Category: Practice

1607 Jamestown (VA), History: English colonists landed and set up camp. It succeeded where the Lost Colony of Roanoke of 1585 failed.

1792 Tasmania, Science: There occurred the first confirmed sighting of a Tasmania Tiger. Earlier in 1642 a crewman with Dutchman Abel Tasman had found a footprint which he likened to that of tiger. In 1792 French naturalist Jacques-Julien Houtou de Labillardière with Admiral d’Entrecasteaux’s expedition to New Holland saw one and sketched it from memory. The last one died in the Hobart Zoo in 1936. Zoologist say the dingo killed off the Tigers on the mainland of Australia, but as the Bass Strait came to separate Tasmania from the continent, those tigers there survived.

1908 Washington DC, Politics: President Theodore Roosevelt delivered the opening address entitled “Conservation as a National Duty” at the outset of a three-day meeting at the Governors’ Conference on the Conservation of Natural Resources. Roosevelt designated 150 national forests, 51 federal bird reservations, four national game preserves, five national parks, and 18 national monuments because ‘nature is not inexhaustible.’ I have read a biography of this remarkable individual. We will not see his like again.

1923 Red Cloud, Literature: Willa Cather’s novel ‘One of Ours’ was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for literature much to chagrin of ambitious rivals like Ernest Hemingway. Below is the home where her imagination flowered, and to which she often returned.

1940 London, Politics: ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat’ said the new Prime Minister in his first speech in the House of Commons. That was Winston Churchill sending the English language into battle, as one of his severest critics grudgingly said.

1885 Elmira, New York, Literature: Mark Twain published ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ often cited as the great American novel. Read it.

1901 Gloucester, England, Technology: Cecil Booth patented a dust removing suction cleaner. He had seen devices that blew dust off furniture to be swept up and conceived reversing the process with a filter to capture the dust. He thought this would be a more hygienic method, if it worked. His first trial was to put a handkerchief over his mouth and suck dust off wooden chairs in a restaurant! The first version was enormous and gas-fired on a wagon drawn by a team of horses. He used it to offer a cleaning service to hotels, hospitals, schools, and like institutions as pictured below. He later turned to electric models and ever smaller devices.

1927 Hollywood, Entertainment: The first list of the Awards by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was printed on the back page of Academy’s irregular newsletter. The names were later reprinted in ‘Variety’ magazine, buried on page 7. Assiduous readers would find that ‘Wings’ was the best picture that year.

1930 Flagstaff, Arizona, Science. At the Lowell Observatory astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto. Percival Lowell had concluded that wobbles in the orbit of Uranus indicated the gravity of another planet out there and he calculated when and where to look. Tombaugh was versed in a new technique using photographic plates with a blink microscope and he took the first picture of Pluto. Other observers soon confirmed the sighting.

1953 Hollywood, Entertainment: ’Bwana Devil’ the first 3-D movie was released. A forgotten movie (rated 4.9 on the IMDB) but it seemed to herald a new age in cinema, which age briefly came and went. Three D recently came….and went again. Who talks about 3-D television these days? Sic transit 3-D, as Cicero said. We still have some 3-D glasses when the old becomes new again.

1551 San Marcos University in Lima Peru opened. The first in the Americas. It still exists as the National University of San Marcos.

1797 Napoleon entered Venice without a fight and dismembered the moribund remnant of the thousand year old Venetian Republic in a few days. He made Venice a part of Italy when he placed one of his brothers on Italian throne. Venetians and Italians agree that Venice is not Italian despite maps, passports, taxes, and more. Several books about Venice are discussed elsewhere on this blog. We hope to visit there this year.

1856 Melbourne, Politics: The antipodean Eight-Hour working day was introduced. Despite predictions of the Pox News of the day the sky did not fall.

1926 The airship Norge flew over the North Pole with Roald Amundsen on board, piloted by Umberto Nobile. It was the first overflight of the Pole.

1949 New Delhi, Politics: The Nehru government appointed Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit Indian ambassador to the United States. She is the first woman ambassador in Washington, and perhaps anywhere.

330 Constantinople became the capital of the Roman Empire. The Column of Constantine remains as shown below; it marks the spot where he declared it the capital. A giant statue of, who else, Connie surmounted the column. The corner of Turkey on the west side of Bosphorus is called Rumi, and that is a reference to Roman. Been there, seen that.

868 The first recorded reference to the Diamond Sutra, a holy text of Mahayana Buddhism, which is the world oldest surviving, dated, and printed book. It is held in the British Library.

1813 William Lawson, Gregory Blaxland, and William Wentworth led an expedition westward from Sydney over the Blue Mountains. The route is the first opening for European expansion into the continent of Australia. Settlements ascending the Mountains from the coast are named for these three stalwarts.

1947 Akron, Technology: The B. F. Goodrich Company announced the development of tubeless tire that increased the safety and ease of driving. The tire blowouts that figure so prominently in movies before this time became largely a thing of the past.

1997 Technology: Deep Blue defeated the unbeatable Garry Kasparov in chess three games to two with one draw.

1497 Florentine Americus Vespucci left on his first voyage to the New World. He went on to demonstrate that Brazil was a separate land mass, not the eastern edge of Asia. Once that was realised it had to be named and his seemed the obvious choice. In all he sailed for the King of Portugal to the New World four times. I once saw his statue on the Uffizi as below.

1752 Benjamin Franklin flew a kite during a lightning storm. His aim was to demonstrate that lighting and electricity were the same thing. He put lightning rods on the roof of his house and elaborate bells connected to them that rang to alert him of the approach of a lightning storm, much to the irritation of Mrs Franklin. I read Walter Isaacson’s turgid biography of Ben years ago. Franklin was quite a fellow, and — did one know? — briefly President of Pennsylvania.

1869 Promontory Summit (Utah), Technology. The Golden Spike was driven binding the transcontinental railroad, reducing the sea-to-sea journey from four months to one week. Though lives were lost in the construction, the job was completed ahead of schedule and under budget. Though I lived and worked for a year nearby in Logan and Ogden, I never visited the site. My bad.

1908 Philadelphia, Society: The first informal Mother’s Day was observed. Anna Jarvis (pictured below) advocated such a day to recognise the role of women as mothers, and she and others lobbied President Woodrow Wilson who conceded in 1914. Business interest, photographers and greeting cards, quickly took it up much to the irritation of Jarvis who in response organised boycotts and launched lawsuits against Hallmark Cards, because she had registered a trademark for Mother’s Day in 1912. Hallmark dropped the apostrophe and continued. Jarvis was arrested for disturbing the peace in her later protests.

1994 Nelson Mandela took the oath of office to serve all South Africans as president, ending three hundred years of white rule. He is the saint of our time.

1386 Lisbon, Politics: Queen Eleanor signed the Treaty of Windsor, and it is remains in force, pledging Portugal and England to mutual aid. It was evoked in World War II to protect Portuguese neutrality while allowing England to use the Azores for strategic purposes and Portugal sold wolfram to Germany. The fine line that Portugal walked during World War II figures in the biography of Salazar reviewed elsewhere on this blog.

1788 London, Politics: The British parliament voted to abolish the slave trade.

1901 Melbourne, Politics. The first sitting of the Australian Parliament convened. On the same date in 1927 it convened for the first time in Canberra. On the same date in 1988 Queen Elizabeth II opened the new Parliament House in Canberra.

1922 Paris, Science: The International Astronomical Union adopted Annie Cannon’s stellar classification system which, slightly amended, remains in use today. It is based on hydrogen absorption as indicated by temperatures and spectral type. She was nearly deaf due to scarlet fever and an ardent suffragette. She worked at the Harvard Observatory after graduating in mathematics from Wellesley College.

1960 Washingotn, D.C, Technology: The Federal Drugs Administration approved the first commercial produced birth control pill which was manufactured by Searle of Chicago. The original research for the Pill had been commissioned by Margaret Sanger and funded by Katherine McCormick (whose fortune also built the hall where I had my 8:00 am poetry class).

1541 Hernando de Soto with a party of four hundred reached Memphis Tennessee having made their way overland from the west coast of Florida where six hundred had landed. In Memphis he found the Mississippi River which became a highway into the continent. He had left from Cuba. Though wealthy from his earlier adventures, he was restless and sought the Spanish King’s commission for further exploration. He first went to the New World in 1515 and later joined Francisco Pizarro in Peru where he had enriched himself at the expense of the Inca.

1886 Atlanta, Commerce: Pharmacist John Pemberton sold the first Coca-Cola. The name was coined by his bookkeeper whose handwriting became the trademark. It was tonic based on the coca leaf and the kola nut, that is, cocaine combined with caffeine. It was a downer and an upper in one!

1901 Melbourne, Politics: The Federal Australian Labor Party was founded with John Watson as leader. Labor Parties had formed in the colonies and with federation they united. Watson became the first Labor Prime Minister, briefly, in 1904. Note that the Party is ‘Labor’ to distinguish it from the broader Labour movement based on trade unions. Below are the Labor MPs and Senators who chose Watson.

1963 London. Film: ‘Dr No’ screened and James Bond was incarnated by Sean Connery.

2016 London, Politics: A practising Muslim Sadiq Khan won election as Mayor of London. After Boris Johnson and compared to his opponents he was regarded as a safe pair of hands.

558 Constantinople, History: Justinian I ordered that the collapsed dome of the Hagia Sophia be rebuilt, and it was. Been there. Seen that.

1700 Philadelphia, Politics: William Penn began the first of a series of monthly meeting advocating black emancipation.

1815 Bathurst, History: The first road over the Blue Mountains was complete at a place that Governor Lachlan Macquarie called Bathurst in honour of the colonial secretary in London who had secured the funding for the project.

1824 Vienna, Music: Beethoven’s 9th, the Choral, symphony premiered. Some regard this as the greatest work of the greatest composer.

1994 Oslo, Art: Norwegian police recovered Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’ (1893) three months after it was stolen. Munch painted the subject several times per the illustration below. After the theft many anonymous and contradictory demands were received. The police judged them to be opportunistic as none offered any proof of possession. By forensic means the police tracked down the villains, a task made simpler because the leader of the foursome had been convicted in 1988 of stealing another Munch painting and his finger prints, DNA, and address were on file.

1682 Versailles, History: Louis XIV moved the royal court to the palace at Versailles. It took twenty years to build this palace. Its purpose was to impress and in that it succeeds. Been there once long ago. No pictures do it justice. Below is one shot of the Galerie des glaces.

1940 San Francisco, Literature. John Steinbeck’s novel ‘The Grapes of Wraith’ was award the Pulitzer Prize in literature. Read it.

1954 Oxford, Sports: Roger Banister broke the four-minute mark for the mile run. Many talking heads had said it was not humanly possible to run a mile in under four minutes. He became obsessed with breaking this barrier after he had been scorned for not going to the 1948 London Olympics because he had examinations in his medical degree at the time. Many years later Banister said that he found running a powerful source of self-expression. Georg Hegel would understand that.

1992 Fulton, Missouri, Politics: Mikhail Gorbachev spoke at Westminster College to mark the end of the Iron Curtin that Winston Churchill had named at that same podium many years before.

1994 Sangatte (France), Technology: The Channel Tunnel between Folkstone England and Sangatte France, a distance of 31 miles, was officially opened. About 30,000 people pass through it each day. I have been one of them a couple of times.

1816 London, Literature: The son of a stable hand, John Keats, published his first poem in ‘The Examiner.’ I met Keats at 8:00 am on Saturdays in McCormick Hall.

1862 Puebla (Mexico), History: Mexicans defeated a French army when Louis Napoleon III used the pretext of loan defaults to expand the French Empire into Mexico while the USA was embroiled in its Civil War. The conflict continued for some years (1861-1867). The date has since become the Mexican National Day. We have been to Mexico twice.

1877 Fort Walsh, Saskatchewan, History: Sitting Bull with thousands of Lakota passed into Canada to escape from the US Army out to avenge Custer’s stupidity. A few redcoats of the North-West Mounted Police at the border extended the Queen’s protection to the immigrants much to the annoyance of the pursing bluecoated avengers.

1925 Dayton (Tennessee), Science: The Scopes Trial began. In part the trial had been staged as publicity stunt by locals but when H. L. Mencken appointed himself ringmaster, it spun out of control, leading to a clash of titans, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow. Bryan is invariably a caricature in this story but his motivation was to oppose Social Darwinism. One fundamental of his fundamentalism was that God made us all in that respect we are all equal, a subtlety lost in the popular stereotype. A biography of the Great Commoner is discussed elsewhere on this blog.

1961 Cape Canaveral, Technology: Alan Shepard became the first American launched into space riding a Mercury-Redstone rocket. When ground control dithered for five hours hesitating to ignite the rocket, an impatient Shepard finally said, ‘Light this candle!’ Off he went. Tom Wolfe’s account of the Mercury program is the best thing that wordsmith ever wrote.