Category: Practice

1792 Captain George Vancouver landed at the site that is now Vancouver though Wikipedia does not mention him in the entry on the city. He had earlier claimed King George Sound near Albany Western Australia for the crown. I have been to Rain City many times and it rained each time while I dined on sable, sturgeon, and halibut.

1912 Ottawa. The Chateau Laurier Hotel opened. Its owner was Charles Hays who had drowned a week earlier while travelling home for the event on the Titanic. Was it named for the Liberal Prime Minister of the time, Wilfred Laurier? Is it haunted by Hays’s ghost? While I stayed there once at a conference these questions I cannot answer.

1923 From Appleton Wisconsin Harry Houdini freed himself from a straight-jacket while suspended forty feet in the air upside down. He had toured Australia in 1910. He spent much of the latter part of his career debunking spiritualists and mediums who were defrauding the public. In do doing he clashed with Arthur Conan Doyle.

1931 The separate territories of North Australia and Central Australia were re-united as the Northern Territory. It had been entire until 1926 when it was split to make the vast real estate more manageable. However the Great Depression made it impossible to sustain two administrative centres, one in Alice Springs and one in Darwin, and the parts were re-united.

1991 Bois Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian Federation. The impossible happened when sales of vodka increased.

1183 BC Troy was sacked and burned according the calculations of Eratosthenes in 200 BC while he was the librarian at Alexandria. He also calculated the circumference of the earth with great accuracy for which he is recognised as a founder of geography. We have been to the site of the horse tamers.

1788 Russian explorer Gerasim Grigoriev Izmailov reached the Alaskan coast, sailing into Yakutat Bay searching for sea otters and other furred animals. He called it ‘Alaska’ from the Aleut word meaning peninsula.

1863 Sydney. In honour of the wedding of the Prince of Wales New South Wales Governor Richard Bourke arranged a demonstration of electric lighting on Macquarie Street, using arc lamps which burn very hot and emit noxious fumes.

1901 New Zealand annexed the Cook Islands. Today the Islands are a self-governing territory in association with New Zealand in foreign and defence matters, much like Tokelau and Niue.

1985 The unmanned Soviet space craft Vega 1 soft-landed a probe on Venus while it went to intercept Halley’s Comet at a distance of nine thousand kilometres and took five hundred pictures, showing a nucleus of fourteen kilometres in length with a rotation every fifty-three hours. Vega 1 now remains in orbit around the sun, causing some to worry that it is depleting the ozone layer.

1792 Captain George Vancouver landed at the site that is now Vancouver though Wikipedia does not mention him in the entry on the city. He had earlier claimed King George Sound near Albany Western Australia for the crown. Been to Rain City many times over the ages.

1912 Ottawa. The Chateau Laurier hotel opened. Its builder and owner was Charles Hays who had drowned a week earlier while travelling home the event on the Titanic. I stayed there once at a conference. Was it named for the incumbent Prime Minister, Wilfred Laurier? Does Mr Hays haunt it? Has the plumbing changed since 1912?

1923 From Appleton WI Harry Houdini freed himself from a straightjacket while suspended forty feet in the air upside down. He had toured Australia in 1910. He spent much of the latter part of his career debunking spiritualists and mediums who were defrauding the public. In do doing he clashed with Arthur Conan Doyle.

1931 The separate territories of North Australia and Central Australia were re-united as the Northern Territory. It had been entire until 1926 when it was split to make the vast real estate more manageable but sustaining two administrative centres (Darwin and Alice Springs) proved too expensive in the Great Depression. It has remained a vast singular entity since. We have been to Darwin twice and enjoyed it a lot and there is talk of visiting Alice Springs one day for the night sky.

1991 Bois Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian Federation. Sales of vodka increased. Now who does he remind me of today….? Is it President Tiny?

1752 In Philadelphia Benjamin Franklin flew a kite in a lightning storm and collected a charge in a Leyden jar. His aim was to prove that lightning in the sky and electricity were one and the same.

1907 The Lumière brothers Auguste and Louis’s process for colour photography called Autochrome Lumière went on the market. It had been patented in 1903. It dominated colour photography until the 1930s when new techniques superseded it. Theirs was a slow and expensive method that produced a soft and blurred image like that below.

1935 Dr. Robert H. Smith of Akron and Bill Wilson of New York City founded Alcoholics Anonymous with a twelve-step program based on psychological techniques related to personality traits in guided group discussions. Today at least 80,000 such discussion groups are in operation with two million participants. The example has inspired other addiction groups.

1948 The US Air Force announced that test pilot Chuck Yeager had flown an X-1 aircraft faster than the speed of sound, i.e., Mach 1+ on 14 October 1947. He inspired Tom Wolfe to write about the Mercury program.

1978 One of twenty-one known copies of the first printing of the Gutenberg Bible sold at a London auction for $2.4 million. The state library of Baden‐Wiirttemberg in Stuttgart bought it before a room crowded with five hundred people in an auction that lasted two minutes. That is nearly $10 million today. Amen.

1534 Jacques Cartier sailed into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence in search of a Northwest Passage to Asia on behalf of King Francis I of France. His explorations initiated French claims to Canada. He made two subsequent voyages to Quebec. He bears no relation to the watch-maker.

1549 The Book of Common Prayer was adopted by the Church of England, being the first prayer book written in English, and became the textbook for generations of learners as well as worshippers.

1891 Banker Paul Gaugin arrived in Pepeete, Tahiti to be a painter. Mario Vargas Llosha’s novel offers great insight into the painting and the man.

1915 Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan resigned in protest at President Woodrow Wilson’s handling of relations with Germany in the hope of arresting the drift of the administration into war. His example may have delayed it. A biography of this great commoner is discussed elsewhere on this blog.

1928 Charles Kingsford Smith landed in Brisbane, having flown across the Pacific Ocean from Oakland California via Suva in Fiji in nine days with three others in the crew.

1869 Chicago, Technology. Ives McGaffey patented the Whirlwind sweeping machine, a vacuum cleaner of sorts. It was bulky device with a belt driven fan cranked by hand to create suction, making it difficult to use with only two hands, and it soon disappeared.

1887 Herman Hollerith patented a punch card calculator while working at the Census Bureau. He had devised it while completing a PhD in engineering at Columbia University. His devices were used well into the Twentieth Century around the world. Indeed I learned FORTRAN programming in graduate school using punch cards. Woe betide a mix-up of card sequence. Through mergers and buy-outs in time his company was ingested into IBM.

1940 Bangkok. A military coup changed Siam’s name to Thailand to signal a break with the past of absolute monarchy. The name Thai-land means land of the free. It also has ethnic connotations that excluded those of Chinese origins, while including some peoples from neighbouring Laos and Vietnam in a Greater Thailand. These latter ambitions made it an ally of Japan for a time.

1951 Alice Springs. The School of the Air began to broadcast via shortwave radio lessons to children in remote locations over one million square kilometres or more. Adelaide Miethke had proposed it in 1944 but it was impossible to do during World War II. Tests began in 1950 and it was formally inaugurated the following year. It continues now in Queensland, West Australia, and the Northern Territory using the internet. Miethke was a long time champion of schools and teachers in South Australia per the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

1987 Wellington. New Zealand government legislated against nuclear weapons and nuclear powered ships, effectively taking itself out of alliance with the United States.

1494 Brokered by the Pope to affirm Christian unity against the Ottoman menace, Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas to divide the world between them.

1654 Paris, History. Louis XIV was crowned king. He became known as the Sun King and ruled until his death in 1715. The palace at Versailles was his creation. ‘L’état c’est moi’ is one of his most famous bons mots. Another is ‘Après moi, le deluge.’ He was a master manipulator of fractious nobles. A double posed for him, since he was too busy making war to do it.

1893 Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. A young lawyer refused to comply with seating arrangements in the first class carriage of a train and was forcibly ejected. This was Mohandas Gandhi’s first act of civil disobedience. He had bought a first-class ticket but was directed to the third class car where the coloured people travelled. No sooner was he off the train than he started to organise protests by travellers.

1905 Oslo. Norway parted from Sweden. It had been Swedish since 1814 and before that Danish. The territorial legislature in Oslo voted to secede in the picture below. Many Swedes became bellicose but in the end a peaceful dissolution was negotiated.

1914 Central America. The first vessel passed through the Panama Canal, making the United States a two-ocean power as never before. It was the SS Ancon pictured below.

1683 The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archeology opened in Oxford University. Elias Asmolean donated his collection of curiosities to seed the museum, which was then organised for teaching purposes. The building was designed by Christoper Wren. Feasted my eyes there.

1816 The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia caused the year without summer. On this day ten inches of snow fell in Massachusetts. The eruption was rated a 7, the only eruption on that level. It blew 150 cubic kilometres of matter into the atmosphere and killed 10,000 in the immediate vicinity. The debris reached forty-three kilometres into the stratosphere. The subsequent effects on agriculture, health, and trade have led to the conclusion that perhaps 90,000 people died as a result. There is a superb episode of Lord Bragg’s ‘In Our time’ about this apocalyptic year.

1844 In London George Williams founded the Young Men’s Christian Association to offer low cost housing to youths migrating to cities for work, as alternatives to taverns, pubs, brothels, and boarding houses. Bible reading and physical exercise were offered to keep things in order.

1859 Queensland separated from New South Wales to make it a self-governing colony. It quickly thereafter established the first parliament in Australia. Ever since Far North Queensland has agitated for separation from Brisbane.

1949 Eric Blair published ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four.’ He insisted that the number be spelled out, but I, for one, don’t know why, though I have read and re-read Bernard Crick’s magisterial edition, and had the pleasure once of seeing Crick discuss the book at Oxford. (Years later when I has Head of Department I found some discretionary funds to contribute to Crick’s visit to the University of Sydney.) People who have never read the book use some of its terminology, like Thought Police, Big Brother, Memory Hole, Thought Crime…. It all sounds like President Tiny as below.

1851 Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery story, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life among the Lowly’ began to appear in serial form in an abolitionist newspaper. It was published as a book in Boston in the next year and sold an astonishing 300,000 copies in twelve months. By 1857 more than two million copies had been sold, making her and the publisher very rich. She gave most of the money to the abolitionist cause. Simon Legree is a violent, crude, and corrupt slave owner in this story, and a Republican voter.

1929 Ramsey MacDonald formed a second minority Labour government in coalition with Lloyd George’s Liberals. The first had lasted nine months in 1924. MacDonald appointed the first woman to cabinet when Margaret Bondfield became Minister of Labour. Oswald Mosley was also in this cabinet. MacDonald offered self-government to India, short of independence. In reaction to the stresses of the Great Depression, the Labour Party split, expelling MacDonald who then lead a National Government dominated by Conservatives until 1935! No one in Britain would consider deficit spending as recommended by John Maynard Keynes and adopted by the Roosevelt administration across the Atlantic.

1933 Washington DC. The United States went off the gold standard, denying creditors the right to be paid in gold. It was one part of a general plan to accumulate gold reserves. In 1974 the Nixon Administration ruled that the US would never return to the gold standard and it has not.

1947 In a commencement address at Harvard University Secretary of State George Marshall laid out the need for what would become known as the Marshall Plan to reconstruct Europe. He described the parlous conditions he had seen in post-war Europe in contrast to the thriving USA. A biography of this giant is discussed elsewhere on this blog. By the way, his only son was killed at Anzio.

1956 Premier and First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev denounced Comrade Josef Stalin to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in a closed session. This was the so-called secret speech, lasting four hours. He detailed the scope, depravity, cruelty of Comrade Stalin and his many acolytes and supporters, some of whom were in attendance and sat in a stony silence. Though not published, the secret speech was widely circulated, e.g., a young Komsomol officer named Mikhail Gorbachev read it. There was considerable reaction from Stalin’s defenders and later they claimed that the speech encouraged the revolts in Poland and Hungary. Secret or not I found three different dates on the internet for it.

1070 The legendary date for the origin of blue cheese near Roquefort, France. According to the story a shepherd left a lunch of bread and ewe’s milk cheese in a cave and forgot about it until some months later when he returned to the area and found that mould had transformed the cheese. The mould comes from the soil of the local caves.

1717 London. The first Grand Lodge of Freemasonry was established. Its founding Premier compiled a history and constitution of Freemasonry tracing its roots back to Biblical Egypt. Hence the Egyptian motifs associated with Freemasonry. We visited a local lodge for enlightenment once and found it most entertaining. (Probably not the purpose of the evening, to be sure.) The numerous entries are Wikipedia are suitably gnomic.

1876 A transcontinental express train left New York City and arrived just over 83 hours later in San Francisco. It had crossed three thousand miles in less than four days. Wagons took four to six months to make the trip.

1919 Washington DC. In a joint resolution Congress approved the Nineteenth Amendment to enfranchise women and sent it to the states for ratification. The House vote was 304-89 and the Senate 56-25. A sufficient number of states ratified by January 1920 when Kentucky accepted it. Women’s work in World War I was credited with providing momentum.

1940 Twenty-two year old Carson McCullers published her first novel, ‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter,’ charting the lives of residents of a boarding house in a Georgia mill town. There is the deaf-mute narrator, the mentally unbalanced trouble maker, the teenage tomboy who wants to play the piano, the alcoholic labor organiser, the owner, and the black physician who hopes for the best against the odds of the time and place. In this and her subsequent books she gave voice to the rejected, the forgotten, the mistreated, the deformed, the broken and the oppressed from the inside out. No reader ever forgets her novels.