Category: Practice

1768 In London retired cavalry sergeant-major Philip Astley staged the first modern circus by doing trick riding in a tight concentric circle that allowed him to do things otherwise impossible. That went well and he added other acts and built an amphitheatre. He took his troupe on tour to France. The term ‘circus’ comes from the circular track via Roman circuses or circuits.

1799 British Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger introduced income tax to fund war with Napoleon’s France.

1868 In Fremantle the Hougoumont, the last ship to transport convicts to Western Australia. WA was founded in 1829 by free settlers. The shortage of labour for the work to be done led the setters to petition London for convicts who began to arrive in June 1850.

1909 The British Nimrod Expedition with Ernest Shackleton reached a the farthest South latitude (88°23′ south) then recorded about 90 miles from South Pole when the weather made it impossible to continue.

2007 Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs demonstrated the iPhone. That is barely a decade ago. More than one billion have now been sold. After a Nokia, after a Sony Ericsson, after an HP, I switched to an iPhone 3 and never looked back.

1800 L’Enfant sauvage d’Aveyron emerged from the forests when his age was estimated by twelve. He had been sighted as early as 1797. Later he was given the name Victor and died in 1825. François Truffaut’s film of the same name is a meditation on humanity and inhumanity, nature and nurture.

1816 Sophie Germain became the first woman to win a prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for a paper on elasticity. Her mathematical studies of Fermat’s Last Theorem shaped investigations for a century or more.

1889 Herman Hollerith patented a punch card calculator. In hindsight it was a forerunner of computer programming. Well do I remember nocturnal visits to the computer centre in the dead of an Edmonton winter with boxes of punch cards.

1912 The African National Congress was founded in Bloemfontein (South Africa) to campaign for voting rights. It was originally called the South African Native National Congress. Later it opposed apartheid. Its most famous member became Nelson Mandela.

1994 Valeri Polyakov left Earth for the Mir space station where he spent the following 437 days. A record that remains. He could not walk upon return. The picture below shows the shuttle Atlantis docking with Mir, giving the relative size of each. The shuttle is much smaller than a Boeing 747. Ergo Mir was not roomy. Wikipedia says Polyakov is alive and well these days.

1558 Calais, the last English possession in France, was captured by the French. Thereafter two countries became and remained separated by the La Manche after four hundred years of dynastic claims and counter-claims. Its proximity to England made Calais seem the natural target for D-Day in 1944.

1789 America’s first presidential election was held over a period of one month. Voters cast ballots to choose state electors; only white men who owned property voted. Three of the thirteen states did not participate because they had not yet ratified the constitution. George Washington won the election and the second place finisher, John Adams, became Vice President. Imagine what Faux News would make of that.

1927 The Harlem Globetrotters played their first game in Hinckley, Illinois south of Chicago. Abe Saperstein, a tailor, was the impresario and manager at a time when blacks were banned from competitive sports. The Globetrotters lived up to the name. Despite the showmanship, clowning, and antics, the team only ever lost one game. It nurtured many a great athlete and provided many with a living and a creative outlet. Saperstein is on the left below. But the way, the Globetrotters had nothing to do with Harlem but took the name because it had caché during the Harlem Renaissance at the time.

1965 The first hydrofoil ferry, the MV Manly, began operating in Sydney Harbour. They seem to walk on the water and cut the time in half for three times the cost of the ferries. Ridden a few of these.

2000 Beverley McLachlin became the first woman to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. She grew up in Pincher Creek, Alberta, population of 3600.

1605 In Madrid Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) published the first edition of ‘El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha’ (Don Quixote). Sometimes this is considered the first novel and it is the foundation of Spanish literature. Cervantes was duelist, debtor, soldier, slave, wounded veteran, and writer. I read a one-volume abridgement in college and that’s it.

1838 In Morristown New Jersey Yale grad Samuel Morse demonstrated the telegraph system for the first time at the Speedwell Iron Works. To prove the utility of transmitting electrical impulses by wires he used a code that came to bear his name.

1900 In Montréal work began on a modest chapel at the bequest of Brother André. It became the massive St. Joseph’s Oratory on Mount Royal. In the picture below the wooden steps in the middle are reserved for those who mount the hill on their knees as an act of penitence. We took the outer stairs when we visited.

1912 In Santa Fe New Mexico became the 47th state of the United States. Its state flag is below. The symbolism comes from Zia Pueblo with the sun at the centre of four directions, four stages of life, four times of day, and the four bases (first, second, third, and home). Kate’s mother grew up there.

2014 In Washington D.C. the U.S. Senate advised and consented to the appointment of Janet Yellen as chair the Federal Reserve. The first woman in that chair in the central bank’s 100-year history. Suspecting Yellen was Hillary in disguise, President Tiny replaced her with Homer Simpson. Fact or fake? Take a pick.

1891 Queensland’s the great shearers’ strike began, leading to the foundation of the Australian Labor Party to represent the interests of workers in parliament.

1895 In Paris in an elaborate public ceremony the blameless Captain Alfred Dreyfus was stripped of rank, humiliated, and trundled through the streets to become the sole inhabitant of Devil’s Island. Robert Harris’s novel about this affair will be discussed on the blog in a post.

1914 In Detroit Henry Ford paid a minimum wage of $5 a day and shared with employees $10 million in the previous year’s profits.

1937 In Lincoln (Nebraska) the first session of the new unicameral state legislature occurred. It is the only unicameral in the United States. (We will not mention Queensland.) George Norris led the campaign for the change which he started in Hastings as detailed in the discussion of a biography of Norris elsewhere on this blog.

1968 The Prague spring began when Alexander Dubček became First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. It ended with tanks on 21 August. We saw some of the sites when in Prague.

1847 Using the masculine pseudonym Ellis Bell, Emily Brontë submitted the manuscript of “Wuthering Heights” to a publisher who had enough sense to publish it.

1965 In the State of Union address to Congress President Lyndon Johnson outlined the Great Society with a long list of measures that galvanised the nation – for a time – into a War on Poverty. Robert Caro’s magisterial biography of LBJ is discussed in other posts on this blog.

1999 For the first time since Charlemagne’s reign in the ninth century, Europe had a common currency when the “euro” became a financial unit in corporate and investment markets. This was the first step to the currency and coin Euro on 1 January 2000. The name had been decided in 1995.

2004 NASA’s rover ‘Spirit’ landed on Mars and it stopped transmitting in 2011, but its sibling, ‘Opportunity,’ just won’t shut up. Below is the first picture that Spirit sent home. N.B. both were designed to last six months. Both overachieved on the KPIs. No low-bid contractors were involved, evidently.

2007 Nancy Pelosi became the speaker of the House, the first woman to hold this post, which made her second in the line of succession for the office of President after the Vice-President. As of today, she’s back!

1521 Pope Leo X ex-communicated Martin Luther. In 1962 on the same day Pope John XXIII (pictured below) ex-communicated Fidel Castro.

1872 Elijah McCoy, whose parents were slaves and took the underground railroad to Canada, got U.S. patent no. 129,843 for a lubricating device that allowed steam locomotives to run without stopping for lubrication. Legend holds that his invention worked so well that machine operators wary of cheap substitutes often requested “the real McCoy.” (There are competing legends that attribute the phrase to others.)

1929 Don Bradman scored 112 v England at Melbourne Cricket Ground – his first Test century with twenty-eight more to follow in a spectacular career.

1938 President Franklin Roosevelt became patron of the March of Dimes to fund research into polio and to assist those afflicted. Dr. Jonas Salk was its research director. When we went to the movies in the 1950s we always put all of the dimes in our pockets into the collection cups for the March of Dimes passed around by ushers like church collection plates. I suppose today the anti-vaxxers would steal them because God told them to do so.

1996 The first clamshell flip mobile phone, the Motorola StarTAC, went on sale. It was the first cell phone to have a screen. Eventually sixty million were sold. No doubt the design was influence by Star Trek communicators.

1839 In France Louis Daguerre took the first photograph of the Moon, as below. His name gave us the Daguerreotype for a kind of photograph.

1890 In D.C. President Benjamin Harrison appointed Alice Sanger to be the first woman on the White House staff. He also appointed Frederick Douglass to be US ambassador to Haiti. I expect the White House cooking and cleaning staff had included women, but Sanger was an office worker of some sort. Little is available about her apart from the appointment. It was a time when agitation for the vote for women was high and perhaps the appointment was intended to mollify that constituency a little. Likewise the agitation for black rights was strong and perhaps Douglass’s appointment was a sop to that. No image of Alice Sanger could be found. Below is Frederick Douglass looking like an Old Testament prophet bringing the word from the wilderness.

1893 In Chicago the World’s Columbian Exposition opened. It was notable for the use of electricity for illumination whether in day or night to make it a White City in a second sense. All the buildings were painted white and at night it was illuminated by electric lights. A book about ‘Chicago’s Perfect Cities of 1893’ (1991) is discussed elsewhere on this blog.

1906 In Brooklyn Willis Carrier patented the world’s first air conditioner. Why did he not get a Nobel Prize? Peace, medicine, physics, or all of the above? That is a mystery to me. Have you heard people who say they have air conditioning in the home or office, but ‘try not to use it.’ I have. My reply is to say the same about the flush toilet. That stops the show.

1922 In D.C. Albert Fall, the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Interior, resigned in response to public outrage over the Teapot Dome scandal. Like many others in the administration of Warren Harding he had been selling public assets to cronies for enormous profits to himself. Has a contemporary ring to it does it not. Rumour has it that Albert Fall is one of President Tiny’s heroes.

45 B.C. In Rome 1 January became the first day of the calendar year with the adoption of the Julian Calendar based on the solar year. Prior to that the New Year had been marked on 1 March. It had been commissioned by Julius Caesar. John Maddox Roberts tells this story through a krimi in’ The Year of Confusion (SPQR XIII).’

1863 In Nebraska farmer Daniel Freeman submitted the first claim under the new Homestead Act for a property near Beatrice. The act opened the West and immigrants followed. The Act gave land to those who would improve it by the mixture of their labour. Sounds like John Locke.

1892 In New York City harbour fifteen-year old Annie Moore from Ireland became the first of the more than twelve million immigrants who passed through the Ellis Island Immigration Station in its sixty-two years of operation. Kate paid it a visit once upon a time. See the discussion of the film ‘Brother from Another Planet’ (1984) elsewhere on this blog for an update on Ellis Island.
1901 In Melbourne the Commonwealth of Australia was proclaimed. Tom Roberts was commissioned to paint the scene and below he is at work.

1962 In London the Beatles auditioned for Decca Records, but the company instead signed Brian Poole & the Tremeloes. The executive who made this call no doubt paid himself a bonus.

1660 In London Queen Elizabeth I granted a Royal Charter to the Company of Merchants of London Trading with the East Indies, later know as the East India Company with its own navy and army it became a law unto itself while providing sinecures to James and John Stuart Mill to write their books.

1879 In Honolulu the cornerstone was laid for the Iolani Palace which was the only royal palace in the United States. We have been through it. Jack Lord used to be there in Hawaii 5-Oh.

1929 In Montréal Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians played “Auld Lang Syne” as a New Year’s Eve song for the first time. The group originated in London, Ontario. Been there and Montréal, too..

1935 In Chicago Charles Darrow was granted United States patent 2,026,082 for the board game Monopoly. Play money was a big hit when there was so little of the real thing to go around in the Great Depression. It was such a success that it crossed the Atlantic in the following year. The poster below marketed the game in England in 1936. Played it more than once.

1999 The millennium observed around the world, while pedants declaimed it would be at the end of 2000. Despite the hype, the bug did not show.