1884 Washington. D.C., Politics: Susan Anthony testified before the House Judiciary Committee on the Sixteenth Amendment to prohibit states from disenfranchising any citizen on account of sex. It was the sixteenth time she had appeared before a Congressional Committee to argue that case. When, years after her death, the Sixteenth Amendment became the law of the land, Oscar Underwood, majority leader in the House of Representatives, called it the Anthony Amendment. This is the same Underwood, Democrat from Alabama, who steered President Woodrow Wilson’s nomination of Louis Brandeis through the anti-Semitism of the time, and once went to the seat of Ku Klux Klan during its convention to denounce it. A biography of Underwood is discussed elsewhere on this blog.
1935 New York City, Literature: Thomas Wolfe published ‘Of Time and the River,’ the sequel to ‘Look Homeward, Angel’ (1931). At 6’ 5” Wolfe wrote standing up using the top of an icebox as a writing surface and produced the manuscript for this book which ran to 10,000 pages. Maxwell Perkins edited that gargantua into 500 pages. The book combined the talents of two geniuses. Wolfe is pictured below with the wooden crates containing the manuscript.
1950 Wolfsburg (West Germany), Technology: The Volkswagen corporation began production of the microbus, called the VW Type 2, or the Transporter, which became an icon of the Counter-Culure in the next decade, when appropriately decorated. It was sometimes called the Combi to refer to its combined use or Splittie for its split windscreen. Ridden in many.
1976 Jilin (China), Science: A meteor weighing 1,174 kilograms along with hundreds of other smaller rocks landed in northern China. Some rock. It is now housed in a museum.
1979 Eindhoven, Technology: The Compact Disc developed by Phillips was demonstrated at a press conference. It went on sale in 1982. The first specimens were to store and play audio (CD-DA), then later adapted for data (CD-ROM). The evolution continued to video. At the time a CD held much more data than the hard drive of a main frame computer. Sony was also in this race and within a year Phillips and Sony pooled resources.
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