Category: Practice

1805 Lewis and Clarke reached the Pacific Ocean, having started in Washington D.C., and using Pittsburgh as the base camp.

1863 Sixteenth President Abraham Lincoln delivered 272 words at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Here’s a fun exercise time-wasters. Imagine how Faux News would bastardise this speech today.

1872 Edmund Barbour of Boston patented the first adding machine capable of printing totals and subtotals. One of his early model is pictured.

1903 Carrie Nation attempted to address the Senate on demon rum from the visitor’s gallery. Earlier she had tried to corner President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House but he was too fast for her. She was 6 feet tall and led numerous hatchetations in which saloons were destroyed from Kentucky, Kansas, to Texas and back.

1926 At the Imperial Conference in London the Balfour Declaration proclaimed Britain and its dominions to have equal constitutional status. In led to the 1931 Statue of Westminster which made it official that the dominions were sovereign.

When What
1477 William Caxton published the first printed book in England, Earl Rivers’s ‘Sayings of the Philosophers.’ Books, we have read a few.

1838 Scottish businessman and chairman of the South Australian Company, George Fife Angas, sponsored twenty-one German Lutherans who arrived in South Australia. More followed in short order. Some settled in Hahndorf which we visited in August 2018.

1865 Mark Twain published his first story, ‘The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.’ Read it in high school.

1883 At noon American and Canadian railroads begin using four continental time zones to end the confusion of dealing with thousands of local times. US Congress enacted time zones in 1918. It ended the distinction between town time and railroad time in thousands of places. See Jo Barnett’s ‘Times Pendulum’ (1999) tells some of this story. I found the book unfocussed and did not discuss it on the blog.

1963 Bell Telephone in the US began to market push button telephones to replace rotary dial phones. The charm of the pulse dial was lost, replaced by tone. No doubt Luddites mourned its passing.

1558 Elizabeth became queen of England at twenty-five and so began the Elizabethan Age.

1869 The Suez Canal opened to shipping traffic. A Pharaonic canal once existed but was lost due to neglect. This canal began in 1854 employing 2.5 million workers, of whom 125,000 died on the job! That is from Wikipedia. Today 14% world trade passes through it, mainly to the states of the Persian Gulf.

1875 Occult spiritualist Mme Helena Blavatsky founded the American Theosophical Society. Let the table rapping begin! Spiritualism with spectres, table raps, séances, and more became a trope in the popular culture. The harvest of dead in the Great War gave it re-newed impetus.

1913 The first ship passed through the Panama Canal from the Atlantic to Pacific Ocean. It was an enormous strategic asset to the United States for three generations. I read McCullough’s book years ago and found it excellent.

1970 Douglas Engelbart patented the first computer mouse. It was ridiculed and disparaged by the experts. Behold below Mouse Number One.

534 Justinian declared his code of laws. It codified and simplified Roman law as it stood at the time for the Eastern Empire at Constantinople. Been there and see some of his works.

1821 William Becknell reached Santa Fe on the route that became known as the Santa Fe Trail. Kate’s mother grew up in New Mexico.

1913 Marcel Proust published ‘Swann’s way,’ the first volume of ‘Á recherche du Temps perdue.’ Read most of it.

1945 UNESCO founded in Geneva. It has done many good works.

1989 South African government of F. W. de Klerk rescinded the Separate Amenities Act, the first step in dismantling apartheid.

1791 At Rose Hill in NSW grape vines were planted which survived and started Australian wine cultivation. The site is a race course now and the grapes have gone to the Hunter Valley.

1881 American Federation of Labor was founded in Pittsburg uniting crafts unions for the first time. Samuel Gompers became its president and remained that for twenty years. We have a graduate of Samuel Gompers High School down the street.

1904 King Gillette patented the Gillette razor blade. Royalty indeed. King was a family name which his parents bestowed on him as a first name. I never use anything else but Gillette.

1920 Forty-one nations opened the first League of Nations session in Geneva. Below is the unofficial logo of the League.

1948 Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King retired after 22 years in office. His anointed successor was Quebecois Louis St-Laurent. King was never without a dog as a familiar. He no doubt occulted his long dead mother, as he frequently did. I meant to type ‘consulted his mother’ but, well, ‘occulted’ fits. His peculiarities are discussed in other posts on this blog. Go for it!

1732 First professional librarian in North America, Louis Timothee, was hired in Philadelphia at the Library Company which still exists. He was a multi-lingual protegé of Benjamin Franklin. Hmm, librarians.

1889 The American journalist, Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Cochrane Seaman), followed the footsteps of fictional character Phileas Fogg from Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. She started in Hoboken and came back 72 days later. She had made a career as an undercover journalist whose exposés of the conditions in a workhouse, an asylum, and a factory made her name. I have flown around the world a couple of times when those tickets were cheaper than point-to-point return tickets.

1922 The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) began the first daily radio broadcasts from Marconi House which I have walked by it in Aldwych a few times. Still listening to the BBC4.

1971 NASA’s Mariner 9 entered Mars’ orbit after 167 days in space. This was the first craft to orbit Mars and returned 7329 images over the course of its mission. Confession time: I have small Mars globe on my desk which is partly based on the data from Mariner 9.

1994 The Eurostar passenger trains between London, Paris and Brussels was launched carrying passengers through the newly completed Channel Tunnel, the train reaches speeds of 186 MPH or 299 KPH. Ridden EuroStar a couple of times but not the one pictured below mysteriously abandoned in the Ardenne forest of Belgium.

1474 Near Belfort, a Swiss army without William Tell defeated a French effort to conquer Switzerland in the Burgundian War. The threat united the peoples of Alps as never before and they stayed that way.

1835 Texas proclaimed its independence from Mexico, and became an independent and sovereign state (until 1845) with Sam Houston as its first president. A biography of Houston is discussed elswhere on this blog.

1895 First shipment of canned Dole pineapples from Hawaii. Still shipping. We have been to the original Dole plantation on Oahu, and another on Maui. Yum, yum.

1953 ‘Robin Hood’ was banned from Indiana state school libraries because it was communist. Oh, oh, watched it every Thursday evening about that time. Did not know he was Red Robin, thought that was a bird in the spring.

1981 The Canadarm, a robotic space arm (the first of five) was deployed on the Space Shuttle Columbia. They were used on more than 90 missions over 30 years. They originated in a Quebec engineering firm.

1859 Jules Leotard performed the first flying trapeze circus act in Paris wearing a garment he designed for the purpose which has since borne his name. Cannot say I have ever donned one.

1900 Art Nouveau style dominated the Exposition Universelle (World’s Fair) in Paris which closed after 50 million visitors. The style uses natural forms, following the Arts and Crafts movement of the previous century. The Exposition disseminated it around the world with those millions of visitors. An enduring example are the Métro entrances like the one pictured. Been on many a Métro ride.

1919 Brothers Ross and Keith Smith with two others in the crew flew from England to Australia in 27 days. Prime Minister Billie Hughes of Australia offered a prize of £10,000 for the first flight from England in less than 30 days to develop an air link to Old Blighty. That was a fortune at the time. There were six starters but only one finisher. Flown the Kangaroo Route many a time, all in less than twenty-seven days. Whew!

1923 Adolf Hitler was arrested for attempt to seize power during Beer Hall Putsch. We forget that the Nazi party vigorously campaigned in many elections and won many of them. That was the voice of the people. For details see my chapter ‘Democratic Theory and Practice’ in Australian Politics, Rodney Smith (ed.) (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989, 1992, 1997), pp. 35-50.

1966 Buzz Aldrin took a selfie performing extra-vehicular activity in space during the Gemini program. Aldrin remained a tireless advocate for space exploration and a bane to flat earthers. Go, Buzz! Check him out on You Tube.

1675 German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz demonstrated integral calculus for the first time to find the area under the graph of y = f(x) function. The foundation calculus as some know it today, but not me.

1880 Irish tenants and harvest workers employed in Ballinrobe by land agent Charles Boycott ostracised him, leading to the term ‘boycott.’ Boycott was refused service in shops, drapers, livery stables, saloons, and people crossed the street rather than pass him by. It was a giant cause célèbre at the time and led to army intervention to force labor. While Boycott worked for Lord Erne who owned vast acreage, it was Boycott himself who was target because he was regarded as arrogant, oppressive, and brutal. He became, briefly, a hero in England and wasshowered with honours for taking the whip to those primitive Irish.

1918 The armistice to end The Great War came into effect. Amen. The front page of the Sydney Morning Herald for this date is behind a paywall so I used the freely available one from the New York Times. During the war it was called The Great War. Afterward the Department of Defense asked U.S. President Woodrow Wilson about filing the mountain of paperwork generated for the war, he said call it ‘The World War’ because it involved action around the world. On how it all started there is no better source that Barbara Tuchman, ‘The Guns of August’ (1962). This book influenced the Cuban Missile Crisis.

1933 One of the worst windstorms of the Dust Bowl blew from South Dakota to Kansas and on to Texas. and lasted more than a week. In one year an estimated 850 million tons of top soil disappeared in the wind, some of falling as far away as New York City, Boston, Philadelphia. First came insects, then drought, and then wind. Then the cycle repeated itself until there was nothing but dust left over a five-year period. The times they were apocalyptic.

1975 Australian Governor-General John Kerr dismissed the elected government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam. The history wars over this event continue. I was listening to the radio at home when the news came. The exercise of the powers of the Governor-General were destroyed in their exercise may be the judgement of history. Nicholas Hasluck’s novel ‘The Dismissal’ (2011) is a long cool worm’s eye view of this totemic event when the goal posts moved.

When What
1871 At Ujiji near Unyanyembe in Africa Henry Morton Stanley said, “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” David Livingstone was one of many who sought the origin of the Nile River. Below is a map of his treks.

1903 Mary Anderson patented a “window cleaning device for electric cars and other vehicles to remove snow, ice, or sleet from the window.” She got the idea riding electric street cars in rain. It became standard equipment on automobiles by 1913.

1911 The Andrew Carnegie Foundation took legal form. One of its major efforts was to build free public libraries like the one in which I learned to read and read. The Carnegie Foundation built the building ain 1903 before the Foundation was incorporated and the local community paid for its collection, staff, and upkeep. Been unable to shake the habit ever since.

1928 The first installment of ‘Im Westen nichts Neues’ by Erich Maria Remarque was published. He had been in the western trenches at 18, wounded five times: gassed, shot, bayoneted, hit by shrapnel, and shot again. In 1933 the book was burned and he fled to Switzerland. In 1938, his German citizenship was revoked on the grounds that he had NOT done war service, making him a stateless person. In 1943 his sister was judicially murdered for his crimes. Her surviving sister was charged 495.80 Reichsmark for the murder. Sounds like something Faux News would make-up, but all too true, unlike Faux News.

1969 Sesame Street debuted on PBS television. It was conceived and promoted by Joan Cooney, a former documentary producer for public television. Muppet characters, created by Jim Henson, are as varied as the human cast, like the crew of the Enterprise in 1966. Imagine how many of the original cast today would be excised by President Tiny Twit.