Author: Michael W Jackson

1611 London, Theatre: Today was the first recorded performance of William Shakespeare’s Scottish play ‘Macbeth.’ Toil and trouble, indeed. Posed below are three Republican Senators.

1828 Timbuktu, Geography: René Caillé found and mapped Timbuktu to win a prize from the Société de Géographie. There were many legends about this place and other Europeans had tried to find and failed, many of them perished. For centuries Timbuktu had been an important way station for travellers and a repository for learning. A book about it is discussed elsewhere on this blog.

1862 Paris, Science: Louis Pasteur completed the first tests of using heat to kill bacteria. This research led to the realisation that germs caused infection, disproving a common belief that in spontaneous generation of disease. (Anti-vaxxers are still there despite a century of free pubic education.) Sterilisation, vaccines, disinfection, and antibiotics all came through the door Pasteur opened.

1902 Paris, Science: Marie and Pierre Curie isolated radioactive radium chloride from pitchblende. She carried specimens around in coat pockets and suffered the consequences.

1968 Ottawa, Politics: Joseph Phillippe Pierre Yves Eliot Trudeau became leader the Liberal Party and Prime Minister when the incumbent Lester Pearson resigned. Trudeau’s finest hour might have been a few weeks later on 24 June on St John the Baptist Day in Montréal. Watch this space.

1897 Boston, Sports: John McDermott (pictured below) won the first Marathon at Boston. Ten of the fifteen starters finished. John Graham had attended the 1896 Athens Olympics and that fired his imagination for long-distance, endurance running. Women officially joined the race in 1972, but a few stalwart women had raced earlier in disguise. Apart from the Olympics, it is the oldest continuous marathon race. In 2018 there were nearly 30,000 starters. I know a few who have done it and lived to tell the tale.

1934 Hollywood, Cinema: Five-year old Shirley Temple appeared in her first feature film, ‘Stand Up and Cheer’ and she stole the show singing and dancing and dimpling. The studio executives realised that and ten more followed in 1934. She had already appeared in dozens of shorts, usually uncredited in the previous two years. She quit the silver screen at age 29 after racking up 60 credits.

1982 Houston, Space: NASA named Sally Ride as its first female astronaut. She went into space twice on Challenger, as shown below. She had been selected from 8000 applicants (men and women). When Ride left NASA she became a professor of physics at the University of California.

1984 Advance Australia Fair began putting listeners to sleep as the national anthem, selected in a plebiscite. Forty-three percent of nitwits voted for it while 28% of the discerning citizens voted for Banjo Paterson’s ‘Waltzing Matilda.’

2011 Havana, Politics: Fidel Castro resigned as First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and President of Cuba after forty-five years as El Jefe. Seen below in 1979 when he once again heaped abuse on what he called rich nations and then demanded their largess at the United Nations. Travellers tell me his picture is still everywhere in Havana.

1831 Sydney, Journalism: Australia’s oldest extant newspaper the ‘Sydney (Morning) Herald’ went on the streets. It succeeded beyond the expectations of the founders and they sold it to John Fairfax in 1846. It remained in the Fairfax family until an MBA took over. The word ‘Morning’ was added in 1842 to distinguish it from rivals that appeared later in the day.

1916 Paris, Literature: Edith Wharton was made a Chevalier of the Legion d’Honour for her war work. After divorcing money bags she was in Paris on vacation when war came, and unlike many others, she stayed. Used some of the dosh to open a workroom for women to make clothing for soldiers. As the Germans neared, many fled but she stayed to house Belgian refugees. She began a letter writing campaign to raise money for hospitals. To raise the profile of the Great War in the United States she made a car trip to the front lines in 1915 with a photographer, leading to publication in ‘Scribner’s Magazine’ and later as a book. Her novels are exquisite observations of social life.

1924 New York City, Games: Simon & Schusters published the first book of crossword puzzles. Never have so many wasted so much time thanks to so few. Cruciverbalist, rejoice!

1936 Honolulu, Aviation: The Pan Am clipper began regular passenger flights between Honolulu and San Francisco. Charlie Chan was soon to be on board.

1969 Fredericton, Politics: New Brunswick enacted legislation to make the province bilingual, the first and only province to do so. About a third of the total population of 750,000 are Francophone who remained even after the expulsion of Acadians (Le grand Dérangement) in 1755 when 15,000 French settlers were forcibly removed to the southern United States, a story burned into my memory with ‘Evangeline’ by Henry Longfellow (whose name graced my primary school). It is an epic poem and that word ‘epic’ refers to endurance required of the auditor for there was no exit from the forest of words primeval, nor from the poem itself.

1387 London, Literature: The characters in Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’ set out on the pilgrimage. This text helped established English as a literary language against Norman French and universal Latin. The Fifteenth Century Caxton edition pictured below changed hands for £4.6 million in 1998.

1875 Jabalpur (India), Sports; A bored British officer devised a table game that today is called snooker as an alternative to billards. It came to England as officers serving in India returned home. The BBC began to broadcast Pot Black to show viewers the merits of colour television with the green baize, red balls, white cue, coloured balls, and the formal dress of the players. It turned into one of its most popular and longest-running productions. The original producer was David Attenborough before he became the jungle whisperer.

1935 Brisbane (QLD), Aviation: Qantas took off on its first overseas passenger flight to Singapore on a De Havilland DH-104. Even today the Qantas flight to Singapore and onto London is styled QF1.

1947 Columbia (SC), Politics: Bernard Baruch, financier, used the term ‘Cold War’ while speaking at a reception South Carolina. Baruch had been a confidant of Presidents Wilson, Coolidge, Franklin Roosevelt, and Truman. At the time he was perceived to be a sounding board for President Truman and the press followed him closely. The phrase was in headlines the next day, and stayed there. This was more than a year before Comrade Stalin imposed the Berlin Blockade.

2002 The 10,000th episode of ‘General Hospital’ aired, the longest running program in US television history, premiering on 1 April 1963. It led the trend for hospital dramas which continues today. Predictable and bland, perhaps, but it has dealt with HIV, pedophilia, white collar drug abuse, violence against women, patient privacy, abortion rights, and the like with greater sensitivity than did the ABC news.

1178 BC A solar eclipse coincided with the return of Odysseus to Ithaca ten years after the end of the Trojan War, it is said. Odie took the very long way home. Must have hired a Sydney taxi driver.

1705 Cambridge, Science; Queen Anne knighted Isaac Newton; he was only the second scientist to be so honoured, the first being Francis Bacon.

1912 Calais, Aviation: Harriet Quimby was the first woman to fly across the English Channel. The feat was upstaged by the sinking of the Titanic. She died in a plane crash later that year in Boston. She was no relation to Mayor Quimby.

1943 Basel (CH), Pharmaceuticals. The first acid trip was taken by Dr Albert Hoffman who accidentally (he said) ingested from LSD-25 which he had been synthesising since 1938 in the investigation of the medical effect of lysergic and diethylaminde compounds. He dutifully recorded his experiences in the laboratory log. He did it again to be sure and then published a report of the hallucinogenic drug which caught some eyes later.

1964 London, Music: The Rolling Stones released the first album. These days it is moss and gall stoned.

1493 Barcelona, History: Christopher Columbus met Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand to report on his first voyage. We have seen the steps where they greeted him.

1729 Leipzig, Music: The premier of Johann Sebastien Bach’s ‘Saint Matthew’s Passion’ was at the Saint Thomas Church pictured below.

1755 London, Lexicography: Dr Samuel Johnson published the ‘Dictionary of the English Language’ in two volumes. We have a copy but not the first edition shown below.

1912 Mid-Atlantic, History: Molly Brown survived the sinking of the Titanic. Brown got into a lifeboat and took charge, hauling others abroad while keeping up a stream of invective and off-colour jokes from her days on the Colorado goldfields where her husband had made a fortune. She became ‘The Unsinkable Molly Brown.’

1955 Des Plaines (IA), Commerce: Ray Kroc started the McDonald’s restaurant with a simple menu, direct delivery to the customer, families welcome, and no fuss. Get it, eat it, and beat it. Rather than waiting for a made to order hamburger, they were ready to go. The alternatives were cafés/bars where families were not welcome and did not want to go, and hotel restaurants with menus in French, where tipping was essential, neckties were required, and children had to be little adults.

1828 Boston (MA), Knowledge: Noah Webster published the first edition of the dictionary that has since born his name with the aim of simplifying language for the new country and making it logical for mass education. Webster was careful to copyright this work. In Webster’s I have trusted over the years. A biography of Webster is discussed elsewhere on this blog.

1841 Baltimore, Fiction: Edgar Allan Poe published ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ which is often cited as the first detective story. August Dupin spots the inhuman hair, as Charlie Chan (‘at the Circus’ [1936]), too, did later. Dupin recurred in two more Poe stories. As a krimiologist of the first water I had to list this event.

1927 Gothenberg (SV), Industry: The first Volvo automobile appeared. Ridden in a few Volvo which were once a cheap alternative to the VW Beetle, but that changed When Volvo went upmarket. I had a train ticket to Gothenbeg once but had to cancel the trip.

1935 Valentine (NE), Ecology: It became Black Sunday when one of the most devastating storms of the Dust Bowl struck. To many people it was apocalyptic signalling the end of days. In the midst of the Great Depression after two generations of over-farming and eight years of drought, from South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico an estimated 300 million tons of top soil was lifted in a maelstrom that lasted a week and more in some places. The skies as far away as Chicago, Boston, and New York City darkened. The Nebraska Sandhills around Valentine lost all their top soil and became what they are called today.

1954 Canberra, Politics: Soviet diplomat Vladimir Petrov asked for political asylum, leading to a diplomatic incident and then a split in the Australian Labor Party that insured it would not govern for twenty years. While MGB agent Petrov feared and despised Stalinism, a few kilometres across the Canberra bushland at the Australian National University Professor Manning Clark, the self-proclaimed dean of Australian historians, had rejoiced at receiving the Order of Stalin about this time. For years Petrov and his wife Evdokia hid in a Melbourne bungalow, while Clark held court. While no one ever criticises Clark, neither does any one ever read his impenetrable prose. That is justice of a sort. In the famous photograph of the time, two armed Russian agents are muscling Evdokia to a plane. When it landed in Darwin for fuel, even more armed Australian agents applied muscle to extract Mrs Petrov.

1668 London, Literature: King Charles II appointed the first poet laureate John Dryden who was a prolific translator, playwright, poet, and essayist. None of his titles registers with me but perhaps with thee.

1742 Dublin, Music: In the secular New Music Hall was the premier of Georg Handel’s ‘Messiah’ which was not intended for Christmas, but rather Easter, nonetheless it has become a Christmas ritual.

1888 Paris, Philanthropy: Alfred Nobel read an obituary of himself which condemned him for inventing TNT. It was his brother Ludwig who had died, but the obituary with the care that distinguishes journalism now as then was about Alfred, not Ludwig. Still it set him thinking….and the Nobel Prizes were the result. A study of the Nobel Prizes is discussed elsewhere on this blog.

1902 Kemmerer (WY) J C Penney opened the first store which still operates. John Cash Penney negotiated volume discounts with suppliers and passed on the lower prices to customers. He also started house brands like Big Mac work clothes. In 1973 there were two thousand stores. Penney’s one of the first and few retailers to discontinue fire arms sales even in Wyoming gun country before Dick Cheney got there. Like the other high inventory retailers it has been hit hard by online rivals. One dominated Second Street in Hastings for years but has been gone for decades.

1964 Sasabe (AZ), Entertainment: Filmed on location, Sidney Poitier was awarded the best actor Oscar for the construction worker in ‘Lilies of the Field.’ He was the first black man to receive this award. When Ann Bancroft handed him the statute, she bussed him on the cheek that shocked the tiny minds and she was pilloried by many a Christian. Poitier had been a GI in World War II with a combat badge to prove it unlike so many of the tiny minds.

1204 The Fourth Crusade to defend Christendom and wrest the Holy Land from the Muslim infidel instead sacked Christian Constantinople. Such are the ways of the Christian. It is so much easier to murder, rape, and rob fellow Christians than go all the way to the hostile territory of Asian Minor and encounter infidels on their home turf. Then as now organised religion prefers soft targets. This episode figures in the books about Venice discussed elsewhere on this blog. We saw some of the walls on our visit to Istanbul.

1932 Culver City (CA), Entertainment: ‘I want to be alone,’ she said in ‘Grand Hotel.’ The group of mismatched stagers thrown together became standard fare in cinema. This line became totemic for at least a generation. For those who do not know who said it, well, so be it.

1954 New York City, Music: Bill Haley and Comets recorded ‘Rock Around the Clock’ as the B-side of a record. Since it was Side B they let rip. By a quirk of fate one bored DJ flipped the record and played the B-side as filler, and the switchboard lit-up. It went on to sell a million in one month and made it to those shores. It became the emblem of Rock and Roll music.

1961 Star City (USSR), Space: Yuri Gagarin became the first person in an Earth orbit. We ate at a restaurant in Moscow with his picture plastered on the walls. Below is the ignition of Vostock 1. Imagine sitting on top of that much firepower.

1981 Cape Canaveral (FL), Space: The first flight of a space shuttle, the Columbia with a crew of two, occurred. After Apollo 13 NASA concentrated on near Earth space with the shuttle program because neither Congress nor the Presidency wanted to risk a disaster en route to the moon. Ah huh.

1888 Amsterdam, Music: The Koninklijk Concertgebouw was inaugurated. Been there, heard that. It is one of the most user friendly concert halls there is. Easy to get in, get around with plenty of plumbing, and get out. Plus the ticket doubles as a public transport pass for the evening and one free drink.

1890 New Jersey, History: The Ellis Island immigration station was established where as many as 12 million entered. By the way, though it lies in New York Harbour it is within the border of the state of New Jersey. Kate has seen it with her own eyes, while I have relied on ‘Brother from Another Planet,’ discussed elsewhere on this blog for my slim knowledge.

1919 Geneva, History: The International Labour Organisation was founded to promote social justice and decent working conditions, partly by setting international labour standards. It has been an agent for collective bargaining, the end of child labour, employment of women, a living wage, free labour, and the like. During World War II its executive decamped Switzerland and worked in exile at McGill University until 1948. The fear of many international organisations in Switzerland was that it would be the next victim of Naziism, or at least forced to compromise in detail with it. Indeed there was a Swiss fascist party the National Front with its partner the New Front that have now been expunged from that country’s history along with much else.

1970 Houston, Space: “Okay, Houston, we’ve had a problem here,” said Jack Swigert, later repeated by Jim Lovell, on board Apollo 13. The mapping and sample collecting mission changed to survival and re-entry. It led to a re-orientation of the space program to near Earth space with the shuttles. Below is the Apollo 13 Command Module on display at the Smithsonian, which I have seen. Some ride.

1976 The Apple 1 computer went on sale. Yes, they called is the ‘1’ because they already working on the next iteration. So like all computers, it was out of date when it went on sale. The instance below is at the PowerHouse Museum (somewhere) in Sydney. (The parentheses are because the future location of this museum remains vexed.)