On This Day in History

[GhostDancer]

1642

 

Abel Tasman discovered Van Diemen's land, later renamed Tasmania.

 

1859

 

Darwin's Origin of Species was published.

 

1871

 

The National Rifle Association was incorporated.

 

1963

 

Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald, JFK's accused assassin, in the garage of Dallas police headquarters.

 

1971

 

D. B. Cooper parachuted from a Northwest Airlines flight with $200,000.

[GhostDancer]

1758

The British captured Fort Duquesne (Pittsburgh) in the French and Indian Wars.

1783

The British evacuated New York City, their last military position, after the Revolutionary War.

1841

The slaves who seized the Amistad in 1839 were freed by the Supreme Court. They had been defended by former president John Quincy Adams.

1947

Movie executives blacklisted the "Hollywood Ten."

1986

Iran-Contra scandal broke.

1998

Jiang Zemin became the first Chinese head of state to visit Japan since World War II.

1999

Elian Gonzalez was rescued off the coast of Florida.

2002

President George W. Bush signed into law the Department of Homeland Security and named Tom Ridge as head.

[GhostDancer]

1789

The first national Thanksgiving Day in the U.S. was proclaimed by President George Washington.

1922

Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon became the first to enter the tomb of King Tutankhamen (Tut) since it was sealed in 1323 B.C.

1940

The Nazis began to force Warsaw's Jews to live in a walled ghetto.

1950

China entered the Korean War.

1975

Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, a follower of Charles Manson, was found guilty of trying to assassinate President Ford.

1998

Tony Blair became the first British prime minister to speak to the Irish parliament.

2000

Katherine Harris certified George W. Bush the winner in Florida's presidential balloting.

[GhostDancer]

1852

Lord Byron's daughter Ada died. She had assisted Charles Babbage with his "analytical engine" and is credited with inventing computer language.

1895

Alfred Nobel signed his last will, which established the Nobel Prize.

1910

New York's Pennsylvania Station opened.

1953

Playwright Eugene O'Neill died in Boston at age 65.

1970

Pope Paul VI was attacked at the Manila airport by a Bolivian painter disguised as a priest.

1973

Gerald R. Ford was confirmed by the Senate to become vice president, succeeding Spiro T. Agnew.

2003

President Bush secretly flew to Iraq to spend Thanksgiving with the troops.

[Pariah]

1497

Portuguese explorer Vasco de Gama became the first navigator to sail around the Cape of Good Hope in his search for a sea route to India. 1718

Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard the pirate, was killed off the east coast of North America. 1842

Mount St. Helens in Washington state erupted. Ash fallout reached as far as 48 miles away. 1906

"S-O-S" was adopted as a distress signal at the International Radio Telegraphic Convention in Berlin. 1943

President Franklin Roosevelt, British prime minister Winston Churchill, and Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek met in Cairo to discuss measures for defeating Japan. 1963

President John F. Kennedy was assassinated while riding in a motorcade in Dallas. 1990

Margaret Thatcher announced her resignation as prime minister of the United Kingdom.

Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis both died the same day Kennedy was assassinated.

[GhostDancer]

1924

Italian composer Giacomo Puccini died in Brussels before he could complete his opera "Turandot.'"

1929

Commander Richard E. Byrd and a crew of three became the first to fly over the South Pole.

1947

The United Nations voted to grant the Jewish people a homeland to be established in Palestine.

1963

President Johnson named a commission headed by Earl Warren to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy.

1986

Actor Cary Grant died in Davenport, Iowa, at age 82.

2001

Beatle George Harrison died of cancer.

[GhostDancer]

1804

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase was tried for political bias.

1900

Irish author Oscar Wilde died in Paris at age 46.

1940

Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were married.

1966

Barbados became independent of Great Britain.

1974

The fossilized remains of a female human ancestor named Lucy (after the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds) were found in Ethiopia.

1993

The Brady Bill, requiring a five-day waiting period for handgun purchases, is signed.

1995

President Bill Clinton became the first U.S. president to visit Northern Ireland.

2004

Ken Jennings ended his 74-game winning spree on the game show, Jeopardy!

[Old Man]

On this day in 2013, Paul Walker died in a stupid but still tragic auto accident.

 

[L. Marcus]

Yesterday, the last of October, was the anniversary of the Battle of Narva.

[GhostDancer]

1824

The presidential election between John Q. Adams, Andrew Jackson, William Crawford, and Henry Clay was turned over to the House of Representatives due to the lack of an electoral-vote majority.

1887

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes appeared for the first time in print in the story "A Study in Scarlet."

1955

Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her front-section bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Ala.

1959

Twelve nations, including the United States, signed a treaty setting aside Antarctica as a scientific preserve free from military activity.

1997

Representatives from more than 150 countries gathered at a global warming summit in Kyoto, Japan, and over the course of ten days forged an agreement to control the emission of greenhouse gases. President Bush pulled the U.S. out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001.

1998

Exxon and Mobil agreed to merge, creating the world's largest corporation.

[GhostDancer]

1804

Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned emperor of France in Paris by Pope Pius VII.

1823

President James Monroe outlined his famous doctrine opposing European expansion in the Western Hemisphere.

1859

Abolitionist John Brown was hanged for his raid on Harper's Ferry.

1942

The first controlled nuclear chain reaction was demonstrated at the University of Chicago.

1954

The Senate voted to condemn Republican senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin for "conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute."

1970

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was established.

1982

Barney B. Clark became the first person to receive an artificial heart in a transplant operation.

1988

Benazir Bhutto was sworn in as the Prime Minister of Pakistan, becoming the first woman to head an Muslim nation.

1990

Composer Aaron Copland died at age 90.

1999

A Protestant and Catholic cabinet convened for the first time in Northern Ireland.

2001

Enron Corp., under CEO Kenneth Lay, filed for bankruptcy.

[GhostDancer]

1776

The first scholastic fraternity in America, Phi Beta Kappa, was organized at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.

1791

Composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in Vienna, Austria, at age 35.

1848

President Polk triggered the Gold Rush of 1848 by confirming that gold had been discovered in California.

1872

Having left New York on Nov. 5, the brigantine Mary Celeste was found adrift off Portugal with everyone aboard mysteriously missing.

1933

The 21st Amendment to the Constitution, repealing prohibition, was ratified.

1955

The American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations merged to form the AFL-CIO.

2002

At Sen. Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday celebration, Senate Republican leader Trent Lott praised Thurmond's 1948 segregationist presidential bid. Lott subsequently resigned his leadership position.

[GhostDancer]

1884

Construction of the Washington Monument was completed.

1889

Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederate States of America, died in New Orleans.

1923

A presidential address was broadcast on the radio for the first time when Calvin Coolidge spoke before Congress.

1926

French impressionist painter Claude Monet died at age 86.

1973

Gerald Ford was sworn in as vice president, replacing Spiro T. Agnew.

1992

The destruction of a mosque in India by Hindu extremists set off two months of Muslim-Hindu fighting that claimed at least 2,000 lives.

1998

Hugo Chavez elected president of Venezuela.

[GhostDancer]

 

1787

Delaware became the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.

1917

The U.S. declared war on Austria-Hungary in World War I.

1941

The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

1972

America's final moon mission, Apollo 17, blasted off from Cape Canaveral.

1975

Indonesia invaded East Timor, leading to a 25-year occupation.

1988

A 6.9 magnitude earthquake hit Armenia, killing 25,000.

2001

Taliban forces fled from Kandahar, their last stronghold in Afghanistan.

2002

Iraq formally declared to the UN that it had no weapons of mass destruction.

2004

Hamid Karzai was sworn in as Afghanistan's first popularly elected president.

[Old Man]

On this day 75 years ago, I guess something happened around here, some sort of fracas, or affray.

 

On this day today, many ceremonies and observances are taking place regarding the previously mentioned event.

[Cancer]

Not many living participants of that event left, I would guess.

[Cassandra]

1941 - Japan Attacks Pearl Harbor.

 

2011 - Actor Harry Morgan dies.

[Old Man]

Not many living participants of that event left, I would guess.

 

A couple thousand.  The USS Arizona survivors are almost gone though.

[GhostDancer]

 

1854

Pope Pius IX proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

1886

The American Federation of Labor was founded at a convention of union leaders in Columbus, Ohio.

1941

Congress declared war on Japan and the U.S. entered World War II.

1949

Communist attacks forced the Chinese Nationalist government to flee to the island of Formosa (Taiwan).

1978

Former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir died.

1980

John Lennon, former member of the Beatles, was shot and killed in New York City by a deranged fan.

1987

President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the first treaty to reduce the nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers.

1993

President Bill Clinton signed The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) into law.

[GhostDancer]

1941

China declared war against Japan, Germany, and Italy.

1958

The anti-Communist John Birch Society was formed.

1965

"A Charlie Brown Christmas" premiered.

1990

Lech Walesa was elected president of Poland.

1993

U.S. astronauts completed repair work on the Hubble Space Telescope.

1996

Archaeologist and anthropologist Mary Leakey died in Kenya at age 83.

[Cancer]

...

1993

U.S. astronauts completed repair work on the Hubble Space Telescope.

(Cancer lapses into "Witness to History" mode)

 

The results of the Hubble First Service Mission (the repair) were announced less than a month after the work was done, at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society, which happens the first full week of January each year. In January 1994 the meeting was in Washington DC. I was there, not specifically to see that announcement, but it was on my list of talks to attend.

 

My wife went with me (we'd been married less than 18 months, and she'd never been to DC before), intending to do the inevitable tourist things at the nation's capital while I did the science meeting things. Her plan worked for about two days, at which point a cold front came in, the temperature dropped 30 degrees overnight, and the day's high was 17 F. Lots of stuff closed for the cold, though no snow came with it. My wife hadn't brought her cold gear, so walking around the Mall was no longer really practical. Consequently, she was with me in the room for the session where the results of the Hubble repair were announced.

 

Unfortunately, I don't remember the speaker's name. The people in the room were mostly astronomers, but there was a large minority of non-scientists there as well; this was beyond all doubt a major news announcement no matter what was said. The speaker had a folder full of overhead projector transparencies, which he set down on the lectern, smirked at the audience, and tipped what he was about to say with the comment, "We got the sign right." Then he launched into his prepared hour-long presentation.

 

(Technical comment: the HST mirror was hardly the first or largest orbiting telescope mirror made. It was, however, the first one that was unclassified; all the others were intelligence satellites, with secret ratings. The military and the intelligence agencies had put in the contracts for those early telescopes that the opticians who did the work were prohibited from working on non-secret work ... this was Cold War-era boilerplate to prevent technology transfer to the dirty Commies. HST, being an international project from the beginning, was always unclassified, not secret. Though they were approached to get a waiver to the no-tech-transfer clause, the security agencies would not budge. Consequently, Perkin-Elmer had to use a rookie optician when figuring the Hubble primary mirror. Inevitably, he made a rookie mistake, leaving out the thickness of a spacer washer in the numbers used by the computer-operated figuring engine that did the work. In what was probably the only real management error NASA committed here, they did not perform an independent check of the mirror figure (remember, HST was years behind schedule and rather over budget, in no small part because of the disaster of the destruction of the shuttle Challenger and deaths of seven astronauts in 1986). Consequently, the mirror was very precisely ground ... to the wrong figure. This was apparent almost immediately after the the telescope was launched, and in between the analysis of the images, and inquiry into the fabrication, the mistake made was established. The only possible uncertainty was in the sign of the deviation from the right figure; for small deviations -- and this was a small deviation -- the pattern of the distorted images doesn't have information about which way, too flat or too curved, the mirror is misfigured, though it tells you quite nicely the magnitude of how much it's off. The "sign" he referred to was this ambiguity of too flat versus too curved. That wasn't a guess, coming as it did from the reconstruction of the fabrication process, though analysis of the astronomical images did have that ambiguity.

 

That first Hubble repair included installing a new camera, which included corrective optics in it, and sacrificed one science instrument for COSTAR, which extended corrective lenses into the light paths of the other science instruments in the other three axial instrument bays. Subsequent missions have replaced all the original instruments and COSTAR, and those later replacements include their own optics making corrections for the misfigured primary mirror.)

 

As we all know, the repair mission was a success. The speaker showed before-and-after images, including the famous "pillars of creation" picture that made the cover of Newsweek. Breathtaking stuff. Beautiful images.

 

But near the end, he showed another transparency, one which most people would call positively ugly. It was strictly a black-and-white scatter dot plot, the kind of thing that comes out of a data reduction package for immediate inspection of data results so the human can judge that the just-taken step was done correctly, and it could well have been a transparency made that morning made from a plot the speaker had been given mere hours before. I have a hard time finding plots that ugly nowadays; the only thing close to comparable in format are those near the bottom of this, but even those have been "prettied up" compared to the quick-look style of the figure the speaker showed. He said nothing to along with the figure. The only legend to it was "M4" at the top, in the same crude typeface as the axis labels.

 

For the first and only time in the session, the speaker was interrupted. Half the room started applauding: the astronomer half. The laypeople were completely flabbergasted, and (since I joined in on the applause) my wife pulled at my arm wanting to know what this ugly was that everyone was applauding, when we'd sat impassive through the most beautiful astronomical images yet shown on Earth a few minutes earlier.

 

The figure was a Hertzprung-Russell diagram, which is probably the most stereotypical kind of graph astronomy has. Every astronomer knows what it is and how to read it and what it shows; it is one of the foundation stones of stellar astrophysics. The "M4" at the top referred to the globular star cluster Messier 4, one of the nearest of these clusters, which were at the time the most ancient things for which we could estimate real ages for from knowledge of stellar astrophysics.

 

In the plot, for the first time, there were a handful of data points clumped together down in the lower left part of the graph: these represented intrinsically faint, fairly hot stars, that have to be tiny. These are white dwarfs, the remnants of stars which no longer have nuclear reactions, and are simply cooling off after losing their nuclear source. How bright they are and how cool they are can tell you how old the stars are, and with globular star clusters being the most ancient things we can get ages for, if you can see these things, the white dwarfs can give you the age of oldest things you know about. They had to be there in the globular clusters, but they are impossible to see using groundbased telescopes. They were among the targets HST was intended to observe, but the misfigured primary mirror rendered impossible to measure.

 

That ugly, inexplicable dot diagram told the astronomers immediately, directly, and unambiguously, in ways that no long verbal expostulation could, that the telescope was finally ready to do the science it had been built to do.

[GhostDancer]

1817

Mississippi became the 20th state in the United States.

1869

The territory of Wyoming authorized women to vote and hold office.

1901

The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in Stockholm, Sweden, in the fields of physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace.

1948

The United Nations General Assembly adopted its Universal Declaration on Human Rights.

1950

Dr. Ralph Bunche became the first black to receive a Nobel Peace Prize.

1964

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., received the Nobel Peace Prize.

1999

Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee was arrested and charged with stealing classified information.

2004

A U.S. passenger jet landed in Vietnam, the first one to do so since the Vietnam War ended nearly three decades earlier.

[GhostDancer]

No kiddie without a Christmas https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10157841294125510&substory_index=0&id=249015940509

[GhostDancer]

1816

Indiana became the 19th state.

1844

Nitrous oxide was used for the first time in dentistry.

1936

King Edward VIII abdicated the throne of Britain for the woman he loved, Mrs. Wallis Simpson.

1941

Germany and Italy declared war on the United States.

1946

The United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) was established.

1994

Russian troups invaded Chechnya in an unsuccessful attempt to restore Moscow's power in the region.

1997

Housing secretary Henry Cisneros was indicted for conspiracy, obstructing justice, and false statements to the FBI.

[GhostDancer]

 

1787

Pennsylvania became the second state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.

1870

Joseph Rainey took his seat as the first African American in the U.S. House of Representatives.

1913

The Mona Lisa was recovered in Florence after having been stolen two years earlier (August 1911) from the Louvre.

1963

Kenya gained its independence from Britain.

1998

The House Judiciary Committee approved a fourth and final article of impeachment against President Clinton.

2000

The U.S. Supreme Court stopped the presidential election recount in Florida.

2001

Yasir Arafat closed the offices of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.