Category: Practice

1840 History, NZ: Captain William Hobson landed in the Bay of Islands to become the First Governor of New Zealand; he co-authored of the Treaty of Waitangi.

1845 Literature, NYC: Edgar Allan Poe published The Raven ‘on a midnight dreary.’ I did a Poe tour of sorts in Baltimore once upon a daytime weary.

1891 Politics, Honolulu: Liliuokalani became the monarch of the Hawaiian Islands. She was the last. We have visited many sites related to her in Honolulu and on Oahu. Her autobiography is discussed elsewhere on this blog. Get clickin’.

1957 Architecture, Sydney: Danish architect Jörn Utzon won the competition to design the Sydney Opera House. It took nearly twenty more years and many careers to complete the project. Two points: it was built with slide rules and hands and it ran over budget by 1300% even with the design compromises and unfinished interior. Not only was it was almost impossible to build but build it they did, it was quite impossible to estimate the cost of building something that had never been done before or since. Kate has graced the boards there many a time. I have haunted the stage door there now and again.

1989 History: Aviation: A United Airlines 747 (Special Performance) set the around-the-world air speed record of 36 hours, 54 minutes, and 15 seconds. This special flight raised $500,000 for children’s charities. That would be more than a million today. Tickets cost a minimum of $5,000, and special guest passengers included astronaut Neil Armstrong. Flown many a United mile and several times with an around-the-world ticket. though not this route.

1807 The first public street lighting with gas was demonstrated on the Pall Mall, London.

1908 Author and activist Julia Ward Howe, famous for her composition, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was an abolitionist and advocated women’s rights, prison reform, and sex education throughout her long life.

1916 President Woodrow Wilson nominated Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court. He had pioneered the eponymous Brandeis Brief which documented with social science data the effect of laws on the society. In Boston he worked largely pro bono on cases involving labor. He was subjected to a long and acrimonious Senate hearing. His Jewish heritage was much maligned along with everything else. I have spent time at Brandeis University.

1935 Iceland made abortion legal. At the time it was a sovereign country in personal association through the king with Denmark. It was the first country to do so.

1958 The Lego brick was patented. Lego has since produced 500 billion bricks, enough for ten lego towers from the Earth to the Moon. Seen plenty of Lego displays, including some in Copenhagen where it started.

1820 Russian Antarctic expedition discovered the continent of Antarctica. Previous efforts to verify a continent had failed because of pack ice.

1888 Thirty-three men met in Washington D.C. Among the number were teachers, philanthropists, soldiers, lawyers, financiers, cartographers, adventurers, geographers, geologists, and more. They founded the National Geographic society for “the increase and diffusion of geographical knowledge.” The first magazine was published nine months later. When we passed the building in D.C. we were worried it would sink into the earth under the weight of all those magazines.

1924 The cadaver of Lenin was placed in Mausoleum in Red Square, Moscow. the story goes that Stalin was impressed by all the crowds that came to see the body, and so extended the viewing to a permanent exhibition. We have seen Vlady in the wax. Stalin was long gone when we visited.

1926 Scottish Inventor John Logie Baird demonstrated his televisor in a London laboratory, showing two dummies’ heads moving. Programming is pretty much the same now: dummies.

1983 The Seikan Tunnel opened, the longest underwater tunnel (53.90 km), between the Japanese islands of Honshu and Hokkaido. Such a link had been contemplated for decades. In design and technology it influence the Chunnel.

66 The fifth recorded perihelion passage of Halley’s Comet. The reference is from the Talmud to “a star which appears once in seventy years that makes the captains of the ships err.”

1500 Spaniard Vicente Yáñez Pinzón becomes the first European to set foot in Brazil. He had earlier sailed with Columbus to the West Indies. However, Spain made no claim to the area, leaving it to the Portuguese by treaty.

1788 Today is Australia Day, commemorating the arrival of the First Fleet at Port Jackson, New South Wales. To see ‘Babakiueria’ is to understand much.

1808 Governor William Bligh was overthrown in the “Rum Rebellion.” It had little or nothing to do with rum though there was plenty of it about. In my early antipodean days I read H. V. Evatt, ‘Rum Rebellion: A Study of the Overthrow of Governor Bligh by John MacArthur and The New South Wales Corps (1943), which found all the parties at fault. There was plenty of that to go around, too.

1918 Herbert Hoover, US Food Administrator, called for “wheatless” and “meatless” days for the war effort. We were mightily impressed by Herbert Everywhere when we visited his presidential library in Iowa, which includes his boyhood home as shown below. Hoover is discussed on several posts on this blog. He was a whirlwind and a humanitarian who admired Democratic President Woodrow Wilson.

41 I, Claudius became Roman emperor. We know the Robert Graves account.

1755 Moscow University was established by Elizabeth II of Russia. Not the one in Idaho. Been by it on the tourist bus.

1858 Felix Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” was played, at wedding of Queen Victoria’s daughter Princess Victoria, to crown prince of Prussia who became Kaiser. It had only been used once before at a wedding and when Queen Victoria chose it that made it a hit.

1915 Alexander Graham Bell in New York and Thomas Watson in San Francisco made a transcontinental telephone transmission.

1924 The International Week of Winter Sports (Winter Olympics) opened at Chamonix, France, at the foot of Mount Blanc. The Canadian ice hockey team wins a gold medal, The team included a fifteen year old figure skater, Cecil Smith, the first woman on a Canadian Olympic team. This was test of concept a Winter Olympiad and it was so successful that the Olympic Committee instituted it as a regular event from 1928.

1727 Czar Peter the Great asserted the “Table of Rank” according to which a commoner could climb by service and merit to the highest positions, likewise the might could fall. The commoner probably did not know that this had been done and might opposed it. A biography of Great Peter is discussed elsewhere on this blog. Seek it out for enlightenment.

1848 James W. Marshall discovered gold on the property of Johann Sutter in California. Marshall was overseeing construction of a sawmill on the American River. The 1849 Gold Rush brought 300,000 in a few months, followed by Levi jeans, California statehood, and the gold that financed the North during the Civil War. Joe Montana came later.

1908 Robert Baden-Powell published “Scouting for Boys” as a manual for self-instruction in outdoor skills and self-improvement. It inspired the Boy Scout movement.

1935 Canned beer was born. In partnership with the American Can Company, the Krueger Brewing Company delivered 2,000 cans of Krueger’s Finest Beer and Krueger’s Cream Ale to faithful Krueger drinkers in Richmond, Virginia. While it sold well there was much resistance from the supply chain to such a change.

1984 Apple Computer Inc launched its revolutionary Macintosh personal computer with a mouse.

1579 Union of Utrecht signed, forming protestant Dutch Republic which became the cornerstone of the Netherlands today. I have been the hall where it was signed in Utrecht.

1849 Elizabeth Blackwell graduated from Geneva Medical College. She was the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States. After years of study, she had applied to more than a dozen of medical schools but only Geneva would accept a woman.

1924 Ramsay MacDonald formed the first Labour Government when Stagey Baldwin’s Conservatives lost a vote of no confidence in the House. The Labour Party had been contesting elections for twenty-four years.

1957 Wham-O toy company produced the first batch of the Frisbees. The Frisbee pie company in Connecticut was established in 1875. Yale students used to throw its empty pie tins, yelling Frisbee as they let fly. Boola! Boola! In 1948, Walter Frederick Morrison and his partner Warren Franscioni invented a plastic version of the disc called the “Flying Saucer” and then the “Pluto Platter” and so began the Frisbee as we know it today.

1960 The bathysphere “Trieste,” crewed by Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh, reached the bottom of Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, the Earth’s deepest known point, about 11,000 meters or seven miles.

1788 History. Sydney. Captain Arthur Phillip was impressed by what he described as “the confidence and manly behaviour” of the aborigines he met at an area he then called Manly Cove. There was once a small historical marker at the parkland near Fairlight Beach where his party rowed ashore. The precise place is now private property. I used to jog along that stretch.

1840 Auckland. History. The first permanent European settlement was established in Port Nicholson on Auckland Island, New Zealand. It was initially part of the Australian colony of New South Wales. It became a separate colony in 1841 and self-governing in 1852.

1899 Politics. Melbourne. Premiers of the six Australian colonies and their advisors met to discuss unification motivated by external threats and internal tariffs. New Zealand took part in some of the early discussions. Queensland and West Australia played the reluctant virgin now and again. Alfred Deakin was one of the intellectual leaders in these discussions. A biography of Deakin is discussed elsewhere on this blog.

1912 Florida. Engineering. The Florida East Coast Railway extension completed 128 miles of roadway and it lasted until 1935, when it was destroyed by a hurricane. It was replaced in 1938 by the Overseas Highway, built on the foundation of the old railroad bed. It has forty-two bridges connecting the Florida Keys to the mainland, at the time it was built it was the longest over water roadway.

1973 Washington DC. Politics. In Roe Versus Wade, the US Supreme Court affirmed an earlier ruling by a vote of 7-2 that medical procedures were private and guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, and explicitly applied that judgement to abortion. The nation does not belong in the doctor’s consulting room, it might be said.

1648 In Annapolis Maryland the first woman lawyer in the American colonies, Margaret Brent, was denied a vote the Maryland Assembly. God said woman should not vote.

1863 John Stuart returned to Adelaide. He had been determined to cross Australia from south to north and succeeded on the fifth attempt; from and to Adelaide it was a total of 3,400 kilometres. Scurvy and the sun blinded him nor could any longer ride on the return journey and was carried on a horse drawn stretcher to Adelaide. He died three years later at 51. My trips to Adelaide have been more comfortable.

1878 Cleopatra’s Needle arrived in England. That is a popular name but the obelisk pre-dates Cleopatra by millennia. Mehmet Ali, viceroy of Egypt, presented it to England in thanks for Lord Nelson’s victory at the Battle of the Nile. The transportation cost prohibited sending it to England until Sir William Wilson sponsored its transportation to London at a cost of around £10,000. On one estimate that amount today is £1,131,473.68. Engineer John Dixon designed a special iron cylinder in which the obelisk would be towed. However, the cylinder became separated from the ship towing it during a gale in the Bay of Biscay and was nearly lost. After drifting for many days, it was recovered. The obelisk arrived in Gravesend on 21 January 1878, and was erected on the Embankment on 12 September 1878. Walked by it more than once.

1957 Patsy Cline appeared on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts. She stole the show.

1976 The first scheduled flight of the Concordes. Two of them. One from London to Paris and one from Paris to London. Commercial flights ended in 2003. In 2004 we saw one take off at Heathrow in a cloud of smoke on its way to an air museum. Never been on one.

1616 The French explorer Samuel de Champlain arrived on the northern shores of Lake Huron opening the Great Lakes to further exploration. Champlain was a settler, navigator, cartographer, draftsman, soldier, explorer, geographer, ethnologist, diplomat, linguist, administrator, and chronicler. He made more than twenty trips from France to Canada, founded Quebec City and Ottawa and is regarded as the Father of New France. He also mapped Lake Nipissing near North Bay where I taught a term for l’Université Laurentienne.

1648 The cornerstone of Amsterdam town hall was laid. It was tarted up and expanded when Napoleon made on his brothers King of the Dutch. It features in our storied Amsterdam video. A biography of the city is discussed elsewhere on this blog.

1841 At the end of the First Opium War China ceded the island of Hong Kong to the British who had invaded southern China to crush opposition to the British trade in opium from Afghanistan. Some of the opponents to the trade were Christian missionaries. We have been to Hong Kong more than once. It teems.

1921 Kemal Attatürk declared the Republic of Turkey with a short constitution. It emerged from the rubble of the Ottoman Empire. We visited his tomb in 2015. A biography of Attatürk is discussed elsewhere on the this blog. Though he despised all things Greek, he was a philosopher-king pace Plato.

1937 FDR became the first US Presidential inaugurated on January 20 as he began a second term. Inauguration date had previously been 4 March but that date from a November election led to a long interregnum of nearly six months. The long time was to allow for Eighteenth Century modes of communication and transportation. It was changed to a closer date to reflect both technology but also the dangers of the world.