Science Gnus Almanac  Home

1.       1792,- Happy Birthday, Nikolay, I. Lobachevsky, Russian mathematician who, with János Bolyai of Hungary, is considered the founder of non-Euclidean geometry – as opposed to Euclid who was the founder of Euclidian geometry. . Lobachevsky constructed and studied a type of geometry in which Euclid's parallel postulate is false (the postulate states that through a point not on a certain line only one line can be drawn not meeting the first line). This was not well received at first, but his greatest vindication came with the advent of Einstein's theory of relativity when it was demonstrated experimentally that the geometry of space is not described by Euclid's geometry. Of course Einstein’s theory was developed in 1905 so the vindication was posthumous.

          1824- Since none of the presidential candidates, Andrew Jackson of Tennessee with 99 electoral votes (Just think, no stupid politician TV commercials in those days!); John Quincy Adams--the son of John Adams, the second president of the United States--with 84 electoral votes; Secretary of State William H. Crawford, who had suffered a stroke before the election, with 41 electoral votes; and Representative Henry Clay of Virginia with 37 electoral votes had received a majority of the total electoral votes in the election of 1824, Congress decided to turn over the presidential election to the House of Representatives, as dictated by the 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. In the November 1824 election, 131 electoral votes, just over half of the 261 total, were necessary to elect a candidate president. Representative Henry Clay agreed to use his influence to have John Quincy Adams elected. Clay and Adams were both members of a loose coalition in Congress that by 1828 became known as the National Republicans, while Jackson's supporters were later organized into the Democratic Party. Thanks to Clay's backing, on February 9, 1825, the House elected Adams as president of the United States. Adams then appointed Clay to the top cabinet post of secretary of state.  Ah, the beauty of politics.

            1878- The White House had its first telephone installed by Alexander Graham Bell himself, during the President Rutherford B. Hayes (brother of Purple Hayes)administration. It is said that the first outgoing call went to Bell, thirteen miles away. Hayes first words instructed Bell to speak more slowly since Bell was a Scotsman with a heavy brogue. President Hayes did not use the phone very often, however, because there were not many other telephones in Washington. He did however, like the 900 numbers and enjoyed speaking with "Babette and her Zen Babes" in particular. He also ordered out for pizza at least once a  week.

            1890- Kipp, Montana had an amazing 34 degree (F) temperature rise in only 7 minutes.  A total rise of 80 degrees occurred in a few hours as 30" of snow was melted in a half day. This put a damper on the Kipp Chamber of Commerce “Fun in the Snow “ celebration

            1913 - The first U.S. drive-in automobile gas station opened at the intersection of Baum Boulevard and St. Clair Street in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was operated by the Gulf Oil Co.. The station featured free air, water, crankcase service, restrooms and a lighted sign for "Good Gulf Gasoline." It was open all night…..and gas was 27 cents a gallon!!!!!!!!

            1921 - The Detroit Steam Motors Corporation announced the Trask steam car. A steam car craze had started when a steam-driven automobile had reached the world-record speed of 127.66mph in 1906- The last steam-powered cars in the U.S. were made in 1926.

            1922-  Cyril Turner (brother of Ike and Tina Turner) became the first U.S skywriter. An Englishman, Turner wrote “Hello U.S.A."  Really! He did!...of course he did it with an accent.

            1955 – Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, an act that was in direct violation of a city ordinance requiring black people to ride in the rear of the bus. Three days after the incident, she was found guilty and ordered to pay a $10 fine, plus an additional $4 in court costs.

            1959- Twelve nations, including the United States and the Soviet Union, signed the Antarctica Treaty, which banned military activity and weapons testing on that continent. It was the first arms control agreement signed in the Cold War period.

1990 - British and French workers digging the English Channel Tunnel, the "Chunnel" between their countries finally met in the service tunnel after knocking out a passage large enough to walk through and shake hands, 22.3 km from the UK and 15.6 km from France. Squeegee men immediately appeared and offered wipe their visors.

1997 - Eight planets from our Solar System lined up from West to East beginning with Pluto, followed by Mercury, Mars, Venus, Neptune, Uranus, Jupiter, and Saturn, with a crescent moon alongside, in a rare configuration visible from Earth that lasted until Dec 8. Of course at that time, Pluto was a planet, now it isn’t.

2.       1804- In Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris (not Indiana), Napoleon Bonaparte crowned himself, Napoleon I. He became the first Frenchman to hold the title of emperor in a thousand years. Pope Pius VII handed Napoleon the crown that the 35-year-old general placed on his own head. Napoleon’s rationale was based on an ostensible plot to do him in by the Bourbons ( family of Louis XVI). He argued that there should be a hereditary monarchy of Bonapartes in order to prevent the return of the Bourbons. In May of next year, Napoleon was crowned King of Italy. Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo by the Duke of Wellington and von Blucher in 1815. He was captured, imprisoned and then exiled to the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean.

            1823 -President James Monroe proclaimed the "Monroe Doctrine." He stated that Marilyn Monroe should only star in comedies and not dramas like The Misfits . No no no he didn’t.  It was a new U.S. foreign policy initiative, primarily the work of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, the Monroe Doctrine forbade European interference in the American hemisphere but also asserted U.S. neutrality in regard to future European conflicts.

             1859 – John Brown kaput. In Charles Town, Virginia, abolitionist John Brown was executed on charges of treason, murder, and insurrection. Brown and followers attempted to take over the U.S Military arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Va. and use the weapons to start a slave rebellion and then a republic of freed slaves and abolitionist whites. A U.S army contingent led by Col. Robert E. Lee ended the plans and arrested Brown.

              1859 – And on the same day John Brown left the world, Happy Birthday, Georges Seurat, as the French painter, famous for his dots rather than brush strokes and famous for his masterwork, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grand Jatte, entered the world.

             1877 -  French scientist, Louis-Paul Cailletet  became the first to liquefy oxygen. He was also was first to liquefy nitrogen, hydrogen, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, and acetylene. Through cooling and compression, the volume of a gas can be reduced by so much that its molecules collapse upon each other and come into contact, changing into a liquid.

             1895 – Twelve years after Cailletet’s work (see above, 1877), James Dewar James Dewar exhibited his new apparatus for the production of liquid air at the Royal Institution  in London. Dewar also invented the Dewar flask or thermos in 1892)and co-invented cordite, a smokeless gunpowder,  in 1889,

          1902 - The first working V-8 engine was patented in France by French engine designer Leon-Marie-Joseph-Clement Levavasseur. The engine block was the first to arrange eight pistons in the V-formation. This was more successful than the Q-8 and W-8 formations previously tried.  Actually, they went through most of the alphabet and were thinking of turning to Cyrillic when the V-8 finally worked.

            1906 - Happy Birthday, Peter C. Goldmark American engineer – born in Hungary.  While working for Columbia Broadcasting System(CBS), in 1936 he developed the first commercial color television system which used a rotating three-color disk.  And in these days of the MP3 player, the LP (long playing record ) is a distant memory but in the mid-1940s Goldmark  began developing a new sound technology—the long-playing record (LP). Goldmark  the diameter of 33 1/3 records to 12 inches and experimented with recording techniques to capture sound better. By 1948, the LP was introduced to the public. They could hold much more music—an entire symphony—and produce better sound then a 78…..even if it was Fabian doing the singing.

            1927 - The first Ford Model A car was rolled out in New York City and in 35 other cities around the U.S., Canada and Europe. The car was affordable: the Phaeton sold for $395 and the Tudor Sedan for $495.  Credit terms were easy and the salesmen wore funny clown suits and yelled and had camels walking around and….no  wait, that’s what happens today.

          1942- The first nuclear chain reaction (fission of the uranium isotope 235) beneath the West Stands of Stagg Field in Chicago, was produced by Drs. Arthur Compton and Enrico Fermi.  This was the birth of the Atomic Age. Three years earlier, they had discovered that if an atom of uranium was bombarded by neutrons, the uranium atom would sometimes was split – fission would take place. Later, it had been found that when an atom of uranium fissioned, additional neurons were emitted and became available for further reaction with other uranium atoms. These facts implied the possibility of a chain reaction, similar in certain respects to the reaction which is the source of the sun's energy and…..boom!

            1957- The first full-scale atomic electric generating station in the U.S. began operation in Shippingport, Pennsylvania -15 years to the day after Fermi's experiment at the University of Chicago.  The plant supplied power to Pittsburgh and the castle of a Dr. Frankenstein who was able to create life that we now know as Lindsay Lohan.  

             1971- The Mars 3 (U.S.S.R.) made the first soft landing on Mars and  returned sixty photos the first radio signals from its surface.            Included in the pictures were some of Elvis, Jimmy Hoffa, and Amelia Earhart.  

            1982- Dr. Barney Clark became the first human to receive an artificial heart. Doctors used the Jarvik-7, named after its designer Robert K. Jarvik, an American physician at the University of Utah. Designed to function just like a natural heart, the Jarvik-7 had two pumps (like the ventricles), each with a disk-shaped mechanism that pushed the blood from the inlet valve to the outlet valve Clark survived for 112 days.  He then  became one of the Zombies that attacked the mall in Dawn of the Dead.

            1988 – The first of several space shuttle flights on December 2 through the years.  Atlantis (STS 27) made a classified (secret) mission.  Astronauts wore fake moustaches and big horn rimmed glasses along with blue fright wigs.

            1990- The shuttle Columbia (STS 35), after one of the longest delays ever – it had been scheduled for a May launch- with its primary mission being round-the-clock observations of celestial sphere in ultraviolet and X-ray astronomy with the ASTRO-1 observatory which consisted of four telescopes.

            1992- The shuttle Discovery (STS 53) was launched for a secret flight for the Defense Department.  Due to the secret nature of the mission the disguised astronauts all wore Bill Clinton masks and kept asking Mission Control to define “is”.

Back To Calendar

3.        1714- An object later identified by Sir William Herschel in 1781 as Uranus, was discovered by John Flamsteed,- who catalogued it in his star catalogue as 34 Tauri. Flamsteed was to become the first Astronomer Royal.

1732- The first mouth to mouth resuscitation occurred when miner James Blair was rescued from a fire in a coal mine in Alloa, Scotland. William Tossach, a Scottish surgeon whose documentation is the first record of artificial respiration…: "there was not the least pulse in either heart or arteries, and not the least breathing could be observed:  So that he was in all appearance dead. I applied my mouth close to his and blowed my breath as strong as I could... I blew again my breath as strong as I could, raising his chest fully with it; and immediately I felt six or seven very quick beats of the heart." This was the first clinical use of artificial respiration, or…..18^th century “forbidden” love.

            1818 - Illinois was the 21st state to enter the United States.  The state of Illinois was named after the Illinois River. The river was named by French explorer Robert Cavelier Sieur de La Salle in 1679 after the Indians he found living along the banks. Illinois is the French spelling for the Illinois and Peoria Indian word "iliniwok," meaning men or warriors and perhaps referring to members of the Illinois tribe. Illinois was the first of nine states that would be admitted to the Union during December.

            1826 – Happy Birthday, George MacClellan, Union Civil War general loved by his troops and  noted for his overestimation of the strength of the enemy, failing to follow up on Robert E. Lee’s weakened forces after the Battle of Antietam, and running for President as a Democrat against Abraham Lincoln in 1864.

1828 – The Electoral College met to elect Andrew Jackson as 7th President of the United States.  Jackson (and vice presidential candidate John C. Calhoun) easily defeated John Quincy Adams (and Richard Rush) in a re run of the election of 1824 – which Jackson had lost when it went to the House of Representatives which decided in favor of Adams.

1833- Happy Birthday Carlos Juan Finlay, Cuban epidemiologist who persuaded Dr. Walter Reed to try to prove that mosquitoes carry yellow fever. Finlay Cuban discovered that yellow fever is transmitted from infected to healthy humans by a mosquito. Although he published experimental evidence of this discovery in 1886, his ideas were ignored for 20 years.

1838- Happy Birthday Cleveland Abbe, (brother of Dear Abbe and Westminster Abbe ) first official weather forecaster (meteorologist) in the U.S. Abbe started a private weather reporting and warning service in Cincinnati. His weather reports or bulletins began to be issued on Sept. 1, 1869. Abbe was the only man in the country who was already experienced in drawing weather maps from telegraphic reports and forecasting from them, so when the U.S Weather Service was created he became the official forecaster of the weather. After all, folks had to blame somebody ! ….when the forecasts were wrong.

            1857 – Happy Birthday, author Joseph Conrad born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski  in Poland. Conrad spent most of his life in England and spent sixteen years with the British Merchant Navy.  The experience provided his with the materials for his most famous works, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Nostromo.

1895 - Happy Birthday Anna Freud, Austrian scientist, psychoanalyst; Sigmund's daughter. She was not “afreud” of the dark but was a founder and one of the foremost practitioners of child psychoanalysis.

            1910- Neon lighting, which had been developed by French physicist Georges Claude, made its public debut at the Paris Motor Show. The colored light is produced by passing electrical current through inert gases in a vacuum tube. As with many inventions, there was a lot of “accident” going on.  His purpose was actually to employ an inexpensive, high quality method of producing pure oxygen to sell to hospitals and welding shops. Looking for a way to use the large quantities of leftover gases such as argon and neon, Claude decided to fill a "Moore" tube with gases and then bombard those gases with electricity; this process, instead of producing pure oxygen, produced intense red and blue lights.  This day should probably be a civic holiday in Las Vegas.

            1912 – The preface to World War I – the first Balkan War ended as Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro signed an armistice with Turkey. In 1913, the Second Balkan War began after Serbia and Greece demanded that Bulgaria cede to them portions of Macedonia. On June 28, 1914, a Serbian, Gavrilo Princip assassinated Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo initiating a series of events connected to entangling alliances that would result in the start of WWI two months later.

1929 – Oh Herb!  President Herbert Hoover announced to the U.S. Congress that the worst effects of the recent stock market crash were behind the nation and the American people have regained faith in the economy.

1933 – Happy Birthday, Paul Crutzen, Dutch atmospheric chemist who received the 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for demonstrating, in 1970, that chemical compounds of nitrogen oxide accelerate the destruction of stratospheric ozone, which protects the Earth from the Sun's ultraviolet radiation.  You know, like melting the polar ice caps.

            1947- A Streetcar Named Desire (discarded titles included; A Streetcar Named Like, A Streetcar Named Mild Infatuation; and A Streetcar Named Stalking), written by Tennessee Williams and starring Marlon Brando – who yelled for “Stella!”, Jessica Tandy, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden opened on Broadway. The play would run until December 1949 and then be turned into the movie that made Brando a star in 1951.

            1960 –Lerner and Lowe’s musical, Camelot opened on Broadway starring Richard Burton, Robert Goulet (who stole the show as Lancelot) and Julie Andrews. 

1967 - Cape Town, South Africa, Dr. Christiaan Barnard, with his team of 20 surgeons, performed the first human heart transplant on a South African businessman, 54-yr-old Louis Washkansky.  The donor was Denise Durval who had been hit by a vehicle while walking to her car from a fast food shop in South Africa. As she  was dying. Her father consented to the removal of her heart.  Washkansky died 18 days later from double pneumonia, contracted after destruction of his body's immunity mechanism by drugs administered to suppress rejection of his new heart.

            1973 - Pioneer 10, the first mission to be sent to the outer planets of the Solar System,  sent back the first close-up images of Jupiter from a distance of about 200,000 km. It spotted a life form, later identified as the pod that came to Earth and caused people to become idiots who appeared on  reality television shows. The spacecraft signal was last detected on Jan. 23, 2003. No signal at all was detected during a final attempt on Feb. 6-7, 2003. Pioneer Project staff at NASA Ames then concluded that the spacecraft power level had fallen below that needed to power the onboard transmitter, so no further attempts would be made

            1979 – In the words of the famous t-shirt, “I’d walk over you to see the Who”…..In Cincinnati, Ohio, eleven fans were killed during a stampede for seats before the British rock group Who concert at Riverfront Coliseum.

1984 - Shortly after midnight, the inhabitants of the city of Bhopal, in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, became victims of the world's worst industrial disaster. Over 40 tons of highly poisonous methyl isocyanate gas leaked out of the Union Carbide pesticide factory. Poisonous gases covered an area of  40 sq. kms killing thousands of people in its immediate wake. Over 500,000 suffered from acute breathlessness, pain in the eyes and vomiting as they ran in panic to get away from the poison clouds that hung close to the ground for more than four hours.  People continue to die from the after effects and the death toll has reached 20,000.

            1999- Mars Polar Lander kaput. The craft, launched in January of 1999  was in the final minutes of slowing itself down, ready to make a self-controlled touch down. It was never heard from again.  An investigation gave the most probable cause for the $ 110,000 failure as spurious signals when the trio of lander legs deployed during descent gave a false indication to onboard smarts of the spacecraft. It fooled itself into thinking it had landed, although it was high above Mars. (Sort of like Herbert Hoover, see 1929 above, thought the economy had recovered)The result  was  a premature shutdown of the spacecraft's engines and the destruction of the lander when it fell onto the planet. In this scenario, the probe would have been destroyed as it smacked into the surface at 50 miles per hour.

            1999- On the same day that Mars Polar Lander (see above) was lost, Tori Murden became the first woman to row across the Atlantic….she arrived at the pier just after her liner had sailed, jumped into a row boat and began rowing to try to catch it and ended up rowing the whole way from the Canary Islands to the West Indies…no, no, no Professor Sy Yentz has his trans-Atlantic sense of humor. Actually, she was on pace to set a record until being caught in a hurricane.  She rowed 3,333 miles in eighty-two days.

Back To Calendar

4.        1783 – Nine days after the last British soldiers left American soil and truly ended the Revolution, at  Fraunces Tavern in New York City, US General George Washington formally said farewell to his officers.  “See ya guys,  take care”.  No, no, no Professor Sy Yentz has his oratorical sense of humor.

             1812-Peter Gaillard of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, patented the horse-drawn power mower. Lawns were large in those days – most of Pennsylvania was a lawn in fact- but think of a lawn mower being pulled by a horse except the lawn mower looks more like a plow that doesn’t dig….got it? One does wonder about what he invented to remove the horse droppings that replaced the grass mowed.        

            1843- Manila paper was patented  by J.M Hollingsworth of Massachusetts. This manilla tasted a bit more bland  than chocolate paper.    Manilla a strong paper or thin cardboard with a smooth light brown finish made from e.g. Manila hemp. And manila hemp is a kind of hemp obtained from the abaca plant in the Philippines.  And hemp is a plant fiber.      

           1849 – Happy Birthday, Crazy Horse, war chief of the Oglala Sioux, one of the bands of the Lakota. He was a prominent leader in the Sioux resistance to white encroachment in the mineral-rich Black Hills of South Dakota. He joined Sitting Bull and Gall in defeating George Armstrong Custer at the battle of the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876.

            1858 – This was another of those “why hadn’t anyone thought of that before” inventions, so Happy Birthday, Chester Greenwood, American inventor and manufacturer of earmuffs. The fifteen year-old, had experienced very uncomfortable cold ears while skating in winter (duh!) near his home in Maine, and he solved his problem with beaver fur pads on a wire frame.  He patented an improved model with a steel band which held them in place and with Greenwood's Champion Ear Protectors, he established Greenwood's Ear Protector Factory. He made lots of money supplying Ear Protectors to U.S. soldiers during World War I.          

            1872 -The mystery of the Mary Celeste .The Dei Gratia, a small British brig, observed the Mary Celeste, an American vessel, sailing erratically but with full sail near the Azores Islands in the Atlantic Ocean. The ship was seaworthy, its stores and supplies were untouched, but not a single human was onboard.  Where did everyone go? Free Happy Meals at Azore’s MacDonalds? Forgot their passports and swam back to get them?  They were hiding and waiting for a signal to jump out and yell “surprise” but no one gave the signal so they just stayed hidden? Tis a mystery.

           1894-George Parker was issued a. patent for a fountain pen design that became the Parker Pen Company's first major success. The pen, named “The Lucky Curve”, solved the problem of  previous pens, which while carried in a pocket, retained ink in the feed tube, as opposed to depositing it in one’s bag or pocket.  Warmed by body temperature, the ink expanded forcing ink from the pen point into the cap and onto the barrel, causing ink-stained shirts or pants and soiled fingers on the next use. Parker’s feed system was designed to drain the ink back into the reservoir by capillary action (think of how liquid travels through plants) when the pen was upright in the pocket of its owner. Oh, and sort of putting the cart before the horse…… the slip-on outer pen cap was patented in 1898.

          1908 – Happy Birthday Alfred D. Hershey, American biologist and creator of the famous “blender experiment” – just like you’d see in a high school science class – to research viruses that infect bacteria, bacteriophages. He proved that only DNA, and not protein, was injected into a bacterial cell by an infecting phage particle. The DNA was sufficient to transfer to the bacteria all the genetic information needed to produce more phage……one could “turn the phage” or as Bob Dylan looked on it in the song, My Back Phages.  He put the phages in a bacterial colony and mixed them but then at the crucial moment he whirred them in a Waring Blendor, which he had discovered produced just the right shearing force to tear the phage particles from the bacterial walls.He won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1969.
           1952 – Not a Stephen King movie but  a heavy smog (a smog is fog that has become mixed and polluted with smoke, technically it’s a form of air pollution produced by the photochemical reaction of sunlight with hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides that have been released into the atmosphere, especially by automotive emissions) descended on  London, England, It persisted  for four days, leading to the deaths of at least 4,000 people. A seemingly harmless high-pressure air mass stalled over the Thames River Valley. When cold air arrived suddenly from the west, the air over London became trapped in place. Fumes from cars and factories were  also trapped in place.  To make matters worse, it was colder than normal which caused residents to burn extra coal in their furnaces. All that “gook” (Professor Sy Yentz likes his scientific vocabulary) caused an extraordinarily heavy smog to smother the city. The smog became so thick and dense that by December 7 there was virtually no sunlight and visibility was reduced to five yards in many places.

            1965- Gemini 7 was launched with astronauts Frank Borman and James Lovell (of Apollo 13 - "Houston, we have a problem" fame) aboard.  Of note is that a just-used urine collection bag split open early in the mission. The crew never managed to collect all the floating globules. When asked to describe the record flight later, Lovell described it as '...two weeks in the Men's Room'. The primary objectives of the mission were demonstrating manned orbital flight for approximately 14 days and evaluating the physiological effects of a long-duration flight on the crew. Among the secondary objectives were providing a rendezvous target for the Gemini 6-A spacecraft – more practice for the docking that would be needed for Moon landings.

            1978-  Pioneer Venus 1, launched in May of 1978 became the first craft to orbit Venus.  The Orbiter was inserted into an elliptical orbit around Venus The Orbiter was a flat cylinder 2.5 m in diameter and 1.2 m high.  It discovered that Venus’s was inhabited by a group of Amazons with pseudo actress/professional wife, Zsa Zsa Gabor as their ruler.  This was made into the documentary, Queen of Outer Space in 1958 – twenty years before the Venus Pioneer…amazing!

            1998 - The space shuttle Endeavor (STS-88) with crew of six astronauts was launched on the first mission to begin assembling the international space station.  By the way, Endeavor, as was all space shuttles, was named after a famous ship of discovery, the Endeavour of Capt. James Cook which sailed from 1768 -1771 during which he “discovered”, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia: South Coast, Australia: North Coast and the Great Barrier Reef

5.        771 - Charlemagne became the sole King of the Franks after the death of his brother Carloman.  Charles has become known as Charles The Great or Charlemagne. His long reign changed the face of Europe politically and culturally, and he himself would remain fixed in the minds of people in the Middle Ages as the ideal king. In more recent times, many historians have taken his reign to be the beginning of the Middle Ages 'proper'. Yet in terms of territorial expansion and consolidation, of church reform and entanglement with Rome, Charlemagne's reign was merely bringing the policies of his father Pippin to their logical conclusions. The Franks (before they became a favorite fast food at Coney Island) The Franks were a confederation formed in Western Germany of a certain number of ancient barbarian tribes who occupied the right shore of the Rhine from Mainz to the sea. Their name is first mentioned by Roman historians in connection with a battle fought against this people about the year 241.  They later moved into Belgaic Gaul (France).

            1360 – Frankly speaking, speaking  of Franks (see Charlemagne 771 above, on this day the French Franc (the basic unit of the monetary system) was created. The franc was introduced by King John II. Its name comes from the inscription reading Johannes Dei Gratia Francorum Rex ("Jean by the grace of God King of the Franks").  John had been captured by the English and was freed by  ransom.  This instilled confidence (??) and the coinage of silver and billon was strengthened. With it came  the creation of a new gold coin called the "Franc d'or à cheval" (on horseback). It is the first FRANC of monetary history.

            1492 - Christopher Columbus, remember him from October?, became the first European to set foot on the island of Hispaniola. Columbus originally named it Espanola.  It is the second largest island of the West Indies, and located within the Greater Antilles. It is divided politically into the Republic of Haiti (west) and the Dominican Republic (east).

            1443 – Happy Birthday, Pope Julius II, Giuliano della Rovere, the “Warrior Pope” – he actually wore armor during an attack on Venice, also responsible for Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel and Raphael’s paintings in the Vatican apartments.

            1868- The first American bicycle school opened in New York City. Funny, we didn't know that bicycles had to go to school.

            1782- Happy Birthday Martin Van Buren, 8th President of the U.S and the first to be native born, meaning born after the Revolution, not running around in a loin cloth and fishing with spears, although the thought of Martin Van Buren in a loin cloth………………..

            1791 – Mozart kaput. Composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in Vienna at age 35. The reason for his death has for a long time been one of the mysteries of musical history, and is likely to remain so. Many theories have been put forward, suggesting ailments such as typhoid fever and kidney failure, and even murder. Rheumatic fever seems most likely, died during an epidemic. Mozart had also suffered from the disease several times as a child, and was thus more likely to contract it as an adult. He was struck suddenly by fever. Rashes and painful swellings followed, and he passed away 15 days later. He is currently decomposing

            1822- Happy Birthday, Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz,  U.S. naturalist and educator who was the first president of Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass. She married the Swiss naturalist, Louis Agassiz, in 1850. Agassiz made revolutionary contributions to the study of natural science with landmark work on glacier activity and extinct fishes. He achieved lasting fame through his innovative teaching methods, which altered the character of natural science education in the United States.  They traveled extensively together. When her husband died in1873, Elizabeth became interested in the idea of college for women to be taught by the "Harvard Annex" in Cambridge. In 1894 the Annex became Radcliffe College

 1839 – Happy Birthday, George Armstrong Custer –the day after Crazy Horse, see December 4, 1849 above), born in Rumley, Ohio -brevet Union General (brevet is a  commission promoting a military officer in rank without an increase in pay) – graduated at the bottom of his class from West Point in 1961- whose troops killed  Confederate Cavalryman Jeb Stuart at Yellow Tavern in May 1864 and met a gruesome end at the hands of the Oglala and Lakota Sioux led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull during “Custer’s Last Stand” at the Little Big Horn in June of 1876.

1854-  Although folding chairs have been around for a while.  They were used by the Egyptians, Etruscans, Greeks, Romans, during the middle ages and through the Renaissance. The next time you go to a show, a sporting event, or the movies, think of Aaron H. Allen of Boston, Mass. who was issued a patent for a folding chair as an "Improvement in Self-Adjusting Opera-Seat" for theatres or other public buildings. Not portable, but the notion of
foldability, adjustability and flexibility of design was paramount, The seat was constructed with weights or springs so it would assume and retain a vertical position when pressure upon it was relieved as the occupant got up from it. It’s basically the same principal and design as the folding seats you sit in now.

 1876- In a wrenching experience for all, D.C. Stillson of Somerville, MA. patented his Stillson wrench. It is a large pipe wrench with L-shaped adjustable jaws that tighten as pressure on the handle is increased.

            1901- We are certain we can say with certainty, Happy Birthday, Werner Heisenberg, German physicist and philosopher who discovered a way to formulate quantum mechanics in terms of matrices in1925. For that discovery, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for 1932. He is most famous, however for his indeterminacy, or uncertainty, principle published in 1927 upon which he built his philosophy. The uncertainty principle is the concept that precise, simultaneous measurement of some complementary variables -- such as the position and momentum of a subatomic particle -- is impossible. You can know where something (and electron) is but you cannot know its speed, conversely, you can know its speed but not where it is. Contrary to the principles of classical physics, the simultaneous measurement of such variables is inescapably flawed; the more precisely one is measured, the more flawed the measurement of the other will be. The uncertainty principle, component of quantum theory. Werner Heisenberg  explained it as "The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa."

            1901 – Happy Birthday, Walt Disney (born on the same day – see above as physicist Werner Heisenberg). Disney was a  pioneer of animated cartoon films (Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, Pluto, and Tom Cruise) and founder of the Disney theme parks, and countless merchandising ideas designed to separate people from their money.

             1908 - Numbers were used for the first time on football uniforms worn by college football players. The University of Pittsburgh Panthers wore their new numbers in the big  game with Washington and Jefferson.

 1933 – “I’ll drink to that.”  The 21^st Amendment to the Constitution repealed the 18^th Amendment to the Constitution.  This was the first time that an amendment repealed an amendment. Prohibition of alcohol was seen as an affront to personal liberty, pushed on the nation by religious moralists. Alcohol was also seen as a source of revenue for the local and national governments. In case you were wondering about the two that came between, the 19^th Amendment was women’s right to vote and the 20^th moved up the date of presidential inauguaration and the new Congress to to January 19 and January 3  respectively.

1945 - The story of the "Lost Squadron" established the legend of the Bermuda Triangle, an area of the Atlantic Ocean where ships and aircraft are said to disappear without a trace. The Bermuda Triangle is located  from the southern U.S. coast across to Bermuda and down to the Atlantic coast of Cuba and Santo Domingo.  Five U.S. Navy Avenger torpedo-bombers comprising Flight 19 left the Ft. Lauderdale Naval Air Station in Florida on a routine three-hour training mission. Flight 19 was scheduled to take them due east for 120 miles, north for 73 miles, and then back over a final 120-mile leg that would return them to the naval base. They never returned.  No trace of the bodies or aircraft was ever found.

            1952- Popular movie ( Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Buck Privates, The Time of Their Lives) comedians Bud Abbott and Lou  Costello debuted their TV show. They made only 52 episodes, but the show still appears in reruns.

            2006 – Your “Nanny State” at work as New York became the first city in the nation to ban artery-clogging trans fats at restaurants. Hydrogenation solidifies liquid oils and increases the shelf life and the flavor stability of oils and foods that contain them. Trans fat is found in vegetable shortenings and in some margarines, crackers, cookies, snack foods and other foods. Trans fats are also found in abundance in "french fries." Trans fats wreak havoc with the body's ability to regulate cholesterol.

Back To Calendar

6.       1421 – Happy Birthday, King Henry VI of England. Henry was the “bud” if you will, in the Wars of the Roses. Only occasionally sane, Henry, a Lancaster,  was usurped by his cousin Edward of York who became Edward IV and eventually murdered in 1471.

            1598- Happy Birthday, Giovanni Bernini (brother of Heart Bernini), Italian who was perhaps the greatest sculptor of the 17th century and also an outstanding architect – the piazza and colonnades at St. Peter’s in Rome.  Bernini created the Baroque style of sculpture.  If a sculpture fell off its pedestal and hit the ground it was “baroque”.  No no no, Professor Sy Yentz has his baroque humor working overtime.

          1670- Happy Birthday, Niccolo Zucchi,. Italian astronomer who, in 1616, designed one of the earliest reflecting telescopes. This pre-dated the telescopes of  James Gregory and Sir Isaac Newton. Zucchi  had become interested  in astronomy from a meeting with Johannes Kepler. With his telescope Zucchi discovered the belts of the planet Jupiter in 1630 and the elastic waist-band of  Mars. Of course a vegetable was named after one of his body joints—the Zucchi Knee. Oh we have no shame.

             1778- Happy Birthday, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, French chemist.. In 1805, by exploding together given volumes of hydrogen and oxygen, Gay-Lussac discovered they combined in ratio 2:1 by volume to form water. Yup, H²O.

            1802 – Happy Birthday Paul-Emil Botta (brother of Bread & Botta),
French consul and archaeologist whose discovery of the palace of the Assyrian king Sargon II at Dur Sharrukin (modern Khorsabad -a village in northern Iraq, 15 km northeast of Mosul,), Iraq, initiated a rush of archaeological explorations  in ancient Mesopotamia. Sargon II, who ruled from 721 to 705 BC, believed in modest living, his palace was an entire city within walls a mile long with huge stone sculptures

          1833 – Happy Birthday, John Singleton Mosby, American Confederate partisan leader. Always working with small groups of men, his effectiveness in harassing Union troops can be debated. Early in 1863, with 29 men, he rode into Fairfax Court House and roused Union General Edwin H. Stoughton from bed with a slap on the rear end. Following the capture of Generals Crook and Kelley by McNeil's partisans, Mosby complimented them, stating that he would have to ride into Washington and bring out Abraham Lincoln to top their success. On another occasion he came near capturing the train on which Grant was traveling.       

            1848- Happy Birthday, Johan Polisa, Silesian (Poland) astronomer who was a prolific discoverer of asteroids, 122 in all, beginning with Asteroid 136 Austria on 18 Mar 1874, using a 6” refractor telescope  to Asteroid 1073 Gellivara in 1923 - all by visual observation, without the aid of photography. Cloudy nights with no observation opportunities were described as a “pain in the asteroid”.

            1865 – Georgia ratified the  13th Amendment to the Constitution, officially ending the institution of slavery, was ratified.  It came 8 months after the Civil War ended in April and stated, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

          1877 - Thomas Edison demonstrated the first sound recording on his tin foil machine, reciting "Mary had a Little Lamb" at his Menlo Park Laboratory, making the first surviving recording of the human voice. The hip hop version sung by Mary J. Blige is now available on CD and downloading from itunes. He may have earlier recorded the word Hellooo in August of the same year.

           1882- The transit of Venus across the sun was photographed on a series of glass plate negatives made by astronomer David Peck Todd. Transits of Venus – the planet passes across the face of the Sun and appears as a black dot- are among the rarest of planetary alignments. Only six such events have occurred since the invention of the telescope. Transits occur in pairs, 8 years apart - 1631, 1639, 1761, 1769, 1874 and 1882. The last transit of Venus was on June 8, 2004 and the next on June 6, 2012 so mark your calendars.  

         1884 – Thirty six years after the cornerstone was laid, the Washington Monument was completed.  Workers placed a nine-inch aluminum pyramid atop the  white marble tower.  It immediately became top heavy and  fell over – no, no, no Professor Sy Yentz has his constructive sense of humor…. Built to honor American hero and the first President, George Washington, the monument is made of  36,000 blocks of marble and granite stacked 555 feet in the air, the monument was the tallest structure in the world at the time. A city law passed in 1910 restricted the height of new buildings to ensure that the monument will remain the tallest structure in Washington, D.C. This remained so until the incredibly large egos of Bill and Hillary Clinton surpassed it during the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries.

            1886 – Happy Birthday, Joyce Kilmer, born in New Brunswick New Jersey, poet author of Trees; - “I think that I shall never see, a poem lovely as a tree….. A sergeant, he was killed in action by a sniper in France during  WWI  on July 30, 1918. He was thirty one years old.

          1888- Happy Birthday, Libby Henrietta Hyman, U.S. zoologist who wrote two laboratory manuals and a comprehensive six-volume reference work, The Invertebrates, -NOT  the story of many politicians - (1940-67) covering most phyla of its subject. Volume I covered Protozoa through Ctenophora) and on to  Volume 6, Mollusca (she could have titled it “Good Golly Miss Mollusk”).

            1902 - The stamp was the first U.S. definitive or commemorative stamp to feature a woman was issued.  The 8¢ stamp honored Martha Washington .  Queen Isabella of Spain had appeared on a stamp in 1893.

            1907 – The worst mining disaster in American history occurred at the Fairmont Coal Company in Monongah, Marion County, West Virginia.  kills 361 coal miners.  361 coal miners were killed.

           1908 – Happy Birthday, Lester Gillis alias Baby Face Nelson, American bank robber, and psycho killer, Baby Face left a trail of dead police officers and bank victims before being mortally wounded in November 1934 in a shootout during which he killed two FBI agents. Nelson was briefly a member of John Dillinger’s gang of bank  robbers earlier in 1934

            1917- The Mont Blanc, a French munitions ship, exploded 20 minutes after colliding with a Norwegian ship, the Imo,  in the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia. She was loaded with 2,300 tons of wet and dry picric acid, 200 tons of TNT, 10 tons of gun cotton and 35 tons of benzol: a highly explosive mixture. The huge explosion came when the ship had drifted towards shore and actually brushed against a dock as people came out to watch the fire. It killed more than 1,800 people, injured another 9,000--including blinding 200--and destroyed almost the entire north end of the city of Halifax, including more than 1,600 homes. The shock wave shattered windows 50 miles away, and the sound of the explosion could be heard hundreds of miles away.

           1921 – The Irish Free State was declared.  Now known as the Republic of Ireland, the country had been under British control since the rule of King Henry II in the 12^th century.          

           1923 - A presidential address was broadcast on radio for the first time as President Calvin Coolidge (aka Silent Cal) spoke to a joint session of Congress.  Coolidge's address was heard on 42 stations from coast to coast. Coolidge told some jokes, sang a few songs and did his Warren G. Harding impersonation.   

            1945- Invented by Percy L. Spenser, the microwave oven was patented. The original was 6ft. tall and weighed 750 pounds…..just perfect for that spot on our counter top.  

           1955- The Federal government standardized the size of license plates at 12 by 6 inches (300 mm by 150 mm) throughout the U.S. Previously, individual states had designed their own license plates, resulting in wide variations of size and style.

          1957 – As millions watched on television, America's first attempt at putting a satellite into orbit failed when the Vanguard rocket carrying it disintegrated  at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Vanguard,  having risen about four feet –not quite enough to achieve orbit- into the air, suddenly sank. Falling against the firing structure, fuel tanks rupturing as it did so, the rocket toppled to the ground on the northeast or ocean side of the structure in a roaring, rolling, ball-shaped volcano of flame. Coming 2 months after the U.S.S.R's successful launch of Sputnik, this was a national embarrassment for America.

            1969 – “Flower power” and hippiedom died at the Rolling Stones “free” Concert at Altamont Speedway in California.  Hell’s Angels acting as security, killed attendee Meredith Hunter culminating an ugly day of violence and drug overdoses.

            1969- On the same day as the horrors of Altamont (see 1969 above), one-hit wonders Steam made their contribution to fraternity parties, sports fan chants and American jargon as their hit Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye rose to number 1 on the charts. Go ahead, start singing…”.na na na na na na na na hey hey hey goodbye…..” Yes, in answer to the question never asked but should have bee….there are eight na s in the chorus.   

            1973 - Following the resignation of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew – who introduced nolo contendre into the lexicon, House Speaker Gerald Ford became the U.S.’s first appointed Vice President. Later, he became the nation’s first non-elected President upon the resignation of Richard Nixon. At the time, Ford (never the brightest bulb in the chandelier) was still trying to remember how to spell resignation.

            1998- Aboard the space shuttle Endeavor, a mating took place……no, no, no, it’s not what you think….it was the mating of the U.S.-built Node 1 station element to the Functional Cargo Block (FGB in Russian) already in orbit to create the international space station.  There were  also two spacewalks to connect power and data transmission cables between the Node and the FGB. The FGB, built by Boeing and the Russian Space Agency, had been  launched on a Russian Proton rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan in November 1998

            2006 -  NASA revealed photographs taken by Mars Global Surveyor suggesting the presence of liquid water on Mars.  The Mars Orbiter Camera on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor provided the new evidence of the deposits in images taken in 2004 and 2005. NASA cited the film “getting lost at the drug store when we took it in to be developed” as the reason for the delay in revealing the photos.  Indicators of water included Martians hosing down their lawns, Martians sitting on floating rafts sipping piÑa coladas, and the “Olympus Mons Splashdown Water Park”.

Back To Calendar

7.     521 – Happy Birthday, Saint Columba, Irish Christian missionary to Scotland. Columba was forty six when he left Ireland and landed on the island of Iona (Iona College is the alma mater of Professor Sy Yentz).  He spent the remainder of his life preaching Christianity in northern Scotland.

             1631- The transit of Venus occurred as first predicted by astronomer Johannes  Kepler. He correctly predicted that a transit of Venus would occur in Dec 1631, but unfortunately, no-one observed it - due to the fact that it occurred after sunset for most of Europe. Kepler himself died in 1630. He not only predicted this particular transit but also worked out that transits of Venus involve a cyclical period of approximately 120 years.  See December 6,1882 above.  And……..the next –and last for 120 years will be in June 2012.  There was one in 2004 but if you missed it………………………..

              1761- Happy Birthday, Marie Gresholtz, better known as Madame Tussaud, French museum curator and creator of wax figures, who founded Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in 1834. She mastered her craft while imprisoned during the French Revolution when the heads of guillotine victims were brought to her for modeling.  In 1802, she took her collection of wax masks of guillotined aristocrats and relics of the French revolution on a tour of Britain. In 1835, she established a base for the collection at the Baker Street bazaar in London.  He sons move the museum to its current location although Madame Tussaud’s is now the Mac Donalds of wax museums with branches every where.  And as long as we’re waxing prosaic about Tussaud,  what is wax?  You were correct. It’s any of various natural, oily or greasy heat-sensitive substances, consisting of hydrocarbons or esters of fatty acids that are insoluble in water but soluble in nonpolar organic solvents. 

           1787- In Delaware, the U.S. Constitution was unanimously ratified by all 30 delegates to the Delaware Constitutional Convention, making Delaware the first state of our United States. Delaware is the second smallest state and the 30 people may have been most of the population at that time. And Pennsylvania was the second state, Rhode Island the 13^th and last.            

            1810- Happy Birthday, Theodore Schwann (who tripped one day and originated the Schwann Dive), discoverer of pepsin (a digestive enzyme found in gastric juice in the stomach that catalyzes the breakdown of protein to peptides.), and coiner of the word metabolism.             Yes, he “never met a bolism” he didn’t like.

          1815 – Happy Birthday, American actor Eli Wallach.  In the opinion of Professor Sy Yentz, Wallach was the greatest Mexican bandit ever.  See, The Magnificent Seven 1960 and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly- 1965.

            1842 - The New York Philharmonic gave its first concert.  The New York Philharmonic is by far the oldest symphony orchestra in the United States, and one of the oldest in the world. The Philharmonic was founded in 1842 by a group of local musicians led by American-born Ureli Corelli Hill.  Highlights of the first concert included Inna Gadda Da Vida, Stand By Your Man, You Light Up My Life, and Satisfaction.

             1873- Happy Birthday, Willa Cather, author born in Winchester, Va. Cather's family moved to Red Cloud, Nebraska when she was nine years old. Her books like O Pioneers and My Antonia celebrated the spirit of the American Great Plains.

1889 -John Boyd Dunlop, a Scottish inventor, was issued a patent for his pneumatic tire. Two years earlier his 9-yr-old son complained of the rough ride he experienced on his tricycle over the cobbled streets of Belfast, Ireland.  Dunlop devised and fitted rubber air tubes held on to a wooden ring by tacking a linen covering fixed around the wheels. Dunlop’s tires were for bicycles.  In 1895, André Michelin was the first person to use pneumatic tires on an automobile, however, not successfully.  In 1911, Philip Strauss invented the first successful tire, but we’re tired to talking about it now.

            1905 - Happy Birthday, Gerard P. Kuiper, Dutch-born American astronomer, who discovered the atmosphere of Saturn’s moon Titan,  Miranda, a moon of Uranus, and Nereid, a moon of  Neptune. He is most famous for predicting the existence of what is now known as the Kuiper Belt, and area of  thousands of comets, dwarf planets, and asteroids traveling outside the orbit of Neptune. He also measured the diameter of the down graded, disgraced imposter, the former planet Pluto. Pluto is a member of the Kuiper Belt in addition to its classification as a "dwarf planet".

         1907- Christmas seals went on sale for the first time, at the Wilmington, Del., post office. The proceeds went to fight tuberculosis.  The idea came from American journalist and social worker,Jacob Riis. In his article, Riis referred to a successful sale of Christmas seals in 1904 in Denmark that raised $20,000 in the fight against TB. Emily Bissell of the Red Cross agreed with Riis’s suggestion that America do the same. She borrowed money from friends to print the first 50,000 Seals, got permission from the Wilmington postmaster to sell them in the post office lobby, and sold the first Christmas Seal on December 7, 1907.  Later attempts at having Christmas walruses, Christmas sea lions, and Christmas narwhals were less successful.

             1926 –The household refrigerator, operating on gas, was patented by the Electrolux Corporation – currently makers of vacuum cleaners but  we’re not sure what the connection is there.  The Electrolux-Servel refrigerator entered the US market in 1926, and after 1927 became the sole gas refrigerator on the US market until the 1950s. Although quieter and more efficient than electro/mechanical systems, gas heat refrigerators never enjoyed the backing of major manufacturers, nor popularity with consumers, especially after the development of a non-toxic refrigerant gas in 1930.  The term "refrigerator" was coined by a Maryland engineer, Thomas Moore, in 1800.

            1941-   At 7:55 a.m on a Sunday morning,  Japanese naval and air forces launched a surprise attack on  the U.S Naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii resulting in thousands of lives lost, major destruction of the U.S Pacific Fleet (fortunately, the U.S aircraft carriers – which would change the tide of the war- were out at sea and avoided damage).  The attack resulted in a declaration of war against Japan and, also, Germany. Incredibly, even though diplomatic relations were breaking down and the imperialist Japanese government and its armed forces presented an imminent threat, President Franklin Roosevelt had done virtually nothing to increase security at Pearl Harbor, the country’s most important Pacific naval base. Among the 18 U.S. ships destroyed, sunk, or capsized were the battleships, Arizona, Virginia, California, Nevada, and West Virginia. More than 180 planes were destroyed on the ground and another 150 were damaged (leaving but 43 operational). American casualties totaled more than 3,400, with more than 2,400 killed (1,000 on the Arizona alone). The Japanese lost fewer than 100 men.

           1968- Check your overdue library books. The great grandson of a Mr. M. Dodd, who had borrowed a book on diseases from the University of Cincinnati Medical Library in 1823, was assessed the largest library fine ever -- $2,646. The great grandson was sentenced to memorizing the Dewey Decimal System and two hours of shushing mothers with loud, obnoxious children.

            1972 - Apollo 17, the sixth and last U.S. moon mission, blasted off from Cape Canaveral. Flight Commander, Eugene Cernan, was the last man on the moon. With him on the voyage of the command module America and the lunar module Challenger were Ronald Evans (command module pilot) and Harrison H. "Jack" Schmitt (lunar module pilot). They would arrive at the Moon on the 11^th. Cernan and Schmitt actually landed while Evans orbited the Moon, joining Michael Collins, Dick Gordon, Stuart Roosa, Al Worden, and Ken Mattingly for the dubious honor of getting to the Moon but not walking on it.

         1982-  The first person executed by lethal injection in the U.S. was Charles Brooks (who, with an accomplice, kidnapped a car mechanic There the mechanic, bound him to a chair with coat hangers, gagged him with tape and then shot him once in the head.) in Texas. In this form of execution, the condemned person is usually bound to a gurney, attached to heart monitors and two needles (one is a back-up) are then inserted into suitable veins.  The lethal injection method was put “on hold” during the early 21^st century as courts decided if it was “cruel and unusual punishment”.  The most popular form of execution became the forcing of prisoners to watch day time “judge” shows for 24 hours at a time resulting in insanity followed by suicide.

            1988- In the northwest of the then Soviet province of Armenia, an earthquake of a 6.9 magnitude on the Richter scale hit, affecting an area 50 miles in diameter. The initial earthquake was followed four minutes later by a powerful 5.8 magnitude aftershock. More than 20 towns and 342 villages were affected, and 58 of them were heavily damaged. Spitak, a major population center, was almost completely destroyed. The earthquake killed more than 25,000 people.  The earthquake occurred along a fairly small thrust fault running northwest-southeast, apparently right under Spitak. During the earthquake, the Spitak section to the northeast of the fault actually rode up (!!!!) over the southwest side.

          1995- The Galileo spacecraft arrived at Jupiter and entered orbit after 6 years of travel including a flyby of Venus and two asteroids, Gaspra and Ida. The orbiter had also carried an atmospheric probe with scientific instruments, which it had released from the main spacecraft in July, 1995, five months before reaching Jupiter Galileo then spent a further 8 years examining Jupiter and its moons Io and Europa. Finally, its mission completed, the craft was sent crashing into the surface of Jupiter. Scientists were concerned that bacteria from Earth might end up contaminating a Jovian moon.  And actually this provided the plot for the hit Jovian movie version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, seen in theaters all over the Great Red Spot.

Back To Calendar

8        1542 –Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, Mary, Queen of Scots, the only surviving child of her father, King James V. Mary ascended to the Scottish throne when the king went kaput at age 30 just six days after her birth (James V had become king at age seventeen months). The king said The king said, "It came with a lass (Marjorie Bruce), it will pass with a lass." Her son would become King James VI of Scotland and upon the death of  Queen Elizabeth I in 1603, become James I, king of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Mary was not the sharpest knife in the drawer and her pathetic taste in men was only exceeded by her inept attempts at usurping her cousin Elizabeth. She was be-headed for treason in 1587.

            1730 – Friday Happy Birthday, Jan Inhenhousz, Dutch-born British physician and scientist who is best known for his discovery of  photosynthesis, the process by which sunlit green plants take in carbon dioxide, fix the carbon, and 'restore' the air (oxygen) required by animals for respiration. A candle can only burn in a closed jar for a few moments before going out, and animals can only breathe for a short while in an enclosed space before suffocating; but we did not always know why.  Enter Ingenhousz, who investigated this phenomenon. Joseph Priestley had earlier shown that plants could restore the ability of the air in the jar to support a flame or keep animals alive, but it was Ingenhousz who observed that plants only had this effect when exposed to light. He also showed that only the green parts of the plants carry out photosynthesis.  In addition, he was a proponent of using live smallpox virus in inoculations before Edward Jenner developed his safer vaccine based on cowpox virus.

            1765-Sunday- Happy Birthday, Eli Whitney American inventor and mechanical engineer who invented the cotton gin ( gin which tasted fuzzy, was hard to swallow and stuck to ice…..no, no, no that was Professor Sy Yentz attempt to drink cotton gin) and developed the idea and methods for mass-production of interchangeable parts. The cotton gin is a machine that separates cotton fiber from the seeds. The device, patented in 1793, greatly stimulated cotton growing in the south and had a profound effect upon slavery by making land owners more dependent on slave labor.  Unfortunately, while a gifted inventor, Whitney’s skills did not translate to the business world. Whitney's gin brought the South prosperity, but the unwillingness of the planters to pay for its use and the ease with which the gin could be pirated by others put Whitney's company out of business by 1797.

            1786 –Friday Happy Birthday, Johann von Charpentier, pioneer Swiss glaciologist. He was one of the first to propose the idea of the extensive movement of glaciers as geologic forces that moved huge boulders (called erratics) and even land bodies (such as Rosie O’Donnell).  When he first presented his glacial theory publicly in 1835, he gained little support except from Louis Agassiz, who later took credit for the idea as his own and went on to fame and fortune and to marry Elizabeth Cabot who would become the founder and first president of Radcliffe College (see December 5, 1822 above). 

           1866- Saturday- The first transpacific side-wheeler steamship to be launched in the U.S. was the Celestial Empire (later re-named China) for the Pacific Mail Company. She had a capacity for 1,300 passengers. It first “sailed” in July, 1867 for Panama and then San Francisco.  It must have gone around the tip of South America since there was no Panama Canal in those days.

          1896- Tuesday -  In a world oozing for a better way to squeeze lemons, a patent for an improvement in a lemon squeezer was issued to African-American inventor John Thomas “J.T.” White. It made squeezing lemons and straining the juice easy and also kept hands clean while juicing. So it produced juice but what about Protestants?

          1909-Wednesday- He rocks in the tree-top all a day long
Hoppin' and a-boppin' and a-singin' the song
All the little birds on J-Bird St.
Love to hear the robin goin' tweet tweet tweet
[Chorus]
Rockin' robin (tweet tweet tweet)
Rockin' robin (tweet tweet tweet)
Oh rockin' robin well you really gonna rock tonight
Every little swallow, every chickadee
Every little bird in the tall oak tree
The wise old owl, the big black crow
Flapping them wings sayin' go bird go….Bobby Day.  Formation of the American Bird Banding Association.  Qite appropriately,  the first  music the bird band played was Lullabye of Bird Land. Dr. Paul Bartsch of the Smithsonian Institution started bird banding in 1902. In its simplest form, it involves putting a metal or plastic band around the leg of a wild bird and then releasing the bird back into the wild. If the bird is recovered, either dead or alive, at a future time, the information is sent to the original bander. Original attempts using lead and  boulders were successful because the birds couldn’t walk very far..much less fly…thus making it easier to keep track of them. It did put a crimp in their migration patterns though.

             1922 –Friday A big day for RNA (also see Thomas Cech, 1947 below). Happy Birthday, John Smith,  English microbiologist who was a pioneer in the field of nucleic acid research. He helped to establish the structure of RNA – and what, you may ask is RNA? An RNA molecule is a linear polymer in which the monomers (nucleotides) are linked together by means of  bonds and to discover the methylation (a group)  of the bases in bacterial DNA. The RNA structure information was crucial to the discovery of the double-stranded model of DNA proposed by Watson and Crick (borrowing from the work of Franklin and Wilkins). ……whew!

            1931 –Tuesday-  The invention of coaxial cable was issued a U.S. patent for the first time in the U.S. It was described as a "concentric conducting system". The inventors were Lloyd Espenschied of Kew Gardens, Queens, N.Y. and Herman A. Affel of Ridgewood, N.J. The patent was assigned to the American Telegraph and Telephone Co. of New York City. The cable was to be used for the recently invented television. This feature reduced frequency losses and provided freedom from outside interference. In November 1936, the first voice transmission was made over coaxial cable installed between New York and Philadelphia.  It was the bombastic wails Mariah Carey warbling the Whiffenpoof Song.

            1940-Sunday- The Chicago Bears, led by quarterback Sid Luckman, just barely edged out  the Washington Redskins, led by Sammy Baugh,  73-0, in the National Football League Championship Game.  This is the most lopsided game in NFL history. Earlier in the season, Washington had defeated Chicago, 7-3, in a regular season game three weeks earlier. After the contest, Redskins owner George Preston Marshall cleverly told reporters that the Bears were crybabies and quitters when the going got tough.

            1941 –Monday- On the day after the sneak attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the United States declared war on Japan.

            1941- On the same day that the U.S declared war on Japan (see 1941 above), the pattern of sneak attacks continued as the Japanese invaded the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies.

            1943 – Happy Birthday, Jim Morrison, lead singer of the American rock group Doors –Light My Fire, L.A Woman, 20^th Century Fox, and The End.   Morrison died in Paris1971. Cause was listed as heart failure but since there was no autopsy, the cause of death remains a mystery.  Morrison, dying at age 27 became a member of what came to be called “The 27 Club” consisting of rock starts who died at that age.  Other members were, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones (Rolling Stones) and later, Kurt Kobain of Nirvana.

            1946 - The first test in the U.S. of black American inventor F.J. Farrell’s was (May 27, 1890) patent for an "Apparatus for melting snow" was made fifty six years later in New York City. The department store, Best & Co. installed 15 coils made up from 4,530 feet of pipe. A mixture of about 67% water with 33% Zerex (yes, the anti-freeze) was circulated, and proved effective to prevent freezing to as low as -5 F. It was first put to use shortly thereafter, on this day, during a blizzard.

 1947 – A good day for RNA (also see John Smith 1924 above).  Happy Birthday, American biochemist and molecular biologist who, with Sidney Altman, was

awarded the 1989 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their discoveries concerning RNA (ribonucleic acid - A nucleic acid molecule similar to DNA but containing ribose, a sugar, rather than deoxyribose, another kind of sugar…and that’s as far as we’ll go). Cech showed that RNA could have an independent catalytic function, a "ribozyme", aiding a chemical reaction without being consumed or changed. 

1951 – Happy Birthday, Bill Bryson, American author – A Walk in the Woods, In a Sunburned Country, A Brief History of Nearly Everything (one of Professor Sy Yentz’ favorite sources)

1967- Major Robert Lawrence, now recognized as the first black astronaut in the nation’s space program, was killed in a crash of his F-104 jet fighter plane.  By NASA  standards, anyone going into astronaut training is an astronaut.  In the 1960’s Air Force standards required flying over fifty miles in altitude. Lawrence’s family struggled for many years to  have him recognized as an astronaut.

1980 – Beatle, John Lennon, one of rock's most influential musicians, was murdered by a lunatic “fan” in front of the Dakota, Lennon's New York apartment building

            1990- The spacecraft Galileo swung      past Earth and was held briefly by gravity until it gained enough energy   from Earth's rotational force to enable it to reach Jupiter. See December 7, 1995 above.

            1993- The astronauts aboard the space shuttle Endeavor installed corrective lenses in the Hubble Space Telescope. The lenses, soft contact lenses, give it lovely violet eyes.

            1994 – Want to see a fast element?  Want to see it again?  Lasting for about four-thousandths of a second before decaying, element 111 was discovered (?) in Germany. Its atom has 111 protons and 161 neutrons in its nucleus, giving it a mass number of 272. As a new element it was named unununium, (Un (one) un (one) un (one) ium), symbol Uuu, according to an internationally adopted system for naming new elements. Only three atoms of the element were made by accelerating nickel atoms to high speed and bombarding them into bismuth – and one should always mind one’s own bismuth-. Unununium has no know uses.

1608 –Tuesday – Happy Birthday, John Milton, English poet author of the epic poems Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Paradise by the Dashboard Light.  

            1652 –Monday - Happy Birthday, Augustus Quirinus Rivinus also known as August Bachmann. Rivinus introduced several important innovations which were later used by other botanists, notably Joseph Pitton de Tournefort and Carolus Linnaeus. He classified the plants according to the structure of the flower. He used dichotomous keys which led first to the higher groups, which he called higher genera (genus summum) of plant orders (ordo), and then to the lower genera.  Among his notable classifications were:  “the one that gave me a rash”; “the one that smells like a used sweat sock”; “the one that looks like Orson Wells sat on it”; and “the one that tastes like chicken”.

            1742 –Sunday- Happy Birthday, Carl (Karl) W. Scheele,Swedish pharmacist. Without advanced apparatus he discovered: Chlorine, fluorine, manganese, barium, molybdenum, tungsten, nitrogen and oxygen. He also discovered compounds such as  ammonia, glycerine, and tannic acid. Unfortunately, he could not get his discoveries published in a timely manner and credit went elsewhere to others (Priestly, for oxygen) who were working on it about the same time. Unfortunately, again the skills of cause and effect, predicting and lab safety were sadly lacking in Scheele’s methodology. He liked to taste everything he worked with, including mercury, prussic acid and hydrocyanic acid.. In 1786 at age 43 he was found dead at his workbench surrounded by an array of toxic chemicals as Bill Bryson says “ any of which could have accounted for the stunned and terminal look on his face”.

            1793 -Monday New York City's first daily newspaper, the American Minerva, was established by Noah Webster. The Federalist daily edited by Noah Webster was meant to curb the propagation of French (think revolution and guillotines) thought in the United States. The paper's name was changed to the Commercial Advertiser in 1797, and Webster remained editor until 1803. The Commercial Advertiser merged with the New York Globe in 1904 and was called the Globe and Commercial Advertiser until the New York Sun purchased it in 1923. It then merged with the New York World, and The New York Telegram and became the World Telegram and Sun. It went kaput during the self destructive newspaper strike of 1962.

            1845 – Zippity doo dah, Zippity aye,
My oh my what a wonderful day
Plenty of sunshine coming my way,
Zippity doo dah, Zippity aye.

Mister blue bird's on my shoulder,,
it's the truth,
it's actual,
everything's satisfactual!
Zippity doo dah,
zippity aye,
zippity doo dah,
zippity aye! ….. written by Allie Wrubel, the lyrics by Ray Gilbert….our favorite version is by Bobb B. Soxx and the Bluejeans.

 Happy Birthday, author Joel Chandler Harris who wrote children's stories told in dialect by Uncle Remus, a slave who entertained a young white boy with American folktales. In 1880 he published Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings and in 1883, Nights with Uncle Remus featuring Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox and other “critters” from the Briar Patch.. His tales of Uncle Remus were made into the no longer politically correct Disney movie, Song of the South in 1946.   In 1888 Harris was named a charter member, with Mark Twain, of the American Folklore Society.

            1851 – Tuesday - The first YMCA in North America was established in Montreal, Quebec.  The Young Men's Christian Association ("YMCA" or "the Y") was founded on June 6, 1844 in London, England, by George Williams. The Village People entertained at all openings.

            1854 –Saturday “ Half a league, half a league, half a league onward.  All in the valley of death road the six hundred. The Examiner newspaper printed Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade," which commemorated the courage (but not the monumental stupidity of the British officers who ordered it)  of 600 British soldiers charging a heavily defended position during the Battle of Balaklava, in the Crimea, just six weeks earlier.

            1884- Tuesday- Ya can't roller skate in a buffalo herd
Ya can't roller skate in a buffalo herd
Ya can't roller skate in a buffalo herd
But you can be happy if you've a mind to  - Roger Miller…………The first U.S. patent for ball-bearing roller skates was issued to Levant M. Richardson of the Richardson Skate Company, Chicago, Illinois. Roller skates had first appeared in 1760 when London instrument maker and inventor, Joseph Merlin, attended a masquerade party wearing one of his new inventions, metal-wheeled boots. Joseph decided to make a grand entrance with the added the pizzazz of rolling in while playing the violin. Lining the huge ballroom was a very expensive wall-length mirror. Unfortunately, Merlin had not invented brakes nor figured out how to stop and so the fiddling skater stood no chance and Merlin crashed solidly into the mirrored wall, as his roller skates crashed into society. Richardson’s contribution increased the reliability and speed of skating by reducing friction.

            1886 –Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Clarence Birdseye, American inventor of the deep freezing food (frozen foods for you microwave fans out there) method and co-founder of General Foods Corp. While on Arctic trips as a field naturalist for the United States government, and after observing the people of the Arctic preserving fresh fish and meat in barrels of sea water quickly frozen by the arctic temperatures, he concluded that it was the rapid freezing in the extremely low temperatures that made food retain freshness when thawed and cooked months later. He learned, too, that the fish, when thawed and eaten, still had all the characteristics of fresh fish. He then concluded that quickly freezing certain items kept large crystals from forming, preventing damage to their cellular structure. Freezing food has a long chilly history. The first to freeze foods beyond the winter months were the Chinese, who used ice cellars as early as 1000 B.C. for their Pu Pu Platters, Wonton soup, General Tso’s Chicken, and Sweet and Sour Pork. The Greeks and Romans stored compressed snow in insulated cellars, and the Egyptians and Indians discovered that rapid evaporation through the porous walls of clay vessels produced ice crystals in the water inside the vessels.

            1921- Friday- One of the worst inventions of the 20^th century, 1921, tetraethyl lead was first given a laboratory test as an anti-knock additive to gasoline fuel. The “knocking” sound  in the one-cylinder laboratory engine was completely silenced. This invention of Thomas Midgley, Jr.,  (who later would give a us chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) ) of  General Motors was first put on public sale as ethyl gasoline in the same city on  Feb. 2  1923. This would pollute the atmosphere until the Clean Air Act of 1970.  By 1980 With the phase-out of lead underway, blood-lead levels in human beings drop 50 percent .

            1926 –Thursday -  Happy Birthday, Henry Way Kendall, American nuclear physicist who shared the 1990 Nobel Prize for Physics with Jerome Isaac Friedman and Richard E. Taylor for obtaining experimental evidence for the existence of the subatomic particles we know as quarks and that quarks are bound together by massless particles known as gluons. Quarks were first named by Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig in 1964. Everyone who works with quarks has their quirks. Gell-Mann chose the name "quarks," pronounced "kworks," for these three particles, a nonsense word used by James Joyce in the novel Finnegan's Wake:  "Three quarks for Muster Mark!"

            1949 –Friday- NFL merged Cleveland Browns,  San Francisco 49ers and Baltimore Colts from All American Football Conference, a short lived four year old league.  The Cleveland Browns won the AAFC Championship each year of the league’s existence; 1946, 1947, 1948, and 1949. Now follow the bouncing ball….The Cleveland Browns would move to Baltimore in 1995 and became the Baltimore Ravens. In 1999, an expansion team would be called the Cleveland Browns and get the team history (back to 1946). The Baltimore Colts would fail after one year and go kaput. However, when a Dallas team (the Texans) bit the dust after 1952, the NFL re-started the Colts in 1953. They would happily flourish until the odious owner Robert Irsay, moved the franchise, literally in the middle of the night in February 1984 to Indianapolis. So in today’s NFL, the Browns are the Ravens, Baltimore is Indianapolis, and the Browns are the newest of the four original AAFC teams.  

             1961 – Saturday- The trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Israel ended with verdicts of guilty on 15 criminal charges, including charges of crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people and membership of an outlawed organization.  Eichmann headed Gestapo Department IV B4 for Jewish Affairs, serving as a self proclaimed 'Jewish specialist' and was the man responsible for keeping the trains rolling from all over Europe to death camps during the Final Solution.

            1963 -Monday  The release of the first Supremes album, Meet the Supremes, with the then goggly-eyed lead singer, now self important has been, Diana Ross. No single from the album would make the top 40 chart. The next album Where Did Our Love Go was the biggie. Of note is that this album followed the October release of When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes which  was the Supremes' first Top 40 pop hit since signing with Motown in 1961…... Eventually reaching number 23 on the Billboard Hot 100…..and it wasn’t on the album.

            1965 – Thursday -The Kecksburg UFO incident: a fireball was seen from Michigan to Pennsylvania; witnesses reported something crashing in the woods near Pittsburgh. All the witnesses interviewed said that the object in question was large, metallic, acorn-shaped, with hieroglyphic markings, and partially buried in the ground. Soon after the object fell, the military was on the scene and cordoned off the area, forbidding access to everyone. In 2003, a NASA official told a Sci Fi channel documentary team that the object could not have been a satellite -- then, in 2005, NASA announced that the object was in fact a satellite. Science Gnus has recently ascertained that it was in fact the space ship that brought Congressman Barney Frank to this planet.

            1968-Wednesday- Hey, do the mouse, yeah
Hey, you can do it in your house, yeah
Haul the rug around the wall
If you folks get bugged
Do it in the hall
Do the mouse, yeah
Let's do the mouse
Come one and do the mouse with me….Soupy Sales………… The first demonstration of the use of a computer mouse was given at the American Federation of Information Processing Societies' Fall Joint Computer Conference at Stanford University, California. Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute invented the computer mouse, a handheld pointing device for computers. One of several experimental pointing devices developed by Engelbart for his ON-Line System (NLS), it was also called the "bug," but "mouse" became more popular because the cord on early models resembled a rodent's tail. If you’re reading this on-line, your hand is probably on the mouse right now.

            1974 - George Harrison released his first album on his Dark Horse label cleverly entitled Dark Horse.  We dare you to name one song from the album.

            1983 –Friday-  Tony Montana: I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.

Tony Montana: I kill a communist for fun, but for a green card, I gonna carve him up real nice.  - The premiere of the re-make of Scarface directed by Brian de Palma and starring Al Pacino as Tony Montana a Cuban criminal imported to the U.S by the hopeless Jimmy Carter.  Also starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Steven Bauer, F. Murray Abraham (Salieri in Amadeus), Michael Moran as “Nick the Pig”,  and Robert Loggia (fondly remembered by the Gnus as Elfego Baca in Disney’s late 50’s western The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca. The original Scarface, directed by Howard Hawks and starring Paul Muni (as Tony Carmonte)  and George Raft was released in 1932

            1992 –Wednesday- Tragic news as the chronically dull Prince Charles of Britain and his wife, the fatuous publicity hound, Princess Diana announced their separation. Married in July of 1981, Charles would now go on to romance his friend’s wife, the beauty challenged Camilla Parker Bowles, Diana  would continue as a tabloid favorite featuring several tawdry affairs and ending in drunken chauffeur car crash escaping paparazzi in Paris.

            1993 -Monday   Astronauts Story Musgrave and Jeff Hofman made the longest space walk of the 11-day mission on board the Endeavor, spending seven hours and 21 minutes on their final task to unravel the 40 ft (12 metre) solar panels completing the repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope. In one of the great “oops” of technology, the mission was the result of a tiny mistake in the manufacture of the $1.55 billion telescope, which made the mirror flatter than it should be by just one-fiftieth of the width of a human hair.

            1993 –Monday Meanwhile back on Earth, scientists in Princeton New Jersey produced a controlled fusion reaction equivalent to 3 million watts. If the power had been in the form of constant electrical current it would have been enough to meet the needs of a small. As it was seven second burst of energy resulted in the creation of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. For those of us confusioned by fusion, it is the joining together of the nuclei of hydrogen atoms, each of which contains one proton. The fused nucleus resulting from this reaction is that of helium, which contains two protons. This process is the opposite of fission, the process that powers conventional nuclear reactors; fission involves breaking apart heavy nuclei, like those of plutonium atoms.

            1994 –Tuesday-  Presidential stud muffin Bill Clinton dismissed the seemingly deranged Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders after the media reported that she had told a conference that masturbation should be discussed in school as a part of human sexuality. Clinton told her to go play with herself.

Back To Calendar

10.     

1394 ––Wednesday- Happy Birthday, King James I of Scotland, aka the Lawgiver, the Captive, the Prisoner….which pretty much sums up his life. James was one of the early Stewarts (spelled Stuarts in England). Becoming king at age 12, he spent most of his childhood in exile, was captured by the English. He finally established his rule and then joined a lengthy list of Scottish monarchs who would be prematurely terminated  in 1437 when  the Earl of Athol and Sir Robert Graham, broke into a party the King was hosting in Blackfriars, Perth, and slew him. Next came, James II  who was only 6 years old when crowned king at Holyrood Abbey in 1437. Make room forJames III who was only 9 years old when his father went kaput. James IV lasted a while, mostly in exile but bit the dust at the Battle of Flodden in 1513.  James made a fatal error (did we mention that when they managed to survive the Jameses were conspicuously incompetent military leaders?) by choosing to advance down a steep slippery slope towards the English forces. His troops slid down the slope in total disarray and were picked off almost at will by the English. James himself was killed. James V was just 17 months old when James IV was killed. He began ruling at age 16. His second wife Mary of Guise gave him two sons who died in infancy, before giving birth to Mary Queen of Scots in the very same week as James lay dying in Falkland Palace, following a nervous collapse after, yes, a defeat at the Battle of Solway Moss. Eventually, the sixth James, James VI of Scotland would become James I, King of England upon the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603.

            1684 –Sunday-  Isaac Newton's derivation of Kepler's laws (three laws of planetary motion) from his theory of gravity, contained in his paper De motu corporum in gyrum, was read to the Royal Society by his good friend Edmund Halley (discoverer of Halley’s Comet).  Halley, jokester that he was, read the paper with a Swedish accent and started each paragraph with “so a physicist goes into a bar….” Newton was able to deduce Kepler's laws from Newton's own laws of motion and his own law of universal gravitation, using his invention of calculus.

.           1778-Thursday-  John Jay, of New York, was elected president of the Continental Congress. Jay had been attending  as a delegate representing New York. The legislature had pronounced the secession of what is now the state of Vermont from the jurisdiction of New Hampshire and New York and sent Jay to Congress charged with the duty of securing a settlement of the territorial claims of his state. He took his seat in congress on the 7th of December, and on the 10th was chosen president in succession to Henry Laurens. There were sixteen presidents of the Continental Congress in all with Cyrus Griffin of Virginia the last in 1789 and Peyton Randolf of Virginia the first – 1774.

                1815-Sunday-  Happy Birthday, Countess Augusta Ada King Lovelace, daughter of poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabelle Milbanke. Ada's parents married on January 2, 1815 but separated on January 16, 1816, a month after she was born. On  April 25, 1816 Lord Byron went abroad and Ada never saw her father again. With the encouragement and support of her mother,  she became a mathematician and over 100 years before the computer, she worked on calculations that would evolved into “computerese”. She has been called the first computer programmer.  The programming language, “Ada” is named after her.
1787 –Monday-  Happy Birthday, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, minister and educator born in Philadelphia, Pa. who founded first public school for deaf children

            1799-Tueday- Don’t follow leaders, watch your parking meters…..Bob Dylan………..In another of the seemingly endless attempts at fixing an exact measurement of the meter, a second legal definition of the meter was made by the French National Assembly. They decreed that it was to be 3 feet and 11.296 lines of the toise -a unit of length of a platinum meter bar, constructed on June 23, 1799 and deposited in the National Archives, as the final standards.  The metric system was made compulsory by law in France. It is as indecipherable today as the initial explanation was back then. The meter was originally defined as 1/10,000,000 of the distance between the equator and either pole; however, the original survey was inaccurate and this standard substituted.  More recently, it has been defined as the distance light travels through a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second. The meter is now the legal standard of length for most of the world, other standards, such as the yard, being defined in terms of the meter.

            1817 –Wednesday- Two Italians in conversation on a bus…. 'Emma come a  first.
Den I come.
Den a two asses come together.
I come once-a-more.
Two asses, they come together again.
I come again and pee twice.
Then I come one lasta time.'
A woman over hears this conversation and interrupts with -You foul-mouthed  swine,'                                                                                     

  'In this country we don't speak aloud in public places about our sex lives'
'Hey, calma down lady,' said the man.
'Who talkin' abouta intimacy?
I'm a justa tellin' my frienda how to spell ' Mississippi'.' ……….Mississippi, became the 20th state.  . Congress had created the Mississippi Territory in 1798.  In 1540, the murderous Hernando de Soto led a large expedition into the area now known as Mississippi looking for gold. The group camped for the winter along the Pontotoc River. When spring came, the group made it to the Mississippi River, but found none of the gold they were searching for. In 1804, and then again in 1812, Congress increased the size of the territory, so it finally reached from Tennessee to the Gulf of Mexico. In 1817 the western part achieved statehood as Mississippi. In 1819, the eastern part achieved statehood as Alabama. When  Mississippi became a state, with substantially its present-day boundaries; the eastern section of the Mississippi Territory was organized as the Alabama Territory. Mississippi is named after the Mississippi River. Though the river was called by many different names, the name Mississippi given to it by the Indians was the name that was used on Robert Cavelier Sieur de La Salle's map of the area in 1695.  More importantly, Elvis was born in Tupelo, Mississippi

             1830-Friday -Happy Birthday, Emily Dickenson, American poet born in Amherst, Mass.  Called ‘The Belle of Amherst’,  Dickenson, wrote hundreds of poems including Because I Could Not Stop for Death, Heart, we will forget him!, “I'm Nobody! Who are You?, “Wild Nights! Wild Nights!”, This is My letter to the World and There Once Was a Young Man from Havana.

            1845 –Wednesday- Civil engineer (while most were civil but there were also rude engineers in those days) Robert Thompson patented pneumatic tires in London.  Unfortunately it was sort of putting the cart before the horse since there were no bicycles or cars in those days so his tire was not a commercial success. Thompson's tire was made for horse-drawn carriages but never really caught on with the public and eventually it faded from the scene. It would be another 40 years before the pneumatic tire reappeared, this time "reinvented" by John Boyd Dunlop (see Dec. 7, 1889 above), who claimed later to have no knowledge of Thompson's work. …………………….I'm so tired
Tired of waiting
Tired of waiting for you ……Ray Davies’ ode to John Dunlop.

            1851-Wednesday- Happy Birthday, Melvil Dewey, American librarian who developed library science in the United States, particularly with his system of classification, the Dewey Decimal Classification which he developed in 1876 for library cataloging. The classification uses numbers from 000 to999 to cover the general fields of knowledge and designating more specific subjects by the use of decimal points. It starts with the 000 for general knowledge and ends in the 900s for Geography and History. Hey! "Dewey  we put this book here? Or, Dewey put it over there"? And…attention anyone who works in an office, Dewey also invented the vertical office file

            1864 –Saturday- Georgia, Georgia, the whole day through
Just an old sweet song
Keeps Georgia on my mind
Talkin' 'bout Georgia
I'm in Georgia………..Ray Charles………..Union General William T. Sherman completed his "March to the Sea" when he arrived in front of Savannah, Georgia. He immediately asked directions to the “Mercer House” and took the Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil tour. The “March to the Sea” began in Atlanta on November 15. After visiting The World of Coca Cola, they left for the shore.

            1868 –Thursday-  The first traffic light was installed outside the Palace of Westminster in London. It  looked like railway signals ….that’s because it was invented by British railroad engineer, J.P Knight…., and used semaphore arms and that were illuminated at night by red and green gas lamps. Since cars had not been invented yet, this light was meant  to control the flow of horse buggies, pedestrians, and Segways. The first actual traffic light was designed by Police Officer William L. Potts of Detroit, Michigan.  By 1920 cars  were a problem. Potts used red, amber, and green railroad lights and about thirty-seven dollars worth of wire and electrical controls to make the world’s first 4-way three color traffic light. It was installed in 1920 on the corner of Woodward and Michigan Avenues in Detroit.

            1869 –Friday-  Wyoming territorial legislators (remember, Wyoming didn’t become a state until 1890) passed a bill that was signed into law granting women the right to vote. Other territories granting women the right to vote were: Territory of Utah 1870; Territory of Washington 1883; Territory of Montana 1887; Territory of Alaska 1913

            1896 –Thursday-The first intercollegiate basketball game as Wesleyan (Connecticut)  beat Yale 4-3.  Another date given is February 9, 1895, between Hamline College and the Minnesota School of Agriculture with Minnesota taking the game 9-3. There is no record in either game of tattooed idiots pounding their chests or  posing after making a shot.  In addition, the players in these games could read (as opposed to only some  of the scholars playing college basketball today).  Basketball was invented by Dr. James Naismith while working for the YMCA training school in Springfield, Mass., in 1892. The game was originally played with between 7 to 9 players on each team, dribbling the ball was not allowed and players were out of the game after 2 fouls.

            1898 –Saturday- The Treaty of Paris was signed, formally ending the Spanish-American War and granting the United States its first overseas empire.  This was another in a long series of Treaties of Paris, which usually ended wars. A 1229 Treaty of Paris ended the Albigensian Crusade. In 1259 there was a Treaty of Paris between Louis IX of France and Henry III of England. The 1303 Treaty of Paris restored Gascony in France to English rule during the 100 Years War. In 1323 Treaty, the Count Louis of Flanders relinquished Flemish claims over Zeeland in Holland. Paris then became “Treatise non Grata” for three hundred years until 1623 when everyone came back for the 1632 Treaty in which France, Savoy, and Venice agree to have Spanish forces leave Valtelline (a valley in the Lombardy region of Italy). In 1657 a Treaty established  a military alliance between England and France against Spain. The 1763 Treaty ended the Seven Years War (known in America as the French and Indian War).  The 1783 Treaty ended the American Revolution. In 1814the Treaty of Paris ended the War of 1812. Note; America liked to settle it’s wars with England in France. 1815 Treaty of Paris followed Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo.  The 1856 Treaty ended the Crimean War.  The 1920 Treaty following the end of WW I established the union of Bessarabia (part of today’s Moldovia) and Romania and that was about it for Treaties of Paris.

            1901-Tuesday- First distribution of Nobel Prizes on the 5th anniversary of the kaputing of Alfred Nobel.  He left a bequest of $9.2 million dollars. Nobel had established the prizes because he felt guilt over his invention of dynamite – he invented it as a mining tool but he felt it magnified the capacity of people to kill one another. These first Nobel Prizes were awarded in Stockholm, Sweden, in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace. The first winners were: Chemistry: Jacobus H. van Hoff , Physics: Wilhelm C. Röntgen, Physiology or Medicine: Emil A. von Behring, Literature: Rene F. A. Sully Prudhomme, Peace: Jean H. Dunant  and  Frédéric Passy

            1906 –Monday President Theodore Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in bringing the Russo-Japanese War to an end.  The war had started with a Japanese sneak attack –three hours before they declared war- on the Russian Far East Fleet at Port Arthur( for other Japanese sneak attacks, see  Pearl Harbor December 7, 1941 above)

            1927 – Saturday -The Grand Old Opry made its first radio broadcast from Nashville, Tennessee. It had begun broadcasting on WSM in November of 1925 and  the show was known as the WSM Barndance until this  night in 1927, when host George Hay made the statement following the shows opening performance by DeFord Bailey; "For the past hour, we have been listening to music taken largely from the Grand Opera, but from now on we will present the Grand Ole Opry" and the name took hold and the show has been called the Grand Ole Opry ever since.

            1931 –Thursday Jane Addams, founder of Hull House became a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, the first American woman so honored.  Hull House was a settlement house.  Settlement houses typically attracted educated, native born, middle-class and upper-middle class women and men, known as “residents,” to live (settle) in poor urban neighborhoods. Hull-House residents provided kindergarten and day care facilities for the children of working mothers; an employment bureau; an art gallery; libraries; English and citizenship classes; and theater, music and art classes.

            1941 –Wednesday-  The Royal Navy battle ship HMS Prince of Wales –just completed in March of 1941 and battle cruiser, HMS Repulse were sunk by  Japanese Navy torpedo bombers near Malaya. The ships had been sent to attack the Japanese forces invading Malaya.  The ships had no aircraft protection to assist them in fighting off the waves of Japanese planes.

            1952 –Wednesday- The opening of the great movie Invasion U.S.A starring no one we ever heard of.  The tagline for the movie was “It will scare the pants off of you”. The plot summary supplied by IMDb is five people are sitting in a New York bar with a mysterious Mr. Ohman, when they hear the news that the Communists are invading the U.S.A. The five rush off to various sections of the country to do their part to stop the invasion, when an A-bomb crashes down upon Manhattan……

            1965 –Friday-  Produced by Bill Graham, seminal rock group, The Grateful Dead performed the first of many concerts at San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium. Previously known as Warlocks they  debuted with the new name at the Fillmore Auditorium for the second San Francisco Mime Troupe Appeal Party. The Jefferson Airplane (lead singer Signe Anderson), The Great Society (lead singer Gracie Slick who would later join the Jefferson Airplane) , the John Handy Quintet, the Mystery Trend, and Sam Thomas also appeared.

            1967-Sunday-  Otis Redding kaput. The great soul singer Otis Redding (Respect –Professor Sy Yentz prefers the Redding version to the Aretha Franklin version….Otis had a much  better horn section…)-, and Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay)  and members of his band, the Bar-Kays were killed in a plane crash during a storm in Wisconsin.

            1974 – Tuesday- Whiskey River take my mind,
Don't let her mem'ry torture me.
Whiskey River don't run dry,
You're all I've got, take care of me…….Willie Nelson……Setting the trend for an endless stream of sex scandals involving politicians, horn dog Representative Wilbur D. Mills, a Democrat from Arkansas, resigned as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee in the aftermath of the first truly public sex scandal in American politics. The very married Wilber was involved in a car crash in Washington D.C.  When police arrived they found the very intoxicated Wilbur and an intoxicated stripper, professional name, Fanny Fox, the Argentine Firecracker.  The Argentine Firecracker then proceeded to jump into the tidal basin, unwittingly beginning the on-going tide of political scandals of sleazoidish representatives of the voters.  

            1984 –Sunday-  The National Science Foundation reported the discovery of the first planet outside our solar system, orbiting a star 21 million light years from Earth.  Don’t hold us to this because the number will keep growing from the 250 or so now known in 170 solar systems. Many of  the creatures from these planets have come to Earth and gotten jobs as annoying supporting characters in CSI type police TV programs.

            1984 – Same Sunday as above, the single Do They Know It's Christmas, written by Bob Geldof (Boomtown Rats) and Midge Ure  was released by Band-Aid. The group was assembled to aid in famine relief in Ethiopia. Who was in Band Aid?  http://www.pubquizhelp.com/christmas/bandaid.html

            1993 –Friday-  The crew of the space shuttle Endeavor deployed the repaired

            Hubble Space Telescope into Earth orbit.  During the course of the mission, astronauts performed a total of five space walks. They captured the Hubble with the shuttle arm, repaired some of the pointing gyroscopes, replaced the previously wobbling solar arrays, and installed the WF/PC2 (Wide Field/Planetary Camera), COSTAR (Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement), and the TPTAD (Taking Pictures of Tourists At Disneyworld Camera).

Back To Calendar

11.     

1282 –Friday-  The appropriately named Llywelyn the Last, aka, Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the last native Prince of Wales, was slewn by the English forces of King Edward I at Cilmeri near Builth Wells, in  south Wales. Of note, Charles the son of Elizabeth II is the current Prince of Wales. Survival of the fittest, not primogeniture was the determining factor for Welsh ruledom so having fought off the opposition of his uncles and of his eldest brother, Llywelyn he laid claim to the principality of Gwynedd in 1258, and took the title Prince of Wales, which was then virtually a new concept. He was recognized as such by the addled Henry III of England in the Treaty of Montgomery in 1267. However, Llywelyn's territorial ambitions gradually made him unpopular with some of the other Welsh leaders, particularly the princes of south Wales. Welsh leaders, like their Scots brethren to the north spent more time fighting with each other than uniting against the English, that’s why they are now part of the United Kingdom.

            1475 –Saturday - Happy Birthday, Pope Leo X. Leo, better known as Giovanni de Medici son of Lorenzo the Magnificent of Florence. Leo served as  Pope from  1513 – 1521 and was Poping when Martin Luther began the reformation in 1519.  

            1719-Monday- The aurora borealis was first recorded. We believe the recording was a bluegrass/opera blend sung by the duo of Garth Brooks and Beyonce. No, no, no it was colonists in the Exeter and Hampton areas of New Hampshire reporting their first experience with the natural phenomenon, Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights. Not knowing what the shimmering lights in the sky were, many believed them to be a sign that Judgment Day was upon them and they retreated to churches to pray and fast and contribute money to television evangelists with big hair who cry when they are revealed as criminals or perverts. What is the Aurora Borealis? She was a student in Professor Sy Yentz 6^th grade class in 1974…. Actually  Aurora Borealis is an atmospheric phenomenon that displays a diffuse glow in the sky in the northern hemisphere. It is caused by charged particles from the Sun as they interact with the Earth's magnetic field.  It is known as the Aurora Australis in the southern hemisphere.

            1769-Monday- Blinded by the light,
revved up like a deuce,
another runner in the night …….Manfred Mann…………..Venetian blinds were patented – not in Venice -but in London by Edward Bevan.  John Hampson of New Orleans in 1841 devised the method used to adjust the angle of the slats on Venetian blinds — this method is still in use today.  The use of slatted blinds can be traced back to Roman and Greek times. In Pompeii, for instance, archaeologists have uncovered homes that have fixed marble slats in the window openings. And, why are they called Venetian blinds?  The early Venetians, (think Marco Polo)  who were great traders, are thought to have brought the idea of the blind from Persia to Venice. The Venetian slaves, once freed, are then thought to have brought the blind to France where it found its way to England for John Hampson’s patent.

            1792- Tuesday “Let’s not lose our heads over this”…..or as he might have said “Pour ne pas perdre la tête au cours de cette”  France's King Louis XVI went before the Convention to face charges of treason. The Convention had replaced the Legislative Assembly, abolished the monarchy and decided to try "Citizen Capet " as Louis XVI was now called, for treason. He was found guilty, sentenced to death, and on Monday, Jan. 21, 1793, guillotined and kaputed. His rather dim, frivolous wife, Marie Antoinette followed him to the big “Versailles in the Sky” on Wednesday, October 16, 1893          

            1816 –Wednesday-  Indiana, the Hoosier State, (what’s a Hoosier? Tough question since no one is really sure where the term came from) http://www.indiana.edu/~librcsd/internet/extra/hoosier.html

 became the 19th U.S. state. Following the Revolutionary War, the area northwest of the Ohio River was granted to the now United States and known as the Northwest Territory. It included present-day Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota. The first US settlement in Indiana was made in 1784 on land opposite Louisville, Ky. William Henry Harrison (later president) was appointed the first governor. Dr. Seuss even wrote a book about Indiana – Horton Hears a Hoosier.

            1843 –Monday Happy Birthday, Robert Koch, German physician and one of the two founders of the science of bacteriology…..the other being Louis Pasteur of France.  He discovered the tubercle bacillus and the cholera bacillus, and anthrax too, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1905 (by people wearing hazmat suits…..because, who would want to be near someone playing with those nasty diseases?) for his investigations and discoveries in relation to tuberculosis.

           1844-Wednesday A laugh riot….. The first dental anesthetic, nitrous oxide ("laughing gas") was used for a tooth extraction on Dr. Horace Wells. The previous day, Wells had attended a demonstration of the effects of inhaling nitrous oxide gas,  hat was being conducted by a traveling lecturer, Gardner Quincy Colton. Colton agreed to administer nitrous oxide to Dr. Wells while another local dentist, John Riggs, extracted one of Wells' molars. Dr. Wells experienced no pain during the procedure, in fact, he thought it was hilarious, and the birth of N₂O as a dental and medical painkiller had arrived.  Wells still demanded a lollipop and a free toothbrush for being “a good patient” when he left the office. Nitrous oxide, is a colorless, almost odorless gas, that was first discovered in 1793 by the English scientist Joseph Priestley who was also famous for being the first to isolate oxygen.

            1863-Friday-  Happy Birthday Annie Jump Cannon, hearing impaired American astronomer who taught at Harvard.  She specialized in the classification of stellar spectra. Stars can be seen through a color spectrum just like the colors of the rainbow.  She reorganized the classification of stars in terms of surface temperature- which gives stars their color- in spectral classes, and catalogued over 225,000 stars  

        1874-Friday- Cheese is a kind of meat

                                                  A tasty yellow beef

                                                  I milk it from my teat

                                                  But I try to be discreet

                                                  Ooh cheese, ooh cheese…..The Mighty Boosh

 Happy Birthday, James L. Craft, Canadian-born manufacturer and inventor of the pasteurizing process for cheese. He was the founder of the Kraft Co. In 1903, he had established a wholesale cheese business in Chicago and in 1916, Kraft patented a processed cheese formula, based on milk solids, that would not spoil. He called it "American Cheese."  Nowadays we have cheese “products”  and cheese “food” but we still call it cheese and it is still a pale imitation of the real thing but your children may grow to be 8ft. tall and have hair under their fingernails.

            1882 –Monday-  Max Born was born. He was a German physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1954, for his statistical formulation of the behavior of subatomic particles – quantum mechanics. Born was also a great teacher, His Ph.D. student Max Delbrück, and six of his assistants (Fermi, Heisenberg, Goeppert-Mayer, Herzberg, Pauli, Wigner) went on to win Nobel Prizes. So a new idea was born to Max Born who was born on this day and his ideas have been borne by his students to this day.

         1911-Monday-  Marie Curie became the first person to be awarded a second Nobel Prize. Her first was for Physics (for discovering radiation) in 1903, this one for Chemistry.  She is still the only person  who has won for two sciences. She had isolated radium by electrolyzing molten radium chloride and analyzing the popularity of  Pat Boone. Nobel Prizes ran in the family, Pierre and Marie’s  elder daughter, Iréne, married Frédéric Joliot in 1926 and they were joint recipients of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935. The younger daughter, Eve, married the American diplomat H.R. Labouisse and as Director of the United Nations' Children's Fund he received the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in 1965.

             1919 –Thursday-  Enterprise, Alabama built a monument to the boll weevil, an insect - yet another illegal immigrant from Mexico (1892)-   The boll weevil wrecks havoc with cotton crops. This forced the citizens of Enterprise to diversify their crops, (mostly with peanuts).  They ended up tripling their income. So they built a statue to honor the bug.  The Boll Weevil Monument is a classical statue of a woman holding a large version of the insect over her head.  It was, and still is, the only monument to an agricultural pest. The real boll weevil is a brown to grayish brown, fuzzy beetle with prominent snout (or bill) bearing the mouthparts, and varying in size from 1/8 to almost ½ inches long.

             1921-Sunday-   University of California graduate student, John A. Larson invented the lie detector. Really! That's the truth! The "lie detector", although Larsen refused to call it a lie detector, measured several body characteristics, which were related to somebody knowing they were telling a lie - and feeling guilty about it. Because it could measure and record several different characteristics at the same time, it was called a polygraph.  Czech graduate student, Max Wertheimer working in Germany had developed an experimental lie detector in 1904.                        

            1928-Tuesday-  The president of the National Baseball League, John Heydler proposed a “designated hitter rule”.  The designated hitter would bat in place of the (notoriously weak hitting) pitcher.  The proposal was turned down only to be enacted 45 years later by the American League. Heydler thought it would speed up the game. This was in the days before the batter stepped out of the batters box after every pitch to adjust his wrist bands, his athletic supporter, his helmet, check his e-mails, and order out for Chinese food.

            1928 – Tuesday- Upset about the proposed “designated hitter rule”, radical anarchist terrorists attempted to assassinate President-elect Hoover (who for some reason was running around Buenos Aries instead of putting together his administration)  by attempting to place a bomb near his rail car, but the bomber was arrested before he could complete his work. President Irigoyen Argentina accompanied Hoover thereafter as a personal guarantee of safety until he left the country.

            1936 –Friday-  The product of years of royal in-breeding, the extraordinarily and conspicuously  dull,  British King Edward VIII abdicated, giving up his throne for a twice-divorced American gold-digger. The former King continued to be a national embarrassment through his pro-German sympathies until palmed off on the Bahamas as Governor-General.

           1941 –Thursday-  As part of its Axis treaty with Japan, Germany declared war on the United States.

            1941 –Thursday- Happy Birthday, J.Frank Wilson who’s one hit in 1964, (with the Caveliers) was Last Kiss.  Professor Sy Yentz includes this item because he knows all the words to Last Kiss and can sing them for you at weddings, bah mitzvahs and birthdays or on request.  This song is about Jeanette Clark and J.L. Hancock, who were both 16 years old when their car hit a tractor-trailer on a road in rural Barnesville, Georgia. They were on a date a few days before Christmas in 1962. A local gas station attendant helping with the recovery of the bodies did not recognize his own daughter. This was written by Wayne Cochran, who lived near the road and was working on a song about all the accidents he saw on it. He finished it and dedicated it to Jeanette Clark. J. Frank ran through eight marriages and became an alcoholic Eventually, all of his fast living caught up with him -- he died October 4, 1991, two months before his 50th birthday. http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=2323

Oh where oh where can my baby be
The Lord took her away from me
She's gone to heaven soI got to be good
So I can see my baby when I leave this world

We were out on a date in my daddy's car
We hadn't driven very far
There in the road straight up ahead
A car was stalled the engine was dead
I couldn't stop so I swerved to the right
I'll never forget the sound that night
The screaming tires the busting glass
The painful scream that I heard last

[Chorus]

WHen I woke up the rain was pouring down
There were people standing all around
Somethign warm flowing through my eyes
But somehow I found my baby that night
I lifted her head she looked at me and said
Hold me darling just a little while
I held her close I kissed her our last kiss
I found the love that I knew i have missed
Well now she's gone even though I hold her tight
I lost my love my life that night
Woh Woh Woh Whow
Ohh  Ohh Ohh Ohh........

           1951 –Tuesday-  Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?
A nation turns its lonely eyes to you
(Woo woo woo)
What’s that you say, Mrs. Robinson
‘Joltin Joe’ has left and gone away?
(Hey hey hey – hey hey hey)………….Paul Simon…………. The great New York Yankee centerfielder, Joe DiMaggio announced his retirement at age 37.  Slowed by chronic injuries, DiMaggio claimed he had “lost his edge”.  Joe was the best, the very best I ever saw." — Stan Musial

             1957 –Wednesday-  On a social note, twenty two year old American singer Jerry Lee Lewis secretly married his 13-year-old third cousin Myra Gale Brown. It was his third marriage. Jerry Lee wondered “if I git divorced does that mean she ain’t my cousin no more”?  The bride, sporting braces in her teeth wore a poodle skirt with sneakers. In lieu of music at the reception, they played Candy Land and Shoots and Ladders.  Myra Gale had to be in bed by 9:30 since it was a school night.

            1957 – Wednesday – Since Jerry Lee was busy getting married he missed the New York Premiere of Don Siegel’s Babyface Nelson starring Mickey Rooney in an over the top performance (although not as good as he was as Killer Mears in The Last Mile) as the 1930’s bank robber. IMdB reminds us of the advertisement tag line…. “More vicious than Little Caesar! More savage than Scarface! More brutal than Dillinger! The "baby-face  butcher" who lined 'em up -- chopped 'em down -- and terrorized a nation”. Also starring was the bizarrely cast, Cedric Hardwicke, Leo Gordon  (who went on to play Frank Nitti in television’s The Untouchables), supporting actor greats Jack Elam and Elisha Cooke Jr. and Carolyn Jones (on to The Addams Family).

            Other premieres on the day include: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner – 1967

Superman, 1978, Throw Momma from the Train 1987, A Few Good Men 1992, Jerry Maguire 1996, Shakespeare in Love 1998, and The Go-Go's: Live in Central Park 2001.

            1964 –Friday- Sam Cooke kaput.  Singer Sam Cooke (You Send Me, Wonderful World, Chain Gang, Havin a Party) was robbed of Christmas money he'd withdrawn earlier in the day for gifts. After the robbery, he was murdered by Motel Manager - Bertha Franklin, who'd shot and killed a man six months earlier at the same motel.

            1972-Monday- Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt, a geologist,  landed on the moon for a three-day exploration.  This would be the final Apollo mission to the moon.  They landed in the Taurus-Littrow region of the Moon in the Lunar Module (LM) while the Command and Service Module (CSM) (with CM pilot Ronald E. Evans) continued in lunar orbit flying to the obscurity unfortunately presented to those Apollo astronauts ( see December 11, 1972 above) who never actually landed on the Moon. During their stay on the Moon, the astronauts set up scientific experiments, took photographs, collected lunar samples, visited the Lunar Gift Shop and purchased t-shirts, mugs and refrigerator magnets The LM took off from the Moon on the 14th and the astronauts returned to Earth on December 19.

            1985 –Wednesday-  For being the first to call within the first minute of an Infomercial, General Electric Company got to buy RCA Corporation for $6.3 billion. Also included in the deal was NBC Radio and Television. General Electric tried for a discount as NBC was currently showing the series Stingray (starring Nick Mancuso), and failed to apologize in writing for airing Pink Lady...and Jeff as well as The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo.

            1997-Thursday The Kyoto Conference took place as more than 150 countries sent parties of delegates via airplane, used hotel space, spent money, consumed large amounts of food, and possibly smoked and then agreed to control the Earth's greenhouse gases after nearly two weeks of producing greenhouse gases, they reached a deal to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases produced world wide.

            1998—Friday. Some sunny day-hay baby
When everything seems okay, baby
Youll wake up and find out youre alone
Cause Ill be gone
Gone, gone, gone really gone
Gone, ga-gone, cause you done me wrong…..Robert Plant and Allison Krauss channeling their inner Everly Brothers………... The Mars Climate Orbiter was successfully launched on a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Station in Florida. However, the probe suddenly disappeared on Sept. 23, 1999. This was the famous multi million dollar blunder where the space ship was destroyed because scientists had failed to convert English Standard measures to metric values. You know, inches to centimeters like you learned to do in 5^th grade.  Engineers concluded that the spacecraft entered the planet's atmosphere too low and probably burned up

            1998-Friday- Scientists announced in the Dec 11 issue of the journal Science that they had deciphered the entire genetic blueprint of an animal - the tiny nematode worm, Caenorhabditis elegans. The length of the name is longer than the length of the actual worm. This was the first time genetic instructions have been spelt out for an animal that, like humans, has a nervous system, digests food, and has sex (You may see a picture of the nematode worm having sex in PlayNematode, “the porno magazine for parasitic worms”). The worm's genetic code is spelt out by 97 million genetic letters corresponding to 20,000 genes. In case you were wondering, there are 3.1 billion letters in the DNA code in every one of the 100 trillion cells in the human body.  Humans have far fewer genes than expected at 30,000 to 40,000, compared to the nematode worm with 18,000 and the fruit fly with 13,000. While we don’t have as many genes, we do have more chinos.

            2010 –Saturday-  Whoops - JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) announced that the Akatsuki spacecraft, a Venus climate orbiter (launched May 20, 2010)failed to enter orbit around Venus. The orbit insertion maneuver was performed, the space agency said in a statement, but “unfortunately, we have found that the orbiter was not injected into the planned orbit as a result of orbit estimation.” While extremely disappointing, perhaps not all is lost. If the spacecraft can be stabilized, but cheer up,  there is a chance it could enter orbit in 6 years when it passes by Venus again. Subsequent data indicated that the failure was caused by a bombardment of false eyelashes launched by the Venusians under the leadership of The Queen of Outer Space,  Yllana and her henchwoman, Zsa Zsa Gabor.

 Back To Calendar

12.   

627 –Wednesday- In the Battle of Nineveh, a  Byzantine army under Emperor Heraclius defeated Emperor Khosrau II's Persian forces, commanded by General Rhahzadh. The Battle of Nineveh was the climactic battle of the last of the Roman-Persian Wars

Roman-Persian WarsThe Roman–Persian Wars were a series of conflicts between the Greco-Roman world and two successive Iranian empires. Contact between Parthia and the Roman Republic began in 92 BC; wars began under the late Republic, and continued through the Roman and Sassanid empires...
 between the Byzantine Empire
and the Sassanid Empire. 
The Byzantine victory broke the power of the Sassanid dynasty and for a period of time restored the empire to its ancient boundaries in the Middle East

Middle East.  But, whoops, not so fast…..

The Byzantine Empire or Eastern Roman Empire, was the continuation of the Roman Empire during the Middle Ages, centered on the capital of Constantinople, and ruled by Emperors in direct and de jure succession to the ancient Roman Emperors...

- Byzantine Empire :* December 12—Battle of Nineveh: Emperor Heraclius defeats the Persians, ending the Roman-Persian Wars.- Asia :* Yathrib – Battle of the Trench: Muhammad successfully withstands a siege by Meccan forces, whose allies, the Jewish tribe of Banu Qurayza, ultimately surrender to...

The Middle East is a region that spans southwestern Asia, southeastern Europe, and northeastern Africa. It has no clear boundaries, often used as a synonym to Near East, in opposition to Far East...

This resurgence of power and prestige was not to last, however, as within a matter of decades an Islamic Caliphate emerged and the battles began all over again and the Roman Empire was kaput.

The Islamic Caliphate may refer to the following Caliphates:*The Rashidun Caliphate*The Umayyad Caliphate**The Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba*The Abbasid Caliphate*The Fatimid Caliphate*The Ottoman Caliphate*The Sokoto Caliphate...

The Arabian Desert is a vast desert wilderness stretching from Yemen to the Persian Gulf and Oman to Jordan and Iraq. It occupies most of the Arabian Peninsula with an area of 2,330,000 square kilometers...

            1630 –Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Olof Rudbeck, Swedish Anatomist, botanist, writer, and architect, who discovered the lymphatic system……. simultaneously with the Danish physician Thomas Bartholin…… The lymphatic vessels resemble the veins and capillaries, but have thinner walls and carry the clear, watery fluid portion of the blood – lymph. Yes, he walked with a noticeable lymph.

           1745 –Sunday-  Happy Birthday, John Jay, a mensch….. (see above, Dec. 10, 1778) first Chief Justice of U.S. Supreme Court, co-author of the Federalist papers and lots of other stuff including member of the American delegation in Paris that negotiated the peace ending the Revolutionary War, and Governor of New York (he didn’t know he was elected until he returned to the U.S from Britain after negotiating the Jay Treaty).

           1787 –Wednesday-  Pennsylvania ratified the Constitution and became the second of the United States of America. The state bird is the ruffed grouse.  We thought you’d like to know that. Following the first immigrants, the Indians, the Swedes were the first to make permanent settlement, beginning with the expedition of 1637-1638, which occupied the site of Wilmington, Delaware. In 1643 Governor Johan Printz of New Sweden established his capital at Tinicum Island within the present limits of Pennsylvania.  In 1655 Governor Peter Stuyvesant of New Netherlands seized New Sweden and made it part of the Dutch colony. Continuing the cycle of colonial hot potato, in 1664 the English seized the Dutch possessions in the name of the Duke of York, the king's brother…...who, by the way, had seized (rather than “Keystone State”, it should be called The Carpe Diem –seize the day- State since there was a lot of seizing going on, possibly resulting in new seizures…but we digress) New Netherlands and renamed it New York. King Charles II signed the province over to William Penn (to settle a debt) in 1681.  It was named after William Penn’s father.

           1792-Wednesday-  Beethoven paid 19 cents for his first music lesson from Franz Joseph Haydn. We have no record of how much he paid for his Fifth. Currently, he is decomposing.

           1796-Monday The first patent for a nail cutting and heading machine was issued to its inventor, George Chandler of Maryland. Initially, many women were excited at this development thinking it meant an end to the heartache of broken nails but it turned out that these nails were for hammering into wood so women would have to wait for the invention of Korean nail salons to solve their problems.  A month earlier, Isaac Garretson of Pennsylvania was issued the first U.S. patent for a nail cutting and heading machine on 16 Nov 1796. Records of these patents were lost in the Patent Office fire of 1836. http://www.todayinsci.com/12/12_12.htm We note that on June 11, 2008  another  George Chandler, this time a 60-year old Kansas retiree was working in his backyard to build a lattice for his wife when a freak accident from a nail gun sent a 2-inch nail into his skull.

          1803-Monday Happy Birthday, James Challis, astronomer, famous in the history of astronomy for his FAILURE to discover the planet Neptune. English Astronomer and mathematician John Couch Adams had studied the deviations in the orbit of the planet Uranus (discovered by  William Herschel in 1781) which indicated a planet even further out. In 1845, Adams gave British  astronomer George Airy a calculated orbital path for the unknown planet. Airy then told Challis, who dithered until July 1846.  He actually sighted the new planet four times without recognizing it. On Sep 23, 1845, the new planet was instead discovered from Berlin Observatory by Johann Gottfried Galle. Challis admitted that Adam's prediction was within 2° of the planet's position. It was the first planet to be discovered using mathematics.

            1821 –Wednesday-  Bon Anniversaire, Gustave Flaubert, French, author of Madame Bovary- a story of adultery and the unhappy love affair of the provincial wife Emma Bovary. It took him five years to complete it and then the book was criticized then banned for a period after its first release.

            1846 –Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Eugene Bauman, German chemist.  In the last year of his life, 1896, he made his most important discovery. He found that the thyroid gland was rich in iodine, an element that was previously not known to occur naturally in animal tissue.  Iodine had been found in seaweed in 1811.  The iodine in the thyroid was tightly bound to proteins.  This makes the thyroid gland unique in the human body. It is the only tissue to contain iodine. This led to the discovery of the iodine-containing thyroid hormone and to its treatment in thyroid disorders.

            1894 –Wednesday-  My brain says I'm receiving pain
A lack of oxygen
From my life support
My iron lung……..Radiohead………..Happy Birthday, Philip Drinker (brother of Social Drinker and Binge Drinker), American engineer who, with Louis Agassiz Shaw, invented the iron lung  in 1927. That same year, the first iron lung was installed at Bellevue hospital in New York City. The first patients of the iron lung were polio sufferers with chest paralysis. From the late 1920's and into the 50's, the iron lung was considered to be the state of the art, high tech, life support technology. It was used to maintain life for those whose breathing capabilities had been impaired or destroyed by polio.

          1896-Saturday- Guglielmo Marconi (see 1901 below)  gave the first public demonstration of his radio equipment at Toynbee Hall, East London. He was introduced by William Preece, chief electrician of the British Post Office. Marconi and Preece would have a long and contentious business relationship. While Marconi tapped the key on the transmitter, Preece carried the receiver box around the room showing that there were no wires yet a bell in the receiver rang each time Marconi closed the key. Professor Sy Yentz highly recommends Thunderstruck by Erik Larson. Larson juxtaposes Marconi’s life and radio inventions with the murderer Dr. Harvey Crippen (who “slew” his domineering wife).  Ultimately, Crippen’s escape from Britain was thwarted as Marconi’s radio allowed authorities to contact U.S authorities and arrest him as his ship arrived in New York. William Preece went on to form the heavy metal rock group, Judas Preece.

            1899-Tuesday- A U.S. patent for a golf tee was issued to African-American, George F. Grant, a dentist from Boston, Mass.  It was not the first-ever golf tee as is often claimed, and in fact did not differ much from the earlier pegs that similarly combined a flexible ball rest and a rigid ground anchor. Since Grant did not sell or promote his handiwork, it went unnoticed by the golfing public.  The first golf tee had been patented in 1889, by Scottish golfers William Bloxsom and Arthur Douglas.

            1900 –Wednesday-  Happy Birthday, Maria Telkes, Hungarian-American designer of the first residential solar heating system and inventor of many patent solar-powered devices, In 1948 she provided the heating system design for an experimental solar-heated house in Dover, Massachusetts. The house was funded by Amelia Peabody, a wealthy Boston sculptor, and designed by architect Eleanor Raymond. In fact, he house is still in use today. Telkes' other solar-powered inventions included a distilling system for life rafts and a solar oven.

            1901-Thursday- Guglielmo Marconi sent his first radio message across the Atlantic.  The message was “Dear Mom, send money”.  Of course he would have sent it in Italian so it would be more like “Il caro mom, trasmette i soldi’. Of course we made that whole thing up. The text of the first message, merely consisted of the three dots of the Morse code letter S sent repeatedly. He, among others, did not foresee the development of the radio and broadcasting industry. Marconi left the early experimentation with wireless telephony to others, Reginald Fessenden and Lee de Forest.

1903-Saturday- Commerical manufacture of the “Multigraph” duplicating machine by the American Multigraph Sales Company of Cleveland, Ohio began on this day.  Harry C. Gammeter, a typewriter salesman had invented and patented the duplicating machine the same year.  On a sales trip to Cleveland he observed a stenographer endlessly copying circular letters and wondered if was possible devise a machine that would print a complete line or page of type with a single stroke The same day, the first line of employees waiting to use the duplicating machine occurred.  

            1913 –Friday- Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa
Men have named you
You're so like the lady with the mystic smile
Is it only cause you're lonely
They have blamed you
For that Mona Lisa strangeness in your smile – Nat King Cole………… Leonardo DaVinci's Mona Lisa, which had been stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris in 1911, was recovered in Florence in the hotel room of Vincenzo Peruggia, a waiter who had previously worked at the Louvre.  He claimed to have stolen the painting so it could be returned to its rightful home in Italy.  He offered to sell it to a dealer under the condition that it only be displayed at the Uffizi Palace in Florence.

            1915 –Sunday-  Happy Birthday, Frank Sinatra, American singer and actor born in Hoboken, New Jersey.  “Old Blue Eyes”, “The Chairman of the Board”, appeared in From Here to Eternity and Von Ryan’s Express among others.  The songs are too many to be listed.  Basically, if it’s a classic song from 1940 – 1990 Sinatra probably recorded a version. Personally, Professor Sy Yentz  prefers his Rogers and Hart interpretations….Where or When, If They Asked Me, I Could Write a Book, and The Lady is a Tramp.

            1925 –Saturday-  On the First Motel, the angels did say…whoops, that’s the First Noel.  On this day, the first motel, “The Motel Inn”, opened.  It was built by Los Angeles architect Arthur Heineman at a cost of $80,000 in San Luis Obispo, halfway between San Francisco and L.A. He coined the term motel, meaning motor hotel, and named this first property Milestone. For $1.25 a night, guests were issued a two-room bungalow with a kitchen and a private adjoining garage. All the units faced a central courtyard which housed the swimming pool and included picnic tables for social gatherings.

            1927-Monday-  Happy Birthday, Robert  Noyce,  U.S. engineer and co-inventor  in 1959, with Jack Kilby, of the integrated circuit, a system of interconnected transistors on a single silicon microchip. He held sixteen patents for semiconductor devices, methods, and structures. So this was not a case of “noyce guys finish last”. Noyce’s nickname was the "Mayor of Silicon Valley."   He was one of the very first scientists to work in the area -- long before the stretch of California had earned the Silicon name -- and he ran two of the companies that had the greatest impact on the silicon industry: Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. 

            1937 –Sunday-  In a preview to Pearl Harbor (see December 7, 1941), Japanese planes attacked the neutral gunboat, USS Panay in the Yangtze River (see this day 2006 for extinction of fresh water dolphins in Yangtze) during the battle for Nanking.  The Panay was escorting U.S refugees and Standard Oil barges away from the battle. After the Panay was sunk, Japanese planes machined gunned life rafts and survivors along the shore.

            1941 –Friday- The premiere of The Wolf Man, directed by George Waggoner. With ads blaring "His hideous howl a dirge of death!", the movie starred Lon Chaney Jr. as Larry Talbot, the wolf man. Also appearing were; Claude Reins, Ralph Bellamy and the ubiquitous Bela Lugosi.

            1953-Saturday-  The first plane to reach the speed of 2-1/2 times the speed of sound (2.5 mach) piloted by  Chuck Yeager flying a Bell X-1A. Yes, when he landed he was “ground Chuck”. Since it only had 4 minutes of rocket fuel the plane had to be carried up to launching altitude by a B-29 . The unexpected discrepant event of this flight was the first ever instance of inertia-coupling in which inertia of the heavier fuselage overpowers the aerodynamic stabilizing forces of the wing and empennage and so the  airplane tumbled violently for more than 40,000 feet before Yeager was able to begin to recover to wings-level, stable flight. The unmatched skill of the Yeager, probably the greatest test pilot of all time,  saved his life and the aircraft.

            1955-Monday-“Singing Cockerells and muscles alive alivo…” Christopher Cockerell, known as the “father” of the hovercraft air-cushion vehicle, (it must have been a painful birth for the mother) filed his first patent for the hovercraft.  A hover craft is a type of vehicle that is supported on a cushion of air. They can be driven on a wide variety of terrain, can travel on water, and are often called Air-Cushion Vehicles. Cockerell, who used a simple experiment with a vacuum cleaner motor and two cylindrical cans to prove the principle that a vehicle suspended on a cushion of air would increase the mobility of the vehicle and allow it to traverse a wider variety of terrains….and, considering the use of vacuum cleaners – clean your living room carpet as a bonus.  

             1957 - Disc Jockey Al Priddy of KEX in Portland, Oregon was fired for violating the radio station's band against playing Elvis Presley's rendition of  White Christmas.

1961-Tuesday- The first satellite in orbit built by private citizens was launched on a Thor-Agena rocket from the Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. The Discoverer XXXVI satellite carried a piggyback 10-lb Oscar I ("Orbiting Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio"). Once in orbit, Oscar separated and began operating as a separate little satellite that transmitted "HI" in Morse code (four dots and two dots) 10 times a minute. O.K, O.K , O.K – so they spent millions of dollars to send a satellite to space and all it did was send back the word “HI”??????  The satellite was designed and hand-built by San Francisco Bay area radio amateurs, most of them associated with electronics firms. The message of "HI" was transmitted  for three weeks and then Oscar burned up upon atmosphere re-entry  (couldn’t they have programmed in “arrgghhhh…….” as it burned up?) in 1962 after making 312 orbits which meant that Oscar was now LOW. Oscar did carry back a number of space microbes that mutated in contact with human beings and became people who live together in houses on reality television shows.

1964 –Saturday- You never close your eyes anymore when I kiss your lips.
And there's no tenderness like before in your fingertips.
You're trying hard not to show it, (baby).
But baby, baby I know it...
You've lost that lovin' feeling,
Whoa, that lovin' feeling,…..The Righteous Brothers…..Records released on this day include, yes, You’ve Lost That Lovin Feeling.  According to BMI music publishing, this was played on the radio more times than any other song of the 20th century. The husband and wife songwriting team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil wrote this at the request of Phil Spector, who was looking for a hit for The Righteous Brothers – Bill Medley and Bobby Hatfield. It was inspired by Baby I Need Your Loving by The Four Tops. http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=429

Also released on this day but in 1970 –Saturday- In a solo effort,  former Buffalo Springfield and intermittent for decades, Crosby, Stills, and Nash….and occasionally Neil Young..was Stephen Stills’ Love the One You’re With. Well there's a rose in the fisted glove
and the eagle flies with the dove,
and if you can't be with the one you love,
honey, love the one you're with,
love the one you're with,
love the one you're with,
love the one you're with.

John Sebastian, Rita Coolidge, Priscilla Jones, David Crosby and Graham Nash provided the backing vocals on the track.

            1980 -Friday Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Leicester, a collection of 36 folios written by Leonardo da Vinci sometime between 1506 and 1510, was auctioned at Christie's. It was bought by Armand Hammer for $4.5 million. At the time, it was the highest price paid for a complete manuscript. In 1994, Bill Gates acquired the Codex Leicester  for zillions, well actually it was 30.8 million and has recently released a CD-ROM.  The Codex Leicester, covers a wide variety of topics, from astronomy to hydrodynamics, and includes Leonardo's observations and theories related to rivers and seas; the properties of water; rocks and fossils; air; celestial light; and pre-army vs. post army Elvis. All of this is expressed in his mirror writing (backwards, right to left), as well as in more than 300 pen-and-ink sketches, drawings, and diagrams, many of them illustrating imagined or real experiments. 

            2000 –Tuesday- In an inconvenient truth, The  U.S. Supreme Court halted the presidential recount in Florida, effectively making Republican George W. Bush the winner of the presidential election over Democrat Al Gore.

            2006 –Tuesday- Fresh water dolphin kaput. The Baiji Yangtze freshwater dolphin was presumed functionally extinct when a search expedition ended an intense six-week search and failed to spot any Yangtze river dolphins, also known as baijis.  The white, freshwater dolphin had a long, narrow beak and low dorsal fin; lived in groups of three or four and fed on fish.  The causes of the extinction were habitat destruction and resulting uncontrolled and unselective fishing,"…. gonna go fishing) gonna have some fun
(gonna go fishing) 'cause it's number one
(gonna go fishing) gonna sit on my butt
(gonna catch a fish) and scrape out its guts
Ahhh, fishing!......The Arrogant Worms.

Back To Calendar 

13.     

Geminid Meteor Shower usually occurs this week.......and we didn't even know it was getting married.  Earth enters a stream of dusty debris from asteroid 3200 Phaethon and, as a result, the annual Geminid meteor shower is “turned on”.   Since most meteor showers are the result of the Earth passing through the debris of a comet, some astronomers believe that 3200 Phaethon may actually be a dead comet.

            1545 –Thursday-  Council of Trent (in northern Italy) began.  The Council would meet in three sessions between 1545 and 1563. It marked a major turning point in the efforts of the Catholic church to respond to the challenge of the Protestant Reformation and formed a key part of the Counter-Reformation.  In the area of religious doctrine, the council refused any concessions to the Protestants but the council took steps to reform many of the major abuses within the church that had partly incited the Reformation

            1557- Friday Speaking of explorers, (see Abel Tasman 1642 below), December 13 has been a good day for them as Sir Francis Drake (who was a cupcake) left England with five ships, the largest being the Pelican soon to be renamed the Golden Hind and 164 men on a mission to raid Spanish holdings on the Pacific coast of the New World and explore the Pacific Ocean. He ended up sailing around the world. Three years later, Drake returned to Plymouth on the only remaining ship, the Golden Hind, marking the first circumnavigation of the earth by a British explorer. After their return, Queen Elizabeth dined on board the Golden Hind at Deptford, on the River Thames. Afterwards, she knighted him Drake later achieved even more fame for (with the help of a ferocious storm) defeating the Spanish Armada in 1588. 

            1642-Saturday-  Abel Tasman, Dutch explorer, sailing for the Dutch East India Company, discovered New Zealand. He became the first European explorer to sight the South Pacific island group which we now know as New Zealand. An attempt to land, did not go so well as several of Tasman's crew were killed by warriors from a South Island tribe.  The tribe interpreted the Europeans' trumpet signals as a challenge to battle. A few weeks earlier, Tasman had discovered what is now called Tasmania, off the southeast coast of Australia. Tasman had named the island Van Diemen's Land, but, like the Tasman Sea between New Zealand and Australia, it was later renamed Tasmania in the explorer's honor. New Zealand is named after the Dutch province of Zeeland. Tasman also discovered Tonga and the Fiji Islands.

1809 –Wednesday-  Patient Jane Todd Crawford arrived at her doctor’s home for the first abdominal surgical procedure. The surgery, to remove an ovarian tumor was postponed until Christmas Day so that swelling caused by the journey could be reduced. It was performed by Dr. Ephraim McDowell-- in Danville, Kentucky.  The operation was performed without the aid of an anesthetic!!!! She was, however forced to listen to some speeches by Joseph Biden and that put her to sleep rather quickly.

1838 –Thursday- Bottle of wine, fruit of the vine, when you gonna let me get sober. LEAVE me alone. Let me go home. Let me go HOME and start over.

                Well, I've rambled around this dirty old town singing for nickels and dimes.

Times getting' rough. I can't get enough to buy me a little bottle of wine…..Kingston Trio

   We wine enthusiasts must wish a hearty Bon Anniversaire, Pierre-Marie-Alexis Millardet, the French botanist and mycologist ( yes, he’s my cologist, not your cologist. Go find your own cologist!) who developed the developed the Bordeaux mixture, the first successful fungicide. He also saved the vineyards of France from destruction by Phylloxera, a genus of plant lice. Phylloxera had been  introduced into Europe on vines imported from the United States for grafting. Millardet gave the phylloxera a taste of its own medicine by  using resistant American vines as grafting stock. He also observed chemicals used by farmers for other reasons (a mixture of copper sulfate, lime and water) and after three years of testing, he found it acted as a suitable fungicide for the mildew caused by the new grafts.  Known as the Bordeaux mixture, it was the first fungicide to receive large-scale use the world over and saved the French wine industry. Among its other achievements was the control of potato blight, the disease which had so famously devastated Irish crops earlier in the century. We are, of course, all familiar with the most expensive “wine” in the world, “I have nothing to wear. You never take me anywhere. You never help out around the house………………………..”

            1856-Saturday- Aluminum to me, aluminum to some
You can shine like silver all you want
But you're just aluminum…..Barenaked Ladies………Correct predictions department as Charles Dickens, writing in Household Words, commented on Henri Sainte-Claire Deville's success in developing the first practical industrial process for producing aluminium, (that’s aluminum in U.Sese) predicted: "Aluminium may probably send tin to the right about face, drive copper saucepans into penal servitude, and blow up German-silver sky-high into nothing". Aluminium is the third most abundant element, comprising some 8 percent of the earth's crust. Yet it was only as recently as during Dicken's lifetime - just a 150 years ago - that a viable production process was established (1854). Aluminium is the most recently (1808) discovered metal in common use. http://www.todayinsci.com/12/12_13.htm

            1862 –Saturday-  The Battle of Fredericksburg, one of  the most decisive Southern victories of the Civil War, occurred as Union general Ambrose Burnside, who had replaced George McClellan,  mounted a series of futile frontal assaults on Prospect Hill and Marye’s Heights outside Fredericksburg Virginia that resulted in staggering casualties. George Meade’s (of later Gettysburg fame) division, on the Union left flank, briefly penetrated Stonewall Jackson’s line but was driven back by a counterattack. Union generals C. Feger Jackson and George Bayard, and Confederate generals Thomas R.R. Cobb and Maxey Gregg were killed. On December 15, Burnside called off the offensive and re-crossed the river, ending the campaign. Burnside was later replaced by the equally ineffective Joseph Hooker.

            1918-Friday-  President Woodrow Wilson became the first serving U.S president to visit Europe as he arrived in France to attend the post-World War I peace conference at Versailles. Wilson sailed on the George Washington and because the Republicans in congress had failed to give him a vote of confidence, he didn’t include any Republicans in the delegation.

            1920-Monday Francis (F.G) Pease (brother of Warren Pease), using an astronomical interferometer r-an array of telescopes or mirror segments acting together to probe structures with higher resolution- determined the diameter of the red star Betelgeuse (527 light years from Earth)  in the “shoulder” of  the  constellation Orion to be 260 million miles.  This was the first measurement of a fixed star. Our sun has a diameter of  886,000 miles.

            1922 –Wednesday-  Nearly eight years after they began offering their removable car-top on Kissel Kar and Kissel automobiles, German auto makers, William Kissel and Friedrich Werner received an American patent for their invention. Their "Convertible Automobile Body" had a removable hard top ,not a folding top, but it was the first convertible.

           1936 – Sunday- The Redskins played their last football game in Boston. The next season the Redskins began playing in Washington, DC. You didn’t know the Redskins played in Boston?  Neither did anyone else.  That’s why they moved

            1937 – Monday- After the Japanese invasion of China, and the day after sinking the neutral American gunboat Panay (see Dec. 12, 1937) the Japanese captured the Chinese capital, Nanking, Japanese General Matsui Iwane ordered that the city be destroyed. Much of the city was burned, and Japanese troops launched a campaign of atrocities against civilians. The duration of the massacre is not clearly defined, although the violence lasted well over six weeks, until early February 1938. In what became known as the "Rape of Nanking," the Japanese killed an estimated 150,000 male "war prisoners," massacred an additional 50,000 male civilians, and raped at least 20,000 women and girls of all ages, many of whom were mutilated or killed in the process.

            1939 –Wednesday- The Battle of the River Plate –The  German pocket battleship (no, a pocket battleship did not fit in your pocket…no matter how big your pocket is – pocket battleships were less well armed and lighter that conventional battleships) Admiral Graf Spee engaged Royal Navy cruisers HMS Exeter, HMS Ajax and HMNZS Achilles in the first major naval battle of World War Two.  The Graf Spee had been raiding shipping in the South Atlantic following the outbreak of WW II on Sept. 1, 1939. There were three neutral countries in South America that allowed ships to use their harbor facilities – Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. The Graf Spee inflicted major damage on the Exeter and , in turn, suffered some minor damage.  Controversially, the Graf Spee commander decided the ship could not escape to the north Atlantic but sought shelter in the River Plate near Montevideo, Uruguay.  The commander, Lansdorff believed the British had five ships trapping him in the estuary. Unbelievably, he had the Graf Spee scuttled on December 17. On the 19^th Lansdorff shot himself.

            1949 –Tuesday-  The American League rejected a revival of the spitball - pitch in which a foreign substance (spit or Vaseline) is applied to the ball by the pitcher before he throws it- which had been outlawed since 1920. Pitchers have since mastered the art of applying foreign substances and not getting caught….usually….Gaylord Perry and Don Sutton expectorated their way to the Hall of Fame.

            1956 –Thursday-  The great Jackie Robinson (thirty seven years old)  of the Brooklyn Dodgers was traded to the hated New York Giants Giants for lefthanded  pitcher Dick Littlefield and $35,000. Robinson retired instead of accepting the trade. Littlefield was traded 10 times during his nine-year career, in trades involving 38 other players. He lasted longest with the Pittsburgh Pirates - almost two years    

            1962-Thursday-  Relay I, the first U.S. communications earth satellite to transmit telephone, television, teleprinter and facsimile signals was launched.  Relay I could not at first function properly because of an abnormal power drain on its storage batteries. The problems were partially resolved by January 3, 1963, making possible the beginning of experiments in transatlantic communication.

           1964 –Sunday- Oh, down in Mexico
I never really been so I don't really know
Oh, Mexico
I guess I'll have to go …..James Taylor……….In El Paso, TX, President Johnson and Mexican President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz settled the issue of Chamizal by setting  off an explosion that diverted the Rio Grande River, reshaping the U.S.-Mexican border. This was a 600-acre strip of formerly Mexican territory which ended up in Texas after the Rio Grande changed course. They proposed to move the Rio Grande back to its original position of 1864 when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed. To keep the course of the Rio Grande from shifting, they developed a plan to build walls around the river to keep it from moving. Both governments agreed to share the cost of all the digging for a new river channel.  In 1963 President Kennedy and Adolfo López Mateos made diplomatic history when they did away with the on-going Chamizal dispute.   

            1977 –Tuesday-  The entire University of Evansville basketball team, coaches, support staff and alumni boosters were killed as a DC-3 aircraft carrying the team to Nashville, Tenn., crashed in rain and dense fog about 90 seconds after takeoff from Evansville Dress Regional Airport. Twenty-nine people died in the crash, including 14 members of the team and its head coach Bob Watson. The National Transportation Safety Board determined the cause was improper weight balance and the failure of the crew to remove external safety locks

            1978 – Wednesday- The first Susan B. Anthony dollar coin entered circulation. Well technically it entered circulation but because everyone hoarded it, it never went back out after someone got it so it didn’t really circulate.  There are supposed to be millions of them out there…..check your change.   Another reason for the failure was the size of the coin. It was often mistaken for a quarter, which was about and eighth of an inch smaller in diameter. Susan B. Anthony was the first woman to be honored by having her likeness appear on a circulating United States coin.

             2000- Wednesday-  Following the U.S Supreme Court’s decision to halt the Florida presidential vote recount (“hanging chads” and all), Democratic candidate Al Gore conceded the presidential election to Republican George W. Bush.  Subsequent unofficial recounts by Gore supporting newspapers such as the Washington Post, New York Times and Miami Herald all confirmed the Bush victory in Florida.

            2003 –Saturday- Macbeth:
[Looking on his hands] This is a sorry sight.  Lady Macbeth:   A foolish thought, to say a sorry sight…….. Saddam Hussein, Iraqi dictator was captured hiding in a hole in the ground. Mr. Hussein claimed he was merely celebrating the Iraqi “Ground Hog” Day and allowed himself to be captured so he could see his shadow.

Back To Calendar

14.   

1287 –Sunday -The  St. Lucia's flood occurred as  the Zuider Zee sea wall in the Netherlands collapsed during a storm, killing over 50,000 people. The Zuiderzee was a shallow inlet of the North Sea in the northwest of the Netherlands, extending about 100 km inland and at most 50 km wide, with an overall depth of about 4 to 5 meters and a coastline of about 300 km. It covered 5.000 km². (2.000 square miles). Its name means "Southern Sea" in Dutch.

            1503 – Monday- Happy Birthday, Nostradamus.  Nostradamus is the Latinized name of Michel de Nostredame French the astrologer beloved by cable TV stations for shows about astrology or magic or predictions or prophets with weird background music as the narrator used the words “strange” and “interesting” a lot. Nostradamus wrote four-line verses (quatrains) in groups of 100 (centuries). He is best known for his book Les Propheties

            1542 –Monday- Now blooms the lily by the bank,
   The primrose down the brae;
The hawthorn's budding in the glen,
   And milk-white is the slae:
The meanest hind in fair Scotland
   May rove their sweets amang;
But I, the Queen of a' Scotland,
   Maun lie in prison strang. …….Robert Burns…..Princess Mary Stuart, became Queen Mary I of Scotland. She is more popularly known as Mary, Queen of Scots. Mary was not the brightest bulb in the chandelier and spent most of her life making poor choices in men (Her second marriage was unpopular and ended in murder and scandal; her third was even less popular and ended in forced abdication in favor of her infant son.) and politics, the latter of which eventually cost her her head after she became involved in a plot to overthrow her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I of England.  At one time, she claimed the crowns of four nations - Scotland, France, England and Ireland.

            1546-Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Tycho Brahe (brother of Maidenform Brahe and Erin Go Brahe),  Danish astronomer. His work in developing astronomical instruments and in measuring and fixing the positions of stars paved the way for future discoveries. He studied the nova of 1572, called "Tycho's star"(in the constellation Cassiopeia) and showed that it was a fixed star- No, it wasn’t repaired, it is a star so distant from Earth that its position in relation to other stars appears not to change. Brahe made a remarkable star catalogue of over 1000 stars. This was not the biggest catalogue in the number of stars, but in accuracy. His improvements of methods and accuracy in observations was very significant. He proved that comets are not objects in the atmosphere. He showed irregularities in the Moon’s orbit. His wall quadrant and other instruments became widely copied and lead to improved stellar instruments. His student, Johannes Kepler used Tycho Brahe's observations when he constructed his famous laws of planetary movement. Brahe was also a duelist and had his nose cut off during a duel.  He was then notable for the silver nose he wore on his face. Also, It has long been thought that Tycho Brahe died of a complication to his bladder, when he “held”  his urine from politeness at a dinner in Prague 1601, eleven days before his death. However, more recent studies started in 1996 from opening the his grave and analyzing his hair, have showed that it is very likely that Tychster in fact went kaput from Mercury poisoning.

            1656-Thursday-  A boon to costume jewelers everywhere as modern-day imitation pearls were first manufactured by a  French rosary-bead maker named Jacquin. He coated the inside surface of a hollow glass bead with a mixture made of fish scales formed from the scales of the bleak or ablette, a little white fish which is found in in the Seine, the Marne, and the Loiret Rivers. An old wives' tale says that if you hold real pearls in your hand, they will be cool to the touch for several seconds before warming up. Genuine pearls tend to warm with contact to the skin much faster than glass pearls. Resin or plastic pearls tend to feel somewhat warm upon first contact. This however is not a sure-fire method for checking authenticity and does not protect you from fraud in cheap television sales or E –Bay.         

             1795 –Monday So, who was Port Jervis (on the Pennsylvania border) New York named after?  Happy Birthday, John Jervis, American civil (he was very polite) engineer who made outstanding contributions in construction of canals, railroads, and water-supply systems for the expanding United States.  He designed and built the 41-mile Croton Aqueduct (New York City's water supply for fifty years: 1842-91). He also designed and built the Croton reservoir which stood on what is now the site of the New York Public Library in the middle of Manhattan.

            1799 –Saturday- The great George Washington, the American revolutionary general who held the army and the colonies together during a series of military defeats and climatic hardships and first president of the United States, who survived smallpox when he was 21 and had three horses allegedly were shot out from under him, died of acute laryngitis – inflammation of his epiglottis, the small flap at the top of the larynx, at his estate in Mount Vernon, Virginia. Yes, he was speechless. He was 67 years old.

            1807-Monday- A meteorite fell at Weston (now called Easton for some bizarre reason), Conn., at 6:30 a.m., making a hole 5-ft long and 4.5-ft wide. This was the New World's first witnessed fall of a meteorite, with subsequent recovery of specimens, since the arrival of the European settlers.

           1819 –Tuesday-  Sweet home Alabama
Where the skies are so blue
Sweet Home Alabama
Lord, I'm coming home to you
Here I come Alabama ……Lynyrd Skynyrd……Alabama became the 22nd U.S. state. Spanish explorers are believed to have arrived at Mobile Bay in 1519, and the territory was visited in 1540 by the explorer Hernando de Soto. The state of Alabama was named after the river. The Alabama River was named by early European explorers after the Indian tribe that lived in the territory and first appeared in 1540 spelled as "Alibamu", "Alibamo" and even "Limamu" in the journals of DeSoto The first permanent European settlement in Alabama was founded by the French at Fort Louis de la Mobile in 1702.The Alabama Territory was created on March 3, 1817 when Congress passed an enabling act allowing the division of the Mississippi Territory and the admission of Mississippi into the union as a state. Some official state symbols: American folk dance :Square dance  Amphibian: Red Hills Salamander, Barbeque Championship – Yes, there is an official state BBQ championship - Christmas on the River Barbeque Cookoff,   Bird: Yellowhamme, Flower: Camellia, Fossil: Basilosaurus cetoides,  Freshwater Fish: Largemouth Bass, Fruit: Blackberry, Gemstone: Star Blue Quartz, Horseshoe Tournament (you gotta love a state with an official horse shoe tournament): Stockton Fall Horseshoe Tournament,  Insect-Monarch Butterfly, Mammal: Black bear, Nut: Pecan,  Reptile: Red-Bellied Turtle, Rock: Marble, Saltwater Fish: Tarpon,  Song: Alabama, words by Julia S. Tutwiler and music by Edna Gockel-Gussen, Spirit (yes, an official whisky): Conecuh Ridge Alabama Fine Whiskey,  Tree: Southern Longleaf Pine

            1900 –Friday- German physicist Max Planck published his world changing study of the effect of radiation on a "blackbody" (a surface that absorbs all radiant energy falling on it. The term arises because all visible light will be absorbed rather than reflected, and therefore the surface will appear black) substance. This was the “birth” of quantum theory - the theory that energy can only be absorbed or radiated in discrete values or quanta. Quantum effects can only be observed in atoms. All particles are subject to quantum theory and this laid the foundation for work of  Einstein (relativity)  and Neils Bohr.

            1901 –Saturday-  The first ping pong (table tennis)  tournament was held at the London Aquarium, hopefully not in the fish tanks. Table tennis had been around in Victorian England for a few years.When the game first started it was called by a number of different names. “Whif whaf,” “gossamer,” and “flim flam” were commonly used to describe it. The words were derived from the sound that the ball made when hit back and forth on the table. In 1901 though, English manufacturer J. Jaques & Son Ltd registered one of the more popular names, Ping-Pong, as a copyright. He later sold the trademark to the Parker Brothers in the United States. Then in the 1920's the name and the sport were revived in Europe as table tennis

            1903 –Monday- The Wright brothers made their first attempt at flight using the Wright Glider at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. They chose the location based on a search for a sandy coastal area for regular breezes and a soft landing surface. They selected Kitty Hawk after scrutinizing Weather Bureau data and writing to the government meteorologist stationed there. The location, although remote, was closer to Dayton. Three days later they would change the world.

             1911-Thursday-   Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen (with his team of Olav Bjaaland, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel, and Oscar Wisting) becme the first man to reach  the South Pole, beating fellow explorer and competitor Robert Scott  to it by about a month (remember – this is summer at the South Pole, temperatures were a balmy -24 degrees). Amundsen discovered, to his chagrin that the souvenier shops were closed and he was unable to buy a t-shirt, mug, or refrigerator magnet saying “I went to the South Pole and all I got was this lousy……)

Tragically, Scott  after being beaten to the pole, died returning from the pole in January 1912 and Amundsen disappeared after a plane crash in June 1928 while taking part in a rescue mission in the Arctic.

            1911- Same Thursday as Roald Amundsen reached the South Pole, Happy Birthday, Hans von Ohain, German aeronautical engineer who designed the first operational jet engine. Ohain conceived his theory of jet propulsion in 1933.  In August 1939, near Rostock, Germany, von Ohain's liquid-filled engine, the HeS-3B, was installed in the HE (Heinkel) 178 airplane. Frank Whittle in England performed simultaneous and parallel work on jet airplanes. Von Ohain and Whittle are thus recognized as being the co-inventors of the jet engine.  Thanks to the jet engine, you can get to your destination faster and then have a wonderful time circling the airport for an hour or so waiting to land.

            1914-Monday Happy Birthday, Solomon Spiegelman, American microbiologist and geneticist who discovered that only one of two strands of molecules that make up DNA, carried the genetic information to produce new substances. The carrier was called ribonucleic acid, better known as RNA. In 1962, he developed a technique that allowed the detection of specific RNA and DNA molecules in cells.

           1918 –Saturday – Just over a month before the Armistice ending the Great War, Finland had the coronation as king of Frederick, a German prince, in October 1918. His coronation was seen as a strengthening the alliance between Finland and Germany. After the war ended on November 11 (a month later if you were counting), the choice of Frederick as a ruler no longer seemed viable. The German Kaiser had abdicated two days earlier, and Germany itself was no longer a monarchy.  Frederick abdicated on December this day leaving the way clear for the Finnish parliament to adopt a new republican constitution in July of the following year. Actually, what really happened was Frederick, while embracing his new kingdom said “ I’m Finnish”.  Everyone thought he said “I’m finished” and accepted his resignation.

            1922-Thursday- Before there was the laser, there was the maser  so Happy Birthday, Nikolay G. Basov,  Soviet physicist, best known for the development of the maser- which was the precursor of the laser. In 1955 he devised a microwave amplifier based on ammonia molecules. This was the basic research in quantum electronics that led to the development of both the maser and the laser.  MASER stands for Microwave Amplification by Stimulation Emission of Radiation. And what is the difference between a Laser and a Maser?  A Laser is a Maser that works with higher frequency photons in the ultraviolet or visible light spectrum. Photons are bundles of electromagnetic energy commonly thought of as "rays of light" which travel in oscillating waves of various wavelengths .  Basov’s work was being mirrored simultaneously and independently by Dr. Charles Townes of Columbia University in New York. (No comments about the epidemic of Soviet post war spying on free world technology) Both scientists, along with Basov’s colleague Dr. Aleksandr M. Prokhorov received the Nobel Prize in 1964 for their contributions to science

            1934 – The premier of Babes in Toyland starring the great Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy as Ollie Dee and Stanley Dum trying  to borrow money from their employer, the toymaker, to pay off the mortgage on Mother Peep's shoe and keep it and Little Bo Peep from the clutches of the evil Barnaby. This version was slightly better than the 1961 version starring Tommy Sands and Annette Funicello.  And, to complete your day, the movie is Also Known As (AKA)Bös

e Buben im Wunderland Austria / Germany

Un jour une bergère Belgium (dubbed version) (French title) / France (dubbed version)

Abenteuer im Spielzeugland Germany                                          Dick und Doof - Rache ist süß Germany

Flip i Flap w krainie cudów Poland                                               Había una vez dos héroes Spain

Hondros - Lignos - Oi 2 gafatzides Greece          Hondros kai o Lignos stin paihnidoupoli, O Greece (reissue title)

Il était une bergère Belgium (French title)                              Kaksi kunnon kisälliä Finland

Kallikantzaroi, Oi Greece                                                      Land des Lachens Austria

Leikkikaluarmeija Finland                   March of the Wooden Soldiers USA (reissue title)