1752 In Philadelphia Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in a lightning storm and collected a charge in a Leyden jar. His aim was to prove that lightning in the sky and electricity were one and the same.
1907 The Lumière brothers Auguste and Louis’s process for colour photography called Autochrome Lumière went on the market. It had been patented in 1903. It dominated colour photography until the 1930s when new techniques superseded it. Theirs was a slow and expensive method that produced a soft and blurred image like that below.
1935 Dr. Robert H. Smith of Akron and Bill Wilson of New York City founded Alcoholics Anonymous with a twelve-step program based on psychological techniques related to personality traits in guided group discussions. Today at least 80,000 such discussion groups are in operation with two million participants. The example has inspired other addiction groups.
1948 The US Air Force announced that test pilot Chuck Yeager had flown an X-1 aircraft faster than the speed of sound, i.e., Mach 1+ on 14 October 1947. He inspired Tom Wolfe to write about the Mercury program.
1978 One of twenty-one known copies of the first printing of the Gutenberg Bible sold at a London auction for $2.4 million. The state library of Baden‐Wiirttemberg in Stuttgart bought it before a room crowded with five hundred people in an auction that lasted two minutes. That is nearly $10 million today. Amen.
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