Author: Michael W Jackson

1534 Jacques Cartier sailed into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence in search of a Northwest Passage to Asia on behalf of King Francis I of France. His explorations initiated French claims to Canada. He made two subsequent voyages to Quebec. He bears no relation to the watch-maker.

1549 The Book of Common Prayer was adopted by the Church of England, being the first prayer book written in English, and became the textbook for generations of learners as well as worshippers.

1891 Banker Paul Gaugin arrived in Pepeete, Tahiti to be a painter. Mario Vargas Llosha’s novel offers great insight into the painting and the man.

1915 Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan resigned in protest at President Woodrow Wilson’s handling of relations with Germany in the hope of arresting the drift of the administration into war. His example may have delayed it. A biography of this great commoner is discussed elsewhere on this blog.

1928 Charles Kingsford Smith landed in Brisbane, having flown across the Pacific Ocean from Oakland California via Suva in Fiji in nine days with three others in the crew.

1869 Chicago, Technology. Ives McGaffey patented the Whirlwind sweeping machine, a vacuum cleaner of sorts. It was bulky device with a belt driven fan cranked by hand to create suction, making it difficult to use with only two hands, and it soon disappeared.

1887 Herman Hollerith patented a punch card calculator while working at the Census Bureau. He had devised it while completing a PhD in engineering at Columbia University. His devices were used well into the Twentieth Century around the world. Indeed I learned FORTRAN programming in graduate school using punch cards. Woe betide a mix-up of card sequence. Through mergers and buy-outs in time his company was ingested into IBM.

1940 Bangkok. A military coup changed Siam’s name to Thailand to signal a break with the past of absolute monarchy. The name Thai-land means land of the free. It also has ethnic connotations that excluded those of Chinese origins, while including some peoples from neighbouring Laos and Vietnam in a Greater Thailand. These latter ambitions made it an ally of Japan for a time.

1951 Alice Springs. The School of the Air began to broadcast via shortwave radio lessons to children in remote locations over one million square kilometres or more. Adelaide Miethke had proposed it in 1944 but it was impossible to do during World War II. Tests began in 1950 and it was formally inaugurated the following year. It continues now in Queensland, West Australia, and the Northern Territory using the internet. Miethke was a long time champion of schools and teachers in South Australia per the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

1987 Wellington. New Zealand government legislated against nuclear weapons and nuclear powered ships, effectively taking itself out of alliance with the United States.

1494 Brokered by the Pope to affirm Christian unity against the Ottoman menace, Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas to divide the world between them.

1654 Paris, History. Louis XIV was crowned king. He became known as the Sun King and ruled until his death in 1715. The palace at Versailles was his creation. ‘L’état c’est moi’ is one of his most famous bons mots. Another is ‘Après moi, le deluge.’ He was a master manipulator of fractious nobles. A double posed for him, since he was too busy making war to do it.

1893 Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. A young lawyer refused to comply with seating arrangements in the first class carriage of a train and was forcibly ejected. This was Mohandas Gandhi’s first act of civil disobedience. He had bought a first-class ticket but was directed to the third class car where the coloured people travelled. No sooner was he off the train than he started to organise protests by travellers.

1905 Oslo. Norway parted from Sweden. It had been Swedish since 1814 and before that Danish. The territorial legislature in Oslo voted to secede in the picture below. Many Swedes became bellicose but in the end a peaceful dissolution was negotiated.

1914 Central America. The first vessel passed through the Panama Canal, making the United States a two-ocean power as never before. It was the SS Ancon pictured below.

1683 The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archeology opened in Oxford University. Elias Asmolean donated his collection of curiosities to seed the museum, which was then organised for teaching purposes. The building was designed by Christoper Wren. Feasted my eyes there.

1816 The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia caused the year without summer. On this day ten inches of snow fell in Massachusetts. The eruption was rated a 7, the only eruption on that level. It blew 150 cubic kilometres of matter into the atmosphere and killed 10,000 in the immediate vicinity. The debris reached forty-three kilometres into the stratosphere. The subsequent effects on agriculture, health, and trade have led to the conclusion that perhaps 90,000 people died as a result. There is a superb episode of Lord Bragg’s ‘In Our time’ about this apocalyptic year.

1844 In London George Williams founded the Young Men’s Christian Association to offer low cost housing to youths migrating to cities for work, as alternatives to taverns, pubs, brothels, and boarding houses. Bible reading and physical exercise were offered to keep things in order.

1859 Queensland separated from New South Wales to make it a self-governing colony. It quickly thereafter established the first parliament in Australia. Ever since Far North Queensland has agitated for separation from Brisbane.

1949 Eric Blair published ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four.’ He insisted that the number be spelled out, but I, for one, don’t know why, though I have read and re-read Bernard Crick’s magisterial edition, and had the pleasure once of seeing Crick discuss the book at Oxford. (Years later when I has Head of Department I found some discretionary funds to contribute to Crick’s visit to the University of Sydney.) People who have never read the book use some of its terminology, like Thought Police, Big Brother, Memory Hole, Thought Crime…. It all sounds like President Tiny as below.

1851 Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery story, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life among the Lowly’ began to appear in serial form in an abolitionist newspaper. It was published as a book in Boston in the next year and sold an astonishing 300,000 copies in twelve months. By 1857 more than two million copies had been sold, making her and the publisher very rich. She gave most of the money to the abolitionist cause. Simon Legree is a violent, crude, and corrupt slave owner in this story, and a Republican voter.

1929 Ramsey MacDonald formed a second minority Labour government in coalition with Lloyd George’s Liberals. The first had lasted nine months in 1924. MacDonald appointed the first woman to cabinet when Margaret Bondfield became Minister of Labour. Oswald Mosley was also in this cabinet. MacDonald offered self-government to India, short of independence. In reaction to the stresses of the Great Depression, the Labour Party split, expelling MacDonald who then lead a National Government dominated by Conservatives until 1935! No one in Britain would consider deficit spending as recommended by John Maynard Keynes and adopted by the Roosevelt administration across the Atlantic.

1933 Washington DC. The United States went off the gold standard, denying creditors the right to be paid in gold. It was one part of a general plan to accumulate gold reserves. In 1974 the Nixon Administration ruled that the US would never return to the gold standard and it has not.

1947 In a commencement address at Harvard University Secretary of State George Marshall laid out the need for what would become known as the Marshall Plan to reconstruct Europe. He described the parlous conditions he had seen in post-war Europe in contrast to the thriving USA. A biography of this giant is discussed elsewhere on this blog. By the way, his only son was killed at Anzio.

1956 Premier and First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev denounced Comrade Josef Stalin to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in a closed session. This was the so-called secret speech, lasting four hours. He detailed the scope, depravity, cruelty of Comrade Stalin and his many acolytes and supporters, some of whom were in attendance and sat in a stony silence. Though not published, the secret speech was widely circulated, e.g., a young Komsomol officer named Mikhail Gorbachev read it. There was considerable reaction from Stalin’s defenders and later they claimed that the speech encouraged the revolts in Poland and Hungary. Secret or not I found three different dates on the internet for it.

1070 The legendary date for the origin of blue cheese near Roquefort, France. According to the story a shepherd left a lunch of bread and ewe’s milk cheese in a cave and forgot about it until some months later when he returned to the area and found that mould had transformed the cheese. The mould comes from the soil of the local caves.

1717 London. The first Grand Lodge of Freemasonry was established. Its founding Premier compiled a history and constitution of Freemasonry tracing its roots back to Biblical Egypt. Hence the Egyptian motifs associated with Freemasonry. We visited a local lodge for enlightenment once and found it most entertaining. (Probably not the purpose of the evening, to be sure.) The numerous entries are Wikipedia are suitably gnomic.

1876 A transcontinental express train left New York City and arrived just over 83 hours later in San Francisco. It had crossed three thousand miles in less than four days. Wagons took four to six months to make the trip.

1919 Washington DC. In a joint resolution Congress approved the Nineteenth Amendment to enfranchise women and sent it to the states for ratification. The House vote was 304-89 and the Senate 56-25. A sufficient number of states ratified by January 1920 when Kentucky accepted it. Women’s work in World War I was credited with providing momentum.

1940 Twenty-two year old Carson McCullers published her first novel, ‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,’ charting the lives of residents of a boarding house in a Georgia mill town. There is the deaf-mute narrator, the mentally unbalanced trouble maker, the teenage tomboy who wants to play the piano, the alcoholic labor organiser, the owner, and the black physician who hopes for the best against the odds of the time and place. In this and her subsequent books she gave voice to the rejected, the forgotten, the mistreated, the deformed, the broken and the oppressed from the inside out. No reader ever forgets her novels.

1539 Hernando de Soto claimed Florida for Spain. Been to Miami and Orlando for conferences. Kate has been to visit Gwen, too.

1748 Amsterdam began the first municipal postal service. Been there many times.

1769 Tahiti. Lieutenant James Cook observed the transit of Venus in a tent. Afterwards, he continued to search for Terra Australis Incognita. Stopped there en route to Australia for the first time in January 1974.

1923 Rome. The Italian government of Benito Mussolini enfranchised women. to Il Duce made the announcement at a world conference on female suffrage held in Rome. Pictured below are members of the Australian delegation to the confab.

1965 Space. One hundred and twenty miles above Earth, Ed White stepped out of Gemini IV for the first American spacewalk for twenty minutes. Gemini missions developed techniques for rendezvous and docking used in later Apollo missions.

1883 Chicago. The first El(evated) trains began to run. We have ridden a few, mostly around the Loop and still have our cards.

1935 George Herman Ruth announced his retirement from baseball. He had acquired the knick-name ‘Babe’ as a teenager for his babyface. He drew so many fans to Yankee games that with the gate proceeds a new stadium was built, often called ‘The House that Ruth Built,’ which lasted until 2008. His batting records stood until the 1960s and 1970s. By the way the Baby Ruth candy bar, it was claimed had nothing to do with George Herman though it came into being in 1920, the year George Herman began hitting prodigious homes runs for the Yankees. The Chicago manufacturer claimed the candy bar was named for President Grover Cleveland’s daughter Ruth, hence Baby Ruth, though there was no connection and Cleveland had left office long before and returned to Buffalo, while Ruth had died. It seems to have been contrived to capitalise on George Herman’s fame without paying him an honorarium.

1953 Westminster. Princess Elizabeth was crowned Queen Elizabeth II in the first televised coronation. Eight thousand guests attended the ceremony, and three million lined the streets. It was broadcast in forty-four languages to millions more even to the antipodes. It remains the last televised British coronation to date.

1962 Paris, Sports: The French Tennis Open was an all-Australian affair. In the Men’s final it was Rod Laver versus Roy Emerson. Laver prevailed, winning three of five sets. But wait, there is more. The Women’s Open was also all-Australian between Margret Court and Lesley Turner with Court winning two of three sets. Court is shown below.

1966 Space. Surveyor I from the United States made the first soft landing on the Moon and began to transmit data with two television cameras and more than a hundred engineering sensors, including radar. It stopped working later in July of 1966.

1763 Glasgow, Literature: H. Spens published the first English translation of Plato’s ‘The Republic’ (1763) and added an introductory essay on ancient philosophy rendering them as Christian precursors. A copy of this edition sold on San Francisco for $US8,000 in 2009. It is a book I have read in whole and in part many times in several translations.

1808 Athens, OH. Ohio University was founded as the first land-grant university. The idea of using land to fund higher education was extended nationally later in the Morrill Acts.

1924 Washington DC. An act of Congress recognised the citizenship of all Native Americans. President Calvin Coolidge signed it the next day. However, the right to vote was governed by state laws, and in many states Native Indians were ineligible to vote until 1957 when Maine was the last state to enfranchise Indians. Coolidge is shown below with representatives of Indian peoples.

1964 Nairobi. Kenya became a republic with Jomo Kenyatta as president. It became one of the success stories of African states. This entry reminded me of Mike Resnick, ‘Kirinyaga: A Fable of Utopia’ (1998) related to Kenya.

1980 Atlanta, Journalism: CNN went to air as the first 24-hour televised news service, repeating the same headlines every hour mixed with ephemeral sensationalism. The Cable News Network was the initiative of Ted Turner.