Author: Michael W Jackson

1348 Prague, Education: Charles University was found by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. I gave a talk there once.

1795 Paris, Technology. France adopted the metre as the basic unit of length. The next year sixteen steel bars were placed around Paris to make it known. One is pictured below in the Place Vendôme which I saw once with my own eyes.

1805 Vienna, Music: Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony Number 3 in E minor (‘Eroica’) premiered with the composer conducing. Below is Beethoven’s autography copy of the score which he defaced in removing the original dedication to Napoleon.

1953 New York City, UN: Dag Hammarskjöld was selected as the second Secretary General of the United Nations. A biography of Hammarskjöld is discussed elsewhere on this blog.

1961 DC, Politics: Because they were part of the heritage of mankind, the Kennedy Administration committed the United States to fund the preservation of artefacts from the ancient historic sites in the Valley of Nile when the Aswan Dam was to be built. In the end American funds came to 16% of the total cost, covering the preservation of the temples at Abu Simbel and more. Kate has seen some of this stuff with her own eyes.

1857 St Martin’s, Literature: Charles Dickens read ‘A Christmas Carol’ for his first public reading.

1906 DC, Politics: Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act and also the Pure Food and Drug Act partly in response to Upton Sinclair’s grotesque exposés in the novel ‘The Jungle’ and in his journalism. The cover below is from the copy I read in college. Enough to make one a vegetarian.

1908 Tunguska (Russia), Science: A giant fireball caused by a gigantic meteoroid flattened an estimated 80 million trees over 2000 square kilometres in Yeniseysk, the largest extraterrestrial impact ever. It struck an area with virtually no human inhabitants., certainly none there survived the impact.

1997 London, Literature: J.K. Rowling published the first Harry Potter novel, ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.’ It has since sold 120 million copies and counting. One of my students wrote an amusing pastiche of this book for an assignment, titled Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Phone. The real magic here was Rowling’s achievement in getting kids to read books.

2016 Älmhult (Sweden), Commerce: The Ikea Museum opened on the site of the very first of its stores. The last piece remains missing. Visitors are channeled through every exhibit with no short-cuts or escape.

0512 Ireland, science: A solar eclipse was recorded by a monastic chronicler.

1859 Queenston (Ontario), History: French acrobat Charles Blondin was the first to cross Niagara Falls on a tightrope 1100 feet long, 160 feet above water, on a three inch rope. He did it several times, each time more elaborate than the last, carrying another person, blindfolded, pushing a wheel barrow, and -la pièce de résistance – stopping halfway across to light a spirit stove and make an omelette, while staring at an iPhone.

1958 Stockholm, Sports: Seventeen year-old Edison Arondes do Nascimento exploded on the soccer world when Brazil beat a highly rated Swedish team 5-2 in the World Cup final. Known as Pelé, he had played only a little in earlier matches but injuries to starters gave him a chance and in the final Pelé dazzled defenders and scored three of the goals and set-up the other two. As one Swede said, there seemed to be ‘five of him at once. Everywhere.’

1990 Dunedin (NZ), Religion: Dr Penny Jamieson became the world’s first diocesan Anglican bishop. Contrary to predictions, the sky did not fall. Although the Pox News blamed the Christchurch earthquake on her.

1995 Space, Technology: The US space shuttle Atlantis docked with the Russian space station Mir, marking the first space cooperation between the two nations.

1635 Guadeloupe (West Indies) , History: France established a permanent settlement at Port-Louis. It remains French and is one of the few places in the Western Hemisphere where the Euro is legal tender.* It is mentioned on TF2 news now and again as the poorest, most backward, most deprived department of France. Think Louisiana and there it is.

1762 St Petersburg, History: Catherine II became sovereign Tsarina and stayed that until her death in 1796. She displaced her estranged husband Peter III in a coup d’état. We saw some of locales of these events in our visit to Russia and some of her gear.

1790 Sydney, History: Lieutenant James MacArthur of the NSW Corps arrived in Sydney. Together with his wife Elizabeth he imported a flock of merino sheep bought in South Africa. By 1803 they had 4000 which they bred carefully. They began exporting wool in 1807 and so the sheep’s back entered Australian history.

1838 Queen Victoria was crowned in Westminster Abbey, a year after acceding to the throne, in an elaboration coronation ceremony.

1888 Apia (Samoa) Robert Louis Stevenson settled in Samoa which inspired his novel of adventure ‘Treasure Island.’ ‘X’ marks the spot, Long John!

*Smart alecks may wish to name others. Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Martinique, and Saint Martin, French Guyana. The Dutch holdings, like Aruba, use a unique currency.

1652 Table Bay (SA), History: The first permanent European settlement in South Africa was established by the Dutch East India company under Jan van Riebeeck. We saw a photograph of a wall built by these settlers in an exhibition recently.

1841 DC, Politics: The first Vice President to succeed a president who died in office took was sworn in. That was John Tyler. Elected President General William Harrison died one month after his inauguration. A biography of Tyler, the accidental president, is discussed elsewhere on the blog. Wits referred to him as ‘His Accidency.’ Suffice it to say here he was a president whose party had disowned him when he accepted the place as Vice President on the ticket with no personal following or profile, and he was, and knew he was, on a one-way ticket. Here’s one for the books, twenty years later he served as a congressman in the Confederate House of Representatives where he tired to promote negotiations, and failed.

1896 Athens, Sports: The Olympic Games were reborn when 60,000 spectators gathered to watch 280 athletes from thirteen nations. Baron Pierre de Coubertin had started promoting the idea in 1892. Thereafter the Olympics were overshadowed by world’s fairs and then lost to World War I. The first successful Olympics (participation, income, and publicity) were held in 1924 in Paris, which included 400 women athletes.

1903 Paris, Politics: The tissue of lies fabricated by the Pox News of the day against Captain Alfred Dreyfus collapsed when secret documents were published that revealed his innocence. Robert Harris’s novel ‘An Officer and a Spy’ about this case is discussed in a post elsewhere on this blog. On the blogosphere there are many who are sure either Dreyfus or Hillary did it.

1968 Surrey (England), Entertainment: ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ screened. Pauline Kael, the New Yorker’s pontificator on movies said it was ‘monumentally unimaginative.’ Yes she did, HAL. The child bride has sung to it in a chorus.

1242 Alexander Nevsky of Novgorod defeated the Teutonic knights (Germans from Lithuania) in the Battle of the Ice. Battles do usually make this list but this one did because Kate once sang in Sergei Prokofiev’s cantata. Alex came out ahead in a poll for the Greatest Russian in 2008, edging Comrade Stalin by a few points. We saw a few things bearing Alex’s name in Estonia and Russia.

1753 Bloomsbury, Knowledge: King George the First assented to an act of parliament to establish the British Museum which later opened in 1759. Sir Hans Sloane had bequeathed his collection of 71,000 objects and 40,000 books to the king in lieu of taxes. This bequest explains why the British Library was until lately housed within the British Museum. I have used the BL many times, and gawked at the BM even more times. N.B. The legislation had a long and slow progression and many other dates are relevant to its development.

1818 Santiago (Chile), History: José de San Martín declared Chile free of Spanish rule. (There are not many dates for Spanish America on the daily history websites so they are rare.

1979 Jabiru (NT), Conservation: The Kakadu National Park was proclaimed. Its area equals half of Switzerland with rock art as old as 60,000 years, birds, plants, and fish species found nowhere else to say nothing of the insects! (I got stung by a gigantic fly in the room, not the bush, and it took months for the swelling to recede.) The has since expanded by 20,000 square kilometres. We spent several days there, staying in the motel pictured below.

2063 Bozeman (MN), Future: The Vulcans made First Contact with Zephram Cochrane whose warp flight had been to the sound of Steppenwolf’s ‘Magic Carpet Ride.’ Fasten the chin strap on those colanders, Time Travellers.

0527 Constantinople, History: The Emperor Justin, very ill, crowned his nephew Justinian as co-Emperor. Justinian became known as The Great and credited with never sleeping for his many actions and reforms over nearly forty years. One reform was to allow marriage between classes and races, and in that spirit he married Theodora who became a mainstay in his regime. His most famous and lasting change was Justinian’s Code that codified, revised, and simplified Roman law. I have read several of Eric Mayer and Mary Reed’s krimis set in this time and place.

1581 Plymouth, History: In absentia Queen Elizabeth I knighted Francis Drake after he circumnavigated the world plundering the Spanish. The treasure he returned with doubled the Crown’s income for that year. His privateering was an open secret and it continued.

1820 Sydney, Architecture: The foundation stone was laid for the building that became the Queen Victoria Building on George Street. It stands still and we have been in it many times after it was redeveloped in the latter 1980s as a retail mall.

1843 Hong Kong, History: In far away London Queen Victoria proclaimed it a British crown colony. after the First Opium War, in which England enforced the importation of opium from Afghanistan into China. We have been to Honkers several times but not lately.

1975 Albuquerque (NM), Technology: Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Micro-soft, a portmanteau word combing ‘micro’ from ‘microprocessors’ with ‘soft’ from ‘software.’ Their first and major client was the Altair 8800 computer made in Albuquerque at the time. The move to Seattle came in 1979. DOS and Windows came later still.

1848 Coogoon (Queensland), History: German explorer and naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt and his party were seen for the last time loading provisions at McPherson’s Station before they disappeared in the quest to reach the Swan River in West Australia. He had earlier traversed the Atherton Tableland to Arnham Land, as shown on the map below. The one-time Little Rome where we shop was named for Ludi in 1871.

1860 St Joseph (MO), History: the first Pony Express mail left for Sacramento, a ten day journey of 1800 miles. Its rivals took three week to three months for the same trip by wagon. In 1861 riders, including Buffalo Bill Cody, delivered Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address to California in eight days. The enterprise yielded to the telegraph and went out of business within two years and entered into legend.

1913 Manchester, Politics: Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst was sentenced to (another) three years jail. She was a recidivist. In 1926 she ran as a Conservative candidate for parliament, in part moved by anti-communism. Less has changed than one might think when reading her words below.

1917 Petrograd, History: Vladimir Lenin arrived at the Finland Station from exile in Switzerland having traveled through Germany in a sealed train to prevent the contagion of communism from escaping, to avoid the Tsar’s secret police, and finally to undermine Russian morale. We went by this station during our Russian tour.

1976 Mururoa Atoll, History: France continued nuclear testing. Kaboom! After years of protests the tests went underground. Then there was the Rainbow Warrior.

1845 Meudon, Science: French physicists Armand Fizeau and Léon Foucault took the first photograph of the Sun. They had made numerous attempts and failed but one did succeed in making a five inch Daguerreotype as below. These two collaborated on many projects. Oh, and yes, this latter is the man with the pendulum. (Either one gets it or one doesn’t not.)

1905 Victoria Falls (Zambia), History: The ambitious Cairo – Cape Town railway opened between Cape Town in South Africa and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. The brainchild of Cecil Rhodes, it was never completed.

1912 Nanjing (China), Politics: Sun Yat-sen called a National Assembly of the Republic of China to supplant the Emperor Puyi. He created the Guomindang Party, a fossil of which remains important in Taiwan, and led it until his death in 1925. He had gone to elementary school in Honolulu. Below is his signature and personal stamp.

1930 Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), History: Ras Tafari Makonnen was invested as Emperor Haile Selassie, and remained that until deposed in 1974. Ryszard Kapuściński’s ‘Emperor’ (1989) gives a remarkable account of the last days of the regime. It inspired to me read three or four of his other titles.

1978 Lausanne (CH), Commerce: Velcro hit the market for first time. Its name is a portmanteau word from the French words ‘velour’ (velvet) and ‘crochet’ (hook). Electrical engineer George de Mestral conceived it while picking burs seeds (illustrated below) from his dog’s fur. It took years for him to develop the idea, conceive of a use for it, and find backers. The alternative explanation is that the Vulcans of First Contact left it behind.

1392 Canterbury (England), Literature: In Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ there is an association between foolishness and April first. This seems to the earliest connection in English, and even this is much disputed as a copying error of some sort. There are later French references in the 1500s.

1778 New Orleans, Economy: Irish immigrant businessman Oliver Pollock created the “$” symbol. How and why is much discussed in Wikipedia. Others are also credited this innovation. It was first used on minted coins in 1797. One of our tour guides in Sevilla offered the explanation illustrated below derived from the imagery on Spanish piece of eight, also called Spanish dollars, a distant corruption of the German thaler. The Mexican peso has always used this symbol from the Spanish coin.

1786 Vienna, Music: Wolfgang Mozart, aged thirty, seated at the keyboard, conducted the debut of his opera ‘The Marriage of Figaro,’ derived from Pierre Beaumarchais’s novel which had been surpassed in France. The play’s denunciation of aristocratic privilege foreshadowed the French Revolution. The revolutionary leader Georges Danton later said that the play “killed off the nobility” and Napoleon Bonaparte called it “the Revolution already put into action.” Below is playbill for the opening performance.

1929 Barcelona, Cinema: Luis Buñel screed his 24-minute film ‘Un Chien Andalou’ made in collaboration with Salvador Dali. Remember that eyeball? I do.

1999 Iqaluit, Canada, on Frobisher Bay, Politics: the Northwest Territory was halved, creating Nunavut, a first peoples homeland with a population of 35,000 spread over 2 million square kilometres of ice and tundra.