1521 Guam, History. Ferdinand Magellan charted Guam and landed to take on fresh water. My dad spent time on Guam in the USAF.
1646 Saugus (Massachusetts), Technology: The Massachusetts Bay Colony issued the first patent in North America to Joseph Jenkes for scythes.
1869 St Petersburg, Science: Dmitri Mendeleev presented the first periodic table of elements to the Russian Chemical Society. It does not look like the poster of Mrs Hoover’s science class.
1899 The Bayer Company patented aspirin. Chemists Felix Hoffman and Arthur Eichengrun refined salicin into a powder that dissolved in water. By 1915 Bayer had developed a tablet. Bayer’s patent expired during World War I and other companies imitated it. Eichengrun was a Jew and during the Nazi Brown Years his name was expunged from the Bayer Company records. He did not survive the Brown Years.
1981 New York City, Culture: Walter Cronkite finished his last CBS Evening News cast, ‘A day like any other,’ as he said at the end of every newscast for thirty years or more except on 22 November 1963. CBS News was news from Ed Murrow, to Mike Wallace, to Walter Cronkite who did for thirty-five years.
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