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.
23 January
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.
22 January
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.
‘The Hat Box Mystery’ (1947)
IMDb meta-data 44 minutes, rated 5.3 by 74 cinematizens.
Genre: mystery, comedy
Verdict: Padded even at 44 minutes.
It opens with the characters introducing themselves to the fourth wall. Never seen that before or since.
PI Tom leaves his Squeeze in charge of the office while he does mens business. A client appears and Squeeze accepts an assignment to take a picture of a woman in a divorce case. What can go wrong?
Well, to avoid being seen with a camera it is hidden in the titular hat box. Got it?
Well get this, Squeeze does not look into the hat box but takes the client’s word for it. This client is wearing a stick-on goatee, a greasy wig, and looks like he missed the clown car. Dutifully Squeeze stakes out the target and when she appears, Squeeze deploys the hat box and discovers that within is a gun not a camera, and she really did shoot the woman. Bang! Dumb!
Tom returns to sort this out. No one noticed until the last five minutes that the gun in the hat box was Tom’s very own gat which Goatee had snitched from Squeeze’s desk while she was licking the tip of a pencil to write a receipt. Nor did anyone realise until the last five minutes that the murder bullet did — Spoiler alert! — not come from the gun in the hat box.
It gets sillier as it goes on. Yet it went on … to a sequel, ‘The Case of the Baby Sitter’ (1947).
There is an in-joke. The ubiquitous Allen Jenkins is Tom’s gofer and he is nicknamed ‘Harvard’ because he did not go to Yale. Get it? No, me neither. See below for the explanation.
Tom Neal stars as Tom. He was a privileged scion with a Harvard law degree who was better known in Hollywood for fistfights, adultery, allegations of rape, drunk-driving, and finally a murder trial. It seems someone shot his wife in the head. He served six years for manslaughter. Justice is certainly blind. However he was finally blacklisted and he disappeared from the silver screen.
When the credits start with Robert Lippert’s name, we all know it is a Filene’s Basement production.
21 January
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.
‘Old Flames’ (2003) by John Lawton
Good Reads meta-data is 529 pages, rated 3.9 by 759 citizens
Genre: Krimi
Verdict: Oh hum
Another in a long series of the adventures of Inspector Fredrick Troy. In it he crosses the path of Kim Philby’s network of Soviet spies in England. As always in these krimis Troy finds incompetence vying with corruption in the English policing, politics, and society. He, like Christopher Foyle, is alone virtuous. All other are fallen.
Troy continues to feel sorry for himself though the early years of the Cold War in 1956. He combines upper class snobbery with world weary ennuni. He is a man of many parts. On the one hand every short-changing newsagent sets him off on the lecture about the corruption of the British, while on the other he accepts or ignores his brother-in-law’s admission of murder, his wife’s years as a Soviet agent whose work no doubt took lives, and a traitorous old school tie. The sanctimonious Troy evidently sees no contradiction in any of this hypocrisy. There is, alas, no reason to think any of this is ironic.
There are estimates that the information Philby supplied to the KGB led to the torture and murder of about sixty individuals, and the imprisonment of more. The victims were largely anti-Soviet nationals in Central and Southern Europe. None of these events bothers Troy as much as a Special Branch officer demanding to see his ID.
In character Troy is exactly the sort of disaffected child of privilege that the Soviets recruited. This is an irony beyond the author’s ken.
The plot is intricate but it takes a millennium for it to evolve. Every page is padded with lengthy and pointless descriptions, e.g., of the cracking brickwork of a train station, or the clothes of woman. I gave up reading most of this descriptions since it did not contribute to plot or character.
It is well-written true. The plot, when it finally emerges, is neat. The characters are diverse. But…. well, it seemed like a very long short story that went nowhere for scores of chapters. I flipped through a third of it without losing the thread. Maybe more. Nor did I feel like I was missing anything.
There are discussions of other Lawton titles on this blog. Seek and find.
20 January
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.
19 January
1825 Ezra Daggett and son-in-law Thomas Kensett patented food storage in hermetically sealed tin cans. They switched from jars which broke to tin containers for fish, fruit, and vegetables.
1915 George Claude patented the first neon tube in patent no, 1,125,476. He had first displayed neon tubes in Paris in 1910. His company held a virtual monopoly on neon lighting into the 1930s because of this patent.
1937 Howard Hughes flew non-stop from Burbank CA to Newark NJ in seven hours and 22 minutes. In 1936 he had done it in nine hours and 27 minutes. All of this before he entered his full nutso phase. In 2003 a Concorde did the trip in just under four hours.
1966 Australia’s longest-serving Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, retired. He out manoeuvred many rivals and opponents, while weathering many a storm.
1983 The Apple Lisa the first commercial personal computer to have a graphical user interface and a computer mouse. The Lisa was targeted at businesses and cost $9,995 (about $25,258.61 today) and because of that price tag it languished. Apple does not always get it right. However today Maserati is small potatoes compared to Apple, as indicated by the pathetic newspaper advertisements it now runs.
18 January
1535 Francisco Pizarro founded the city of Lima in Peru. I only know it through novels like Isaac Goldemberg’s ‘Remember the Scorpion,’ discussed elsewhere on this blog, and many titles from Mario Vargas Llosa. In short order the Spanish extracted so much silver from Peru in pieces of eight that it drove the value of the metal down. In 1551 the first university in the new world was founded there. it figured in the world news today. Yuck.
1788 Captain Arthur Phillip and the First Fleet of 736 British convicts arrived at Botany Bay. These days it is described as The Invasion. What a bedraggled set of invaders they must have been. First in Botany Bay, then Manly Cove, and finally Sydney Harbour.
1778 The English explorer Captain James Cook became the first European to see the Hawaiian Islands. He named them for the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Sandwich. Hawaii is our second home.
1912 Robert Scott and party reached the South Pole to discover that Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian explorer, had preceded them by just over a month. It got worse. Not on our itinerary.
1919 Bentley Motors Limited was founded. Seen a few but never been in one.
17 January
1773 Captain James Cook’s ship, the ‘Resolution,’ became the first recorded ship to cross the Antarctic Circle.
1819 Simón Bolívar, the “Liberator,” proclaimed Columbia a republic. Though he himself was hardly a republican. A review of the biography below is to be found elsewhere on this blog.
1821 Mexico permitted three hundred American families to settle in Texas. The Austin family land grant is represented below. We saw the original in the museum in Austin. These three hundred became known as the Old Three Hundred in Texas society. A regime change in Mexico City soured relations with the immigrants in short order. The new regime also alienated the Mexicans living in Texas who allied with the immigrants.
1917 The United States paid Denmark $25 million for the Virgin Islands. Denmark had little capacity to control the islands, while the United States feared that if Denmark fell into German hands, then U-Boats might be stationed there. The Islands were regarded as forward defence of the Panama Canal.
1949 The Volkswagen Beetle went on sale in the United States. Two were sold. We have each owned one and ridden in many others.
