotage involving excessive amounts of  schokogugelhupf, wiener schnitzel, and kaiserschmarrn caused the sinking of the Italian battleship Leonardo da Vinci in Taranto. Only two years old, Leonardo da Vinci was a Conte di Cavour class battleship. In typical Italian navy refurbishment, nn  September 17, 1919, Leonardo da Vinci was refloated upside down,

1921 – Tuesday - "Who is he anyhow, an actor?"
      "No."
      "A dentist?"
     "...No, he's a gambler."  Gatsby hesitated, then added cooly: "He's the man who fixed the World Series back in 1919."
     "Fixed the World Series?" I repeated.
      The idea staggered me.  I remembered, of course, that the World Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as something that merely happened, the end of an inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people--with the singlemindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.
     "How did he happen to do that?" I asked after a minute.
     "He just saw the opportunity."
     "Why isn't he in jail?"
     "They can't get him, old sport.  He's a smart man." F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.  Eight White Sox players were acquitted of throwing the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. Despite being acquitted of criminal charges, the players were banned from professional baseball for life by baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The eight men included the great "Shoeless" Joe Jackson; pitchers Eddie Cicotte and Claude "Lefty" Williams; infielders Buck Weaver, Arnold "Chick" Gandil, Fred McMullin, and Charles "Swede" Risberg; and outfielder Oscar "Happy" Felsch.

 1923 –Thursday-  President Warren G. Harding kaput. The hapless Harding, arguably the worst American president, died of a stroke at the age 58 in a hotel in San Francisco. Harding had just toured Alaska and the West Coast, a journey some believed he had taken to be as far as possible from Washington and the increasing rumors of corruption in his administration. He had suffered from food poisoning a few days earlier, possibly from an excess consumption of “Rice a Roni, the San Francisco Treat”.  Rumors about the cause of death began to circulate almost immediately. Foremost among them was a poison theory, in which some speculated that Harding took his own life in despair over troubles within the administration; others suggested that Mrs. Harding poisoned her husband to end his unfaithfulness. Another theory pointed to unhappy cronies who feared that the president might make good on his promise to clean up his administration. Recent scholarship has effectively scuttled such speculation. The opening of Harding’s physician’s records indicates that the president had long suffered from high blood pressure and that a heart attack was the cause of death. http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h1374.html

     1932 –Tuesday- The positron (antiparticle of the electron) was discovered by Carl D. Anderson. Earlier in the century, Victor Hess  had discovered a natural source of high energy particles: cosmic rays. Anderson, was studying showers of cosmic particles in a cloud chamber and saw a track left by "something positively charged, and with the same mass as an electron". He initially speculated it was the brain of Joe Biden.  After nearly one year of effort and observation, he decided the tracks were actually antielectrons, each produced alongside an electron from the impact of cosmic rays in the cloud chamber. He called the antielectron a "positron", for its positive charge.

 1934 –Thursday-   And thus I clothe my naked villany
With odd old ends stol'n out of holy writ,
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil……..Richard……King Richard III (I, iii, 336-338) With the death of German President, the ancient,  Paul von Hindenburg, Chancellor Adolf Hitler became absolute dictator of Germany under the title of Führer, or "Leader."

       1939 –Wednesday-  German-born physicist Albert Einstein wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, urging "watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action" on the part of the United States in atomic research. Einstein, a lifelong pacifist, feared that Nazi Germany had begun work on an atomic bomb.

            1943 –Monday- Tell me why. I don’t like Mondays ……..Boomtown Rats.  The U.S. Navy patrol torpedo boat, PT-109, sank after being attacked by a Japanese destroyer.  Japanese Amagiri. While in the Blacket Strait at 1:30am on August 2, 1943. Amagiri rammed PT-109, sinking it. The boat was under the command of Lt. John F. Kennedy.

            1945-Thursday- Potsdam,  last wartime conference of the "Big Three"--the Soviet Union, the United States, and Great Britain--concluded after two weeks of intense and sometimes acrimonious debate. Held in  Berlin suburb of Potsdam after Germany's surrender in World War II. Harry Truman, the odious Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill –replaced in the middle due to a lost election  by Clement R. Attlee met to discuss European peace settlements, the administration of defeated Germany, the demarcation of the boundaries of Poland, the occupation of Austria, the definition of the Soviet Union's role in eastern Europe, the determination of reparations, and the further prosecution of the war against Japan.    

            1947 – Monday Ever alert for great movie themes, we find a Jesse James day; the Gnus notes the premiere of Jesse James Rides Again, starring Clayton Moore who would go on to fame as television’s The Lone Ranger.  In this one Jesse James is a good guy chasing bad guys who are trying to drive ranchers off their land.  Natually one of the ranchers is Linda Sterling, heroine of many post war serials.  Thirteen years later in

1960 – Tuesday  The premiere of Young Jesse James, starring Ray Strickland as “young” Jesse.  Another character, of course is Cole Younger, (played by Willard Parker)  who, we presume was younger than young Jesse. Merry Anders played Belle Starr. Merry Anders appeared on every TV show ever made.  Take a look at IMDb- http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0026039/

1955 –Tuesday- To Catch a Thief, (surprisingly, considering the two prior items, it wasn’t Jesse James)  directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, premiered . The movie, featured Grant as a former cat burglar suspected of a rash of jewelry thefts and Kelly (in not much of a reach)  as a spoiled heiress,

1964 – Sunday-Veni, vidi, velcro –I came, I saw, I  stuck around!– the U.S Vietnam experience.  North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the destroyer USS Maddox (DD-731). The Gulf of Tonkin is a body of water that lies on the East Coast of North Vietnam and the West Coast of the island Hainan. The Maddox was conducting a "DeSoto patrol", referring to an espionage mission. The purpose of this mission was to collect intelligence on radar and coastal defenses of North Vietnam. North Vietnamese torpedo patrol boats attacked the Maddox. The U.S.S. Ticonderoga sent aircraft to repel the North Vietnamese attackers and sunk one boat while damaging other enemy vessels.

1962 - Aretha Franklin made her TV debut (at that time she was not the size of a float in the Thanksgiving day parade)  on ABC's American Bandstand, lip synching, Don't Cry Baby and Try a Little Tenderness or I’ll sit on you

1990 –Thursday- Quando omni flunkus moritati -When all else fails, play dead……. Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait, Iraq's tiny, oil-rich neighbor. They would have invaded several days late but the couldn’t find Kuwait and had to Google the directions.  The four soldiers of Kuwait's defense force were rapidly overwhelmed, and retreated to Saudi Arabia. The emir of Kuwait, his family, and other government leaders also fled to Saudi Arabia.  Within hours Kuwait City had been captured and the Iraqis had established a provincial government. By heroically conquering Kuwait, Iraq gained control of 20 percent of the world's oil reserves and, for the first time, a substantial coastline on the Persian Gulf so that Saddam Hussein could have a beachfront cabana.

1990 –Thursday-  Possibly related to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Sven-Erik Soderman, driving an Opel Kadett at Mora, Sweden, set a world's record in stunt driving on this day in 1990. Soderman reached a speed of 102.14mph while driving his car on two side wheels. Later, in 2001 he picked up 15 full food cans while driving his Volvo 740 on two wheels, at Mora Siljan Flygplats, Mora, Sweden.

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3.  1492- From the Spanish port of Palos, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus set sail in command of three ships--the Santa Marýa, the Pinta, and the Niýa--on a journey to find a western sea route to China, India, and the fabled gold and spice islands of Asia. On October 12, the expedition sighted land, probably Watling Island in the Bahamas, and went ashore the same day, claiming it for Spain. Later that month, Columbus sighted Cuba, which he thought was mainland China, and in December the expedition landed on Hispaniola, which Columbus thought might be Japan. So basically, he had no idea where he was. He established a small colony there with 39 of his men. The explorer returned to Spain with gold, spices, and "Indian" captives in March 1493 and was received with t honors by the Spanish court of Ferdinand and Isabella. He was the first European to explore the Americas since the Vikings set up colonies in Greenland and Newfoundland in the 10th century. Also see August 1 above.

     1769- The La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, California were first noticed by a Spanish expedition.  Juan Crespi, a Franciscan friar with the expedition of Gaspar de Portola, the first Spanish governor of the “Californias”, he wrote, "a most unusual creature emerged from the pits”……….”it claims it is called a "Paris Hilton". 

       1811- Happy Birthday, Elisha Otis, American inventor. Otis did not invent the elevator, he invented the automatic safety brake for elevators, which later made high-rise buildings practical. Prior to this many elevators ended their descent on impact.

      1880 - The American Canoe Association paddled into existence at Lake George, New York.

      1900 – Happy Birthday, John T. Scopes, high school teacher, actually working as a substitute biology teacher when accused of teaching evolution in early April of 1924 and subject of famous 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial.

     1908-A nearly complete, buried, skeleton of a Neanderthal man was discovered in a cave at La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France, by two young brothers Amédée and Jean Bouyssonie.  It was later identified as Larry King.

            1908- And on the same day, and still underground -  the Philadelphia Subway opened. It was also known as Tube Transportation. The original 1908 section was built with private funds by the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company and  ran east and west under Market Street from 15th Street to 2nd Street; Municipal funds were not used until a subsequent line that opened in 1928

      1933 - The infamous Mickey Mouse Watch was introduced. It sold for $2.75. A Mickey Mouse Clock sold for $1.50 but then it was harder to keep it on your wrist.

      1958 -  Leaving from Point Barrow, Alaska, the USS Nautilus (named after the submarine piloted by Captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea)  became the first submarine to travel under the geographic North Pole as it then continued on to Greenland

       1996 - A sacred day in the history of wedding receptions as the Macarena by Los Del Rio, hit #1 on "Billboard". It stayed and stayed at the top -- for 14 smash weeks. It will never leave us.  It will be played and played forever................isn't that a violation of the Geneva Convention about cruel punishment? Or is We’ve Only Just Begun even worse?

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4.  

1693 -Champagne was invented by Dom Perignon. Well, not so fast there pilgrim....the English rather than the French were the ones who invented Champagne in the 17th century. And  the word "invented"  means making sparkling wine deliberately, and through a reproducible process. The first French documents that refer to Champagne date from 1718. These papers report that the first time this happened was around 20 years earlier (bringing the date to circa 1698). In England however, Sir George Etheredge made mention of sparkling wine as early as 1676. Source - http://www.champagneinfo.net/Productie/ChampagneHistorie/tabid/174/Default.aspx. ..... Dom Perignon was a was a Benedictine monk frequently credited (erroneously) with the invention of champagne. The Méthode champenoise was developed by him. The cuvée of champagne Dom Pérignon is named after him and if the wine is good, what does it matter?

     1755 - Happy Birthday, Nicolas Jacqes Conte, the French inventor of the modern pencil.

     1792 - Happy Birthday, Percy Byssche Shelley, English Romantic poet  of, among others, his masterpiece Prometheus Unbound , Ode to the West Wind, and To a Skylark.

       1892 -"Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her father 40 whacks and when she was done, she gave her mother forty-one..".   Someone killed Andrew and Abby Borden of Fall River, Mass..  Couldn't have been daughter Lizzie who just happened to be in the house when it happened, and was seen burning the dress she wore that day. She was a “sweet young woman” and the jury acquitted her in 90 minutes.  Probably the only 12 people in the universe that didn't think she did it.

      1912 - See below 1944 - on the same day Anne Frank would be arrested - Happy Birthday, Raoul Wallenberg, Swedish humanitarian who rescued at least 100,000 Jews from certain death in World War II. He died in a Communist (Russia) prison July 17, 1947)

     1922 - As opposed to the rest of the time when your phone goes dead, this time phone service was shut down on purpose as every telephone in the U.S. and Canada went dead when AT&T and the Bell System shut down all its switchboards and switching stations for one minute in memory of Alexander Graham Bell, who had died two days earlier. During this time, none of the 13 million telephones in operation could be used.

      1944 -Acting on tip from a traitorous Dutch informer, the Nazi Gestapo captured 15-year-old Jewish diarist Anne Frank and her family in a sealed-off area of an Amsterdam warehouse. The Franks had been hidden there in 1942 because of fear of deportation to a Nazi concentration camp.  The Franks were initially imprisoned in Auschwitz, Anne and her sister, Margot were then sent to Bergen-Belson death camp where they died in early 1945, just 2 months before the liberation of the camp by the allied army.

        1952 - The first transatlantic helicopter flight was made  by two US Air Force H-19s.  They flew from Massachusetts to Weisbaden, Germany in 51 hours, 55 minutes.  The luggage was lost.

       1964 - The murdered bodies of three civil rights workers were found buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi. James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner had disappeared June 21, not long after they had been held for six hours in the Neshoba County, Mississippi jail on charges of speeding.

         1983 - Ornithologicide!! New York Yankee outfielder Dave Winfield was arrested after a game by Toronto police (who presumably had nothing better to do) after he threw a baseball during warm ups and accidentally killed a seagull. Question if the bird lived near a bay would it be called a baygull (with cream cheese)?

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 5.    1858 – The first trans-Atlantic cable. In 1854, Cyrus West Field had conceived the idea of the telegraph cable across the ocean  and obtained a charter to lay a line across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. He made four unsuccessful attempts, beginning in 1857.  Evidently they could not obtain a 2,000 mile long extension cord.  Ha ha ha Professor Sy Yentz has his extensive sense of humor.  In July 1858, howver, four British and American vessels--the Agamemnon, the Valorous, the Niagara, and the Gorgon--met in mid-ocean for the fifth attempt.  On August 5, the cable had been successfully laid, stretching nearly 2,000 miles across the Atlantic at a depth often of more than two miles. On August 16, President James Buchanan and Queen Victoria exchanged formal introductory and complimentary messages. He asked her for a date and then they went to see the Broadway musical, Grease.  Unfortunately, the cable proved weak and the electric current insufficient and by the beginning of September had ceased functioning.  They didn’t get a permanent cable until 1866.

      1861 – The Income tax was first passed into law in 1861, NOT 1913. The text of the law read: SEC. 89 And be it further enacted, That for the purpose of modifying and reenacting, as hereinafter provided, so much of an act, entitled "An act to provide increased revenue from imports to pay interest on the public debt, and for other purposes," approved fifth of August, eighteen hundred and sixty-one, as relates to income tax;... They kept calling it a duty not a tax.

            1864 - The spectrum of a comet was observed by Giovanni Donati, who concluded that comets are, at least in part, gaseous. Between 1854 and 1864 he discovered six new comets, the brightest of which, found in 1858, became known as Donati’s Comet.

          1864- "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" said Union Admiral David Farragut as he lead his flotilla to victory at the Battle of Mobile, Alabama.  With the loss of one of its last major Southern ports, the fall of Mobile Bay was a huge blow to the Confederacy, and the victory was the first in a series of military successes that aided the reelection of Abraham Lincoln over George McClellan in 1864.

       1884 - The cornerstone for the Statue of Liberty was laid at Bedloe’s Island (now called Liberty Island), New York. The actual statue, designed by Fredric Bartholdi, was accepted as a gift to the United States from the people of France by U.S. President Grover Cleveland on October 28, 1886. 

       1914 - Traffic lights were installed Cleveland, OH.  They had red and green lights and buzzers. The American Traffic Signal Co. turned over to the City of Cleveland on, the first set of traffic signals, which were installed at East 105th street and Euclid avenue. They cleverly placed the signals in operation at five p. m – rush hour.

       1930- "That's one small step for (a) man..........."  Happy Birthday, Neil Armstrong, born in Wapakoneta, OH.  The first man to walk on the moon.  Commander Armstrong’s first space flight occurred in 1966 aboard Gemini 8. During this flight, he and fellow astronaut David Scott successfully performed the first docking in space between two vehicles – a necessary step for the moon landings to come when the lunar module would have to dock with the command module…..and make sure that no aliens jumped out of people’s stomachs.

    1948 - An earthquake occurred just about 100 miles from Quito,  Ecuador killing 6,000 people and injuring another 20,000.  The 6.7-magnitude tremor was particularly deadly for its size because of the landslides it set off.

            1957 –American Bandstand, hosted by Dick Clark and featuring lip-synching recording artists and dance trend setting teens, made it’s network debut on  ABC. Bandstand began as a local program on WFIL-TV (now WPVI), Channel 6 in Philadelphia on October 7, 1952. Then it was hosted by Bob Horn and was called Bob Horn's Bandstand. After a brief scandal involving the host and underage girls, the show got a new host in July 1965, clean-cut 26 year old Dick Clark. When ABC picked the show up, it was renamed American Bandstand, and made it's first national show debut on this day in  1957. The show was moved to Los Angeles in 1964. ….where either it lost its soul or Professor Sy Yentz had moved on musically and didn’t care anymore. From 1963 to 1987 Bandstand was on only once a week, on Saturday. Briefly it was part of the USA Network with new host David Hirsh but went off the air in 1989.

1962 - Movie actress Marilyn Monroe was found dead, an apparent suicide, in her home in Los Angeles. And on the same day in 1984, British actor, Richard Burton died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

            1962 -And, speaking of stars, on this day in  Australian radio astronomers fixed the location of the previously known radio source 3C 273, in the constellation Virgo. In 1963 this became the first member of a new class of object eventually to be called quasars or "quasi-stellar radio sources." An optical telescope at the Hale Observatory saw it as a faint star-like object with a visible jet. Quasars radiate as much energy per second as a hundred or more galaxies. 3C273 is the still brightest quasar known.

                  1963- The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed.  It banned nuclear weapons tests "or any other nuclear explosion" in the atmosphere, in outer space, and under water. They could, however, still be tested underground.

      1969 - Mariner 7 flew past Mars. It took quite a few pictures and made several Martian atmospheric readings regarding temperature and composition. August 5 almost had another Martian experience. See below.

       1973 -The USSR launched Mars 6, which unfortunately made it to Mars but the data sent back was unreadable because of a flawed computer chip. And of course in that Communist Utopia , no one ever bothered to mention the failure.

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6.   1181- A supernova was observed by Chinese and Japanese astronomers. 

     1667- Happy Birthday, Johann Bernoulli major member of the Bernoulli family of Swiss mathematicians. He investigated the then new math of calculus, which he applied to the measurement of curves, to differential equations, and to mechanical problems.

    1753- In a shocking experience, Professor Georg Richmann of St. Petersburg, Moscow, was killed by his experiment with lightning. One year after Benjamin Franklin's kite experiment, Richmann attached a wire to the top of his house and led it down to an iron bar suspended above "the electric needle" and a bowl of water partly filled with iron filings. It was reported that during a storm, Richmann was struck while about a foot from the bar, and closely observing the needle. "A globe of blue and whitish fire about four inches in diameter" came from the bar struck Richmann's forehead" with "an explosion like that of a small cannon." That was the end of Dr. Richmann.  He did, however get to join the “circuits”.

     1809 - " Half a league, Half a league, Half a league onward.  Into the valley of death  road the six hundred.... Happy Birthday, Alfred Tennyson, English poet and author of The Charge of the Light Brigade among many others.

      1881 - Happy Birthday, Sir Alexander Fleming, Scottish bacteriologist, who discovered penicillin. In 1928, while working on influenza virus, he observed that mold had developed accidentally on a staphylococcus culture plate and that the mold had created a bacteria-free circle around itself. He experimented further and he found that a mold culture prevented growth of staphylococci, even when diluted 800 times. The  substance, which he named Katie Couric……no no no, he named it penicillin, began the highly effective practice of antibiotic therapy for infectious diseases.

    1890 - Continuing with our electrical theme from 1753, the electric chair was used for the first time - to execute the murderer, William Kemmler, in New York..

    1911 - I Love Lucy.  Happy Birthday comedienne Lucille Ball, born near Jamestown, NY.

    1926 - Gertrude Ederle became the first American woman to swim the English Channel.  It took 14 hours and 34 minutes.  She had just missed the ferry, dove in and never did catch it.

     1928 - Happy Birthday, Andy Warhol, one of the most influential artists of the latter part of the 20th century. He was born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania1

     1945, - Seeking a quick end to World War II and prevent perhaps a million casualties that an invasion of Japan would incur, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, by the American B-29, Enola Gay (named after pilot, Lt. Col. Paul Tibbett's mother).

      1985 - The 19th space shuttle mission, Challenger landed at Edwards AFB.  The Challenger's next flight, January 28, 1986 would be the disaster 73 seconds after take-off that took the lives of 7 astronauts.

        1996 - NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin announced the discovery of evidence of a primitive life form on Mars. The evidence came from a fossil found on a meteorite in Antarctica believed to have come from Mars billions of years ago.  The primitive life was later identified as Richard Nixon or possibly Al Gore.

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7.    1782- George Washington created the Order of the Purple Heart, a decoration to recognize merit in enlisted men and noncommissioned officers.  At his headquarters in Newburgh, New York, Washington devised a  badge, for "any singularly meritorious Action," was the "Figure of a Heart in Purple Cloth or Silk edged with narrow Lace or Binding." This device, the Badge of Military Merit, was affixed to the uniform coat above the left breast and permitted its wearer to pass guards and sentinels without challenge and to have his name and regiment inscribed in a Book of Merit.  It fell out of used after the Revolution until 1931 when General Douglas MacArthur, reopened work on a new design. His object was medal issued on the bicentennial of George Washington’s birth.Miss Elizabeth Will, an Army heraldic specialist in the Office of the Quartermaster General, was named to redesign the newly revived medal, which became known as the Purple Heart.

            1794- Angry farmers in the Monongahela Valley of Pennsylvania rebelled against the federal tax on liquor and stills. This was the Whiskey Rebellion as the farmers demonstrated their anger by torching tax collector's homes, as well as "tarring and feathering revenue officers." The government moved quickly to quell the rebellion: President Washington called in 12,900 Federal troops from to surrounding states to forcefully usher the farmers back to their homes where everyone had a shot of Jack Daniels’ and then another and then another and then they for got what they were angry about.

                1869- You’ve seen versions eclipses of the Sun saving explorers or soldiers in many movies but on this day, George Davidson, a prominent astronomer and explorer was exploring the Chilkat Valley in Alaska and correctly predicted an eclipse of the Sun.  It may have saved his life.  He had been warned that the Chilkat Indians were angry because of previous provocations and might be hostile. His initial meeting with the Chilkat on August 6 was tense. Davidson explained that he had come for purely scientific reasons, and he meant them no harm. Understandably, because of previous treatment from white folks, the Indians were skeptical.  Chilkat said that he was especially anxious to observe a total eclipse of the sun that he predicted would occur the following day. The Indians didn’t believe him, but they left the party in peace for the time being.Sure enough on August 7,  the sky grew dark over the Chilkat Valley as the moon eclipsed the sun, as Davidson had predicted. The Chilkat fled to the woods. Thereafter, they left Davidson and his party alone, leading one historian to speculate that the astronomer's prediction may have saved the entire team from attack.

            1876 – Happy Birthday, Mata Hari.  Mata Hari  was the stage name of the Dutch exotic dancer and prostitute Gertrud Margarete Zelle, who was shot by the French as a spy on October 15,  1917.
            1888 - Theophilus Van Kannel of Philadelphia received a patent for the revolving door.  He had actually tried several times but  he kept going around in circles. There were several problems connected to conventional push/pull open doors. Van Kannel’s revolving door served as an airlock, preventing the rapid influx of cold air into warm buildings on chilly, windy days. The revolving door also kept out street noises and fumes. The door proved particularly useful in skyscrapers, where the pressure differences created by a large column of warm air inside the building and the outside cold air made conventional doors difficult to open or close.  You’ve all seen those doors that “refuse to close” on a windy day.

      1896- Happy Birthday, Luis Allen Hazeltine, of Morristown, NJ, invented the neutrodyne circuit.  This circuit made commercial radio possible…….. considering the quality of commercial radio that  we hear today...............was this a good thing?

     1903 – Happy Birthday, Louis Leakey, British archaeologist and anthropologist born in Kabete, Kenya.. Leakey was largely responsible for convincing scientists that Africa, rather than Java or China, was the most significant area to search for evidence of human origins. Louis Leakey, his wife Mary, and their second son Richard made the key discoveries that have shaped our understanding of the first men, including Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Larry King, Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, Dick Clark and Barbara Walters.

            1915 -Driving a Peugeot, race-car driver Dario Resta broke the 100mph speed barrier in a race in Chicago.  Nowadays people routinely top 100mph as they race to the last parking space in a mall parking lot during Christmas shopping season.

                1928- Deflation!  The dollar went to a "shrink"! The dollar was left in the pants pocket and put in the dryer and it shrank.  Nah, Professor Sy Yentz has his laundromatic humor. On this day the day the dollar literally shrank. The Treasury unveiled a new version of the note that was one third smaller than its predecessor.  All the other bills shrank too.  Shrink shrank shrunk. Now everyone had to change to a new size wallet.

            1937 - Happy Birthday, William R. Maples (had a large and syrupy family tree did Dr. Maples), American forensic anthropologist who examined and identified the skeletons of a number of historical figures, including Czar Nicholas II and other members of the Romanov family killed in 1918 by the Bolsheviks, Vietnam MIAs, conquistador Francisco Pizarro, President Zachary Taylor -to determine if he had been poisoned, as had been proposed by some at the time. Test results showed that he had not been, and in 1994 helped convict Byron De La Beckwith of the 1963 murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers. Author of Dead Men Do Tell Tales.

       1942 – Nine months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. forces landed at Guadalcanal, marking the start of the first major allied offensive in the Pacific during World War II.

            1947 - In a remarkable feat of navigation in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, the wooden raft Kon-Tiki, which carried Thor Heyerdahl and five companions more than 4,000 miles from Peru, made landfall on a reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands – near Tahiti in Polynesia. Some people will do anything to avoid the fares on the cruise ships.  The raft was later entered in a race,  the Kon Tiki Derby.

      1959 -  The first photograph ever taken of the earth by a U.S. satellite showed a crescent shape of part of the planet in sunlight. Visible was Mexico taken from 17,000 miles above by the Explorer 6 satellite. The picture took 40 minutes to transmit or about the same time it takes "dial up" internet users to download a picture today.

        1998 - Islamic terrorists set off a pair of major explosions near U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killing 224 people, including 12 Americans.

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8.   1886- Happy Birthday, Matthew Henson, the African-American explorer who accompanied Admiral Peary to the North Pole in 1909.  After a disagreement over who would sit on Santa's lap, they went for a ride on Blitzen.

       1901- Happy Birthday, Ernest Lawrence, the South Dakota born physicist (Somehow "Lawrence of South Dakota" does not have the same resonance as Lawrence of Arabia) winner of the 1939 Nobel Prize for Physics for his invention of the cyclotron  in 1929.  The cyclotron is a device for accelerating nuclear particles to very high velocities without the use of high voltages. The swiftly moving particles are used to bombard atoms of various elements, disintegrating the atoms to form, in some cases, completely new elements. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Element 103  were named lawrencium (Lr) in his honor.

     1931 – Happy Birthday, Sir Roger Penrose, English mathematician who, with his father Lionel, developed the Penrose stairs, Penrose triangle, and Penrose tiles (think Escher).  He  also calculated the basic features of black holes….namely they are like Robert Frost’s woods – “dark and deep”.

             1948 - Happy Birthday, Svetlana Savitskaya , a Russian cosmonaut, the second woman in space .  She was selected as a cosmonaut in 1980, as part of a female team selected to upstage pending U.S  female astronaut flights on the space shuttle. She became the second woman in space in 1982, seven months before Sally Ride became the first American female astronaut in space  She also became the first woman to walk in space. Her later command of an all-female crew to Salyut 7 on the occasion of International Woman's Day was cancelled due to problems with the space station, a limited number of Soyuz T spacecraft available for docking with the station, who got to use the bathroom first thing in the morning, whose eye shadow was whose, and who got control of the remote so she could watch Oprah.

        1974 -   President Richard M. Nixon announced his intention to become the first president in American history to resign. He was threatened with impeachment and the release of self-incriminating White House tapes involving him in the scandal to cover up the infamous Watergate burglary of the Democratic National Committee in 1972. Just before noon the next day, August 9, Nixon officially handed in his papers and ended his term as the 37th president of the United States.  Gerald Ford (not the sharpest knife in the drawer), who had been appointed Vice President when Spiro T. Agnew resigned, became the 38th president (a word that Ford could probably not even spell).

       2005 - Set those clocks! The U.S. Energy Policy Act of 2005 was signed by President George W. Bush.  The Act extended Daylight Saving Time, effective in 2007, to begin three weeks earlier on the second Sunday of March and end a week later on the first Sunday of November

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9.    378 - Towards the end of the Roman Empire, the Romans lost a lot more battles than they won.  That’s why it  “fell”.  In one of the most decisive battles in history, a large Roman army under Valens, the Roman emperor of the East (the empire was split into east and west by this time), was defeated by the Visigoths at the Battle of Adrianople in present-day Turkey. Two-thirds of the Roman army, including Emperor Valens himself, were killed. The official end of the Roman Empire came in when Rome itself was conquered by the Visigoth Odoacer and his men in the year 476 AD.

         1593 - Happy Birthday, Izaak Walton, English naturalist who wrote The Compleat Angler – the story of geometry ……..no, no, no – Professor Sy Yentz has his Pythagorean sense of humor ---in 1653 (now over 300 printings).  It combines practical information about fishing with folklore and is the story of three friends, traveling through the English countryside

        1776 - Happy Birthday, Count Amadeo Avogadro Italian chemist and physicist who discovered that at the same temperature and pressure equal volumes of all perfect gases contain the same number of particles. This is known as Avogadro's Law.  His law lead to the Avogadro's Number.  The number being 6.022 x 10²³ units per mole of a substance. He realized the particles could be either atoms, or more often, combinations of atoms, for which he coined the word "molecule."  We  know considerably less famous Avogardo's Favorite Letter of the Alphabet, Avorgaro's Recipe (for mole stew), or Avogadro's Avocado.  

      1859 - The invention of the escalator escalated as the first U.S. patent for an escalator design improvement in was issued to Nathan Ames, of Saugus, Mass. The escalator had steps mounted on an inclined endless belt or chain. Did you hear about the blond who was late for a meeting because the escalator broke? 

      1896; Happy birthday, Jean Piaget, Swiss child psychologist and zoologist. At age 15 he was contributing articles on mollusks  to journals of zoology, and his doctoral degree thesis was on the distribution of mollusks ( "Good Golly Miss Mollusk") in the Valaisian Alps in Switzerland.  From mollusks he somehow turned to researching how mental growth in humans develops in several successive stages from infancy to adulthood. Called "the embryology of intelligence", it made him famous, not to mention an adjective -"piagetian" and a must read for every teacher education course ever given.

     1898- Inventor Rudolf Diesel received a patent for the diesel internal combustion engine. The diesel engine allowed trains and ships to operate more efficiently with oil instead of coal.  In case you were wondering, a gasoline engine intakes a mixture of gas and air, compresses it and ignites the mixture with a spark. A diesel engine takes in just air, compresses it and then injects fuel into the compressed air.  In 1913 he vanished overboard from a steamer bound for London; his body washed up ten days later.    

       1902 - Edward VII was crowned king of England following the death of his mother, Queen Victoria. Edward,  who was 60 by the time the dour ancient Hanover queen, who began her “queenship” in 1837,  passed away  reigned until 1910.

            1908-  The Tide turned as the electric washing machine was patented by Alva J. Fisher of Chicago, Illinois.  Introduced by the Hurley Machine Company the Thor washing machine was a drum type washng machine with a galvanized tub and an electric motor.

      1918-  With its historic and always impeccable timing, the U.S Government ordered a stop to the production of automobiles, not knowing that an armistice ending WW I three months later would be signed on Nov. 11, 1918. The government required that all production in auto factories would be for military purposes as of January 1, 1919, thus the only cars that would be made would be staff cars for the military.      

        1936 – Continuing to embarrass Adolf Hitler and his “master race”, Black American Jesse Owens won his fourth gold medal at the Berlin Olympics as the United States took first place in the 400-meter relay. His previous three medals were in the 100 meter and 200 meter dash and the long jump. 

            1945 - Seeking a quick end to WW II, after Japan refused an unconditional surrender following Hiroshima, an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, a ship building center.  The immediate surrender of the Japanese meant that a third bomb, which would have been ready around August 17, would not be needed.

       1969- Early in the morning of the 9^th, Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten, Charles “Tex” Watson and Patricia Krenwinkel members of Charles Manson's cult stabbed and mutilated five people in movie director Roman Polanski's Beverly Hills, California, home,including Polanski's pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate. Later that night, they murdered  a wealthy couple, Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary. All were convicted including Manson.  Unfortunately, none were executed.  All remain in prison.

             1974 - Richard Nixon left Washington as an ex-president having officially resigned at noon.  Gerald R. Ford was sworn in as president, beginning two slap stick years of falls, faux pas and ineptitude.

            1988- President Ronald Reagan nominated Lauro Cavazos to be secretary of education and the first Hispanic to serve in the Cabinet.

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10.    1821 - As part of Henry Clay's Missouri Compromise of 1920 (Maine entered as a “free” state), Missouri entered the Union as the 24th state making it 12 free states and 12 slave states.  It was the first state located entirely west of the Mississippi River.

          1833 - The village of Chicago, Illinois was incorporated. Since the population was 200 people it had a long way to go to becoming a city. The original village included an area of about three-eighths of a square mile.  The name "Chicago" derived from the Indians but it is not known which tribe named the town and many theories have been advanced to explain the origin of the name.  It probably means “city in which Cubs go over 100 years between World Series Championships”.

         1846 - An Act of Congress (trying to look busy?) established the Smithsonian Institution. In 1829 English scientist James Smithson left his fortune ($508,318) to the people of the United States to found an institution for the "increase and diffusion of knowledge." The great minds of the U.S then spent the next 12-14 years  trying to figure out what kind of institution (university? Science museum? Museum?) it would be.

         1856 - Happy Birthday, William Willet, English builder who invented Daylight Saving Time (see August 8). His original idea was to make four weekly changes of 20-mins each, for a total of 80-mins. (Oh wouldn't that have been a joy!). The first Daylight Saving Bill in 1908, which proposed a single one hour at the change of season failed to pass in Parliament in Britain.  The idea finally came “light” during WW I for wartime fuel savings and the rest is …..well, daylight savings.

        1874 - Happy Birthday, Herbert C. Hoover, the 31st U.S. President.  As Missouri was the first state west of the Mississippi, Herbert was the first U.S. President born west of the Mississippi River - in West Branch, Iowa.  He was also the president to have a telephone at his desk. "Hello, I can't come to phone right now, this Depression has me depressed."

       1885 – America's first commercially operated electric streetcar, invented by Leo Daft, (one of the earliest “trains” with a 3^rd rail) began operation from Baltimore to Hampden

        1889 – Englishman,  Dan Rylands of the Hope Glassworks in Yorkshiire, patented the screw cap for bottles

         1889- Same day. The complete skeleton of a thirty-six foot long and fifteen-foot high mammoth was found in St. James, Nebraska.  The mammoth was later identified as Bill Clinton’s ego.

            1889- Same day again – Happy Birthday, Charles Brace Darrow American inventor who designed the board game Monopoly. He had invented the game on  March 7, 1933. On  Dec  31, 1935, a patent was issued for the game of Monopoly assigned to Parker Brothers, Inc., by Charles Darrow of Pennsylvania.   Darrow was paid off in Monopoly money plus Baltic Avenue and a Get Out of Jail Free card.

        1897 - "Take 2 aspirin and call me in the morning." Dr. Felix Hoffmann successfully created a chemically pure and stable form of acetylsalicylic acid........aspirin.

         1909 - Happy Birthday, Leo Fender (brother of Repeat O. Fender and Chronic O. Fender), American inventor of electronic musical instruments. In 1948 he invented the first solid-body electric guitar to be mass-produced, the Fender Broadcaster. It was later renamed the Fender Telecaster.  His Stratocaster, developed in 1954, became the favored guitar of rock guitarists. The Telecaster and Stratocaster are arguably, the most popular and successful guitar designs in history. Jimi Hendrix (probably used a lot of them since he liked to set them on fire), Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, The Beatles (not Ringo), Dave Gilmour, John Frusciante of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Kurt Cobain and many others have used Stratocasters.

        1921 – Future President, Franklin D. Roosevelt was stricken with polio at his summer home on the Canadian island of Campobello.  Roosevelt thought he had “lumbago” but poliomyelitis is a  crippling viral disease that would leave him paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life.

             1945- A day after the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan agreed to the Potsdam Conference terms of unconditional surrender.   President Harry S. Truman ordered a halt to atomic bombing.

         1960 - An ejected space capsule from Discoverer 13 was recovered when it returned from orbit. It was the first man-made object recovered from space. Mysterious waves from the object resulted in the compulsion of many people to name their children Tyler.

            1990 – The American space probe Magellan arrived at its planned polar orbit around Venus. Magellan circled the planet once every 3-hr 15-min, collecting radar images of the surface in strips about 17-28 km (10-17 mi) wide and radioed back the information. Magellan  had been  carried into space in the shuttle cargo bay of the space shuttle Atlantis, launched in  May of 1989 with Sigourney Weaver at the controls.  It  was the first planetary spacecraft to be released from a shuttle in Earth orbit.

            2003-  The United Kingdom recorded its first-ever temperature over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Of course since they are Celsius, folks woke up, heard 37.77777777 and promptly put on overcoats before going out. August 2003 was the hottest August ever recorded in the northern hemisphere and broke all previous records for heat-related deaths.

            2006- British authorities announced they had thwarted an Islamic terrorist plot to simultaneously blow up 10 aircraft heading to the U.S. using explosives smuggled in hand luggage.

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11.      1807 - Robert Fulton, started commercial steam ship navigation as he sailed the Clermont up the Hudson River from New York City

           1807 - Happy Birthday,  David Atchison who was actually president for a day on March 4, 1849, when as president pro tem of the U.S Senate he served on the Sunday before Zachary Taylor (Old Rough and Ready) was inaugurated.  Taylor had refused to be inaugurated on a Sunday. Atchison also organized the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe railroad.             

           1861 - Happy Birthday, James B. Herrick, American physician and clinical cardiologist who was the first to observe and describe sickle-cell anemia.  

            1874- Harry S. Parmelee of New Haven, Conn. received a patent for the sprinkler head.  A sacred day for lawn care.

            1877 - American astronomer Asaph Hall (brother of Front Hall, Rear Hall and Monty Hall) discovered the two moons of Mars, which he named Phobos and Deimos. In Greek mythology, they were the sons of Ares (Mars) and Aphrodite (Venus). Deimos is Greek for "panic" and phobos is Greek for "fear".  They are probably asteroids pulled by Jupiter into orbits that allowed them to be captured by Mars. There is some speculation that they originated in the outer solar system rather than in the main asteroid belt....maybe even asteroid suspenders.

      1896 - We're not pulling your chain....Harvey Hubbell of Bridgeport Ct. patented  the first electric light bulb socket featuring an on-and-off  pull chain.

        1909 - The liner S.S. Arapahoe was the first ship to use the S.O.S. radio distress call. Its wireless operator, radioed for help after a propeller shaft snapped while off the coast at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. Yes, the first S.O.S was the result of someone getting the shaft.

        1934 - In a great day for the movie industry, the first federal prisoners arrived at Alcatraz.  Think of all the movies that wouldn't have been made or worse, the alternative titles; The Birdman of the Federal Correctional Facility at Atlanta or Escape From the Minimal Security Correctional Facility at Poofville.

         1950 - Happy Birthday, Steve Wozniak , co-founder with Steve Jobs of Apple Computer

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 12.    1851 - Isaac Singer was issued a patent for a sewing machine with a double treadle. He had to pay huge settlements to Elias Howe, another sewing machine patent holder. Singer, instituted business innovations like installment buying, after-sale servicing and trade-in allowances.       

        1865 - After studying Louis Pasteur's germ theory of disease (that infections are caused by bacteria), Dr. Joseph Lister (brother of  Schindler's Lister and Top Ten Lister) became the first surgeon to use disinfectant during an operation. Lister used phenol (carbolic acid) as a disinfectant for surgery. This dramatically reduced the surgical death rate from 45% to 15%.        

      1883 - The quagga became extinct when the last mare at Amsterdam Zoo died. The quagga looked like a zebra but it only had stripes on the front of its body - sort of like someone ran out of paint. The quagga had been hunted to extinction without it being realized until many years later. The Quagga, formerly inhabited areas of South Africa.  They were seen by the settlers as competitors for the grazing of their livestock, mainly sheep and goats. So, goodbye quagga. The quagga was the first extinct animal to have its DNA studied. Now, by breeding with selected southern plains zebras an attempt is being made to retrieve at least the genes responsible for the Quaggas coloration. It’s turning into a real quaggamire.

     1898- The end of the Spanish-American War. The brief, one-sided conflict was ended when Spain formally agreed to peace on U.S terms:  the cession of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Manila in the Philippines to the United States

       1908 - The first Model T, Ford known as the "Tin Lizzie," was produced in Detroit, Michigan. The Model T revolutionized the automotive industry. It provided an affordable, reliable car (previously cars were viewed as being for rich folks) for the average American.  The first "Tin Lizzie" cost only $850 and seated two people. No word about "dealer incentives" or 0% interest “regardless of you credit history”, or "President's Day Sales Events".

        1953- Thanks to spies and American traitors who provided the technology, the Soviet Union detonated its first hydrogen bomb, in Kazakhstan, less than a year after President Harry Truman announced that the United States had developed a hydrogen bomb.

        1977- The Enterprise, named after the Star Trek space module and the prototype for the space shuttle, made its first flight on its own within Earth's atmosphere after being launched from a Boeing 747, separated, and then touched down in California's Mojave Desert. The Enterprise never actually flew in space.  In all test flights it was mounted on the 747 (it looked like they were mating) and flew and landed after separation.

        1981 - IBM introduced the PC personal computer

        1960- Echo I, the first communications satellite was launched.

       1990 -  Fossil hunter, diver, archaeologist, explorer Susan Hendrickson discovered three huge bones jutting out of a cliff near Faith, in the Black Hills of South Dakota.  No, it wasn’t Jimmy Hoffa. They turned out to be part of the largest-ever Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton ever discovered, a 65 million-year-old specimen dubbed Sue, after its discoverer. After Sue was discovered she underwent a lengthy custody battle – surprise, surprise! Finally, in 1997, the custody fight ended after Sue was auctioned in New York. The Field Museum of Natural History, in Chicago, Illinois, bought Sue. The price: $8.36 million!  Sue’s skeleton is 90% complete.  The best specimen ever found. She is 13 feet high at the hips and 42 feet long from head to toe.  Sue's five foot-long,2,000-pound skull with its 58 teeth, some as long as a human forearm. In her teeth were found remnants of Japanese people left from her attack on Tokyo in 1958.

            1991 - Mt. Hudson, in the Chilean Andes erupted, sending up a cloud of gas that killed 1 million sheep. We didn't want to "pull the wool over your eyes". We are not sheepish about mentioning this ewe know.

13. It’s Blame Someone Else Day

         1422 - Happy Birthday, William Caxton, the first English printer.  Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press in Germany around 1450, but Caxton  (1422?-1491), was the first English printer, born probably in Tenterden, Kent. His translation and print of The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, in 1474, was the first book printed in English. He also printed the Canterbury Tales and  some Danielle Steele books.  Fewer than 40 of Caxton's publications still exist. 1474, was the first book printed in English

       1655- Happy Birthday, Johann Denner, German inventor, maker of musical instruments and inventor of the clarinet.  Previously, single reeds were used only in organs (kidney? pancreas? ladder?)and folk instruments. The clarinet's immediate predecessor was the small mock trumpet, or chalumeau, an adaptation of a folk reed pipe that Denner is credited with improving. Benny Goodman sends his thanks.

        1642 - Christiaan Huygens discovered the Martian south polar cap. Previously people couldn’t decide whether is was a Martian south polar chapeau, sombrero, top hat, or beret so they settled on cap.

        1860- Happy Birthday, Annie Oakley, the greatest of the Western female sharpshooters.

        1888- Happy Birthday, John L. Baird, Scottish engineer, who was the first man to televise outline pictures of objects in 1924. This was followed the next year by recognizable human faces. By 1926, he was able to demonstrate TV for moving objects at the Royal Institution, London

       1889- William Gray of Hartford, Connecticut, received a patent for a coin-operated telephone. “Please deposit an additional 50 cents for ten more seconds…………..”

       1899- Happy Birthday, Alfred Hitchcock, English born movie director of such hits as, Pyscho, North By Northwest, Strangers On a Train, The Birds and duds like Marnie.

         1907 - The first taxi cab in New York City. This probably also the day for the first illegal taxi turn, obnoxious horn honking, cutting off other drivers, taking the "scenic route", and getting "lost" going to the airport.  The word taxi comes from taximeter, the instrument used to measure distance traveled and cost.  Cab comes from cabriolet, which was a taxi predecessor, but with one horse pulling it.

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14.    1820- The New York Eye Infirmary, the first U.S. eye hospital, opened in New York City. Many medical schools sent their best Pupils. Really! These puns keep getting Cornea.

         1840 - Happy Birthday,  Richard von Krafft-Ebing, German neuron-psychiatrist who opened the field of sexual psychopathology, particularly deviant sexual behavior. He also introduced the term "paranoia." But that didn’t necessarily mean someone was out to get him………………….

         1521 Hernando Cortez completed the conquering of the Aztecs as his forces captured Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec empire. Cortéz' soldiers destroyed  the city and captured Cuauhtemoc, the Aztec emperor

         1784 - Although Alaska had been sighted by a Russian expedition led by Danish explorer, Vitus Bering in 1741, on this day the first permanent Russian settlement, founded by fur trader, Grigory Shelikov, was established on Kodiak Island.  

         1860 - Happy Birthday, Ernest Thompson Seton, English born American naturalist and writer who was an early practitioner of the modern school of animal-fiction writing. Wild Animals I Have Known was one Professor Sy Yentz favorite childhood books.

         1888- The first electric meter was patented by Oliver B. Shallenberger in Rochester PA........................and this was a good thing?

          1900 - The Boxer Rebellion came to an end as an international force of British, Russian, American, Japanese, French, and German troops ended the siege of   the Chinese capital of Peking . With the end of the Boxer Rebellion, everyone in China now had to wear Briefs.

          1953- David Mullany Sr. invented the whiffle ball (hollow plastic, sometimes with holes like swiss cheese – see August 1), a ball that curved when it was thrown, for his 13-year-old son

          1994 - The Hubble space telescope photographed Uranus with rings. The rings had previously been discovered in photos sent back  by Voyager.  Remember the pronunciation of the planet's name has the emphasis on the first syllable, NOT the middle.  The rings are around "yure-ehnus", while you may have rings around yur AIN us, we don't really want to know. Of course if you insist on mispronouncing it, there is a list that can be interesting: there is methane in yur AIN us, yur AIN us has many moons, yur Ain us is gaseous, yur AIN us is greenish/blue......and so on....please feel free to add to the list if you are anal.

         2003- A major blackout knocked out power across the eastern United States and parts of Canada. It started at 4:10 p.m. ET and 21 power plants shut down in just three minutes. Fifty million people were affected, including residents of New York, Cleveland, and Detroit, as well as Toronto and Ottawa, Canada. Although power companies were able to resume some service in good time, power remained off in other places for more than a day.

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15. This is   National Relaxation Day and National Failures Day

         1057 - Yes Shakespeare fans, there really was a Macbeth. On this day at the Battle of Lumphanan, King Macbeth of Scotland was slain by Malcolm Canmore (means "big head"), whose father, King Duncan I, was murdered by Macbeth 17 years earlier.

         1794 - Happy Birthday, Elias Fries (brother of French Fries, and Home Fries), a Swedish botanist, developer of the first system used to classify fungi. A mushroom walks into a bar and orders a drink.  He is refused service by the bartender and says “Why not? I’m a fun guy.”

         1877- Thomas Edison coined the telephone greeting "Hello." He suggested the use of Hello to the president of the Telegraph Company to answer the phone instead of "Ahoy" suggested by Alexander Bell.

         1888 - Happy Birthday, T.E Lawrence (not to be confused with actor Peter O'Toole who portrayed him in the movie Lawrence of Arabia),  British archaeological scholar, military strategist, and author known for his legendary war activities in the Middle East during WW I and for his book about the war in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

        1914 - The Panama Canal was officially opened.  It cut through the Isthmus of Panama ("isthmus be the place") to shorten the voyage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

       1934- American explorer William Beebe and Otis Barton descended 3,028 feet in their  bathysphere into the ocean near Bermuda.The bathysphere withstood over 1,360 pounds of pressure. Connecting the bathysphere to the barge was a 3,500-foot steel cable, almost an inch thick. A solid rubber hose, carrying telephone wires and electricity for lights, provided Beebe and Barton with e their only contact with the outside world. Once inside the sphere, Beebe remarked upon the tight quarters it provided: "The longer we were in it, the smaller it seemed to get." Beebe was not motivated by breaking records or making history, however. His passion lay in the discovery of creatures never before observed. And yet THEY DIDN’T BRING A CAMERA so there is no record other than visual descriptions of what they saw.

1935-  Actor and humorist, and one of the most popular entertainers in America, Will Rogers died in a plane crash in Alaska while flying with his friend, aviation pioneer Wiley Post.

        1961 -Just two days after blocking off free passage between East and West Berlin (divided like the rest of Germany after WW II)  with barbed wire, the communist East German government, with strings pulled by their Soviet communist puppet masters, began building the Berlin Wall to permanently close off access of its citizens to the West. For the next 28 years, the heavily fortified Berlin Wall, which separated East and West Berlin and completely surrounded West Berlin (which was in East German territory) stood as a symbol of the failures of the communist "paradise".)

        1969 – “Well I came upon a child of God. She was walking along the road…..”(Crosby Still and Nash – written by Joni Mitchell).The festival that would come to be known as Woodstock opened at Max Yasgur's dairy farm in upstate New York. In addition to the music the festival gave new meaning to playing in the mud.  

       1994 - The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) issued a press release that physicists there recently cooled atoms to 700 nanokelvins, the coldest temperature ever recorded for matter. NIST scientists chilled a cloud of cesium ("We have come to praise cesium, not barium") atoms very close to absolute zero using lasers to catch the atoms in an optical lattice (we usually have lattice in our salads). The atoms reached 700 nanokelvins, or 700 billionths of a degree above absolute zero. Zero kelvin (-273ºC – named after British scientist Lord Kelvin), or absolute zero, is the temperature at which atomic thermal motion would stop.

16.    1812- American General William Hull surrendered Fort Detroit and his army to the British without a fight. Of Hull's 2,000-man army, most were militiamen + the Detroit Tigers, Detroit Red Wings, Detroit Pistons and Detroit Lions, and British General Isaac Brock allowed them to return to their homes on the frontier. The regular U.S. Army troops were taken as prisoners to Canada. With the capture of Detroit, Michigan Territory was declared a part of Great Britain and Shawnee chief Tecumseh increasd his raids against Americans  in the frontier area.. In September 1813, U.S. General William Henry Harrison (Old Tippicanoe), the future president, recaptured Detroit.  Tecumseh was killed at the Battle of the Thames in 1813 (Harrison was again the American general), effectively ending any Indian Confederation.

            1858 - Queen Victoria (widow) sent the first official telegraph message across the Atlantic Ocean from London to President Buchanan (bachelor), in Washington DC. Reminiscent of current dial up computer wait times, it began transmission at 10:50am and was completed at 4:30am the next day, taking nearly 18-hrs to reach Newfoundland. With 99 words, consisting of 509 letters, it averaged about 2-min per letter. The message asked about Buchanan’s plans for the evening and did he need a date and was the pizza thick or thin crusted.  This earliest Transatlantic cable went dead within a month.

            1884 – Happy Birthday, Hugo Gernsback, inventor (over 80 patents), author, editor, and publisher for whom the prestigious Hugo Award (for Science Fiction writing) is named. He is credited with inventing Science Fiction.  In 1926, he started a magazine, Amazing Stories, exclusively dedicated to what he called "scientifiction," and later renamed "science fiction."So many famous writers got their start in Amazing Stories that he is known as the father of modern science fiction. The most important science fiction award is named in his honor: the "Hugo."

            1896 - The Klondike Gold Rush in the Yukon Territory was  kicked off as prospector George Carmack found gold on the river bed in shallow water while salmon fishing along the Klondike River in the Yukon, Canada….don’t we all?

          1888- Happy Birthday, T.E Lawrence, British soldier better known as Lawrence of Arabia.

            1889-  The loop-de-loop Roller Coaster was patented by Edwin Prescott. It was built at West 10th Avenue, Coney Island in 1901. The track was made of steel, the loop was larger, but most importantly it was an ellipse which pulled relatively few g's and provided a safe ride. Unfortunately, the public of the time was not terribly daring and  was more inclined to watch than ride. The Loop-the-Loop struggled financially  along until World War One, making money by charging people admission to the viewing area. Many more paid to watch than to ride and the coaster ended bankruptcy…..after a long series of ups and downs.

             1904 – Happy Birthday,  Wendell Stanley,  Spanish-American biochemist who received (with John Northrop and James Sumner) the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1946 for his work in the purification and crystallization of viruses, which demonstrated their molecular structure. Stanley also crystallized singer “Crystal Gale and made her brown eyes blue”.

            1960- Continuing our "descent theme" (see Beebe and Barton 8/15), Captain Joseph W. Kittinger made the longest delayed parachute jump on record when he jumped out of a balloon at 102,800 feet and dropped 84,700 feet or 16.04 miles before opening his parachute over New Mexico.  He was in an open gondola decorated with a paper license plate that his five-year-old son had cut out of a cereal box. He was protected against the subzero temperatures by layers of clothes and a pressure suit--he experienced air temperatures as low as minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 70 degrees Celsius)--and loaded down with gear that almost doubled his weight. The gondola climbed to the maximum altitude in one hour and 31 minutes even though at 43,000 feet (13,106 meters) he began experiencing severe pain in his right hand caused by a failure in his pressure glove and the attacks of flying monkeys…no,no,no Professor Sy Yentz has his Ozian sense of humor.  He remained at the peak altitude for about 12 minutes; then he stepped out of his gondola and “whooshed” into the darkness of space. After falling for 13 seconds, his six-foot (1.8-meter) canopy parachute opened and he landed safely

             1977/1948 - Elvis Presley and Babe Ruth died on the same day.  Thought you might need to know that. P.S Bela Lugosi (Dracula) also died on this day but in 1956.  He was making the immortal Plan 9 from Outer Space when he died at the beginning of filming.  Director Ed Wood’s  brother in-law finished Lugosi’s scenes wearing a cape (a la Dracula) to cover most of his face.

             1988- Vice President George H.W. Bush tapped Indiana Sen. Dan Quayle to be his running mate on the Republican ticket.  Quayle’s answer was delayed several days as he tried to learn to use the telephone, got frustrated and tried to walk to Bush’s headquarters. Got lost and waited patiently in a landscaping store trying to figure out which “Bush”.

             2003-  An international meeting of chemists officially named element 110-  Darmstadtium, symbol Ds. This was first identified in a high-energy physics laboratory in Darmstadt, Germany where Element 110 was created for a fraction of a thousandth of a second....Post "creation conversation might have been: "There it is."  
"Where?" "It's gone now."  "Where was it?"  "There."  "What did it look like?" "I don't know, it was all too fast". "Oh".

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17. 1798- Happy Birthday, Thomas Hodgkin, English physician who, in 1832 described the malignant disease of lymph tissue that we know now eponymously as Hodgkin's Disease.  In 1865 another British physician, Samuel Wilks, described the same disease picture, independently of Hodgkin and with greater precision. As he later became acquainted with the work of Hodgkin, he recognized the latter’s workand named the condition for Hodgkin

         1786- Happy birthday Davy Crockett, famous frontiersman killed at the Alamo. He was born in a small cabin on the banks of the Nolichucky River (not on a mountain top – as the Disney song goes) in Tennessee.  Famous for his credo; “Be sure you’re right. Then go ahead.” From 1827 through 1833, Crockett actually served in Congress However, in his run for a fourth term in Congress, he was defeated by a narrow margin. Disgusted with politics, Crockett left Tennessee, and his family,  and headed for Texas in the fall of 1835. On  January, 9 1836 he wrote a daughter back in Tennessee: "I would rather be in my present situation than to be elected to a seat in Congress for life." Less than one month later, however, Crockett and 189 others were killed at the Alamo by Mexican General Santa Anna’s forces.

             1809- Robert Fulton left New York on his steamboat (called the Clermont by history but called the North River Steam Boat by Fulton) for Albany. He made the 132 mile trip in thirty-two hours ( or about how long it takes to make the trip by car on the last day of a holiday weekend) and successfully demonstrated to the world the possibilities of steam navigation.

          1835 - In a wrenching experience, 1835, the wrench was patented by Solymon Merrick of Springfield, Massachusetts.  The physics of a wrench are that the tool works as lever. The lever one of the six simple machines ( pulley, wedge, wheel & axel, inclined plane, and screw. Note that Merrick’s was the first wrench, the monkey wrench (invented by Charles Moncky), the pipe wrench, the ratchet wrench, and even the ratchetless wrench (used in space) were yet to come

        1890 - Happy Birthday, Ralph R. Teetor of Hagerstown, Indiana, inventor of the cruise control.  Interestingly, an accident left Teetor blind at age 5, he quickly learned to develop his mind and his sense of touch to achieve remarkable results in mechanics.   He developed Cruise Control in the 1940s, patenting it under the name Speedostat in 1953. And never once did Teetor totter in his quest for success.

        1920 – New York Yankees pitcher, Carl Mays hit Cleveland Indians shortstop Ray Chapman in the head with a pitch.  This was the era before batting helmets.  Chapman died the next day.  Mays,who had a reputation for “pitching inside” was investigated and cleared by the New York District Attorney.

            1957- At a major league baseball game, during the same “at bat” by Richie Ashburn of the Philadelphia Phillies, spectator, Alice Roth had her nose broken by a foul ball. Two pitches later, another foul ball off Ashburn’s bat hit her as she was being loaded onto a stretcher.

            1978 - The Double Eagle II completed the first transatlantic balloon flight when it landed near Paris. It took 137 hours after lifting off from Preque Isle, Maine to get to Paris (or about the same time it takes to get out of O'Hare Airport in Chicago when there are thunder storms in the vicinity). Ben Abruzzo, Maxie Anderson, and Larry Newman piloted the balloon over 3,233 miles.

         1987 -Good riddance as Rudolf Hess, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's former deputy, was found dead in Spandau Prison in Berlin at the age of 93, apparently the victim of suicide. Hess was the last surviving member of Hitler's inner circle and the sole prisoner at Spandau since 1966. He had been in prison since a mysterious flight to Scotland in 1941 where he was captured.  Why the flight?  Lots of theories from peace initiative to mental instability.

18. 1227 - Genghis Khan kaput. Genghis Khan, born Temujin, the Mongol leader who created an empire stretching from the east coast of China west to the Aral Sea (a landlocked sea –currently drying up in Central Asia between Kazakhstan in the north and Uzbekistan in the south. Glad we could clear that up for you.) died during a campaign against the Chinese kingdom of Xi Xia. He fell from his horse when it startled while he was hunting.He eventually died from internal injuries as a result of the fall.  First he was Genghis Khan but being deceased he was now Gengis Khant.

         1587 - Happy Birthday Virginia Dare (sister of Double Dare, Who's Dare, and Dr. Kil Dare), first child born in America of English parents on Roanoke Island, NC.    

       1590 -On what would have been Virginia Dare's 3rd birthday, her grandfather, John White, the governor of the Roanoke Island colony, found her and 100 other colonists missing as he  returned from a supply-trip to England.  The only clue to their mysterious disappearance was the word "CROATOAN" carved into the  that had been built around the settlement. White thought the letters meant that the colonists had moved to Croatoan Island, some 50 miles away, but a search of the island found none of the settlers.  The disappearance remains a mystery to this day.

            1838- The first scientific expedition outfitted by the US government was a US ocean exploration fleet that sailed from Virginia to study the Pacific Ocean and the "South Seas".  The six sailing vessels of the South Seas Exploring Expedition, or Ex. Ex. as it was called, included lots of  navigational and scientific instruments and stores as well as 346 men, including nine scientists and artists.  They were very busy folks, The path  of the Ex. Ex. led: first south to Cape Horn, with a side trip from there to the Antarctic, to the west coast of South America, then to Tahiti and the Fiji Islands and Australia, and from there a more extended exploration of Antarctica. The expedition then backtracked to Australia and New Zealand, to the Fiji and Hawaiian Islands, and from there to another of its prime objectives, the Pacific Northwest, in order to explore that coast and strengthen American claims to the Oregon Territory and the San Francisco Bay. Next, the ships sailed to Manila, Singapore, around Cape Town, and to New York, concluding the last all-sail circumnavigation of the world. The also visited Club Med Tahiti, as well as “Girls Gone Wild” on Fiji.

            1868-Pierre Janssen, French astronomer discovered how to observe solar prominences without an eclipse. His work was independent of that of the Englishman Joseph Norman Lockyer, who made the same discovery at about the same time. He discovered helium in the solar spectrum during eclipse.  Janssen also established an observatory on Mont Blanc, and published a pioneering book of photographs of the Sun, Atlas de photographies solaries  in 1904.

      1909 - The first race was held at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. It is now the home of the world's most famous motor racing competition, the Indianapolis 500.  The first race was a five mile nail biter as 12,000 spectators watched Austrian engineer Louis Schwitzer win with an average speed of 57.4 miles per hour.

            1960 - The first oral contraceptive was marketed by the Searle Drug Company in America.  The first oral contraceptive was actually submitted first for regulatory approval in 1957 as a treatment for menstrual disorders and infertility, not as a contraceptive (although the drug had been developed as an oral contraceptive). It was not until 1960 that the same drug was submitted to FDA for approval specifically as an oral contraceptive.

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19.   1646 - Happy Birthday, John Flamsteed, England's first Astronomer Royal. Established the Greenwich Observatory, as one of a group of scientists who convinced King Charles II to build a national observatory

        1785- Happy Birthday, Seth Thomas, American clock manufacturer who was one of the pioneers in the mass production of clocks.

       1812 - During the War of, yes, 1812, the U.S. Navy frigate Constitution, commanded by Captain Isaac Hull, defeated the British frigate Guerrière in a battle off the coast of Nova Scotia. Witnesses claimed that the British shot merely bounced off the Constitution's sides, as if the ship were made of iron rather than wood. So it was nicknamed “Old Ironsides”. By the war's end, "Old Ironsides" destroyed or captured seven more British ships. The success of the USS Constitution against the supposedly invincible Royal Navy provided a tremendous boost in morale for the United States during a war in which it lost most of the battles, not to mention the city of  Washington D.C…..which in retrospect wasn’t such a bad thing.

      1830- Happy Birthday, Lothar Meyer.  Never heard of Lothar Meyer? Lothar is another of those folks who lost out as the “inventor of”, “discoverer of”, or “developer of”.  In Meyer’s case it was the Periodic Law. The German chemist who discovered the Periodic Law, independently of Dmitry Mendeleev, at about the same time 1869. In fact, both Meyer and Mendeeyev worked with Robert Bunsen, although five years apart. However, he did not develop the periodic classification of the chemical elements as thoroughly as Mendeeyev and ended up as triva.

        1839- Louis Daguerre announced the invention of the daguerreotype photographic process. This was the first process to allow an image to be chemically fixed as a permanent picture, a precursor of the photograph.   He had discovered that a latent image could be developed making  it possible to reduce the exposure time from some eight hours to thirty minutes.  It had been announced originally on  January, 7 1839 but details were not divulged until August, 19  when the process was announced publicly, the French government which had bought the rights to the process from him, and given it free to the world.

         1851 – Happy Birthday, Charles Hires, American manufacturer, the inventor of his brand of root beer, sold by the Hires Co.. Root beer dates all the way back to colonial settlers. As a Philadelphia pharmacist, Hires tasted a herbal tea while visiting New Jersey. Upon his return, he created a similar drink, "Hires' Herb Tea," with sassafras as the main flavoring ingredient. He sold the mixture at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in tiny packets that contained his mixture of various herbs, barks, and berries, for housewives to brew, now calling it  "root beer."  And that is the roots of this particular root beer.  In the 1960s, the Food and Drug Administration banned any sassafras extract that contained the suspected carcinogen safrole, a colorless essential oil. Safrole had been the flavoring most closely associated with root beer, and bottlers scrambled to find substitutes, including an artificial flavor to replace the prohibited extract. Wintergreen is now the dominant flavoring in most root beer, along with vanilla, which supplies creaminess.

        1856, Gail Borden of Brooklyn, NY, patented his process for condensed milk. You've heard of Borden's condensed milk ... "The milk from contented cows." This slogan was one of the great American advertising campaigns.  Although how they got powdered milk from cow mystifies Professor Sy Yentz.

       1871 – Happy Birthday, Orville T. Wright, American aviator, who with his brother, Wilbur, invented the first powered airplane, Flyer, capable of sustained, controlled flight on Dec. 17, 1903. At Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville made the first ever manned powered flight, remaining airborn for 12-seconds and cover 120 ft. – just under ½ the length of a Boeing 747. The luggage was lost and Orville was delayed in de-planing as the ground crew could not get the jetway to operate.  After Wilbur died of typhoid in 1912, Orville sold his interest in the Wright Company in 1915.

            1887 - Dmitri Mendeleev having developed the Periodic Table of Elements used a balloon to ascend to an altitude of 11,500 feet (3.5 km) to observe an eclipse of the Sun in Russia. He made the solo ascent above Klin without any prior experience. In 1876, he had visited the U.S. to observe the Pennsylvania oil fields

              1895 - Gunfighter, John Wesley Hardin was killed in El Paso, Texas.  There are some similarities to the murder of Wild Bill Hickok.  Like Hickok, Hardin was gambling, although with dice - not cards, when his killer (in this case an off-duty policeman named John Selman), walked up behind him and shot him in the head.

      1906- Happy Birthday, Philo T. Farnesworth, engineer who discovered a system for electronic television.  Farnsworth was a 15-year-old high school student when he designed his first television system. Six years later he obtained his first patent. In 1927, Farnsworth was the first inventor to transmit a television image comprised of 60 horizontal lines. Demonstrating his prescience, the image transmitted was a dollar sign. Farnsworth developed the dissector tube, the basis of all current electronic televisions In 1935 he demonstrated his complete television system. Farnsworth's basic television patents covered scanning, focusing, synchronizing, contrast, controls, and power. He also invented the first cold cathode (and then protestant?) ray tubes and the first simple electronic microscope. The Philco TV manufacturing was named after him     Who invented the television?  Lots of hands in that pie (John Baird, Vladimir Zworkin) but give Philo T. a lot of the credit.

         1921 - O.K Trekkies  - Happy Birthday, Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek.

        1934,- Adolf Hitler, already chancellor, was also elected president of Germany (see the death of Hindenberg on August 2) in a consolidation of power that ended the short history of the Weimar republic. This accelerated the events which would lead to the great horror known as WW II. 

            1934 – Same day as the first race at Indianapolis, the first “All-American Soap Box Derby” was held in Dayton, Ohio. The event was organized by newsman Myron Scott, who covered a race of boy-built cars and was so impressed that he began a similar program on a national scale. Presumably soap boxes were a bit larger in those day. The race was moved to Akron, Ohio because of its hills, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s government run WPA money funded the construction of the official Derby Downs track. The race is still held annually as kids from the United States and several foreign countries (as the organizers continue the ever lasting battle against adult cheating). Boys and girls, ages nine through 16, are allowed to compete.

            1935 Happy Birthday, Storey Musgrave, American astronaut and physician who made six flights into space. His first space flight was on Apr, 9 1983 with the maiden voyage of the ill fated Space Shuttle Challenger, during which he and Don Peterson conducted the first Space Shuttle extravehicular activity to test the new space suits. He flew on five more Space Shuttle flights which included all of the Space Shuttles; Challenger, again, Atlantis, Discovery, Endeavour, and Columbia.

         1960- Sputnik 5, carrying two dogs, was launched into space and were later retrieved as the first living organisms from space.  The dogs then developed as alien pods and took over the minds of anyone who petted them and resulted in the creation of Pamela Sue Anderson.

            1976 - President Gerald R. Ford won the Republican presidential nomination at the party's national convention in Kansas City.  It took several hours for advisors to  explain to the muddled Ford exactly what this meant.  He when on to run one of the most inept campaigns in history, highlighted by his identifying Communist puppet countries, notably Poland, as free during a debate with his slightly less inept opponent, the rather weird Jimmy Carter.

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20.    

1779 – Happy Birthday, Jöns Jacob Berzelius, Swedish scientist, one of the founders (with Lavoisier) of modern chemistry.  He developed the concepts of the ion and ionic compounds.  He also measured the weights of 43 elements. He found that the weights of compounds were not integer multiples of the hydrogen atom. He also found that the weights could be reduced through a regimen of diet and exercise. Ha ha ha Professor Sy Yentz has his fitness sense of humor.

             1804 - Sergeant Charles Floyd became the only fatality of the during the two years, four months and nine days of  the Lewis and Clark Expedition as he died of acute appendicitis near present day Sioux City, Iowa only three months into the journey. Professor Sy Yentz, who suffered a ruptured appendix in 2005, knows what it must have been like except  this was 1804 and Floyd was hundreds of miles from doctors or medicine.  Poor Sgt. Floyd wasn’t allowed much rest though as by 1857 the river had eroded and undermined the bluff causing most of the Sergeant's grave to slide into the river. Concerned citizens of Sioux City Iowa retrieved many of the bones including his skull. His remains were then  buried about 200 yards east of the original burial site. At this time, there was only wooden markers placed at the grave. In 1894, there was a publication of Floyd's journal which aroused a new interest of citizens. Cattle had trampled Floyd's grave and the markers were carved away by souvenir hunters. Again the grave was reopened and the remains were identified and reburied on August 20th, 1895. A marble slab marked this time in sturdy urns and the site. This slab was three feet wide and seven feet long. Many efforts were made to raise money for the monument, which stands on his grave today. On the twentieth of August in 1900 the cornerstone was laid. The fourth time Floyd's remains were unburied and reburied at the base of the monument. This monument is made of white stone one hundred feet tall and was completed on the thirtieth of May 1901. This monument was the first National Registered Landmark in the United States.

           1833 – Happy Birthday,  Benjamin Harrison, 23rd President of the United States. 1889-1893. Grandson of old “Tippicanoe” William Henry Harrison  of the lamentable four hour inauguration speech given in the rain resulting in his death shortly afterwards, Benjamin was the cheese for the Grover Cleveland Sandwich.  Cleveland preceded and succeeded him as president. Harrison’s Vice President was Levi Morton.

            1866 - President Andrew Johnson formally declared the American Civil War over. On April 2, Johnson declared the Civil War over everywhere except Texas. On this day he declared it over in Texas too.

            1872- William Robinson was issued a patent for electric train signaling. This gave the railroad industry its first means of automatic vital signaling. By 1878, Robinson founded the Union Electric Signal Co. to hold his patents, to produce track circuits, and to install them. This technology continues to be a foundation of rail signaling and communications today. A low voltage battery current runs up one rail and down the other. As long as current flows from the battery through one rail to the relay and back through the other rail, the relay remains energized and routes current from another battery to the green lamp of a clear signal. But when a train is present, the circuit is short circuited by the steel wheels and axles of the cars; a broken rail or an open switch will also break the circuit. As a result the relay is opened and the signal displays red.

            1890 – Happy Birthday, (Howard Phillips)  H. P. Lovecraft, American writer of horror stories such as The Call of Cthulhu, The Colors Out of Space, and the Dunwich Horror.

            1899- Happy Birthday, Salomon Bochner, Galician-born American mathematician and educator responsible for the development of the Bochner theorem of positive-definite functions and the Bochner integral. We put these items in because  we have no idea what they mean but it’s really impressive.

            1900 - Japan's primary school law was amended to provide for four years of mandatory schooling.

            1911- The first cable message sent around the world from the U.S. by commercial telegraph was transmitted from New York City. It cleverly read "This message sent around the world," and  left the New York Times building at 7:00 pm and was received 16 minutes later after traveling nearly 29,000 miles through 16 relays via the Azores, Gibraltar, India, The Philippines, Midway Island, Guam, Hawaii, San Francisco, Biff's Canned Goods of Des Moines, and Giovanni's Take-Out Pizza of Arthur Ave. in the Bronx , and ...(oh, we're just kidding about Biff and Giovanni)

            1912 – Happy Birthday, Jerome Murray, American inventor of the peristaltic pump that made open-heart surgery possible. It  would pump blood without damaging the cells through a method of expansion and contraction that imitates the way that peristalsis moves the contents of the digestive tract Peristaltic describes the action that moves material through a tube or hose. It's the action that takes place when you squeeze a tube of toothpaste.  He also invented the airplane boarding ramp inspired on a day in 1951 at the Miami International Airport he saw passengers having to walk in the rain to the terminal. In all, he held 75 patents including a television antenna rotator, electric carving knife, high-speed dentist drill, power car seat and an audible pressure cooker.

          1920 – Professional football had been around for a while.  On this day it finally got organized as an organizational meeting, at which the Akron Pros, Canton Bulldogs, including Jim Thorpe, Cleveland Indians, and Dayton Triangles were represented, was held at the Jordan and Hupmobile auto showroom in Canton, Ohio. This meeting resulted in the formation of the American Professional Football Conference.  Former Yale football star William "Pudge" Heffelfinger became the first-ever professional football player when he was hired by the Allegheny Athletic Association to play in a game against their rival the Pittsburgh Athletic Club in November 1892.

            1930, Philo Farnsworth patented a television system. This was his first patent, with a description of the image dissector tube, which was his (remember John Baird and Vladimir Zworkin were also essential) most important inventive contribution to the development of television.  Farnsworth conceived the world's first all-electronic television at the age of 15.  In 1922, Farnsworth sketched out for his Chemistry teacher his idea for an "image dissector" vacuum tube that could revolutionize television. The same year of his patent, 1930, his  labs were visited by Vladimir Zworykin of RCA, who had invented a television that used a cathode ray tube (1928) and an all-electric camera tube (1929). This led to a patent battle that lasted over ten years, resulting in RCA's paying Farnsworth $1M for patent licenses, for TV scanning, focusing, synchronizing, contrast and controls devices.

            1930 – Same day as Philo Farnsworth’s patent - the first demonstration telecast of home television in the U.S. was received in New York City. A half-hour program was hosted by the cartoonist Harry Hirschfeld, and demonstrated on screens placed in a store in the Hotel Ansonia, just north of 72^nd street on Broadway, the Hearst building 8^th Ave. and 56^th street, and a home at 98 Riverside Drive. The signal traveled about six miles, the greatest distance for TV transmission to date. The show, America Blows Its Nose, was an early version of 21^st Century reality shows featuring seriously demented attention seekers.

            1940 - Joseph Stalin added another to his list of millions of murders as exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky was fatally stabbed by an ice-ax-wielding assassin at his compound outside Mexico City. He died the following day. The killer--Ramón Mercader--was a Spanish communist and agent of  Stalin. Trotsky died from his wounds the next day.  Trotsky was a key Bolshevik figure in the Russia Revolution, helping to overthrow the Tsarist regime in Russia and becoming an influential figure in the early days of the Soviet Union.  He was forced into exile in the 1920s after losing a power struggle with eventual Soviet leader Stalin

         1960- The USSR recovered two dogs, Belka and Strelka ("Squirrel" and "Little Arrow"), the first live animals to be recovered from orbit. The Spunik 5 also carried 40 mice, 2 rats and a variety of plants but they went kaput. After a day in orbit, its retrorocket was fired and the landing capsule returned to Earth. Earlier, on  November 3, 1957,  the USSR launched Sputnik 2, with Siberian husky, Laika. Laika went kaput in space too. Meanwhile, the two recovered dogs were filled with space pods that took over the brains of several bureaucrats and melded into the happy, fun loving First Secretary of the Communist Party,  Leonid Brezhnev.  

            1968 - In another shining example of communist "freedom", some 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops (controlled by the Soviet Union) and 5,000 tanks invaded Czechoslovakia to crush what was known as the "Prague Spring"--a brief period of liberalization in the communist country. The liberal reforms of First Secretary Alexander Dubcek were repealed and Dubcek removed.  Later photos showed him working as a street sweeper.

            1969 - All four Beatles were together in the recording studio for the final time as they finished the Abbey Road LP. It would be released in Britain on September 26, 1969.  They had been working on the Let it Be album but set it aside to do this one that featured Here Comes the Sun, Something, and Come Together.

        1975 Viking 1, an unmanned space probe was launched to Mars . Viking actually landed on Mars one year later on July 20 - the 7th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.   The same day, the craft sent back the first close-up photographs of the rust-colored Martian surface including a rock that looked like a face (Elvis?.....we're just kidding)Note: all space launch dates noted in the Gnus are sourced at NSSDC Master Catalog Display: Spacecraft.

         1977, NASA launched Voyager 2, an unmanned spacecraft towards Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus & Neptune. It carried a 12-inch copper phonograph record contained greetings from Earth people in 60 languages, samples of music from different cultures and eras, (obviously no Hip Hop or we would have been vaporized by aliens by now) and natural sounds of surf, wind and thunder, and birds, whales and other animals. The recording, called "Sounds of Earth" was also placed Voyager 1. The record also contained electronic information that an advanced technological civilization could convert into diagrams, pictures and printed words, including a message from President Carter.

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21.   1660 - Happy Birthday, Hubert Gautier, French architect who authored the first book on bridge building Traité des Ponts, in 1716  Gautier initially trained as a doctor, then turned  to mathematics and finally engineering. He served as an engineer for 28 years province of Languedoc in southern France. Some of you were thinking “but wasn’t Hubert Gautier the Archbishop of Canterbury in England?  Yes you were.  Well that was a different Hubert Gautier.  He served as Archbishop from 1193-1205.

        1831 - Nat Turner's slave rebellion started in Virginia. During the next two days and nights, Turner and 75 followers terrorized Southampton County, killing about 60 whites. The state militia--consisting of some 3,000 men--crushed the rebellion.  Turner himself was not captured until the end of October, and after confessing without regret to his role in the slaughters, he was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. On November 11, he was hanged in Jerusalem, Virginia.

      1841- John Hampson of New Orleans, Louisiana was issued the first patent for Venetian Blinds even though the popular Venetian blinds were actually invented in Persia. It was the traveling Venetian traders which brought the blinds to Venice and Paris thus were most often being credited as the inventor     

      1858- The first of the seven  Lincoln - Douglas Debates.  Stephen Douglas, Democrat and Abraham Lincoln, later a Republican, debated the issue of slavery as they ran for the U.S Senate seat in Illinois.

       1888- William S. Burroughs, a former bank clerk from New York residing in St. Louis, Missouri, received a patent for his adding machine. To use Burroughs’ adding machine, an operator first pushed down the digits on the keyboard for the number to be added. Pulling the crank forward caused the entry to print. Releasing the crank added the number to those already entered. This is how the New York City budget is currently calculated. Adding took place through a system of toothed segments and gears. In the first machine, the only way to see the sum was to print it out.

       1903- A 12 horsepower single-cylinder Model F Packard automobile arrived in New York, completing a trip across the U.S. from San Francisco. It was driven by "Tommy" Fetch from the Packard Motor Car works. Along for the ride was Marius Krarup, a journalist. They left San Francisco on June 21 The trip took 51 days, an average run of almost 80 miles per day. We are sure if they stopped at the Spam Museum on the way. They replaced only three tires and a broken front spring. Vermont doctor Horatio Nelson with mechanic Crocker Sewell, had completed a similar - but two days slower - trip in a Winton car the previous month. Also of note that Packard went out of business in August, 1958.

 1911- The Mona Lisa was stolen.  It wasn't quite the type of high tech theft we seen in the movies or on TV. Vincenzo Peruggia walked into the Louvre, in Paris, went straight to the famous Mona Lisa, removed it from the wall, hid it beneath his clothes, and walked out. A while late an amateur painter set up his easel to paint a copy and noticed it was gone. Investigators and detectives searched for the painting for more than two years . In November 1913, Italian art dealer Alfredo Geri received a letter from a man calling himself Leonard. It indicated that the Mona Lisa was in Florence and would be returned for a hefty ransom. When Peruggia attempted to receive the ransom, he was captured. The painting was unharmed. Peruggia claimed he was extracting revenge for Napoleon's conquering of Italy.  Sounds reasonable to us.

        1959 - Hawaii became the fiftieth state.  Though Captain James Cook called the islands that he discovered in 1778 the Sandwich islands, this honor to the Earl of Sandwich would be short-lived. King Kamehameha I united the islands under his rule by 1819 as the Kingdom of Hawaii. Two theories exist on the origin of the name Hawaii. One theory has it that the name comes from a combination of the words "Hawa" and "ii" and means a small or new homeland; "Hawa" meaning a traditional homeland and "ii" meaning small and raging. The other theory is that the name comes from the traditional discoverer of the islands, Hawaii Loa. There is a third theory, the Steve McGarrett, Hawaii Five-O theory, which wanted to name the state “Book em Dano”.

       1986- Over 1700 people died when toxic gas erupted from Lake Nyos, a volcanic lake, in an extinct volcano in the West African nation of Cameroon. The gas was carbon dioxide which, because it is more dense than air, stayed near the ground and flowed down valleys. The cloud traveled as far as 15 miles from the lake.  

        1989 - The U.S. space probe Voyager 2 fired its thrusters to bring it closer to Neptune's moon Triton. Triton [TRY-tun] is the largest moon of Neptune, with a diameter of 2,700 kilometers (1,680 miles). It was discovered by William Lassell, a British astronomer, on October 10, 1846 scarcely a month after Neptune was discovered. Triton is colder than any other measured object in the Solar System with a surface temperature of -235° C (-391° F). The next coldest is Professor Sy Yentz house in the Pocono Mountains on a typical February morning.

      1993- Contact was lost with the Mars Observer spacecraft, following the pressurization of the rocket thruster fuel tanks, three days before it was to begin orbiting the Red Planet. The Mars Observer was to be the first U.S. spacecraft to study Mars since the Viking missions 18 years earlier. The fate of the $980 million mission remains unknown.  Possibly the rock that looked like a face (see Viking 1 August 20 1975) sent up death ray beams from it's eyes and ...............................................

            1997 - Hudson Foods Co. closed a plant in Nebraska, agreeing to destroy some 25 million pounds of hamburger after the largest meat recall in U.S. history.  Federal officials said the reason for the addition recall is that Hudson took leftover raw materials from one day's production and used them in the next day's production. Would you like some ketchup on your e coli burger?

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22.  1485 - Attention again (See MacBeth on August 15), Shakespeare fans. In the last major battle of the War of the Roses (Lancaster vs. York), King Richard III was defeated and killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field by Henry Tudor, the Earl of Richmond. After the battle, the royal crown, which Richard had worn into the battle, was picked out of a bush and placed on Henry's head. His crowning as King Henry VII began the rule of the house of Tudor over England, a dynasty that would last until Queen Elizabeth's death in 1603.  Even today, people may need tudors when studying for a test.

       1647 - Happy Birthday, Denis Papin, French inventor of the piston steam engine. It took over 200 years to connect the piston steam engine to use in a car.  He lived in Britain and also invented the pressure cooker.

        1834- Happy Birthday, Samuel Pierpont Langley, American astronomer, physicist and aviation pioneer.

         1864-  The International Red Cross was founded. The Geneva Convention of 1864 for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick of Armies in the Field is adopted by 12 nations meeting in Geneva. Note: Clara Barton and Adolphus Solomons founded the American Red Cross in 1861.

         1865, - William Sheppard of New York City, patented liquid soap.  We presume he was bubbling over with enthusiasm at the thought of cleaning up with his invention.

        1902 - President Theodore Roosevelt became the first U.S. President to ride in an automobile. His first drive took place in Hartford, Connecticut.

        1920- Happy Birthday, Ray Bradbury, science fiction author - Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451 and many, many others.

        1920- And.......born on the same day - Happy Birthday, Dr. Denton A Cooley , a U.S. surgeon and educator chiefly noted for heart-transplant operations. He was also the first to implant an artificial heart in a human.

      1922 - Irish revolutionary and Sinn Féin politician Michael Collins was killed in an ambush in west County Cork, Ireland

         1962 - The Savannah, the world's first nuclear-powered ship, completed her maiden voyage from Yorktown, Va., to Savannah, Ga.

         1989- The first complete ring around Neptune was discovered by Voyager.  No word about face shaped rocks though.

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23.    1609- The telescope was first demonstrated by  Galileo. " You point it at something and then you look through this end and it makes  stuff look bigger and closer".  "You should see Babbette Bacciagaloupi when she comes out of the shower................"

         1617- The first one-way streets were established in London. An Act of Common Council was passed to regulate the "disorder and rude behavior of Carmen, Draymen and others using Cartes." Seventeen narrow and congested lanes were specified. They ran into Thames Street, including Pudding Lane (where the Great Fire of London began in 1667). The traffic regulation continued for two centuries.

       1754 - Bon Anniveraire, Louis XVI, the last King of France. He was executed at the guillotine on Jan 21, 1793.  Possible last words were, "let's not lose our heads over this." 

        1769- Happy Birthday, zoologist Baron Georges Cuvier (who's tests were always marked on a cuvier).A founder of comparative anatomy and paleontology, Curvier insisted upon factual evidence, not only for his own theories but also for those of his colleagues. According to Wolfram Research, a famous story tells how his students dressed up in a devil's costume and woke up Cuvier in the middle of the night, chanting "Cuvier, Cuvier, I have come to eat you." Reportedly, Cuvier opened his eyes, remarked "All creatures with horns and hooves are herbivores. You can't eat me," and went back to sleep.

        1785 - Happy Birthday, Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, victor at the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812.  Most famous for his post battle quote -  “We have met the enemy, and they are ours."

      1859- The first hotel elevator was installed in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, NYC.  The elevator traveled 6 floors and operated on the principal of the Archimedian screw.  No word as to what kind of musak was pumped in.

       1966 - The Lunar Orbiter 1 took the first photograph of the Earth from the Moon

        1986 - Your tax dollars at work.  Congress voted to make the rose the official national flower of the United States.  They debated several thorny issues before the vote.

     2005 — Data from the Cassini spacecraft indicated that Saturn's ring system has its own atmosphere  (some candlelight, soft music, a glass of wine.....)-separate from that of the planet itself. During its close fly-bys of the ring system, instruments on Cassini determined that the environment around the rings is like an atmosphere, composed principally of molecular oxygen. This atmosphere is very similar to that of Jupiter's moons Europa and Ganymede.

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24.  79 A.D - After centuries of dormancy, Mount Vesuvius erupted in southern Italy, devastating the prosperous Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum and killing an estimated 20,000 people. The cities, buried under a thick layer of volcanic material and mud, were never rebuilt and largely forgotten in the course of history. In the 18th century, Pompeii and Herculaneum were rediscovered and excavated, providing an incredible archaeological record of the everyday life of an ancient civilization. This was certainly not history's first "pain in the ash", but a memorable one none the less.  The Gnus recommends Pompeii-A Novel by Robert Harris, an historical novel but great and accurate history.

       1456 - The printing of the Gutenberg Bible was completed.  The print run started on February 23, 1455, using moveable type. This Bible was printed in Mainz, Germany by printer Johann Gutenberg and its production marked the beginning of the mass production of books. A complete copy comprises 1282 pages.

        1814 - British troops captured and burned the city of  Washington General Robert Ross, after a  victory  at the Battle of Bladensburg, Maryland, and march unopposed into Washington, D.C. Unfortunately (we say unfortunately  because of our low opinion of the current collection in Washington), most congressmen and officials fled the nation's capital as soon as word came of the American defeat. President James Madison and his wife, Dolly, escaped just before the British arrived. In fact, earlier in the day, President Madison, during the Battle of Bladensburg had at one point actually taken command of one of the few remaining American gun batteries. He then became the first and only president to exercise in actual battle his authority as commander in chief.

      1853 - It has been claimed that the first potato chips were prepared by Chef George Crum, an American Indian, at Moon's Lake House in Saratoga Springs, NY. When railroad magnate Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt was dining there, he sent his fried potatoes back to the kitchen, complaining they were "too thick." The chef, George Crum retaliated by slicing paper thin strips of potatoes and frying them to a crisp. But Vanderbilt loved these "Saratoga Chips" and they became an instant success. Note: The website,  Today in Science History seeks a reliable reference for the particular date, but year 1853 is given by several sources. The story is too good not to include somewhere, even if the day is not verified!     

      1869 - The first U.S. patent for a waffle iron was issued to Cornelius Swarthout of Troy, N.Y.

       1891 - Thomas Edison applied for a movie camera patent. However, the most important element in making a movie ... the film ... was six years away from being patented.  So basically, as of this day you could set up your movie camera but you couldn't take any pictures because film wasn't invented yet.

         1907 - The Bréguet-Richet Gyroplane No. 1 made what is generally believed to be the first vertical flight, hovering about 2 feet off the ground for one minute, powered by a 45 h.p. engine.

        1932 - Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly non-stop across the United States, traveling from Los Angeles to Newark, N.J., in just over 19 hours.

       1997 -  Gordon Spence discovered the largest known prime number,  2^2976221 - 1, the 36th known Mersenne prime number. It took his 100-MHz Pentium PC fifteen days to prove it. At 895,932 digits in length, if printed out the number would stretch for 1.4 miles or if spoken 8 hours a day would take 28 days to complete.

       2006- Pluto may be Walt Disney's dog.  Pluto may be the god of the Underworld.  But as of today it was now longer a planet.  The International Astronomy Association revised the definition of a planet from roundness to orbital dominance as a condition for full-fledged planethood. That knocks out Pluto, which crosses the orbit of Neptune; Xena, which orbits among the icy wrecks of the Kuiper Belt, and Ceres, which is in the asteroid belt. Xena and Ceres were briefly to be considered planets but now out they go.  When the astronomers finish hurling solar system mobiles at each other we'll probably end up with the old mnemonic "My Very Education Mother Just Sent Us Nine..........now we'll never know.

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25.     325 -The Council of Nicaea, the first ecumenical debate held by the early Christian church, ended with the establishment of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. The Council had been convened by Roman Emperor Constantine I in May. 

           1875 - Having just missed the ferry, English merchant navy captain, Mathew Webb, dove in and followed it across the English Channel, thus becoming the first person to successfully swim across the Channel.  Professor Sy Yentz is just kidding about the ferry (although he used it with Gertrude Ederle also). He has his nautical sense of humor, but Captain Webb accomplished the 21-mile crossing, which was really 39 miles of swimming because of tidal currents, in 21 hours and 45 minutes.

        1880- Happy Birthday , Joshua Lionel Cowen American inventor of electric model trains who founded  the Lionel Corporation (1901), which became the largest U.S. toy train manufacturer. These trains with their 3 rails are ridiculously expensive today as compared to the American Flyer trains given Professor Sy Yentz as a youth ( 2 rails ) which are virtually worthless today.

           1910 -Everyday, many of you use this man's invention, Happy Birthday to  Arnold Neustadter, inventor of the Rolodex, an alphabetized rotating card file with a ball-bearing clutch. He invented it in the 1940s. Neustadter specialized in office technology, also inventing the Swivodex, spill-proof inkwell, the Clipodex, a knee-top dictation tool,  and several discovered by Professor Sy Yentz, the Ignorodex, which helps a worker pay no attention to a supervisor, the Look Busyodex, which makes one look like one is actually doing something, the Let the Phone Ringodex, which allows works, particularly civil servants to pass up phone calls, and the Arrive Late-Leave Earlyodex, which promotes a shorter work day.

        1929-The airship Graf Zeppelin passed over San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, headed for Los Angeles after a trans-Pacific voyage from Tokyo.

         1944 - After more than four years of Nazi occupation, Paris was liberated by the French 2nd Armored Division and the U.S. 4th Infantry Division. General Dietrich von Choltitz, commander of the German division, disobeyed an order by Adolf Hitler to blow up Paris' landmarks and burn the city to the ground before its liberation.

         1973- The first scan was made using CAT (Computer Assisted Tomography).

         1981- Voyager 2 flew by Saturn.  It flew within 63,000 miles  of Saturn's cloud cover, sending back data and pictures of the 6th planet in its closest approach to Saturn,  and showed that the "ringed planet" had  not a few, but thousands of rings. Photographs were also sent back of a number of Saturn's moons.

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26.    1346 - The cannon, firing a round ball carved from rock, was first used in battle in France. Edward III of England reportedly (Froissart's Chroniques of the Battle of Crécy) used 22 cannon during the defeat of Philip VI of France at the Battle of Crécy, although it was the English archers who were the decisive force in the battle.

           1740 - Happy Birthday,Joseph-Michel Montgolfier, French balloon pioneer, who with his younger brother, Étienne would take the first manned balloon flight.  The balloon was one of those rabbity looking things they make at birthday parties that squeaks a lot as it is being made.  We think they got it at a county fair.

            1743 - Happy Birthday, Antoine Lavoisier, French chemist and physicist.  He is known as the "father of modern chemistry".  He was guillontined during the French Revolution.

          1843 - The first U.S. design of a typewriter that successfully typed was issued a patent to Charles Thurber of Norwich, Conn. Called a Chirographer, and known as "Thurber's Patent Printer," it was proposed as an aid for the blind. A roller provided inking. However, the machine was slow to use, and had little success.

        1873 - Happy Birthday, Lee De Forest (brother of Gozinta De Forest and Petrefied Forest), American  inventor of the audicon vacuum tube, which made possible live radio broadcasting and became the key component of all radio, telephone, radar, television, and computer systems before the invention of the transistor in 1947. He held 300 patents.

         1883 -Final blast from Mount Krakatoa an island volcano in the Dutch Indies (now Indonesia) (named after the foot injury suffered by an explorer who cracked his toe) erupted with violent explosions that destroyed two thirds of the island and produced huge tsunami waves that swept across the entire region, killing an estimated 36,000 people. The waves were powerful enough to cross the Indian Ocean and travel beyond Cape Horn. The powerful blast was the most violent known in human history, was loud enough to be heard in Australia, and the shockwave was registered by barometers England. The huge amount of volcanic dust thrust high into the stratosphere eventually traveled around the world. The dust blocked sunlight causing temperature drops and chaotic weather patterns for several years afterwards.  And it was real!!! Not some silly disaster movie.

        1906 - Happy Birthday, Albert B. Sabin,  Polish-American physician and microbiologist best known for developing the first oral polio vaccine in 1955 which was administered to millions of children in Europe, Africa, and the Americas beginning in the late 1950s. He was also known for his research in the fields of human viral diseases, toxoplasmosis, and cancer

        1909 - An almost perfectly preserved Cro-Magnon man skeleton was discovered by Swiss paleontologist Otto Hauser.  It turned out to be Larry King.

        1920 - Women's right to vote was granted by the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution.  The amendment was the culmination of more than 70 years of struggle by woman suffragists. Its two sections read simply: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex" and "Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

         1957 - One of the great disasters of industry (see New Coke for another)in 1957 Ford produced its first Edsel  The car was named after Henry Ford's son, Edsel Bryant Ford. 110,847 Edsels were built before the company finally got the message and stopped production after three years due to lack of sales and negative press. To this day Edsel is a synonym for disastrous failure.

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27.    413 BC, A lunar eclipse caused panic on Athens fleet and thus affected the outcome of a battle in the Peloponnesian War. The Athenians were ready to move their forces from Syracuse when the Moon was eclipsed. The soldiers and sailors were frightened by this celestial omen and were reluctant to leave. Their commander, Nicias, consulted the soothsayers and postponed the departure for 27 days. This delay gave an advantage to their enemies, the Syracusans, who then defeated the entire Athenian fleet and army, and killed Nicias.

         1776  -The Battle of Brooklyn occurred as British forces under General William Howe defeated the main Continental Army forces under General George Washington at the Battle of Brooklyn in New York. Fortunately, with the Army pushed to the East River and facing catastrophic defeat, a dense fog descended virtually eliminating visibility.  The British attack paused and Washington and his troops were able to escape to Manhattan.........where everyone started looking for a one bedroom condo in a building with a concierge.........

         1859 - Colonel Edwin L. Drake drilled the first successful oil well in the United States near Titusville, Pennsylvania. The drilling had reached 69 feet, 6 inches when a dark film floating on the water below the derrick floor was noticed.  The price of gas immediately rose to 2.95 for regular.             

         1875 - After searching for 15 years, the element gallium was discovered by P.E. Lecoq de Boisbaudran. Professor Sy Yentz could have saved him a lot of trouble, after all, everyone knows that there are 4 quartiums in a gallium. 

         1894- A sad day as the first graduated income tax was passed.  As is done today, some snarky congressman (they were all men in those days) snuck the tax into another bill.  President Cleveland fought it and the Supreme Court voted it unconstitutional.  The TAX had to wait until 1913 when it was passed as the 16th amendment to the Constitution.

        1962 - The United States launched the Mariner 2 space probe, which flew past Venus the following December

          2003- The world's biggest battery was connected to provide emergency power to Fairbanks, Alaska's second-largest city. The environmental conditions cause a total city blackout every two or three years. The $35 million rechargable battery contains 13,760 large nickel-cadmium cells that weigh a total of 1,300 tons and cover 2,000 square meters, an area greater than a sports field. The battery can provide 40 megawatts of power, enough for around 12,000 people, for up to seven minutes, while diesel backup generators are started. It also comes in handy for radios and flashlights at picnics.  The jumper cables must be pretty huge too.

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28.    1565 - St. Augustine, Fla.  was founded  (and we didn't even know it was losted) and is the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the US.

          1749 - Happy Birthday, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, German author-philosopher - Dr. Faustus.

         1789 - Sir William Herschel discovered Saturn's moon Enceladus

         1828- Happy Birthday, Leo Tolstoy, Russian author considered one of history's greatest novelists . War and Peace, and Anna Karenina.

          1837- In today's hot news (gnus), pharmacists John Lea and William Perrins of Worcester, England began the manufacture of Worcester Sauce.

          1862- The US Engraving and Printing Bureau began operations.

          1877 -  Happy Birthday, Charles S. Rolls (brother of Egg Rolls, Onion Rolls, and Hard Rolls), British motorist, aviator, and automobile manufacturer who was one of the founders of the Rolls-Royce Ltd. automobile company. He was the first aviator to fly across the English Channel and back nonstop in June of 1910.  Rolls was the first British pilot to die in a flying accident  later that same year.        

        1903 - Happy Birthday, Bruno Bettelheim, Austrian-born American psychologist known for his work in treating and educating emotionally disturbed children.

           1919 - Happy Birthday, Sir Godfrey N. Hounsfield  (of the Hounsfields of the Baskervilles?) English electrical engineer who shared the 1979Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (with Allan Cormack) for creation of computerized axial tomography (CAT) scanners.

         1922- The first radio commercial aired on WEAF in New York City. It was a 10-minute (a really long time when you think about it!) advertisement for the Queensboro Realty Co., which had paid $100 for the "honor".

        1954 - That’s All Right Mama (other side was  Blue Moon of Kentucky) became Elvis Presley’s first hit single on local charts in Memphis, Tennessee.  

          1963 - Civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech to a few hundred thousand people in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC.

         1993 - A picture was taken showing first moon of an asteroid. The asteroid Ida and its newly-discovered moon, Dactyl was imaged by NASA's Galileo spacecraft, about 14 minutes before its closest approach to the asteroid on. Ida appears to be about 32 miles in length and is irregularly shaped. It shows numerous craters, including many degraded craters, indicating that Ida's surface is older than previously thought.

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29.  1533- Francisco Pizarro's Spanish conquistadors executed Atahuallpa, the 13th and last emperor of the Incas. The death of Atahuallpa, the last free reigning emperor, marked the end of 300 years of Inca civilization. See Cortez and the Aztecs August 14.

        1632- Happy Birthday, John Locke (brother of Pad Locke, Yale Locke, and Canal Locke) 
English physician who was the most important philosopher during the Age of Reason (17th century - rationalists and empiricists). He spent over 20 years developing the ideas he published in most significant work, Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690. As an empiricist, Locke believed that all knowledge is acquired through the senses.  Rationalists, think Rene Descartes, believe that knowledge is acquired through reason alone.  All this has given Professor Sy Yentz a headache but he can't decide if it came through the senses or if he thought too hard.

        1809 - Happy Birthday Oliver Wendell Holmes, American physician who discovered the contagious nature of childbed fever, and coined the term "anesthesia" (from Greek words meaning "no feeling").He was more famous as an essayist-poet, and was the father of the Supreme Court judge, who coincidentally was named..... Oliver Wendell Holmes.

        1831 - Charles Darwin returned home from a geology field trip to find several letters inviting him on a scientific voyage of HMS Beagle. He was 22 years old, and had just graduated from Cambridge University. The rest is, as they say, history.

       1862 - Confederate General Robert E. Lee thoroughly defeated  Union General John Pope  at the Second Battle of Bull Run.  This battle was the first major battle with Lee's Lieutenants, James Longstreet and Stonewall Jackson working at their strategic best.

        1876- Happy Birthday, Charles F. Kettering, inventor and automotive pioneer. His inventions included the electric starter for automobiles.

        1885 - The first motorcycle was patented by Gottfried Daimler in Germany

        1893-  A  patent was issued to Whitcomb L. Judson for a "Zipper Clasp Locker or Unlocker for Shoes." Yes, a zipper for shoes.

         1915 - Happy Birthday, Nathan Pritikin, scientist and more famous as a  nutritionist. His Pritikin Diet focused that moderate exercise combined with a diet low in fat and high in unrefined carbohydrates.  Refined carbohydrates (think white bread) have had almost all the fiber taken out of them.

         1942 - The international humanitarian agency, the Red Cross, revealed that Japan had refused free passage of ships carrying food, medicine, and other necessities for American POWs held by Japan.

        1949 - The Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb.  As with most Communist technology, it was the work of espionage and the theft of ideas from democratic countries. Specifically the culprit in this case was Klaus Fuchs, a German-born physicist who had helped the United States build its first atomic bombs, and was later arrested  for passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets. While stationed at U.S. atomic development headquarters during World War II, Fuchs had given the Soviets precise information about the U.S. atomic program, including a blueprint of the "Fat Man" atomic bomb later dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.

        1965 -"Space calling Ocean" -  astronaut Gordon Cooper in orbit 100 miles above the Earth aboard Gemini 5 held a conversation with aquanaut  Scott Carpenter  (who had previously flown in space) in Sealab II which was 205 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. It was first time an astronaut in space spoke with an aquanaut. Gemini 5 splashed down later in the day. Conversation transcript: "How's the weather up there?" "There is no weather, I'm in space." How's the weather down there?" "Wet."

        1991- The Soviet parliament suspended all activities of the Communist Party....ending 75 years of Communist dictatorships.

         2005 - Hurricane Katrina made landfall near New Orleans, Louisiana, as a Category 4 hurrican . Despite being only the third most powerful storm of the 2005 hurricane season, Katrina was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States. After briefly coming ashore in southern Florida on August 25 as a Category 1 hurricane, Katrina gained strength over the Gulf of Mexico before slamming into the Gulf Coast In addition to bringing devastation to the New Orleans area (the criminal incompetence of the mayor, governor and FEMA made it even worse), the hurricane caused damage along the coasts of Mississippi and Alabama, as well as other parts of Louisiana.

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30.     30 B.C. - Cleopatra, queen of Egypt and lover of Julius Caesar and later  Mark Antony, committed suicide via poisonous snake bite (we presume she suffered a pain in the asp) following the defeat of her and Antony's forces against Octavian, adopted son of Julius Caesar and the future first emperor of Rome when he took the name Augustus.

         1797- Happy Birthday, Mary Shelley - wife of English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley- author of Frankenstein.

        1871- Happy Birthday, Ernest Rutherford, New Zealand born British physicist and teacher. He researched the structure of the atom.  In 1899 he discovered alpha particles and beta particles, followed by the discovery of gamma radiation the next year.  In 1919 he achieved the artificial splitting of light atoms. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1908.

        1918 Communist Vladimir Lenin (born Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov)  was shot after speaking at a factory in Moscow by Fanya Kaplan, a member of the Social Revolutionary party. Lenin was seriously wounded but (unfortunately for the hundreds of millions who would suffer under Communist dictatorships) he survived the attack. 

         1935 - Happy Birthday, Sylvia A. Earle (sister of Duke of Earle) American oceanographer who is an advocate of public education regarding the importance of the oceans as an essential environmental habitat. In 1990, Earle was named the first woman to serve as chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the agency that conducts underwater research, manages fisheries, and monitors marine spills.

        1979 - The first recorded occurrence of a comet hitting the sun occurred releasing energy about equal to 1 million hydrogen bombs.

          1983 -  Guion S. Bluford Jr. became the first black American astronaut to travel in space, flying aboard the shuttle Challenger 3 in the eighth Space Shuttle Mission. In another first, Bluford and four colleagues blasted off from Cape Canaveral at night.

         31.      1742- Swarms of grasshoppers destroyed pastures and crops in Pennsylvania. In 2005 and 06, swarms of gypsy moths have destroyed thousands of acres of trees in the Poconos (where Professor Sy Yentz resides).

               1786- Happy Birthday, Michel-Eugene Chevreul, lived to be 103, French chemist who began the study of the chemistry of fats (notably, Minnesota Fats and Fatty Arbuckle). He discovered fatty acids.

             1874- Happy Birthday, Edward L. Thorndyke, American psychologist considered to be the "father of Educational Psychology" who studied the process of learning in animals, children and adults.

             1886