Calendar Highlights

The Dangers of Chewing bubble Gum in Class

1.        1812 -President Madison asked congress to declare war on England.

             1849 -Happy Birthday, Edgar F. and Freelan O. Stanley, American inventors, twin brothers, the most famous manufacturers of steam-driven automobiles. You may remember the Stanley Steamer.

            1864 -The Battle of Cold Harbor. Coming less than a month after the battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania in which for Robert E. Leewere pyrrhic victories - strategically successful but the lost soldiers could not(unlike Grant who suffered even larger losses) be replaced, Cold Harbor was oneof the biggest disasters of the war for the Union as on June 3, Grant sent waveupon wave of troops to be slaughtered as they attacked well entrenchedConfederate troops.

             1869- Thomas Edison of Boston, Mass., received his first patent. It was for an "electrographic vote recorder." The device was the first of its kind, and would enable a legislatorto register a vote either for or against an issue by turning a switch to theright or left. The original may have still been used in general elections, first in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004.

            1875 -Alexander P.Ashbourne received a patent for a "Process Preparing Cocoanut for DomesticUse"

             1880-The first pay telephone service in the United States, for public use went into service.The toll was given to an attendant. It was installed by the Connecticut Telephone Co. in their office atYale Bank Building at State and Chapel Streets in New Haven, CT. Later that day the first coin was lost in the phone.

             1886- BlackAmerican inventor W.H. Richardson was issued a patent for a "CottonChopper"

            1909-Thomas A. Edison received a patent for "Shaft-Coupling" . It must have been important as many people continue to get shafted to this day.

            1920, Thomas A. Edisionreceived a patent for "Composition of Matter for Sound-Records or the Like andProcess" .

            1947-The first photosensitive glass was                         made in Corning, NY (“no pictures       please”).

            1961 - And now we can listen to Beyonce singing the best of Pat Boone - FM stereo broadcasting was authorized to begin in the U.S. when on this date the Federal Communications Commission received its first notifications of such regular operation, from WEFM Chicago and WGFM Schenectady. Both stations had previously experimented with stereo broadcasting, as had others. 

            2002-  "Turn out the lights!" The first national law prohibiting "light pollution" went into effect. The Czech Republic became  the first nation to outlaw excess outdoor light. All outdoor light fixtures in the country must be shielded to ensure light goes only in the direction intended, and not above the horizontal. Czech astronomers had lobbied for the legislation.

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2.        1686-The publication of Newton's Principia was arranged in London at the Royal Society. The minutes of the meeting record that the astronomer Edmund Halley would "undertake the business of looking afte rit and printing it at his own charge." The NY Times Book Review felt that Newton had gotten over his inertia and understood the gravity of the situation.

            1865-Confederate GeneralEdmund Kirby Smith, commander of Confederate forces west of the Mississippisurrendered. With Smith's surrender, the last Confederate army ceased to exist,bringing a formal end to the Civil War, the bloodiest four years in U.S.history.

              1875-  Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson first transmitted sound over wires. This successful experiment was completed in a fifth floor garret at what was then 109 Court Street in Boston.  It marked the beginning of world-wide telephone service." Mr. Watson had twanged a clock spring in their experimental telegraphic device, which Mr. Bell physically heard on a 2nd device. On March 10th, 1876, at the same workshop on Court Street, Alexander Graham Bell shouted the famous words, "Mr. Watson, Come Here, I Want to See You." Thomas Watson, his assistant, surprisingly heard Bell's voice over their telegraphic contraption, and this event marks the first use of a telephone in history.

It was followed by, “ Hi, we’re not in right now, but leave a message when you hear the beep and we'll get right back to you.”

            1883- The first electric elevated railroad began operation in Chicago.

            1896- The first radio patent was issued to Guglielmo Marconi in England for his wireless telegraphy apparatus  for "Improvements in Transmitting Electrical Impulses and Signals, and in Apparatus Therefor."  Marconi later patented radio talk show hosts in patent called. "Whatamidoing?"

              1928- Kraft's Velveeta Cheese was invented. It was packaged using the 1921 invention of a tinfoil lining that could house the cheese inside a wooden box.  The invention of a food product, how appetizing!

The flower of the month  is the Rose

3.        1726-  Happy birthday, James Hutton, Scottish scientist who founded the science of geology.  Rumor is he got off to a rocky start.  Hutton was described as a man of keen insights and lively conversation. Unfortunately, it was beyond him to set down his ideas in a form that anyone could begin to understand. A biographer described him as “almost entirely innocent of rhetorical accomplishments.” Here is a sample from his masterwork, A Theory of the Earth with Proofs and Illustrations.“The world which we inhabit is composed of thematerials, not of the earth which was the immediate predecessor of the present, but of the earth which, in ascending  from the present, we consider as the third, and which had preceded the land that was above the surface of the sea, while our present land was yet beneath the water of the ocean. “ He was equally bad as a public speaker.

Fortunately…he died ..and after he died, a friend named John Playfair – Professor of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh not only actually understood what Hutton was trying to say, but after Hutton’s death, Playfair produced a simplified exposition of the Huttonian principles, Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth.

            1761-  Happy Birthday, Henry Shrapnel, English army general who invented the eponymous shrapnel shell in 1784. Shrapnel projectiles contained small shot or spherical bullets, usually of lead, along with an explosive charge to scatter the pieces as well as fragments of the shell casing. The resulting hail of high-velocity debris was often lethal. Shrapnel caused the majority of wounds caused by artillery in WW I when shells were still being made using his original principals.

          1777- Happy Birthday, Charles Bernard Desormes, French physicist and chemist. He determined the ratio of the specific heats of gases in 1819. Most of  his work was in collaboration with his son-in-law Nicolas Clément . Desormes correctly determined the composition of carbon disulphide (CS₂) - a toxic colorless flammable liquid now used in the manufacture of rayon and cellophane and carbon tetrachloride and as a solvent for rubber and carbon monoxide (CO) - is a colorless, odorless, and tasteless gas-  in 1801-02. In 1813 they made a study of iodine – discovered by Bernard Courtois, and its compounds.

            1864 – Happy Birthday, Ransom E. Olds, American automobile inventor and creator of the Oldsmobile, now defunct but one of the more successful cars of the twentieth century. Olds also created the assembly line in 1901. The new approach to putting together automobiles enabled him to more than quadruple his factory’s output, from 425 cars in 1901 to 2,500 in 1902.

             1879- Happy Birthday, Raymond Pearl, American scientist who made significant contributions in the areas of biology, genetics, eugenics, and statistics. One of the founders of biometry, the application of statistics to biology and medicine, Pearl was ahead of his time, warning of the dangers of smoking as early as 1936 and the benefits of alcohol in moderation – as opposed to overuse or abstinence (although, “abstinence makes the heart grow fonder”) - in 1926.

            1885-   African-American inventor/scientist Branville T. Woods received his first patent. It was for the first steam boiler furnace.  A steam boiler furnace is an enclosed vessel in which water is heated and circulated, either as hot water or as steam, for heating or power.

             1903-  Happy birthday, Charles Drew, U.S. surgeon who organized the first blood bank. Segregation rules at the time forbade Dr.Drew, a black man, to donate his own blood.  Drew had found during his work at Columbia University that by separating the liquid red blood cells from the near solid plasma and freezing the two separately, he found that blood could be preserved and reconstituted at a later date.  Dr. Drew established the American Red Cross blood bank, of which he was the first director, and he organized the world's first blood bank drive, nicknamed "Blood for Britain".

           1920 – Twelve years before James Chadwick discovered the neutron, physicist Ernest Rutherford speculated on the possible existence and properties of it in his second Bakerian Lecture, London, on "The Nuclear Constitution of Atoms." “A neutron walks into a bar, orders a drink. When it offered to pay, the bartender refused to take the money saying ‘for you, it’s no charge”……..No, no, no, he didn’t say that…. He speculated on “conditions where it  would be possible for an electron to combine much more closely with the H nucleus, forming a kind of neutral doublet. Such an atom would have very novel properties. Its external field would be practically zero, except very close to the nucleus..."

            1965 - The first American astronaut to make a “spacewalk”…a bit difficult to “walk when there is no surface to walk on, but why quibble…….. was Major Edward White II,  when he spent 20 minutes outside the Gemini 4 capsule during Earth orbit at an altitude of 120 miles. A tether and 25 foot airline were wrapped in gold tape to form a single, thick cord kept him from floating away.  He used a hand-held 7.5 pound oxygen jet propulsion gun to maneuver around.  White was a member of the Apollo 1 crew killed in a fire while testing their flight capsule in January 1967.

            2008-The brand new Japanese science laboratory was attached to the International Space Station.  Space Shuttle Discovery's STS-124 mission launched had been launched on  May 31st . It quickly got down to business, unloading the huge 11.2 meter-long lab using the station's robotic arm. This was the second component of Kibo (Japanese for "Hope") to be attached to the station, the first was a logistics module sent to the station by Endeavour in March. The third and final part of the lab, a facility that will allow outdoor experiments be exposed to space, will be delivered some time next year.  The lab will be used to create huge mutant reptiles that will attack Tokyo as well as bizarre men who will wear their hair in pony tails well into middle age.

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4.        780 B.C -The first total solar eclipse reliably recorded by the Chinese was noted.

            1844-  An "aukward"  moment in wildlife history. The great auk became extinct when the last one died on Eldey Island.

             1872 –A process for making Vaseline was patented by Robert Chesebrough of New York City. Chesebrough had worked in the oil-fields of Pennsylvania. The vaseline is a product from petroleum, made from the residue of petroleum distillation left in the still after all oil has been vaporized.

            1937-The first shopping carts were introduced at the Humpty Dumpty supermarket in Oklahoma City. They were invented by the store owner, Sylvan Goldman.

            1942 – Battle of Midway

            1963-Six-year-old Robert (Bobby) Patch received a U.S. patent for a "Toy Truck". The toy separated into a chassis, driver's cab, truck body, wheels andfour axles so it could be reassembled in either a closed van body or dump truck form.

            1975- Paleontologists in North Carolina discovered the oldest animal fossil in the U.S., a 620 million year old marine worm.  The marine worm fossil, still singing “ Halls of Montezuma ", promptly invaded Iraq.

            1984- Send in the clones.  DNA from an extinct mammal, the Quagga (a brown, horse-like beast with zebra stripes on the front of its body, which inhabited South Africa until it was exterminated by hunters in the early 19th century), was successfully cloned by scientists at the University of California.   they used samples from an over 140-yr-old quagga skin in a German museum, and managed to extract enough DNA from the animal's flesh to determine some of its sequences of "base pairs," the molecular rungs that link the two spiral halves of a DNA molecule (looks like a ladder). The scientists showed the quagga DNA was more closely related to the zebra than the horse.

            1989 -Tiananmen Square massacre. Chinese troops attacked Tiananmen Square in the center of Beijing, killing and arresting thousands of pro-democracy protesters. Then the Communist government made believe it never happened.........and people believed them!

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5.        World Environment Day

            469 BC – Happy Birthday (approximately), Socrates, Greek philosopher.  He is considered one of the founders of Western philosophy. H e strongly influenced Plato, who was his student, and Aristotle, whom Plato taught.  A mnemonic for the correct order of the three is SPA.  His work continues to form an important part of the study of philosophy. Socrates himself left no writings, and most of our knowledge of him and his teachings comes from the dialogues of his most famous pupil, Plato, and from the memoirs of Xenophon. Using a method now known as the Socratic dialogue, or dialectic, he drew forth knowledge from his students by pursuing a series of questions and examining the implications of their answers. He looked upon the soul as the seat of both waking consciousness and moral character, and held the universe to be purposively mind-ordered. In 399 B.C. Socrates was tried for corrupting the morals of Athenian youth and for religious heresies; it is now believed that his arrest stemmed in particular from his influence on Alcibiades and Critias, who had betrayed Athens to Sparta. He was convicted and drank the cup of poison hemlock given him.

            1553 – Happy Birthday, Bernardino Baldi, Italian mathematician and physicist. His principal contribution to physics was a commentary on the pseudo-Aristotelian Questions of Mechanics, which was written in the 1580's, but was published in 1621 after Baldi's death. In this he developed the idea of center of gravity.

             1656- Happy Birthday, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort , French botanist and physician, a pioneer in systematic botany, whose system of plant classification represented a major advance in his day.  Hewas responsible for defining a genus as a cluster of species and distinguished between the description of a plant and its nomenclature. Among his notable classifications were Genus – Gave Me a Rashium, Genus – Smells Like a Sweat Sockium, and Genus – Tastes Like Chickenium.

            1760 – Happy Birthday, Johan Gadolin, Finnish chemist, an expert in the chemistry of the elements known as the lanthanide series of elements- the 15 elements with atomic numbers 57 through 71, from lanthanum to lutetium.  Gadolin's best known achievement was in 1794 the discovery of yttria which was a new earth (element in oxide form), present in a black mineral found seven years earlier in Ytterby quarry near Stockholm. This was the first rare earth (lanthanide) element discovered; later the mineral was named in his honor gadolinite and element 64 gadolinium.  Ytterium Atomic Number:  39, Atomic Weight:  88.90585 is pronounced as IT-ri-em. Gadolinium, Atomic Number:  64 has an Atomic Weight of  157.25

            1783 – In the main square of the French town of Annonay, the Montgolfier Brothers, Joseph and Etienne, launched an unmanned  309 foot diameter linen and paper spherical balloon, open at the bottom to receive heat from a fire on the ground. The balloon rose to a height of 6000 feet and was aloft for ten minutes. On September 19, of that year, from the palace grounds at Versailles, the brothers launched the first living creatures - a duck, a sheep, and a rooster - on a successful eight minute two-mile flight in a hot air balloon.

            1819 -Happy Birthday, John C. Adams, British mathematician and astronomer, one of two people who independently discovered the planet Neptune, although Urbain Leverrier of the Berlin Observatory usually gets the credit.  Neptune was discovered by means of mathematics before being seen through a telescope.  In 1843,. Adams began working to find the location of the unknown planet. Adams predicted the planet would be about 1 billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) farther from the sun than Uranus. He completed his remarkably accurate work in September 1845. Adams sent it to Sir George B. Airy, the Astronomer Royal of England. However, Airy, joining the long list of dolts who did not listen to genius when it appeared before them,  did not look for the planet with a telescope. Apparently, he lacked confidence in Adams. Meanwhile, Urbain J. J. Leverrier, a young French mathematician unknown to Adams, began working on the project. By mid-1846, Leverrier also had predicted Neptune's position. He sent his predictions, which were similar to those of Adams, to the Urania Observatory in Berlin, Germany. Johann G. Galle. Unlike, Airy, Galle listened to the young mathematician and on  Sept. 23, 1846, Galle and his assistant, Heinrich L. d'Arrest, found Neptune near the position predicted by Leverrier. Today, both Adams and Leverrier are credited with the discovery.  Adams made many other contributions to astronomy, notably his studies of the Leonid meteor shower  in 1866 where he showed that the orbit of the meteor shower was very similar to that of a comet. He was able to correctly conclude that the meteor shower, a was associated with the comet. We now know that most meteor showers are associated with comets. 

            1850 – Happy Birthday, Pat Garrett, American Western lawman famous for killing Billy the Kid in 1881.  At midnight, Sheriff Garrett shot “The Kid”  dead at Fort Sumner, N.M in one Pete Maxwell's darkened bedroom. Garrett was squatting alongside the mattress talking with Maxwell as the Kid entered. Mr. The  Kid cocked his revolver and whispered "Quien es?" ("Who is it?"). Mr. Garrett answered by firing twice with one bullet striking the Mr. The Kid squarely in the heart. Garrett lived the rest of his life off the fame of being Billy the Kid’s killer.

            1862 -Happy Birthday, Allvar Gullstrand, Swedish ophthalmologist and recipient of the 1911 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his research on the eye as a light-refracting apparatus. Gullstrand researched the way the eye refracts light, and invented the slit lamp for eye exams -- a device still used by ophthalmologists. He detailed the structure of the cornea (he studied cornea-on-the-cob) and improved corrective lenses for people who had undergone cataract surgery

            1878 – Happy Birthday, Pancho Villa, Mexican revolutionary. Though he was a killer, a bandit, and a revolutionary leader, many remember him as a folk hero (sort of like Che Guevera but not a communist). Pancho Villa was also responsible for a raid on Columbus, New Mexico in 1916, which was the first attack on U.S. soil since 1812. The U.S. sent several thousand soldiers across the border to hunt for Pancho Villa. Though they spent over a year searching, they never caught him.  On May 20, 1920, Adolfo De la Huerta became the interim president of Mexico. De la Huerta wanted peace in Mexico so negotiated with Villa for his retirement. Part of the peace agreement was that Villa would receive a hacienda in Chihuahua. Villa retired from revolutionary life in 1920 but had only a short retirement for he was gunned down in his car on July 20, 1923.  The assassins were never arrested.

            1882 – And they still manage to lose your luggage!!!!  John Mitchell Lyons, railway clerk in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, received a Canadian patent for "Improvements in Baggage Checks and Coupon Tickets".  This was a way to track and identify luggage.  The  baggage check separated into halves along a perforation with  both pieces printed with same route information and identifying number; one half attached to bag, other given to passenger to claim luggage at destination.

            1877-“The eyes of taxes are upon you…”  New York, as ever a state willing to tax anything (including the patience of the residents), in an effort to protect the dairy industry, passed a law to tax on oleomargarine. When a court voided the ban on margarine in New York,  the dairy industry “udderly” infuriated,  turned its attention to Washington, resulting in Congressional passage of the Margarine Act of 1886. Margarine had first been created in France in 1870  by Hippolyte Mège-Mouriez for  the Emperor Louis Napoleon III.

            1884- At the Republican Convention (June 3-6),Civil War hero Gen. William T. Sherman refused the Republican presidential nomination, saying, "I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected." This resulted in the nomination of resulting in the nomination of: James G. Blaine of Maine, for President and John A. Logan of Illinois, for Vice-President.  The ticket lost in the election of 1884 to Democrats Grover Cleveland and Thomas A. Hendricks

            1895 – Happy Birthday, William Boyd, American actor better known as Professor Sy Yentz favorite childhood western cowboy hero, Hopalong Cassidy. He started the Hopalong series in 1935 and after he had made 54 "Hoppies" for his original producer, Harry Sherman, Sherman dropped the series. Boyd then produced and starred in 12 more on his own. In 1948 Boyd, in a wise and precedent-setting move, bought the rights to all his pictures just as TV, and young Professor Sy Yentz,  were  looking for Saturday-morning western fare. He starred in the TV series until 1954 with his horse Topper, and his sidekick played by George ‘Gabby’ Hayes, and later, by Andy Clyde.  It was the first significant Western to appear on network television and began in 1949.  The last episode,  Tricky Fingers aired on  April 2, 1954. The reruns went on and on.      

            1900- Happy Birthday, Dennis Gabor (brother of either Zsa Zsa or Eva - we get them confused- Gabor), Hungarian-born electrical engineer who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1971 for his invention of holography (holograms) – used in his electron microscopy in 1947- , a system of lensless, three-dimensional photography that has many applications. Look for those holograms on your driver’s license, in Europe telephone credit cards use holograms to record the amount of remaining credit. Fighter pilots use holographic displays of their instruments so they can keep looking straight up. Museums keep archival records in holograms. One of the best uses for holography is candy. The candy’s surface is etched into tiny prism-like ridges that display 3-D images in brilliant iridescent colors. Gabor’s other work included research on high-speed oscilloscopes, communication theory, physical optics, and television. And no, he was not related to either Zsa Zsa or Eva Gabor, otherwise he would have been an idiot.

          1956 - Elvis Presley introduced his new single, Hound Dog, on The Milton Berle Show.  Elvis scandalized the audience with his suggestive hip gyrations. In the media frenzy that followed, other show hosts, including Ed Sullivan, denounced his performance. Sullivan swore he would never invite Presley on his own show, but that autumn he booked Elvis for three shows. Actress Deborah Padgett also appeared Elvis performed with Berle who was billed as Elvis’ brother Melvin Presley.

            1967 The beginning of the Six-Day War as Israel, responding to a threatening build-up of Arab forces – the Muslims had been trying to destroy Israel since its modern rebirth in 1948 - along its borders, launched simultaneous attacks against Egypt and Syria. Jordan then entered the war, but the Arab coalition was no match for Israel's proficient armed forces. In six days of fighting, Israel occupied the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt, the Golan Heights of Syria, and the West Bank and Arab sector of East Jerusalem, both previously under Jordanian rule. By the time the United Nations cease-fire took effect on June 11, Israel had more than doubled its size

          1968 At 12:50 a.m. PDT, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, a presidential candidate and brother of assassinated president John F. Kennedy , was shot three times by a an Islamic/Palestinian terrorist assassin, Sirhan B. Sirhan in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Five others were wounded. The senator had just completed a speech celebrating his victory in the California presidential primary.

            1976- Damn Dam Done. The Teton Dam, a 305-foot high earth-fill dam across the Teton River in Madison County, southeast Idaho, collapsed and released the contents of its reservoir at 11:57 AM.  Failure was initiated by a large leak near the right (northwest) abutment of the dam, about 130 feet below the crest. The dam, designed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, failed just as it was being completed and filled for the first time.  The collapse of the dam resulted in the deaths of 11 people  and 13,000 cattle. The dam cost about $100 million to build, and the federal government paid over $300 million in claims related to the damn dam failure. Total damage estimates have ranged up to $2 billion. The dam was never rebuilt.

            1977- The first personal computer, the Apple II, went on sale. They were the invention of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. You had to supply your own keyboard and monitor. The Apple II was one of three prominent personal computers that came out in 1977. Despite its higher price, it quickly pulled ahead of the TRS-80 and the Commodore Pet (probably because the "Pet" wasn't housebroken.)

             1981- An epidemic disease, later to be named as AIDS that killed five homosexual men in Los Angeles,  was briefly described by Dr. Michael Gottlieb in the newsletter of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. This was the first notice to be published on AIDS, though it had not yet been given that name.  Gottlieb reported that within days of the June 5 report, doctors began telephoning from all over the nation to tell him about their own patients with pneumocystis - a form of pneumonia caused by the yeast-like fungus. Over time, intensive care units at UCLA and across the country began to fill with young gay men requiring ventilators, their lungs choked with the same strange organism. The AIDS epidemic was underway.

            2004 - Ronald W. Reagan, the 40th president of the United States, died, after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease.

            2008 – Flushed with success, It was a very good day for the crew on board the International Space Station.  The shuttle Discovery brought parts to fix the faulty toilet. T Russian flight engineer Oleg Kononenko was able to replace the broken urine collection pump in a 2 hour repair job and specialists in Moscow checked his work to verify it was working fine. Fortunately, the solid waste disposal was working o.k.If  the repair was unsuccessful, it may have seriously hindered the manned presence on the station and many experiments would have gone down the toilet.

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6.        1436- Happy Birthday, Regiomontanus, aka, Johannes Müller von Königsberg  the foremost mathematician and astronomer of 15th-century EuropeA letter from this period, sent to the astronomer Giovanni Bianchini  contained Regiomontanus' analysis of all the ways in which current (13^th century) astronomical theory disagreed with the observed phenomena, and expressed the hope of a collaborative effort to restore the discipline. It is often said that Regiomontanus set the agenda for the reform of astronomy to which Copernicus, Tycho Brahe and Kepler all contributed.

            1683 - The Ashmolean, the world's first university museum, opened in Oxford, England. In 1677, English archaeologist Elias Ashmole donated his collection of curiosities to Oxford University, and the school's directors planned the construction of a building to display the items permanently. Sir Christopher Wren was commissioned for the job, and on June 6, 1683, (we’ve also seen it as May 24, 1683 ….it depends on whom it was opened to)  the Ashmolean opened.  Even the use of the term 'Museum' was a novelty in English: a few years later the 'New World of Words' (1706) defined it as 'a Study, or Library; also a College, or Publick Place for the Resort of Learned Men', with a specific entry for 'Ashmole's Museum', described as 'a neat Building in the City of Oxford'.

            1755- Happy Birthday, Nathan Hale, American Revolutionary patriot. He was hanged, by order of General William Howe, as a spy, in the city of New York, at what is now the intersection of East Broadway and Market Streets, on September 22, 1776. Hale’s last words;  “I only regret,” he said, “that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

            1833- Andrew Jackson became the first President to ride on a railroad train.”Old Hickory” rode on a Baltimore and Ohio train from Ellicott's Mill, MD to Baltimore. (John Quincy had also taken that train, but not while he was President.)  The steam locomotive was first developed in England at the beginning of the 19th century by Richard Trevithick and George Stephenson. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad had begun operation in 1828 with horse-drawn cars, but steam power was added and by 1831, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad had completed a line from Baltimore to Frederick, Maryland. Two years later, Andrew Jackson gave railroad travel its presidential christening. Jackson accumulated a few other “firsts”. He the first president to be born in a log cabin and the first president to be nominated by a political party. He also survived the first attempt to assassinate a president.

             1847- 15 year old Hensen Crockett Gregory used a fork to poke out the centers of uncooked doughnuts his mother was making. This let the dough cook more thoroughly.  In 1937, the Salvation Army made this National Donut Day.  Doughnuts have been around for centuries. Archaeologists turned up several petrified fried cakes with holes in the center in prehistoric ruins in the Southwestern United States.  Professor Sy Yentz had one of these originals at the local convenience store yesterday. Most discussions about doughnut history begin with the mid-19th century and the first recorded doughnut recipes. At this time doughnuts were known as olykoeks, or oily cakes, and it's primarily the Dutch who are credited with taking sweet dough balls and frying them in pork fat. The Hensen Crockett story as a teenager is nice but another has him as a sea captain (note: he did become a sea captain)  with the steering of  boat poking a hole in the center during a storm. A doughnut origin debate was actually held in 1941. The Crockett story (both young and old) is the most popular but another theory came from one Chief High Eagle, a Wampanoag tribesman,  who said his people created the doughnut when several of their arrows missed settlers, striking Pilgrim's cakes instead. In 1872 John Blondel of Thomaston, Maine, took out a patent on a spring loaded doughnut hole machine and by the World War I doughnuts were so popular that the Salvation Army sent them to American troops. Mass production began with a machine introduced by a Bulgarian immigrant; Arnold Levitt in 1921. After World War II , Levitt dropped a “u”, a “g”, and an “h” and  founded the Donut Corporation of America.

            1865 – Quantrill kaput.  Confederate Civil War raider (would be called a terrorist today), William Quantrill, who gave Jesse and Frank James their start, died from gunshot wounds suffered in a May skirmish with Union soldiers.

             1882-  The electric flat iron was patented by H.W. Seely  in New York City.  Early electric irons used a carbon arc to create heat, however, this was not a safe method……..as they tended to burn and possibly electrocute one as one ironed the collar of a shirt. In 1892, hand irons using electrical resistance were introduced by Crompton and Co. and the General Electric Company.  It wasn’t until the early 1950s electric steam irons were introduced.

            1882 -  More than 100,000 inhabitants of Bombay (now Mumbai) India were killed as a cyclone in the Arabian Sea pushes huge waves into the city’s harbor.  

           1907- An end to thousands of years of dirty clothes as  Persil, the first household detergent, was marketed by Henkel & Cie, of Düsseldorf, Germany as the first "self-acting" washing powder in the world. In 1880 soap started to compete with washing powder, which was originally simply pulverized soap. Henkel added perborate as a bleaching agent to the washing agent. During the washing process, the oxygen formed small bubbles, taking over the hard work at the washboard, saving time and taking the “sun” out of sun-bleaching. The name “Persil” is derived from the two most important chemical raw materials in the product, perborate and silicate. But it is not good to stick in the mouths of children who have used bad language.

             1918 - The first large-scale battle fought by American soldiers in World War I began in Belleau Wood, northwest of the Paris-to-Metz road.  It saw the re-capture by U.S. forces of the wood on the Metz-Paris road taken at the end of May by German. The battle was also demoralizing for the Germans as getting weary after almost four years of war and casualties, very large American re-enforcement of the allied armies meant a fresh, well supplied foe to deal with. An armistice would be signed five months later on November 11.

           1932 – Happy Birthday, David Scott, American astronaut who was the first to drive a wheeled vehicle on the moon during the Apollo 15 mission on  July 31,  1971. He was in command of its Lunar Module which made the fourth lunar landing, and became the seventh person to walk on the moon and the first to use the Lunar Rover vehicle on the moon's surface for which he received multiple traffic citations.  Among them, failure to use a seat belt, driving on the wrong side of the road, speeding, and using an expired driver’s license.  A space veteran, Scott and command pilot Neil Armstrong were launched into space on the Gemini 8 mission-- on March 16, 1966--a flight originally scheduled to last three days but terminated early due to a malfunctioning thruster. Scott served as command module pilot for Apollo 9, March 3-13, 1969. This was the third manned flight in the Apollo series, the second to be launched by a Saturn V, and the first to complete a comprehensive earth-orbital qualification and verification test of a "fully configured Apollo spacecraft."   

            1932 – In a taxing situation, the U.S Congress, warming up to its late 20^th century frenzy of tax increases, levied first gasoline tax as a part of the Revenue Act of 1932. The Act mandated a series of excise taxes on a wide variety of consumer goods. Congress placed a tax of 1¢ per gallon on gasoline and other motor fuel sold.

             1933- The first drive-in movie theater was opened in Camden, New Jersey. Invented by Richard Hollingshead, a sales manager at his Whiz Auto Products, the patent for the Drive-In Theater had been issued on May 16, 1933. With an investment of $30,000, Hollingshead opened the first drive-in on Tuesday June 6, 1933 at a location on Crescent Boulevard, Camden, New Jersey. The price of admission was 25 cents for the car and 25 cents per person.  The first movie was X-Men, The Beginning of the Alphabet, starring Halle Berry and Alex Trebek.

            1942-  the first parachute jump in the U.S. using a nylon parachute was made by Adeline Gray. Leonardo da Vinci between 1483 and 1485, sketched an idea for a device (a "tent roof") that would let someone down safely from high buildings, but it stayed a concept, never getting off the drawing board. Parachutes were once made from silk but now they are almost always constructed from more durable woven nylon fabric, sometimes coated with silicone to improve performance and consistency over time. Nylon was a newly invented synthetic substitute produced by the DuPont Co. It had been exhibited at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Gray, a parachute rigger at the Pioneer Parachute Company jumped from an aircraft flying from Brainard Field, Hartford, Conn.

            1943 – Happy Birthday Richard E. Smalley, American chemist and physicist. Smalley won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his discovery (with Robert F. Curl, Jr., and Sir Harold W. Kroto) of fullerenes, the third known form of pure carbon (diamond and graphite are the other two known forms). The atoms of fullerenes are arranged in a closed shell. Carbon60, the smallest stable fullerene molecule, consists of 60 carbon atoms that fit together to form a cage, with the bonds resembling the pattern of seams on a soccer ball. The molecule was given the name buckminsterfullerene because its shape is similar to the geodesic domes designed by the American architect and theorist R. Buckminster Fuller.

            1944- D-day, “Operation Overlord” as the allied armies invaded Normandy on the coast of France in a major offensive against the Nazis.  160,000 Allied Troops landed long a 50-mile stretch of heavily-fortified French coastline to fight the Germans on the beaches of Normandy. General Dwight D. Eisenhower had overall command of the more than 5,000 ships and 13,000 aircraft  which supported the D-Day invasion, and by day’s end on June 6, the Allies  had gained a foot- hold in Normandy. The D-Day cost was high -more than 9,000 Allied Soldiers were killed or wounded -- but more than 100,000 soldiers began the march across Belgium and France and into Germany to defeat the Nazis.  Why was it called D-Day?  Probably because D-Day is a term often used in military parlance to denote the day on which a combat attack or operation is to be initiated.

            1971-  Soyuz (based on a 1964 Beatles song, " I Soyuz Standing There") 11 was launched into orbit.  It carried the first men to a space station, Salyut 1. Yes, it was an opportunity to salyut the flag. In a rush to beat the Americans to a space station, the Soviets launched this ill-fated mission two years before the American Skylab.  The main telescope was inoperative due to failure of cover to jettison. There was a fire in the space station nearly resulting in emergency evacuation and finally, a fail-safe valve opening during re-entry resulted in decompression and death of entire crew.    Other than that that, things went fine.        

            1971 – Ed Sullivan Show kaput. On Sunday June 6, 1971 The Ed Sullivan Show   was cancelled on CBS-TV after 24 seasons. Ed, a New York newspaper columnist had begun the show – then called Toast of the Town on June 20, 1948. Among the first guests were the comedy team of  Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis and the writing team of  Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II. The last show, on this day, was a rerun of the March 28, 1971 show starring ….a bit of a come down from Martin and Lewis and Rogers and Hammerstein…..singer, Melanie, David Frye (impressionist). Danny Davis & the Nashville Brass, and comedian, Lennie Schultz.

            1975-  An anticyclonic, or clockwise     tornado was seen west of Alva Oklahoma. Most tornadoes spin in a cyclonic, or counterclockwise fashion.  This tornado actually picked up a farm house, carried it for miles and dropped it on a witch.

            1985 - Authorities in Brazil exhumed a body later identified as that of “Angel of Death”, Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who conducted medical experiments on inmates at Auschwitz during World War II.  He had drowned in 1979 at a Brazilian beach resort and was buried under an assumed name- Wolfgang Gerhard.

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7.        1869-  Ives W. McCaffrey patented (he invented it in 1868) the suction principle vacuum cleaner.  Prior to this time, vacuum cleaners were quite unscrupulous and had no “principles at all.  This machine had a suction fan driven by a hand crank on the handle, but it did not have a brush roll. Called the Whirlwind, it sold for $25, a high price in those days. Only two are known to have survived to this day, one of which can be found in the Hoover Historical Center. Professor Sy Yentz currently uses one for for household cleaning. Perhaps it’s the other?  The first patent for an electrically driven "carpet sweeper and dust gatherer" was granted to Corinne Dufour of Savannah, Georgia in December 1900.

            1892 - George Sampson patented the clothes dryer.  Sampson's dryer used the heat from a hot stove to dry clothes and was a ventilator type machine.  The ventilator was a barrel-shaped metal drum with holes in it. It was turned by hand over a fire. The modern “tumble dryer” consists of a rotating drum called a tumbler through which heated air is circulated to evaporate the moisture from the load. The tumbler is rotated relatively slowly in order to maintain space between the articles in the load. In most cases, the tumbler is belt-driven by an induction motor.

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8.        1625 -HappyBirthday Gian Domenico Cassini,Italian-born Frenchastronomerwho, among others, discovered Cassini's division, the dark gapbetween the rings A and B of Saturn. He also discovered four of Saturn's moonsand devised a first law on astronomical refraction (which alters the apparentposition of a heavenly body near thehorizon).

             1637-ReneDescartes published the bookDiscourse on Method of Rightly Conducting theReason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. It was regarded as a major workin science and mathematics. He expressed his disappointment with traditionalphilosophy and with the limitations of theology; only logic, geometry andalgebra should be respected, because of the utter certainty which they canoffer. Ushering in the "scientific revolution" of Galileo and Newton, Descartes'ideas swept aside ancient and medieval traditions of philosophical methods andinvestigation. But people had to be careful not to 'put Descartes before thehorse."

             1786 -Thefirst commercially-made ice cream in the U.S. was advertised in New York City byMr. Hall of 76 Chatham Street (now Park Row). For non-commercial production ofice-cream, an earlier date of 17 May 1784 is recorded in George Washington'sexpense ledger for the purchase of "a cream machine for ice". No mention of whenit dripped on his shirt.

            1916; HappyBirthday Francis C. Crick.a British biophysicist, who, with James Watsonand Maurice Wilkins, received the 1962 Nobel Prize forPhysiology or Medicine for their determinationof the molecular structureof deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the chemical substance ultimatelyresponsible for hereditary control of life functions. Crick and Watson begantheir collaboration in 1951, and published their paper on the double helixstructure onApril 2,1953 inNature. Thisdiscoverybecame a cornerstone of genetics and waswidely regarded as one of the most important discoveries of 20th-centurybiology. Before this one might say that biophysicists were "up the Crick withouta paddle".
           1938-  The Amorphos Titanium, or giant calla lily ( nicknamed the “stinking corpse lily”, because of its scent) blossomed at the Bronx Botanical Garden.  The flower was 8 ft. in diameter.  It was plucked for use as a corsage for a local prom                but whoever wore it got a hernia.

            1957-  The X-15 rocket plane made its first flight.

            1975-  Venera 9 from the U.S.S.R. was launched to make the first orbit of Venus.

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9.       1822- Charles Graham received the first patent for false teeth ("Graham Crackers"?). His were not the first false teeth in use, however. In the Colonial years, rotten teeth were considered the cause of many illnesses, and they would be extracted. Varied ways of replacing them were tried. For example, George Washington had at least four sets of false teeth (though none were wooden, despite a myth to that effect).

         1836; Happy Birthday Elizabeth Garret Anderson, English physician who sought the admission of women to professional education, especially in medicine. She become the first woman to qualify as a medical practitioner in Britain (1865), despite being refused admission by the medical schools because it was their policy not to train women as doctors. She had to study medicine privately, under some of the country's leading physicians; at times she was forced to dissect cadavers in her own room because she was forbidden to use hospital facilities. In 1865 she qualified as a medical practitioner by examination of the Society of Apothecaries. The following year, she founded the St. Mary's Dispensary for Women in London. She was also the first female member of the British Medical Association (1873-92).

         1905, Albert Einstein published his analysis of Planck's quantum theory and its application to light. His article appeared in Annalen der Physik. Though no experimental work was involved, it was for these insights that Einstein earned his Nobel Prize.

          1913- Happy Birthday, Patrick  Steptoe  a British scientist and medical researcher who, with Robert Edwards, perfected in-vitro fertilization of the human egg. Their technique made possible in the birth of Louise Brown, the world's first "test-tube baby," on 25 July 1978

            1931-  Robert Goddard patented the first                      rocket- powered aircraft design. However, it drew no military interest from either the Army or the Navy, despite its innovative design, since even the government following the great Depression had limited resources to fund proper research.

            1958-  True story—A woman was sucked thorugh the window of her home during a tornado and carried 60 ft.  Found next to her when she      landed was a phonograph record entitled “Stormy Weather”.

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10.     1862- The first recorded Tornado occurred in New Haven, Connecticut at  about 2:30 p.m.

            1943- The ball point pen was patented by Laslo Biro. He had invented the pen with quick-drying ink in 1938 while working as  a journalist in Budapest, Hungary. Biro was also a sculptor and hypnotist.

           1955- The first U.S. report was made of the separation of a virus into component parts. After the separation the viruses hired lawyers to renegotiate the prenuptual agreement.......just kidding.  This work was performed on the tobacco virus, which furthermore could be reconstructed from those parts to produce a material as effective as the virus in its original form in producing disease in tabacco and other plants.

          2000, The Millenium Bridge - a footbridge across the Thames River - was opened by Queen Elizabet