Calendar Highlights

The Dangers of Chewing bubble Gum in Class

The flower of the month  is the Rose

And the Rock of the Month is the Pearl

June Birthstone: The Pearl

Apologia -  "I am constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fix'd and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament."……….Julius Caesar - Julius Caesar (III, i, 60 – 62)

You may note that several June dates do not have our usual elucidation and occasional exaggeration, pithy quotes, and song lyrics as well as yiddish comments.  As the Gnus has grown, Professor Sy Yentz has found summer months to be a challenge for Gnus expansion from the original cut and pastes of several years ago. Golf rules the summer for the retiree. Rest assured that off line we have gathered the forces of Wikipedia, Today in Science History, Today in Sports, Today in Movie History, This Day in History and all our secondary sources in giant lists of daily events.  As the weather cools, we will double check and expand each to make it our own.We hope to complete the entire Gnus by the end of 2010. Gay ga zinta hate (Go in good health). Or –

Vos may nota ut plures June balanus operor non have nostrum usitas elucidation quod aliquando exaggeration pithy laudo , quod carmen lyrics pariter ut yiddish ineo. Ut Gnus has adultus , Magister Sy Yentz has instituo estas mensis futurus a challenge pro Gnus laxamentum ex exemplar incidere quod crustulum of plures annus abhinc. Golf sceptrum estas pro decessor. Sileo certe certo ut off versus nos have recolligo copiae copie of Wikipedia , Hodie in Scientia History , Hodie in Lusum , Hodie in Movie History , Is Dies in History quod totus nostrum secundus radix in giant album of cotidie vices. Ut tempestas frigus , nos mos geminus reprehendo quod impendo sulum facio is nostrum own.We spes perpetro universus Gnus per terminus of 2010. Or -

1.        1812 -President Madison asked congress to declare war on England.

             1849 -Happy Birthday, Edgar F. and Freelan O. Stanley, American inventors, twin brothers, the most famous manufacturers of steam-driven automobiles. You may remember the Stanley Steamer.

            1864 -The Battle of Cold Harbor. Coming less than a month after the battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania in which for Robert E. Leewere pyrrhic victories - strategically successful but the lost soldiers could not(unlike Grant who suffered even larger losses) be replaced, Cold Harbor was oneof the biggest disasters of the war for the Union as on June 3, Grant sent waveupon wave of troops to be slaughtered as they attacked well entrenchedConfederate troops.

             1869- Thomas Edison of Boston, Mass., received his first patent. It was for an "electrographic vote recorder." The device was the first of its kind, and would enable a legislatorto register a vote either for or against an issue by turning a switch to theright or left. The original may have still been used in general elections, first in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004.

            1875 -Alexander P.Ashbourne received a patent for a "Process Preparing Cocoanut for DomesticUse"

             1880-The first pay telephone service in the United States, for public use went into service.The toll was given to an attendant. It was installed by the Connecticut Telephone Co. in their office atYale Bank Building at State and Chapel Streets in New Haven, CT. Later that day the first coin was lost in the phone.

             1886- BlackAmerican inventor W.H. Richardson was issued a patent for a "CottonChopper"

            1909-Thomas A. Edison received a patent for "Shaft-Coupling" . It must have been important as many people continue to get shafted to this day.

            1920, Thomas A. Edisionreceived a patent for "Composition of Matter for Sound-Records or the Like andProcess" .

            1947-The first photosensitive glass was                         made in Corning, NY (“no pictures       please”).

            1961 - And now we can listen to Beyonce singing the best of Pat Boone - FM stereo broadcasting was authorized to begin in the U.S. when on this date the Federal Communications Commission received its first notifications of such regular operation, from WEFM Chicago and WGFM Schenectady. Both stations had previously experimented with stereo broadcasting, as had others. 

            2002-  "Turn out the lights!" The first national law prohibiting "light pollution" went into effect. The Czech Republic became  the first nation to outlaw excess outdoor light. All outdoor light fixtures in the country must be shielded to ensure light goes only in the direction intended, and not above the horizontal. Czech astronomers had lobbied for the legislation.

Back to Calendar

2.       

455 –Wednesday-  The pump don’t work cause the Vandals took the handle…..Bob Dylan……..The Vandals entered Rome, and plunder the city for two weeks. Yes, entire Idaho St. student body attacked the Eternal City in a desperate search for potatoes.  Vandals were originally Germanic tribes inhabiting [living in] East Germany in the 3rd century B.C. In AD 270 they invaded Romania and Hungary near the Danube River, part of the Roman Empire. Emperor Constantine was forced to make a treaty and give them land there. Around this time, Attila and the Huns (a famous Budapest doo wop singing group) were also threatening Rome. In in 451, one of his generals Aëtius won a major victory over Attila in Gaul. In 454, Valentinian had Aëtius killed out of jealousy and fear he would try to take over. However, two of Aëtius generals and supporters assassinated Valentinian in 455. Rome was without a leader.  Enter the Vandals, stage right.  Valentinian’s widow,  Eudocia, had invited them.  She had been forced to marry his successor, Maximus, and was out for revenge. Pope Leo met with Vandal leader Gaiseric outside the city gates, and persuaded him to have mercy on the people of Rome. The Vandals then proceeded to sack Rome for 14 days, taking all the art and treasure they could find. The good news was that as per Leo's request, there was no murder, arson, or torture.  Gaiseric was a formidable ruler, as shown by the conquests of the Vandals. After his death in 477 AD, the forces weakened, and they were conquered in a single campaign by the Romans.

            1098 –Thursday-  During the First Crusade, the eight month Siege of Antioch ended as Christian forces took the city. As so often happens with sieges, sneaky betrayal, not military force won the day.  One of the Christian leaders, ohemund of Taranto, secretly contacted an Armenian named Firouz who commanded one of the city's gates. After receiving a bribe, Firouz opened gate on the night of June 2/3, allowing the crusaders to storm the city.
    

            1686-Sunday- The publication of Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica ("Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy"), known to posterity as the Principia. was arranged in London at the Royal Society. The minutes of the meeting record that the astronomer Edmund Halley would "undertake the business of looking afte rit and printing it at his own charge." The New York  Times Book Review felt that Newton had gotten over his inertia and understood the gravity of the situation but that many of his arguments were elliptical. And it was all the result of a bet.  The great architect and mathematician, Christopher Wren made a wager as to why the shape of a planet’s orbit is an ellipse. He offered a prize of 40 shillings (about 2 weeks pay). He wagered with…Robert Hooke and Edmund Halley.  Hooke, notorious for taking credit for the work of others,  said he knew already but wouldn’t tell them on the grounds that it would rob others of the satisfaction of making the discovery for themselves.Halley went to see his friend, Isaac Newton.  Newton agreed it was an ellipse because, as he said, “I have calculated it”.  However, he couldn’t find any of the work Now we know where students get it from. He agreed to re do the calculations and provide a paper.He did as he promised. He worked on it for two years and added a bit more….He ended up writing Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, The Principia.   It not only explained mathematically the orbits of heavenly bodies, but also identified gravity.  At it’s heart were Newton’s three laws of motion. It has also been called on of the most inaccessible books ever written (obviously they never tried  Thomas Hutton).  But Hooke reappeared on the scene and He got in an argument with Newton over the priority of the inverse square law.  Don’t we all?  Newton refused to release the vital 3rd volume. Halley’s shuttle diplomacy resolved the issue. But wait! There’s more!

The Royal Society had promised to publish the work. Unfortunately, they had used too much money publishing previous year’s (scintillating no doubt) book The History of Fishes. Halley paid for the Principia with his own funds.He accepted a job as Clerk for the Royal Society.  Because they were still short of funds……..He was paid instead in copies of……..The History of Fishes.

            1692 –Monday-  Because it’s witchcraft, wicked witchcraft
And although, I know, it’s strictly taboo ………Frank Sinatra…………Bridget Bishop became the first person to go to trial in the Salem witch trials in, yes,  Salem, Massachusetts. She was found guilty, and hanged on June 10. Bridget,  born sometime between 1632 and 1637 was quite the social butterfly.  She  married three times.  Her third and final marriage, after the kaputions of her first two husbands, was to Edward Bishop, who was employed as a "sawyer" (lumber worker).  In 1680 she had been charged (but cleared) of witchcraft, and on other occasions she had ended up in the courthouse for violent public quarreling with her husband.  In addition to her somewhat outrageous (by Puritan standards…..but then everything was outrageous by Puritan standards..) lifestyle, the fact that Bishop "was in the habit of dressing more artistically than women of the village" also contributed in large part to her conviction and execution. She was described as wearing, "a black cap, and a black hat, and a red paragon bodice bordered and looped with different colors." This was a showy costume for the times. Aside from encouraging rumors and social disdain, this "showy costume" was used as evidence against her at her trial for witchcraft. In his deposition, Shattuck, the town dyer mentions, as corroborative proof of Bishop being a witch, that she used to bring to his dye house "sundry pieces of lace" of shapes and dimensions entirely outside his conceptions of what would be needed in the wardrobe of a plain and honest woman. Fashionable apparel was regarded by some as a "snare and sign of the devil." http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/salem/SAL_BBIS.HTM

            1731 –Saturday-   Happy Birthday - Martha Dandridge Custis Washington Martha Washington, First American first lady. At the age of seventeen, she married Colonel. Daniel Parke Custis, age thirty seven. She had four children with Col. Custis. Her eldest was a daughter, Frances, who died in infancy, next was a son named Daniel,  whose early death is supposed to have hastened his father’s death. The third was Martha, who died in 1770 as a young woman, and last was John, who was killed during the siege of Yorktown at age twenty seven. She married George in 1759. 

            1740 –Thursday-  Nine years younger and born on the same day as Martha Washington, Happy Birthday, Donatien Alphonse François, Comte de Sade, better known as the Marquis de Sade, depraved, debauched, French author of Les 120 Journées De Sodome, Justine (1791) and the sequel, Juliette (1797),

            1763 –Thursday-   During Pontiac's Rebellion, Pontiac, upset that G M had created the Sunbird, attacked what is now Mackinaw City, Michigan. The Chippewas captured Fort Michilimackinac by diverting the garrison's attention with a game of using the subterfuge of a bagataway (lacrosse) game to take the British unexpectedly. They kicked the ball into the fort and before you could say, Trojan Horse, many of the British were killed via terminal stupidity with some taken prisoner. The French population (which far out numbered the British) was unharmed.

            1780 –Friday-  The Derby horse race is held for the first time. It could have been named The Bunbury but  was eponymously named for r Edward Stanley, 12th Earl of Derby, who founded the race.  He proposed a race for both colts and fillies over the same distance of one mile. The story goes that his friend Lord Bunbury tossed him for the honor of naming the new race. The toss was won by the Earl of Derby and thus, it was called after himself.  There was some solace for Bunbury since his , Diomed that won the first event.

            1787 –Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Nils Gabriel Sefström, Swedish chemist who discovered the element vanadium. He examined iron ore after the Tanburg mine manager had pointed out an interesting test.  They tested the ore by dissolving it in hydrochloric acid and if a black powder resulted the steel was likely to be brittle. Sefström investigated and found that what was important in the test was the presence or absence in the ore of a new element. In 1830 he isolated the new element, which he named vanadium - atomic number 23 -after the Norse goddess Vanadis.  Approximately 80% of the vanadium produced is used as ferrovanadium or as a steel additive. Of course in the “and I listened to you?” category, vanadium was originally discovered by Andres Manuel del Rio (a Spanish mineralogist) at Mexico City in 1801, who called it erythronium, since most of the salts turned red when heated. A French chemist incorrectly declared that del Rio's new element was only impure chromium. Del Rio thought himself to be mistaken and accepted the statement of the French chemist.

            1793 –Sunday-  Jean-Paul Marat recited the names of 29 people to the French National Convention. Almost all of these people would be  guillotined, followed by 17,000 more over the course of the next year during the Reign of Terror  which began in September. Gnus recommendation – A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel. On July 13, just six weeks after his words condemned people to decapitation, 1 a young Royalist from Caen, Charlotte Corday, managed, by a clever subterfuge, to gain entry into his apartment. When Marat agreed to receive her, she stabbed him in his bathtub

            1840 –Tuesday- “Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.” Happy Birthday- Thomas Hardy, English novelist, poet and dramatist. Hardy set his "Novels of Character and Environment," as he did most of his other novels, poems and short stories, around the market town of Dorchester ('Casterbridge'), near his boyhood home at Bockhampton. The Gnus favorite is Jude the Obscure but Hardy’s works included, Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and the favorite of English classes everywhere, The Return of the Native.

            1850-  Happy Birthday, Jesse Boot, obscure in most of the world but, the English chemist who founded Boots Company, Ltd. At 13 he inherited his father's herbalist shop, andin  his spare-time he studied pharmacy and in 1877 opened his first chemist shop (aka drug store, apothecary, dispensary) . Boot realized that the established chemists in Nottingham had a price-fixing policy. He decided to sell his goods cheaper than the other chemists. Boot advertised in the Nottingham Daily Express that the 128 items in his shop at Goose Gate were being sold at reduced prices and the rest is drug store history.

            1855 –Saturday-  So bring me two pina coladas
One for each hand
Let's set sail with Captin Morgan
And never leave dry land …..Garth Brooks……The Portland Rum Riot occured in Portland, Maine. A 19^th century “Nanny Stater”- Neil Dow guided his Maine Law through the legislature and Maine became the first "dry" state. Strangely, in spite of endless adjustments, however, the Maine Law never succeeded in destroying the liquor traffic or public thirst. In 1855, Dow ordered the militia to fire on civilians (mostly Irish Immigrants) as they descended upon Portland's City Hall, looking for a stash of liquor they had heard was kept there. One man was killed by Dow's forces.

            1857-Tuesday-   Elias Howe and Isaac Singer are the names usually associated with the history of the early sewing machine and few have ever heard of James Edward Allen Gibbs. “After studying the position and relations of the needle and shaft with each other, I conceived the idea of a revolving hook on the end of the shaft, which might take hold of the thread and manipulated it into a chain stitch. My ideas were, of course, very crude and indefinite, but it will be seen that I then had the correct conception of the invention afterwards embodied in my machine." The first practical U.S. chain-stitch sewing machine was patented by a farmer, James E. A. Gibbs of Mill Point, Va. It was a single-thread, twist-loop, rotary hook design. This method thus produced a chain-stitched seam. http://www.ismacs.net/willcoxandgibbs/james-edward-allen-gibbs.html

            1858-Wednesday-  The Donati Comet was first seen and named after its discoverer, Giovanni Battista Donati, of  Florence. It was the second-brightest comet of the nineteenth century  and came closest to Earth (on October 9, and was last seen on March 4, 1859. Around the time of closest approach the Earth, the comet developed a prominent dust tail, up to 60° long and curved like a scimitar, for which it is best remembered.
 

              1875-Wednesday-   Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson first transmitted sound over wires. This successful experiment was completed in a fifth floor room  at what was then 109 Court Street in Boston.  While using his “harmonic telegraph" discovered he could hear sound over a wire. The sound was that of a twanging clock spring. Mr. Watson had twanged (or, it could have been Duane Eddy and his “twangy guitar”) a clock spring in their experimental telegraphic device, which Mr. Bell physically heard on a 2nd device. Just over nine months later….on  March 10th, 1876, at the same workshop on Court Street, Alexander Graham Bell shouted the famous words, "Mr. Watson, Come Here, I Want to See You." Thomas Watson, his assistant, surprisingly heard Bell's voice over their telegraphic contraption, and this event marks the first use of a telephone in history. It was followed by, “ Hi, we’re not in right now, but leave a message when you hear the beep and we'll get right back to you.”

            1881-Thursday-  Happy Birthday Henry J. Round, English electronics engineer whose numerous invention contributed to the development of radio communications. Round worked with Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company, Ltd., from 1902 to 1914, first in the United States, where he improved the tuning components of radio receivers and built early radio direction finders and radio telephones. See Marconi below – 1896.

            1883-Saturday-  The first electric elevated railroad made a trial run in Chicago.  For some reason they put it indoors.  For some reason, the idea did not catch on.  New York City began elevated railway service in the early 1870s, running in Manhattan on Ninth Avenue and Greenwich Street. It was America's first elevated railroad, but it was steam-powered. At the Berlin Exhibition of 1879 some 600 yards of track were laid, on which a little three-horse-power electric engine, designed by Werner von Siemens, hauled a load of some thirty passengers at a speed of four miles an hour. Current was supplied by a third rail laid between the track rails. The 1883 version, developed by, surprise, Thomas Edison and Stephen D. Field aimed to impress the crowds at the Chicago Railway Exposition, and they did. They built a narrow-gauge 3-foot-wide track in the gallery around the edge of the main exhibition building, with tight curves at each end of the 1,552-foot track -- less than one-third of a mile long. The locomotive weighed 3 tons and was 12 feet long by 5 feet wide. It drew current by rubbing a wire brush on each side of an electrified, central third rail. The 15-horsepower locomotive pulled a passenger car at and chugged along at  9 mph. http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/06/dayintech_0602

           1886 –Wednesday-  On a social note U.S. President Grover Cleveland married Frances Folsom in the White House, becoming the only president to wed in the executive mansion. - Cleveland was also the first president to have a child born in the White House; his daughter Esther in 1895. John Tyler and Woodrow Wilson also married (not to each other) while in office but managed to splurge on catering halls.  Cleveland, was dazzling in a tux by Halson.  The bride was resplendent in a Martha Stewart gown from K Mart.  Music in the Blue Room was provided by Guido and His Harmonica Orchestra playing the Chicken Dance, the Hokey Pokey and YMCA.  The wedding reception came to an abrupt halt when the crowd ran screaming from the room as Guido launched his polka version of We’ve Only Just Begun.

            1896- TuesdayOtis Pond, an engineer then working for Nikola Tesla, said, "Looks as if Marconi got the jump on you." Tesla replied, "Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents..  The first radio patent was filed by Guglielmo Marconi in England for his wireless telegraphy apparatus  for "Improvements in Transmitting Electrical Impulses and Signals, and in Apparatus Therefore." 

           1904 –Thursday Johnny Weissmuller, American swimmer and actor. Weismuller was born in Timisoara, Romania,  though he would later claim to have been born in Windber, Pennsylvania, probably to ensure his eligibility to compete as part of the US Olympic team. He was winner of five Olympic gold medals, 67 world and 52 national titles, holder of every freestyle record from 100 yards to the half-mile. Weismuller became more famous for his scholarly, erudite, clad in loincloth, Tarzan starting in 1932 with Tarzan, The Ape Man, and on to;  1934 Tarzan And His Mate, 1936 Tarzan Escapes, 1939 Tarzan Finds A Son, 1941 Tarzan's Secret Treasure, 1942 Tarzan's New York Adventure, 1943 Tarzan Triumphs, 1943 Tarzan's Desert Mystery, 1945 Tarzan And The Amazons, 1946 Tarzan And The Leopard Woman, 1947 Tarzan And The Huntress, 1948 Tarzan And The Mermaids (where he fought an octopus).  Weismuller, having grown attached to Hollywood jungle sets,  then made sixteen Jungle Jim movies.

       1907-Sunday- Old rockin' chair's got me, my cane by my side
Fetch me that gin, son, 'fore I tan your hide
Can't get from this cabin, goin' nowhere
Just set me here grabbin' at the flies round this rockin' chair…Hoagy Carmichael…… Happy Birthday Edwin Shoemaker, American inventor and engineer who with his cousin, Edward Knabusch, created the recliner chair and started the La-Z-Boy
furniture company to manufacture it.  That first recliner chair was a wood slat outdoor folding chair
from orange crates.  A comfortable
concept, the chair followed the contour of a person’s body, both sitting up and
leaning back.

            1922-Friday- Happy Birthday, American geologist, Clair Patterson. Using lead and uranium isotopic data from a meteorite, he calculated an age for the Earth of 4.55 billion years; a figure far more accurate than those that existed at the time and one that has remained unchanged for over 50 years. He determined through ice-core samples from Greenland that atmospheric lead levels had begun to increase steadily and dangerously soon after tetra-ethyl lead began to see widespread use in fuel. He devoted the rest of his life to removing as much introduced lead from the environment as possible.

Following his criticism of the lead industry he was refused contracts with many research organizations, including the United States Public Health Service, and was excluded from a 1971 National Research Council panel on atmospheric lead contamination.Eventually, Patterson's efforts led to the Clean Air Act of 1970, and ultimately the removal of lead from all gasoline in the United States by 1986. Lead levels within the blood of Americans are reported to have dropped by up to 80% Most Earth Science texts do not mention him….and the reviewer of one text that did….Thought he was a woman.

            1925 –Tuesday-  “ Not tonight.  I have a headache.”  First baseman, Wally Pipp, asked out of the line up and manager, Miller Huggins replaced him with Lou Gehrig for the New York Yankees, beginning a streak of 2,130 consecutive games played, topped only by Cal Ripken, Jr. in 1995. Exactly 16 years later to the day, in 1941 Gehrig passed away at age 37,  from Amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Gehrig, who’s baseball totals would have been even greater also hold one of baseball’s more dubious achievements – the lowest stolen base percentage of all time among players with 200 or more attempts.  50.2%. Wally Pipp, to be fair, was probably benched by Huggins due to a batting slump. The headache occurred  a few weeks later when his skull was fractured by a practice pitch from Charlie Caldwell, an event that may have been mistakenly linked to his initial benching. Pipp was later traded to the Cincinnati Reds before the 1926 season. He played 372 games for them over the next three seasons before retiring.

             1928-Saturday- Kraft's Velveeta Cheese was invented. It was packaged using the 1921 invention of a tinfoil lining that could house the cheese inside a wooden box.  The invention of a food product, how tacky. The United States Food and Drug Administration categorized it as pasteurized process cheese spread. It was developed by a cheese maker,  Emil Frey. He was trying to help the company he worked for find a way to dispose of the excess whey. Whey was a waste product that was made as a result of the cheese making process. Frey was working on another idea when he serendipitously  stumbled on a combination of the whey and another cheese that when mixed together created a smooth, almost velvety cheese material. That is of course why it was given the name Velveeta Cheese, because of the consistency. It was also good for mortar when making brick walls. http://www.cheeselovers.org/velveeta-cheese.html

            1930-Monday-  Happy Birthday,  Charles Peter (Pete) Conrad, American astronaut. Conrad had quite a space resume.  He was the third man to walk on the moon during the Apollo 12 mission. He had other experience in space on Gemini 5 (launched August 21,  1965, logging a new space endurance record of 8 days), on Gemini 11 (launched 18 Sept. 18,  1966, first orbit rendezvous and docking), and the Skylab 2 mission (1973). Returning to Earth, on 14 February 14, 1996, Conrad was a crew member for a record-breaking flight around the world in a Lear jet.

            1946 –Sunday-  Spawning of Peter Sutcliffe, English serial killer known as The Yorkshire Ripper. Sutcliffe, a textbook example for death penalty advocates is serving life for the murders of 13 women in west Yorkshire between 1975 and 1981.

            1946–Sunday-  Birth of the Italian Republic:Eighty five years after the unification of Italy and installation of Victor Emmanuel as king,  in a referendum, Italians voted to have a monarchectomy and  turn Italy from a monarchy into a Republic. After the referendum the king of Italy Umberto II di Savoia was exiled to Portugal.

             1947 –Sunday The premiere of  The Corpse Came C.O.D. Directed by Henry Levin, it starring George Brent and Joan Blondell, in a Tracy/Hepburnish comedy
        

            1964 –Tuesday-  The Rolling Stones made  their American TV debut on the Les Crane Show, another of ABC’s attempts to challenge Johnny Carson. They didn’t perform.  They took questions from the audience.  

            1966 –Surveyor 1 landed in Oceanus Procellarum on the Moon, becoming the first U.S. spacecraft to soft land on another world.  The main objectives of the Surveyors were to obtain close-up images of the lunar surface and to determine if the terrain was safe for manned landings. Each Surveyor was equipped with a television camera. This was how Paul Abdul was discovered. In addition, Surveyors 3 and 7 each carried a soil mechanics surface sampler scoop which dug trenches and was used for soil mechanics tests which led to the discover of Senator Charles Schumer, and Surveyors 5, 6, and 7 had magnets attached to the footpads and an alpha scattering instrument for chemical analysis of the lunar material which caused the break up of the marriage of Britney Spears and Jason Allen Alexander.

            1967 –Friday- What would you think if I sang out of tune,
Would you stand up and walk out on me.
Lend me your ears and I'll sing you a song,
And I'll try not to sing out of key.
Oh I get by with a little help from my friends,
Mmm,I get high with a little help from my friends,
Mmm, I'm gonna try with a little help from my friends.   In the U.S., Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released by the Beatles. It was released on June 1 in Britain. This was the first album to have song lyrics printed on the back cover.  Produced by George Martin, there were thirteen songs on the album with Within You and Without You being Harrison’s only contribution. The concept behind the album cover collage was the burial of the old I-Want-to-Hold-Your-Hand Beatles. The celebrities looking over the flower bouquet Beatles logo are mourners.  The album was heavily produced and took 129 days and about 700 hours to complete. The Beatles first album, Please Please Me, was recorded in less than 10 hours.

1969 –Friday- Australian aircraft carrier Melbourne sliced the destroyer USS Frank E. Evans in half during a Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) exercise (possibly Operation Bumper Boats) off the coast of Vietnam. HMAS Melbourne was called a jinx ship, not only did it sink the Evans, it had sunk in HMAS Voyager 1964. Both were caused by human error and incompetence on the bridge.  

1992 –Tuesday- In a national referendum Denmark rejected the Maastricht Treaty by a thin margin. and only accepted it in a second vote in May 1993 after receiving an optout on monetary union like the UK and a promise that Danish pastry would not be called Euro Bagels. In France it squeaked home by just 50.4 to 49.7. The Maastricht Treaty served two purposes. It amended the provisions of the Treaty of Rome while hugely advancing the agenda set out under the Single European Act (1986) for deepening European Political Union (EPU). It created a new model for the Community based around three 'pillars' which, broadly speaking, covered economic relations, foreign affairs and home affairs and the fact that a cup of coffee in Italy cost 4 billion lire.  It ... officially created the European Union (EU), which became the title to cover all the functions of the much-expanded European governmental structure and enabled Belgium to conquer the continent. It set in train the process of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), which would lead to the creation of the Euro.

1997 –Monday-  In Denver, Colorado, home grown terrorist Timothy McVeigh was convicted on fifteen counts of murder (out of 168 who died) and conspiracy for his role in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. McVeigh would be executed in June, 2001.

1999 –Wednesday  Well this was certainly exciting, The Bhutan Broadcasting Service brought television transmissions to the Kingdom of Bhutan for the first time. It was  currently the only service to offer both radio and television to the Kingdom, and is the only television service to broadcast from inside the Bhutanese border. Bhutan is landlocked country in South Asia, located at the eastern end of the Himalaya Mountains and bordered to the north, south, east and west by the Republic of India and to the northwest by Tibet.  Viewers could now enjoy cultural highlights such as My Favorite Yak, Life on the Mo Chhu River (sort of like a Bhutanese Glee), Another Day, Another Ngultrum, Tibet Sucks,  and Thimphu Tonight.

2003 –Monday-  Europe launched its first voyage to another planet, Mars. The European Space Agency's Mars Express probe launched from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan. In March 2010, European Mars Express (Mex) probe has made its closest flyby of the Martian moon Phobos, passing just 67km (42 miles) from its surface. Mars Express consists of two parts, the Mars Express Orbiter and the Beagle 2, a lander designed to perform exobiology and geochemistry research. Beagle 2  bit the dust and  failed to land safely on the Martian surface but  the Orbiter has been successfully performing scientific measurements. Residual microbes returned to Earth resulted in a mutation causing Americans to be possibly the most obnoxious tourist on the Earth, except for roving bands of Chinese and Japanese looking for photo ops.  

2004 –Wednesday- Fed Ex ….. Ken Jennings began his 74-game winning streak on the syndicated game show Jeopardy! Just in case someone gives you an answer of "Most of this firm's 70,000 seasonal white-collar employees work only four months a year."…don’t say Fed Ex

2004-Wednesday-  Like a sturgeon
Touched for the very first time
Like a sturgeon
When your heart beats
Next to mine ….apologies  to Madonna……While Ken was beginning his winning streak on Jeopardy, a 2.75-meter sturgeon weighing 120 kg was caught in Swansea Bay off the coast of Wales by Robert Davies. Sturgeons are extremely rare in British waters, so this catch was interesting, but by a statute dating back to the testeronically challenged,  King Edward II the 14th century the fish had to be offered to the Crown if caught in Britain. When Buckingham Palace told him he could "dispose of it as he saw fit,", despite protests from Sarah Ferguson that she was hungry and from Princess Anne who thought it resembled one of her cousins, Davies auctioned it off at Plymouth fish market for £700, but then the  local police confiscated it as a protected species under British law.  If the prouerbe be true,‥that a fishe beginneth first to smell at the head, the faultes of our seruantes will be layed vppon vs.
[1581 G. Pettie tr. S. Guazzo's Civil Conversation iii. 51]

3.        1726-  Happy birthday, James Hutton, Scottish scientist who founded the science of geology.  Rumor is he got off to a rocky start.  Hutton was described as a man of keen insights and lively conversation. Unfortunately, it was beyond him to set down his ideas in a form that anyone could begin to understand. A biographer described him as “almost entirely innocent of rhetorical accomplishments.” Here is a sample from his masterwork, A Theory of the Earth with Proofs and Illustrations.“The world which we inhabit is composed of thematerials, not of the earth which was the immediate predecessor of the present, but of the earth which, in ascending  from the present, we consider as the third, and which had preceded the land that was above the surface of the sea, while our present land was yet beneath the water of the ocean. “ He was equally bad as a public speaker.

Fortunately…he died ..and after he died, a friend named John Playfair – Professor of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh not only actually understood what Hutton was trying to say, but after Hutton’s death, Playfair produced a simplified exposition of the Huttonian principles, Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth.

            1761-  Happy Birthday, Henry Shrapnel, English army general who invented the eponymous shrapnel shell in 1784. Shrapnel projectiles contained small shot or spherical bullets, usually of lead, along with an explosive charge to scatter the pieces as well as fragments of the shell casing. The resulting hail of high-velocity debris was often lethal. Shrapnel caused the majority of wounds caused by artillery in WW I when shells were still being made using his original principals.

          1777- Happy Birthday, Charles Bernard Desormes, French physicist and chemist. He determined the ratio of the specific heats of gases in 1819. Most of  his work was in collaboration with his son-in-law Nicolas Clément . Desormes correctly determined the composition of carbon disulphide (CS₂) - a toxic colorless flammable liquid now used in the manufacture of rayon and cellophane and carbon tetrachloride and as a solvent for rubber and carbon monoxide (CO) - is a colorless, odorless, and tasteless gas-  in 1801-02. In 1813 they made a study of iodine – discovered by Bernard Courtois, and its compounds.

            1864 – Happy Birthday, Ransom E. Olds, American automobile inventor and creator of the Oldsmobile, now defunct but one of the more successful cars of the twentieth century. Olds also created the assembly line in 1901. The new approach to putting together automobiles enabled him to more than quadruple his factory’s output, from 425 cars in 1901 to 2,500 in 1902.

             1879- Happy Birthday, Raymond Pearl, American scientist who made significant contributions in the areas of biology, genetics, eugenics, and statistics. One of the founders of biometry, the application of statistics to biology and medicine, Pearl was ahead of his time, warning of the dangers of smoking as early as 1936 and the benefits of alcohol in moderation – as opposed to overuse or abstinence (although, “abstinence makes the heart grow fonder”) - in 1926.

            1885-   African-American inventor/scientist Branville T. Woods received his first patent. It was for the first steam boiler furnace.  A steam boiler furnace is an enclosed vessel in which water is heated and circulated, either as hot water or as steam, for heating or power.

             1903-  Happy birthday, Charles Drew, U.S. surgeon who organized the first blood bank. Segregation rules at the time forbade Dr.Drew, a black man, to donate his own blood.  Drew had found during his work at Columbia University that by separating the liquid red blood cells from the near solid plasma and freezing the two separately, he found that blood could be preserved and reconstituted at a later date.  Dr. Drew established the American Red Cross blood bank, of which he was the first director, and he organized the world's first blood bank drive, nicknamed "Blood for Britain".

           1920 – Twelve years before James Chadwick discovered the neutron, physicist Ernest Rutherford speculated on the possible existence and properties of it in his second Bakerian Lecture, London, on "The Nuclear Constitution of Atoms." “A neutron walks into a bar, orders a drink. When it offered to pay, the bartender refused to take the money saying ‘for you, it’s no charge”……..No, no, no, he didn’t say that…. He speculated on “conditions where it  would be possible for an electron to combine much more closely with the H nucleus, forming a kind of neutral doublet. Such an atom would have very novel properties. Its external field would be practically zero, except very close to the nucleus..."

            1965 - The first American astronaut to make a “spacewalk”…a bit difficult to “walk when there is no surface to walk on, but why quibble…….. was Major Edward White II,  when he spent 20 minutes outside the Gemini 4 capsule during Earth orbit at an altitude of 120 miles. A tether and 25 foot airline were wrapped in gold tape to form a single, thick cord kept him from floating away.  He used a hand-held 7.5 pound oxygen jet propulsion gun to maneuver around.  White was a member of the Apollo 1 crew killed in a fire while testing their flight capsule in January 1967.

            2008-The brand new Japanese science laboratory was attached to the International Space Station.  Space Shuttle Discovery's STS-124 mission launched had been launched on  May 31st . It quickly got down to business, unloading the huge 11.2 meter-long lab using the station's robotic arm. This was the second component of Kibo (Japanese for "Hope") to be attached to the station, the first was a logistics module sent to the station by Endeavour in March. The third and final part of the lab, a facility that will allow outdoor experiments be exposed to space, will be delivered some time next year.  The lab will be used to create huge mutant reptiles that will attack Tokyo as well as bizarre men who will wear their hair in pony tails well into middle age.

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4.        780 B.C -The first total solar eclipse reliably recorded by the Chinese was noted.

            1844-  An "aukward"  moment in wildlife history. The great auk became extinct when the last one died on Eldey Island.

             1872 –A process for making Vaseline was patented by Robert Chesebrough of New York City. Chesebrough had worked in the oil-fields of Pennsylvania. The vaseline is a product from petroleum, made from the residue of petroleum distillation left in the still after all oil has been vaporized.

            1937-The first shopping carts were introduced at the Humpty Dumpty supermarket in Oklahoma City. They were invented by the store owner, Sylvan Goldman.

            1942 – Battle of Midway

            1963-Six-year-old Robert (Bobby) Patch received a U.S. patent for a "Toy Truck". The toy separated into a chassis, driver's cab, truck body, wheels andfour axles so it could be reassembled in either a closed van body or dump truck form.

            1975- Paleontologists in North Carolina discovered the oldest animal fossil in the U.S., a 620 million year old marine worm.  The marine worm fossil, still singing “ Halls of Montezuma ", promptly invaded Iraq.

            1984- Send in the clones.  DNA from an extinct mammal, the Quagga (a brown, horse-like beast with zebra stripes on the front of its body, which inhabited South Africa until it was exterminated by hunters in the early 19th century), was successfully cloned by scientists at the University of California.   they used samples from an over 140-yr-old quagga skin in a German museum, and managed to extract enough DNA from the animal's flesh to determine some of its sequences of "base pairs," the molecular rungs that link the two spiral halves of a DNA molecule (looks like a ladder). The scientists showed the quagga DNA was more closely related to the zebra than the horse.

            1989 -Tiananmen Square massacre. Chinese troops attacked Tiananmen Square in the center of Beijing, killing and arresting thousands of pro-democracy protesters. Then the Communist government made believe it never happened.........and people believed them!

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5.        World Environment Day

            469 BC – Happy Birthday (approximately), Socrates, Greek philosopher.  He is considered one of the founders of Western philosophy. H e strongly influenced Plato, who was his student, and Aristotle, whom Plato taught.  A mnemonic for the correct order of the three is SPA.  His work continues to form an important part of the study of philosophy. Socrates himself left no writings, and most of our knowledge of him and his teachings comes from the dialogues of his most famous pupil, Plato, and from the memoirs of Xenophon. Using a method now known as the Socratic dialogue, or dialectic, he drew forth knowledge from his students by pursuing a series of questions and examining the implications of their answers. He looked upon the soul as the seat of both waking consciousness and moral character, and held the universe to be purposively mind-ordered. In 399 B.C. Socrates was tried for corrupting the morals of Athenian youth and for religious heresies; it is now believed that his arrest stemmed in particular from his influence on Alcibiades and Critias, who had betrayed Athens to Sparta. He was convicted and drank the cup of poison hemlock given him.

            1553 – Happy Birthday, Bernardino Baldi, Italian mathematician and physicist. His principal contribution to physics was a commentary on the pseudo-Aristotelian Questions of Mechanics, which was written in the 1580's, but was published in 1621 after Baldi's death. In this he developed the idea of center of gravity.

             1656- Happy Birthday, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort , French botanist and physician, a pioneer in systematic botany, whose system of plant classification represented a major advance in his day.  Hewas responsible for defining a genus as a cluster of species and distinguished between the description of a plant and its nomenclature. Among his notable classifications were Genus – Gave Me a Rashium, Genus – Smells Like a Sweat Sockium, and Genus – Tastes Like Chickenium.

            1760 – Happy Birthday, Johan Gadolin, Finnish chemist, an expert in the chemistry of the elements known as the lanthanide series of elements- the 15 elements with atomic numbers 57 through 71, from lanthanum to lutetium.  Gadolin's best known achievement was in 1794 the discovery of yttria which was a new earth (element in oxide form), present in a black mineral found seven years earlier in Ytterby quarry near Stockholm. This was the first rare earth (lanthanide) element discovered; later the mineral was named in his honor gadolinite and element 64 gadolinium.  Ytterium Atomic Number:  39, Atomic Weight:  88.90585 is pronounced as IT-ri-em. Gadolinium, Atomic Number:  64 has an Atomic Weight of  157.25

            1783 – In the main square of the French town of Annonay, the Montgolfier Brothers, Joseph and Etienne, launched an unmanned  309 foot diameter linen and paper spherical balloon, open at the bottom to receive heat from a fire on the ground. The balloon rose to a height of 6000 feet and was aloft for ten minutes. On September 19, of that year, from the palace grounds at Versailles, the brothers launched the first living creatures - a duck, a sheep, and a rooster - on a successful eight minute two-mile flight in a hot air balloon.

            1819 -Happy Birthday, John C. Adams, British mathematician and astronomer, one of two people who independently discovered the planet Neptune, although Urbain Leverrier of the Berlin Observatory usually gets the credit.  Neptune was discovered by means of mathematics before being seen through a telescope.  In 1843,. Adams began working to find the location of the unknown planet. Adams predicted the planet would be about 1 billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) farther from the sun than Uranus. He completed his remarkably accurate work in September 1845. Adams sent it to Sir George B. Airy, the Astronomer Royal of England. However, Airy, joining the long list of dolts who did not listen to genius when it appeared before them,  did not look for the planet with a telescope. Apparently, he lacked confidence in Adams. Meanwhile, Urbain J. J. Leverrier, a young French mathematician unknown to Adams, began working on the project. By mid-1846, Leverrier also had predicted Neptune's position. He sent his predictions, which were similar to those of Adams, to the Urania Observatory in Berlin, Germany. Johann G. Galle. Unlike, Airy, Galle listened to the young mathematician and on  Sept. 23, 1846, Galle and his assistant, Heinrich L. d'Arrest, found Neptune near the position predicted by Leverrier. Today, both Adams and Leverrier are credited with the discovery.  Adams made many other contributions to astronomy, notably his studies of the Leonid meteor shower  in 1866 where he showed that the orbit of the meteor shower was very similar to that of a comet. He was able to correctly conclude that the meteor shower, a was associated with the comet. We now know that most meteor showers are associated with comets. 

            1850 – Happy Birthday, Pat Garrett, American Western lawman famous for killing Billy the Kid in 1881.  At midnight, Sheriff Garrett shot “The Kid”  dead at Fort Sumner, N.M in one Pete Maxwell's darkened bedroom. Garrett was squatting alongside the mattress talking with Maxwell as the Kid entered. Mr. The  Kid cocked his revolver and whispered "Quien es?" ("Who is it?"). Mr. Garrett answered by firing twice with one bullet striking the Mr. The Kid squarely in the heart. Garrett lived the rest of his life off the fame of being Billy the Kid’s killer.

            1862 -Happy Birthday, Allvar Gullstrand, Swedish ophthalmologist and recipient of the 1911 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his research on the eye as a light-refracting apparatus. Gullstrand researched the way the eye refracts light, and invented the slit lamp for eye exams -- a device still used by ophthalmologists. He detailed the structure of the cornea (he studied cornea-on-the-cob) and improved corrective lenses for people who had undergone cataract surgery

            1878 – Happy Birthday, Pancho Villa, Mexican revolutionary. Though he was a killer, a bandit, and a revolutionary leader, many remember him as a folk hero (sort of like Che Guevera but not a communist). Pancho Villa was also responsible for a raid on Columbus, New Mexico in 1916, which was the first attack on U.S. soil since 1812. The U.S. sent several thousand soldiers across the border to hunt for Pancho Villa. Though they spent over a year searching, they never caught him.  On May 20, 1920, Adolfo De la Huerta became the interim president of Mexico. De la Huerta wanted peace in Mexico so negotiated with Villa for his retirement. Part of the peace agreement was that Villa would receive a hacienda in Chihuahua. Villa retired from revolutionary life in 1920 but had only a short retirement for he was gunned down in his car on July 20, 1923.  The assassins were never arrested.

            1882 – And they still manage to lose your luggage!!!!  John Mitchell Lyons, railway clerk in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, received a Canadian patent for "Improvements in Baggage Checks and Coupon Tickets".  This was a way to track and identify luggage.  The  baggage check separated into halves along a perforation with  both pieces printed with same route information and identifying number; one half attached to bag, other given to passenger to claim luggage at destination.

            1877-“The eyes of taxes are upon you…”  New York, as ever a state willing to tax anything (including the patience of the residents), in an effort to protect the dairy industry, passed a law to tax on oleomargarine. When a court voided the ban on margarine in New York,  the dairy industry “udderly” infuriated,  turned its attention to Washington, resulting in Congressional passage of the Margarine Act of 1886. Margarine had first been created in France in 1870  by Hippolyte Mège-Mouriez for  the Emperor Louis Napoleon III.

            1884- At the Republican Convention (June 3-6),Civil War hero Gen. William T. Sherman refused the Republican presidential nomination, saying, "I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected." This resulted in the nomination of resulting in the nomination of: James G. Blaine of Maine, for President and John A. Logan of Illinois, for Vice-President.  The ticket lost in the election of 1884 to Democrats Grover Cleveland and Thomas A. Hendricks

            1895 – Happy Birthday, William Boyd, American actor better known as Professor Sy Yentz favorite childhood western cowboy hero, Hopalong Cassidy. He started the Hopalong series in 1935 and after he had made 54 "Hoppies" for his original producer, Harry Sherman, Sherman dropped the series. Boyd then produced and starred in 12 more on his own. In 1948 Boyd, in a wise and precedent-setting move, bought the rights to all his pictures just as TV, and young Professor Sy Yentz,  were  looking for Saturday-morning western fare. He starred in the TV series until 1954 with his horse Topper, and his sidekick played by George ‘Gabby’ Hayes, and later, by Andy Clyde.  It was the first significant Western to appear on network television and began in 1949.  The last episode,  Tricky Fingers aired on  April 2, 1954. The reruns went on and on.      

            1900- Happy Birthday, Dennis Gabor (brother of either Zsa Zsa or Eva - we get them confused- Gabor), Hungarian-born electrical engineer who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1971 for his invention of holography (holograms) – used in his electron microscopy in 1947- , a system of lensless, three-dimensional photography that has many applications. Look for those holograms on your driver’s license, in Europe telephone credit cards use holograms to record the amount of remaining credit. Fighter pilots use holographic displays of their instruments so they can keep looking straight up. Museums keep archival records in holograms. One of the best uses for holography is candy. The candy’s surface is etched into tiny prism-like ridges that display 3-D images in brilliant iridescent colors. Gabor’s other work included research on high-speed oscilloscopes, communication theory, physical optics, and television. And no, he was not related to either Zsa Zsa or Eva Gabor, otherwise he would have been an idiot.

          1956 - Elvis Presley introduced his new single, Hound Dog, on The Milton Berle Show.  Elvis scandalized the audience with his suggestive hip gyrations. In the media frenzy that followed, other show hosts, including Ed Sullivan, denounced his performance. Sullivan swore he would never invite Presley on his own show, but that autumn he booked Elvis for three shows. Actress Deborah Padgett also appeared Elvis performed with Berle who was billed as Elvis’ brother Melvin Presley.

            1967 The beginning of the Six-Day War as Israel, responding to a threatening build-up of Arab forces – the Muslims had been trying to destroy Israel since its modern rebirth in 1948 - along its borders, launched simultaneous attacks against Egypt and Syria. Jordan then entered the war, but the Arab coalition was no match for Israel's proficient armed forces. In six days of fighting, Israel occupied the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt, the Golan Heights of Syria, and the West Bank and Arab sector of East Jerusalem, both previously under Jordanian rule. By the time the United Nations cease-fire took effect on June 11, Israel had more than doubled its size

          1968 At 12:50 a.m. PDT, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, a presidential candidate and brother of assassinated president John F. Kennedy , was shot three times by a an Islamic/Palestinian terrorist assassin, Sirhan B. Sirhan in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Five others were wounded. The senator had just completed a speech celebrating his victory in the California presidential primary.

            1976- Damn Dam Done. The Teton Dam, a 305-foot high earth-fill dam across the Teton River in Madison County, southeast Idaho, collapsed and released the contents of its reservoir at 11:57 AM.  Failure was initiated by a large leak near the right (northwest) abutment of the dam, about 130 feet below the crest. The dam, designed by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, failed just as it was being completed and filled for the first time.  The collapse of the dam resulted in the deaths of 11 people  and 13,000 cattle. The dam cost about $100 million to build, and the federal government paid over $300 million in claims related to the damn dam failure. Total damage estimates have ranged up to $2 billion. The dam was never rebuilt.

            1977- The first personal computer, the Apple II, went on sale. They were the invention of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. You had to supply your own keyboard and monitor. The Apple II was one of three prominent personal computers that came out in 1977. Despite its higher price, it quickly pulled ahead of the TRS-80 and the Commodore Pet (probably because the "Pet" wasn't housebroken.)

             1981- An epidemic disease, later to be named as AIDS that killed five homosexual men in Los Angeles,  was briefly described by Dr. Michael Gottlieb in the newsletter of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. This was the first notice to be published on AIDS, though it had not yet been given that name.  Gottlieb reported that within days of the June 5 report, doctors began telephoning from all over the nation to tell him about their own patients with pneumocystis - a form of pneumonia caused by the yeast-like fungus. Over time, intensive care units at UCLA and across the country began to fill with young gay men requiring ventilators, their lungs choked with the same strange organism. The AIDS epidemic was underway.

            2004 - Ronald W. Reagan, the 40th president of the United States, died, after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease.

            2008 – Flushed with success, It was a very good day for the crew on board the International Space Station.  The shuttle Discovery brought parts to fix the faulty toilet. T Russian flight engineer Oleg Kononenko was able to replace the broken urine collection pump in a 2 hour repair job and specialists in Moscow checked his work to verify it was working fine. Fortunately, the solid waste disposal was working o.k.If  the repair was unsuccessful, it may have seriously hindered the manned presence on the station and many experiments would have gone down the toilet.

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6.        1436- Happy Birthday, Regiomontanus, aka, Johannes Müller von Königsberg  the foremost mathematician and astronomer of 15th-century EuropeA letter from this period, sent to the astronomer Giovanni Bianchini  contained Regiomontanus' analysis of all the ways in which current (13^th century) astronomical theory disagreed with the observed phenomena, and expressed the hope of a collaborative effort to restore the discipline. It is often said that Regiomontanus set the agenda for the reform of astronomy to which Copernicus, Tycho Brahe and Kepler all contributed.

            1683 - The Ashmolean, the world's first university museum, opened in Oxford, England. In 1677, English archaeologist Elias Ashmole donated his collection of curiosities to Oxford University, and the school's directors planned the construction of a building to display the items permanently. Sir Christopher Wren was commissioned for the job, and on June 6, 1683, (we’ve also seen it as May 24, 1683 ….it depends on whom it was opened to)  the Ashmolean opened.  Even the use of the term 'Museum' was a novelty in English: a few years later the 'New World of Words' (1706) defined it as 'a Study, or Library; also a College, or Publick Place for the Resort of Learned Men', with a specific entry for 'Ashmole's Museum', described as 'a neat Building in the City of Oxford'.

            1755- Happy Birthday, Nathan Hale, American Revolutionary patriot. He was hanged, by order of General William Howe, as a spy, in the city of New York, at what is now the intersection of East Broadway and Market Streets, on September 22, 1776. Hale’s last words;  “I only regret,” he said, “that I have but one life to lose for my country.”

            1833- Andrew Jackson became the first President to ride on a railroad train.”Old Hickory” rode on a Baltimore and Ohio train from Ellicott's Mill, MD to Baltimore. (John Quincy had also taken that train, but not while he was President.)  The steam locomotive was first developed in England at the beginning of the 19th century by Richard Trevithick and George Stephenson. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad had begun operation in 1828 with horse-drawn cars, but steam power was added and by 1831, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad had completed a line from Baltimore to Frederick, Maryland. Two years later, Andrew Jackson gave railroad travel its presidential christening. Jackson accumulated a few other “firsts”. He the first president to be born in a log cabin and the first president to be nominated by a political party. He also survived the first attempt to assassinate a president.

             1847- 15 year old Hensen Crockett Gregory used a fork to poke out the centers of uncooked doughnuts his mother was making. This let the dough cook more thoroughly.  In 1937, the Salvation Army made this National Donut Day.  Doughnuts have been around for centuries. Archaeologists turned up several petrified fried cakes with holes in the center in prehistoric ruins in the Southwestern United States.  Professor Sy Yentz had one of these originals at the local convenience store yesterday. Most discussions about doughnut history begin with the mid-19th century and the first recorded doughnut recipes. At this time doughnuts were known as olykoeks, or oily cakes, and it's primarily the Dutch who are credited with taking sweet dough balls and frying them in pork fat. The Hensen Crockett story as a teenager is nice but another has him as a sea captain (note: he did become a sea captain)  with the steering of  boat poking a hole in the center during a storm. A doughnut origin debate was actually held in 1941. The Crockett story (both young and old) is the most popular but another theory came from one Chief High Eagle, a Wampanoag tribesman,  who said his people created the doughnut when several of their arrows missed settlers, striking Pilgrim's cakes instead. In 1872 John Blondel of Thomaston, Maine, took out a patent on a spring loaded doughnut hole machine and by the World War I doughnuts were so popular that the Salvation Army sent them to American troops. Mass production began with a machine introduced by a Bulgarian immigrant; Arnold Levitt in 1921. After World War II , Levitt dropped a “u”, a “g”, and an “h” and  founded the Donut Corporation of America.

            1865 – Quantrill kaput.  Confederate Civil War raider (would be called a terrorist today), William Quantrill, who gave Jesse and Frank James their start, died from gunshot wounds suffered in a May skirmish with Union soldiers.

             1882-  The electric flat iron was patented by H.W. Seely  in New York City.  Early electric irons used a carbon arc to create heat, however, this was not a safe method……..as they tended to burn and possibly electrocute one as one ironed the collar of a shirt. In 1892, hand irons using electrical resistance were introduced by Crompton and Co. and the General Electric Company.  It wasn’t until the early 1950s electric steam irons were introduced.

            1882 -  More than 100,000 inhabitants of Bombay (now Mumbai) India were killed as a cyclone in the Arabian Sea pushes huge waves into the city’s harbor.  

           1907- An end to thousands of years of dirty clothes as  Persil, the first household detergent, was marketed by Henkel & Cie, of Düsseldorf, Germany as the first "self-acting" washing powder in the world. In 1880 soap started to compete with washing powder, which was originally simply pulverized soap. Henkel added perborate as a bleaching agent to the washing agent. During the washing process, the oxygen formed small bubbles, taking over the hard work at the washboard, saving time and taking the “sun” out of sun-bleaching. The name “Persil” is derived from the two most important chemical raw materials in the product, perborate and silicate. But it is not good to stick in the mouths of children who have used bad language.

             1918 - The first large-scale battle fought by American soldiers in World War I began in Belleau Wood, northwest of the Paris-to-Metz road.  It saw the re-capture by U.S. forces of the wood on the Metz-Paris road taken at the end of May by German. The battle was also demoralizing for the Germans as getting weary after almost four years of war and casualties, very large American re-enforcement of the allied armies meant a fresh, well supplied foe to deal with. An armistice would be signed five months later on November 11.

           1932 – Happy Birthday, David Scott, American astronaut who was the first to drive a wheeled vehicle on the moon during the Apollo 15 mission on  July 31,  1971. He was in command of its Lunar Module which made the fourth lunar landing, and became the seventh person to walk on the moon and the first to use the Lunar Rover vehicle on the moon's surface for which he received multiple traffic citations.  Among them, failure to use a seat belt, driving on the wrong side of the road, speeding, and using an expired driver’s license.  A space veteran, Scott and command pilot Neil Armstrong were launched into space on the Gemini 8 mission-- on March 16, 1966--a flight originally scheduled to last three days but terminated early due to a malfunctioning thruster. Scott served as command module pilot for Apollo 9, March 3-13, 1969. This was the third manned flight in the Apollo series, the second to be launched by a Saturn V, and the first to complete a comprehensive earth-orbital qualification and verification test of a "fully configured Apollo spacecraft."   

            1932 – In a taxing situation, the U.S Congress, warming up to its late 20^th century frenzy of tax increases, levied first gasoline tax as a part of the Revenue Act of 1932. The Act mandated a series of excise taxes on a wide variety of consumer goods. Congress placed a tax of 1¢ per gallon on gasoline and other motor fuel sold.

             1933- The first drive-in movie theater was opened in Camden, New Jersey. Invented by Richard Hollingshead, a sales manager at his Whiz Auto Products, the patent for the Drive-In Theater had been issued on May 16, 1933. With an investment of $30,000, Hollingshead opened the first drive-in on Tuesday June 6, 1933 at a location on Crescent Boulevard, Camden, New Jersey. The price of admission was 25 cents for the car and 25 cents per person.  The first movie was X-Men, The Beginning of the Alphabet, starring Halle Berry and Alex Trebek.

            1942-  the first parachute jump in the U.S. using a nylon parachute was made by Adeline Gray. Leonardo da Vinci between 1483 and 1485, sketched an idea for a device (a "tent roof") that would let someone down safely from high buildings, but it stayed a concept, never getting off the drawing board. Parachutes were once made from silk but now they are almost always constructed from more durable woven nylon fabric, sometimes coated with silicone to improve performance and consistency over time. Nylon was a newly invented synthetic substitute produced by the DuPont Co. It had been exhibited at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Gray, a parachute rigger at the Pioneer Parachute Company jumped from an aircraft flying from Brainard Field, Hartford, Conn.

            1943 – Happy Birthday Richard E. Smalley, American chemist and physicist. Smalley won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his discovery (with Robert F. Curl, Jr., and Sir Harold W. Kroto) of fullerenes, the third known form of pure carbon (diamond and graphite are the other two known forms). The atoms of fullerenes are arranged in a closed shell. Carbon60, the smallest stable fullerene molecule, consists of 60 carbon atoms that fit together to form a cage, with the bonds resembling the pattern of seams on a soccer ball. The molecule was given the name buckminsterfullerene because its shape is similar to the geodesic domes designed by the American architect and theorist R. Buckminster Fuller.

            1944- D-day, “Operation Overlord” as the allied armies invaded Normandy on the coast of France in a major offensive against the Nazis.  160,000 Allied Troops landed long a 50-mile stretch of heavily-fortified French coastline to fight the Germans on the beaches of Normandy. General Dwight D. Eisenhower had overall command of the more than 5,000 ships and 13,000 aircraft  which supported the D-Day invasion, and by day’s end on June 6, the Allies  had gained a foot- hold in Normandy. The D-Day cost was high -more than 9,000 Allied Soldiers were killed or wounded -- but more than 100,000 soldiers began the march across Belgium and France and into Germany to defeat the Nazis.  Why was it called D-Day?  Probably because D-Day is a term often used in military parlance to denote the day on which a combat attack or operation is to be initiated.

            1971-  Soyuz (based on a 1964 Beatles song, " I Soyuz Standing There") 11 was launched into orbit.  It carried the first men to a space station, Salyut 1. Yes, it was an opportunity to salyut the flag. In a rush to beat the Americans to a space station, the Soviets launched this ill-fated mission two years before the American Skylab.  The main telescope was inoperative due to failure of cover to jettison. There was a fire in the space station nearly resulting in emergency evacuation and finally, a fail-safe valve opening during re-entry resulted in decompression and death of entire crew.    Other than that that, things went fine.        

            1971 – Ed Sullivan Show kaput. On Sunday June 6, 1971 The Ed Sullivan Show   was cancelled on CBS-TV after 24 seasons. Ed, a New York newspaper columnist had begun the show – then called Toast of the Town on June 20, 1948. Among the first guests were the comedy team of  Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis and the writing team of  Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II. The last show, on this day, was a rerun of the March 28, 1971 show starring ….a bit of a come down from Martin and Lewis and Rogers and Hammerstein…..singer, Melanie, David Frye (impressionist). Danny Davis & the Nashville Brass, and comedian, Lennie Schultz.

            1975-  An anticyclonic, or clockwise     tornado was seen west of Alva Oklahoma. Most tornadoes spin in a cyclonic, or counterclockwise fashion.  This tornado actually picked up a farm house, carried it for miles and dropped it on a witch.

            1985 - Authorities in Brazil exhumed a body later identified as that of “Angel of Death”, Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who conducted medical experiments on inmates at Auschwitz during World War II.  He had drowned in 1979 at a Brazilian beach resort and was buried under an assumed name- Wolfgang Gerhard.

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7.        1869-  Ives W. McCaffrey patented (he invented it in 1868) the suction principle vacuum cleaner.  Prior to this time, vacuum cleaners were quite unscrupulous and had no “principles at all.  This machine had a suction fan driven by a hand crank on the handle, but it did not have a brush roll. Called the Whirlwind, it sold for $25, a high price in those days. Only two are known to have survived to this day, one of which can be found in the Hoover Historical Center. Professor Sy Yentz currently uses one for for household cleaning. Perhaps it’s the other?  The first patent for an electrically driven "carpet sweeper and dust gatherer" was granted to Corinne Dufour of Savannah, Georgia in December 1900.

            1892 - George Sampson patented the clothes dryer.  Sampson's dryer used the heat from a hot stove to dry clothes and was a ventilator type machine.  The ventilator was a barrel-shaped metal drum with holes in it. It was turned by hand over a fire. The modern “tumble dryer” consists of a rotating drum called a tumbler through which heated air is circulated to evaporate the moisture from the load. The tumbler is rotated relatively slowly in order to maintain space between the articles in the load. In most cases, the tumbler is belt-driven by an induction motor.

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8.        1625 -HappyBirthday Gian Domenico Cassini,Italian-born Frenchastronomerwho, among others, discovered Cassini's division, the dark gapbetween the rings A and B of Saturn. He also discovered four of Saturn's moonsand devised a first law on astronomical refraction (which alters the apparentposition of a heavenly body near thehorizon).

             1637-ReneDescartes published the bookDiscourse on Method of Rightly Conducting theReason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. It was regarded as a major workin science and mathematics. He expressed his disappointment with traditionalphilosophy and with the limitations of theology; only logic, geometry andalgebra should be respected, because of the utter certainty which they canoffer. Ushering in the "scientific revolution" of Galileo and Newton, Descartes'ideas swept aside ancient and medieval traditions of philosophical methods andinvestigation. But people had to be careful not to 'put Descartes before thehorse."

             1786 -Thefirst commercially-made ice cream in the U.S. was advertised in New York City byMr. Hall of 76 Chatham Street (now Park Row). For non-commercial production ofice-cream, an earlier date of 17 May 1784 is recorded in George Washington'sexpense ledger for the purchase of "a cream machine for ice". No mention of whenit dripped on his shirt.

            1916; HappyBirthday Francis C. Crick.a British biophysicist, who, with James Watsonand Maurice Wilkins, received the 1962 Nobel Prize forPhysiology or Medicine for their determinationof the molecular structureof deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), the chemical substance ultimatelyresponsible for hereditary control of life functions. Crick and Watson begantheir collaboration in 1951, and published their paper on the double helixstructure onApril 2,1953 inNature. Thisdiscoverybecame a cornerstone of genetics and waswidely regarded as one of the most important discoveries of 20th-centurybiology. Before this one might say that biophysicists were "up the Crick withouta paddle".
           1938-  The Amorphos Titanium, or giant calla lily ( nicknamed the “stinking corpse lily”, because of its scent) blossomed at the Bronx Botanical Garden.  The flower was 8 ft. in diameter.  It was plucked for use as a corsage for a local prom                but whoever wore it got a hernia.

            1957-  The X-15 rocket plane made its first flight.

            1975-  Venera 9 from the U.S.S.R. was launched to make the first orbit of Venus.

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9.       1822- Charles Graham received the first patent for false teeth ("Graham Crackers"?). His were not the first false teeth in use, however. In the Colonial years, rotten teeth were considered the cause of many illnesses, and they would be extracted. Varied ways of replacing them were tried. For example, George Washington had at least four sets of false teeth (though none were wooden, despite a myth to that effect).

         1836; Happy Birthday Elizabeth Garret Anderson, English physician who sought the admission of women to professional education, especially in medicine. She become the first woman to qualify as a medical practitioner in Britain (1865), despite being refused admission by the medical schools because it was their policy not to train women as doctors. She had to study medicine privately, under some of the country's leading physicians; at times she was forced to dissect cadavers in her own room because she was forbidden to use hospital facilities. In 1865 she qualified as a medical practitioner by examination of the Society of Apothecaries. The following year, she founded the St. Mary's Dispensary for Women in London. She was also the first female member of the British Medical Association (1873-92).

         1905, Albert Einstein published his analysis of Planck's quantum theory and its application to light. His article appeared in Annalen der Physik. Though no experimental work was involved, it was for these insights that Einstein earned his Nobel Prize.

          1913- Happy Birthday, Patrick  Steptoe  a British scientist and medical researcher who, with Robert Edwards, perfected in-vitro fertilization of the human egg. Their technique made possible in the birth of Louise Brown, the world's first "test-tube baby," on 25 July 1978

            1931-  Robert Goddard patented the first                      rocket- powered aircraft design. However, it drew no military interest from either the Army or the Navy, despite its innovative design, since even the government following the great Depression had limited resources to fund proper research.

            1958-  True story—A woman was sucked thorugh the window of her home during a tornado and carried 60 ft.  Found next to her when she      landed was a phonograph record entitled “Stormy Weather”.

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10.     1862- The first recorded Tornado occurred in New Haven, Connecticut at  about 2:30 p.m.

            1943- The ball point pen was patented by Laslo Biro. He had invented the pen with quick-drying ink in 1938 while working as  a journalist in Budapest, Hungary. Biro was also a sculptor and hypnotist.

           1955- The first U.S. report was made of the separation of a virus into component parts. After the separation the viruses hired lawyers to renegotiate the prenuptual agreement.......just kidding.  This work was performed on the tobacco virus, which furthermore could be reconstructed from those parts to produce a material as effective as the virus in its original form in producing disease in tabacco and other plants.

          2000, The Millenium Bridge - a footbridge across the Thames River - was opened by Queen Elizabeth. . As the first few thousand people crossed the bridge, it developed an unexpected and potentially dangerous sideways "wobble". This caused people to reflexively walk "in step", which increased the oscillation. The design had been adapted from a computer model typical for a car bridge, but which did not take into account the lateral forces associated with human walking. A major engineering oops!  After structural damping was added to stop the oscillation, the bridge re-opened in 2002.

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11.     1292-  Natural scientist Roger Bacon (brother of Eggsan Bacon) died.  He        held that experimentation and observation were fundamental to  science.  We could say that he invented Inquiry Science.

            1742,Benjamin Franklin invented the Franklin stove. Rather than patent it, he chose to write about it in a book so that others could freely copy his design.

            1844-  Charles Goodyear dropped a    mixture of rubber and sulphur on a        hot stove and discovered the vulcanization process for rubber.Unfortunately, the hamburger was a bit too chewy.

            1860Happy Birthday, MaryJane Rathburn, American marine zoologist known for establishing the basictaxonomic information onCrustacea. "A white sport coat and a pinkcrustacean"..... but let's not get crabby over this.

            1910-  Happy Birthday, Louis W.Alvarez, U.S. physicist who deviseda method for x-raying ancient buildings, including the pyramids of Egypt.

            1910-  And, born on the same day as Walter Alvarez, Happy Birthday,  Jacques Cousteau, French oceanographer and electrifying television personality.

            1963- Your bureaucracy at work...... The Mercury space capsule was patented. It was assigned to NASA. Of course the patent was applied for four years earlier on October 6,  1959. Mercury 1 had already flown, on May, 5 1961, in a 15-min sub-orbital flight carrying Alan B. Shepard  2 YEARS !!!!!before the patent was issued.

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12.     Happy birthday—oh, that’s right, no U.S. presidents were born in June.            Aren't you glad you know that now?

            1837- British inventors William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone received a patent for their electromagnetic telegraph. Their invention was put in public service in 1839, five years before the more famous Morse telegraph.

            1839 -  Abner Doubleday, (who later became a major name in book publishing),  created the game we know as baseball (or so the story goes). It happened in Cooperstown, NY which, coincidentally, is the present home of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

            1897- The Swiss Army Knife was patented by Carl Elsener

            1913- The first animated cartoon, The Artist's Dream (also known as The Dachsund) in which a dog eats sausages until it explodes was released. John Randolph Bray invented and patented the process.

          1979-The Gossamer Albatross flew across the English Channel, an airplane powered solely by human power. Cyclist Bryan Allen used a pedalling mechanism.........and no training wheels!

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13.     323B.C. - The death of Alexander the Great the young Macedonian military genius who conquered lands stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to India. Mr."The Great" died in present-day Iraq, at the age of 33 after a prolonged banquet of eating and drinking.

1816-The first U.S public building to use gas lighting was the Peale Museum inBaltimore, Md. This was obviously an "appealing" idea.

            1831-Happy Birthday, JamesC. Maxwell, Scottish physicist and mathematician. Maxwell's research unitedelectricity and magnetism into the concept of the electro-magnetic field. Thefour partial differential equations, now known as Maxwell's equations, firstappeared in fully developed form inElectricity and Magnetism(1873).Since he died at the relatively young of 48,some of the theories he advanced in physics were only conclusively proved long after his death. Maxwell's ideas alsopaved the way for Einstein's special theory of relativity and the quantumtheory.

            1844-a door lock waspatented by Linus Yale

            1926-Happy Birthday, Jerome Lejeune, French geneticist who discovered the first human chromosomal anomaly, the trisomy 21, the chromosome that causes Down syndrome

            1944-  The missile age began as German V-1 and V-2 rockets hit England.

            1983-  Pioneer 10 became the first spacecraft to pass beyond the orbit of the farthest planet, Neptune, thus            becoming the first man-made object      to leave the solar system. Remember, the eccentricities of Pluto's orbit around the Sun brought it closer to the Sun than Neptune for the 20 year period of 1979 - 1999.

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14.     Flag Day- marks the creation of the national banner and it's acceptance by the Continental Congress

            on this day in 1777.

            1811 - Happy Birthday, Harriet Beecher Stowe,author of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

            1834-Sandpaper wasofficially invented as inventor Isaac Fisher Jr. (who was accused of rubbingpeople the wrong way) of Springfield Vt. received his patents.

            1864-Happy Birthday, AloisAlzeimer, German psychiatrist, whorecognizedthe disease of pre-senile dementia thatwould be named after him.

            1868-  Happy birthday, Karl Landsteiner, U.S. physicist who discovered human blood groups.  Initial groupings were a bit primitive mainly consisting of; "the red stuff                coming out of your nose", scabs, and ."the spurty kind  that looks like a fountain".

1881 - John McTammany Jr. of Cambridge Mass. was issued a patent for for his invention of a player piano.

1884- New York was the first state in the U.S. to enact legislation requiring the burying of utility wires. It required that in any incorporated city with a population over 500,000 "all telegraph, telephonic and electric light wires and cables ... be placed under the surface of the streets, lanes and avenues."

1923-  Warren Harding made the first radio broadcast by a U.S. president: “Anyone want to buy land in Teapot Dome, Wyoming?”.  The cognescenti know that the Gnus is cleverly referring to the famous scandal that branded Harding an inept, corrupt president.

1951- the Univac1, the world's first commercial computer was unveiled in Washington, DC. and  The Univac was manufactured for the U.S. Census Bureau by Remington Rand Corp. The  computer was 8 feet high, 7-1/2 feet wide and 14-1/2 feet long.....which made it a bit large for a lap top. 

1972- the insecticide DDT was banned from use in the U.S. after 31 Dec 1972, by executive order of the Environmental Protection Agency.

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15.     

763 BC –Saturday- The  Assyrians recorded  a solar eclipse.  In Assyria, each year was named after a different ruling official and the year's events were recorded under that name in the Canon. Under the year corresponding to 763 B. C., a scribe at Nineveh recorded this eclipse and emphasized the importance of the event by drawing a line across the tablet. These ancient records have allowed historians to use eclipse data to improve the chronology of early Biblical times. In 1983 Bonnie Tyler, an non-Assyrian,  recorded a total eclipse of the heart.

            923–Tuesday-  We note this because the Gnus is dedicated to preserving silly monarchial names as at the Battle of Soissons,King Robert I of France was kaputed by King Charles the Simple who was then was arrested by the supporters of Duke Rudolph of Burgundy. Chuckie the Simple was the posthumous son of Louis II the Stammerer. Charles was too young to assume the throne on the death of his half-brother, Carloman, in 884 or that of his cousin, Charles the Fat, in 888.

            1215-Monday –King John thought… Oo, baby, here I am, signed, sealed, delivered, I'm yours! ….Stevie Wonder. The English Barons renewed their oath of fealty and King John (the only king named John in English history) put his seal (neither a walrus nor manatee would fit) on the Magna Carta (Great Charter). John, who was both remarkably arrogant and remarkably unlucky throughout his reign(1200 - 1216) had to sign the document following a revolt by the English nobility against his rule. The Magna Carta, essentially a peace treaty between John and his barons, guaranteed that the king would respect feudal rights and privileges, uphold the freedom of the church, and maintain the nation's laws and allowed for the formation of a parliament. It was a collection of 37 English laws - some copied, some recollected, some old and some new and something borrowed something blue. The content of the document was drafted by Archbishop Stephen Langton and the most powerful Barons of England. King John signed the document which was originally called the 'Articles of the Barons' on June 10, 1215. The barons renewed the Oath of Fealty to King John on June 15, 1215. An amusing version of John’s kapution in 1216 involves  his demise from acute constipation while sitting on the toilet. This gave rise to the traditions of calling the bathroom the "John" and the toilet the "throne".

             1300-Tuesday-  “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality”.  Poet Dante Alighieri became one of six priors of Florence, active in governing the city. Dante's political activities, which include the banishment of several rivals, led to his own exile from Florence, after his group, the White Guelphs (yes, he was a right jolly old Guelph and I laughed when I saw him…….) was defeated by the Black Guelphs in 1302. He would write his great work, The Divine Comedy, as a virtual wanderer, seeking protection for his family in town after town.

            1330 –Thursday-  Happy Birthday- Edward the Black Prince, named Prince of Wales in 1343.  Prince Edward was the eldest son of King Edward III and Queen Philippa of Hainault. It was said that he received his cognomen at the Battle of Crecy, leading his father’s forces to victory over the French while attired in a black cuirass, a piece of armor covering the body from neck to waist.  In 1355, he was appointed his father's lieutenant in Gascony and the following year led another significant victory against the French at Poitiers, taking the French king, John II,  prisoner.   Edward went kaput at in  1376, and was buried in Canterbury Cathedral. His young son, the testeronically challenged Richard II, succeeded Edward III a year later.

             1580 –Sunday- Eight years before his disastrous Armada, Phillip II of Spain declared, William the Silent to be an outlaw. No response from William. But actually there was.  William, Prince of Orange,  and his brother Louis of Nassau had raised an army to drive the Spanish out of the Netherlands. In 1573, chiefly for the sake of policy, William had become a Calvinist.  The struggle with Spain continued. The Union of Utrecht (1579) proclaimed the virtual independence of the northern provinces, of which William was the uncrowned ruler. Philip II denounced William as a traitor, and a high price was set on his head in 1580. Instead of remaining silent,  William replied with his famous Apologia, in which he sought to vindicate his own conduct, and just for good measure,  but hurled violent accusations at the Spanish king- “Ik kan niet goedkeuren dat vorsten over het geweten van hun onderdanen willen heersen en hun de vrijheid van geloof en godsdienst ontnemen, or for you non-Dutch speakers, “I can not approve that monarchs desire to rule over the conscience of their subjects and take away from them their freedom of belief and religion." William was assassinated in 1585, at Delft by a French Catholic fanatic, Balthasar Gérard thus earning the dubious distinction of being the first ruler to be assassinated with a hand gun.

            1667 – Wednesday- Jean-Baptiste Denys administered the first fully-documented human blood transfusion. He reported successful transfusions from sheep to humans. When asked for comment, the donor uttered “baa”.  When asked for comment, the donee uttered, “baa”. From a lamb he received about twelve ounces of blood, after which he "rapidly recovered from his lethargy, grew fatter and was an object of surprise and astonishment to all who knew him".http://www.pbs.org/wnet/redgold/innovators/bio_denis.html

The earliest reported blood transfusion was in 1492 as  Pope Innocent VIII, in Rome, had an apoplectic stroke; became weak and went into a coma. His physician advised a blood transfusion as a therapeutic measure for the Pope's illness. Employing crude methods, the Pope did not benefit and went kaput by the end of that year. The discovery of the circulation of blood by William Harvey stimulated experiments on the circulation; intravenous injection was begun by Christopher Wren and Clarke in the 1650's. This was followed by the first trial of transfusion of blood in animals.

            1752-Thursday-  If she's put together fine
And she's readin' my mind (stop)
I can't stop (stop)
I can't stop myself
(Stop, stop)
Lightning is striking again
Lightning is striking again
And again and again and again…..Lou Christie………Benjamin Franklin flew his kite during a storm and discovered that lightning was produced by electricity.  This was a shocking yet enlightening experience. What Franklin was investigating was whether or not lightning was an electric phenomenon.  Seems fairly simple today but way back when before the French and Indian War visible electrical sparks were short and to make the connection to lightening thousands of yards long was, to use 20^th century physicist Neils Bohr’s term, a quantum leap.  One thing, however, is certain: if he did do an experiment like this, he did not do it the way it is often shown. No, he didn't tie a key to the kite string, fly it in a thunderstorm, and wait for it to be struck by lightning! It might have proved the theory but it would result in Franklin’s kapution. There are safe ways to do similar things, however, and Franklin, in his various writings, shows that he was quite aware of both the dangers and the alternatives. http://www.ushistory.org/franklin/info/kite.htm

            1775 –Friday- George Washington was appointed commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. Being appointed was different than receiving a commission so according to The Journals of the Continental Congress George Washington was unanimously selected as Commander in Chief of the Continental Army on June 15, 1775. In a speech given to the Continental Congress on June 16, Washington accepted the commission and requested that he not receive a salary for his service, only that his expenses be paid at the conclusion of the war. On June 17, the Continental Congress drafted Washington’s commission as commander in chief.  On June 19, he received the commission.

            1776 –Saturday-  “Delaware?  Where the hell is that?  Can you find it on the map? Ooh look, it’s this tiny little dot under New Jersey….”  Seems that Delaware was intent on making up in Declarations of Independence what it lacked in geographical size. The Assembly of the Lower Counties of Pennsylvania declared itself independent of British and Pennsylvanian authority, thereby creating the state of Delaware.  Delaware did not exist as a colony under British rule. As of 1704, Pennsylvania had two colonial assemblies: one for the “Upper Counties,” originally Bucks, Chester and Philadelphia, and one for the “Lower Counties on the Delaware” of New Castle, Kent and Sussex. All of the counties shared one governor.

1836 –Wednesday- Oh, once upon a time in Arkansas,
An old man sat in his little cabin door
And fiddled at a tune that he liked to hear,
A jolly old tune that he played by ear.
It was raining hard, but the fiddler didn't care,
He sawed away at the popular air,
Tho' his rooftree leaked like a waterfall,
That didn't seem to bother the man at all…….. Colonel Sanford C. Faulkner. Arkansas was admitted as the 25th U.S. state. In the early days of statehood, a couple of U.S. Senators had some disagreement on the spelling and pronunciation of Arkansas. One preferred to be called the senator from Arkan"saw" and the other preferred to be called the senator from Ar"Kansas". In 1881, the conflict was resolved when the state General Assembly passed a resolution stating that the state's name was to be spelled "Arkansas" but pronounced Arkan"saw". It’s all too much, The state's name has been spelled several ways throughout history. In Marquette and Joliet's Journal of 1673, the Indian name is spelled AKANSEA. In LaSalle's map a few years later, it's spelled ACANSA. A map based on the journey of La Harpe in 1718-1722 refers to the river as the ARKANSAS and to the Indians as LES AKANSAS. In about 1811, Captain Zebulon Pike, a noted explorer, spelled it ARKANSAW. http://www.netstate.com/states/intro/ar_intro.htm

Shamefully, The Arkansas Traveler is not the state song.  It is relegated to “Historical Song”.  The state song is the blithering Arkansas, composed in 1987 while Honest Bill Clinton was Governor. Other symbols include: Beverage -Milk; Bird -Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos), and yes, Arkansas has an official creed, cleverly named the 

The Arkansas Creed, Gem -Diamond,  Grain -Rice, an official Historic Cooking Vessel- Dutch Oven,  Insect- Honeybee (Apis mellifera), Mammal-White-tailed Deer (Odocoileus virginianus), Mineral -Quartz Crystal, Musical Instrument -Fiddle, Rock -Bauxite. Soil -Stuttgart Soil Series,Tree -Pine Tree (Genus Pinus L.), a self designated, Trout Capital of the U.S.A. – Cotter, and the official vegetable is  South Arkansas Vine Ripe Pink Tomato

1844- Saturday- Rubber ball, I come bouncin' back to you
Rubber ball, I come bouncin' back to you
Ah-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh
I'm like a rubber ball
Baby that's all that I am to you
(Bouncy, bouncy) (bouncy, bouncy)
Just a rubber ball
'Cause you think you can be true to two
(Bouncy, bouncy) (bouncy, bouncy)
You bounce my heart around
(You don't even put her down)
And like a rubber ball
I come bouncin' back to you
Rubber ball, I come bouncin' back to you …..Bobby Vee….Charles Goodyear improved on his February 24 patent for vulcanized rubber when he  received another patent  for "An Improvement in India-Rubber Fabrics."  This way of processing India-rubber added white lead to his sulfur and heating method so he didn’t have to sulfur the consequences.  Before Goodyear’s first 1844 patent, rubber products melted in hot weather, froze and cracked in cold, and adhered to virtually everything

1846 – Monday- Thanks to James K. Polk, representatives of Great Britain and the United States signed the Oregon Treaty, which settled the long-standing dispute with Britain over who controlled the Oregon territory. The treaty established the 49th parallel from the Rocky Mountains to the Strait of Georgia as the boundary between the United States and British Canada. The United States gained formal control over the future states of Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana, and the British retained Vancouver Island, navigation rights to part of the Columbia River, a future number one draft choice, and the Vancouver marmot, Canada’s most endangered species.

            1864 –Wednesday-  There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures. Brutus, Julius Caesar Act 4, scene 3, 218–224 ……..Ulysses S. Grant's Army of the Potomac and Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia began their end game as the first wave of Union troops attacked Petersburg, the vital Southern rail center 23 miles south of the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. The two armies would not become crash again until April 9, 1865, when Lee surrendered and his men went home. In a  brilliant tactical maneuver, Grant marched his army around the Army of Northern Virginia, crossed the James River unopposed, and advanced his forces to Petersburg.  Lee knew  that the fall of Petersburg would lead to the fall of Richmond. He hurriedly reinforced the city's defenses. Grant's army arrived first. On June 15, the first day of the Battle of Petersburg, some 10,000 Union troops under General William F. Smith moved against the Confederate defenders of Petersburg, made up of only a few thousand armed old men, boys and reality show contestents, commanded by General P.G.T. Beauregard. However, the Confederates had the advantage of formidable physical defenses, and they held off the way overly cautious Union assault. The next day, more Federal troops arrived, but Beauregard was reinforced by Lee, and the Confederate line remained unbroken during several Union attacks occurring over the next two days. The siege would last until April 12, 1865.

1867-Saturday-  He had some gall! The first U.S. gallstone operation was performed by Dr. John Stough Bobbs, known as "the father of cholecystotomy" (yes, another “father of”),  in Indianapolis, Indiana. While operating on his patient, Mary E. Wiggins for a suspected ovarian cyst, he found, surprise, that the gall bladder was inflamed and contained little thingees  like "several solid ordinary rifle bullets."….Note; Bobbs had served in the Civil War…… He opened the sac, removed multiple gallstones but left the gall bladder in place.

            1880- Tuesday- The first U.S. patent for a safety razor was issued to brothers Frederick and Otto Kampfe of New York, who made and sold their invention. Two decades later, King Camp Gillette invented the more famous disposable safety razor blade. Histories written by the American Safety Razor Co. (which acquired the Kampfe business c.1919) have said the Kampfe Brothers began manufacturing the Star safety razor in 1875 ”in a one-room shop in New York City.”  The very very very first safety razor however was invented by Jean Jacques Perret of Paris. Perret was  a master cutler and author of Pogonotomie, au L'Art D'Apprende à se Raser Sol-Méme (Pogonotomie, or The Art of Shaving Oneself in 1769 and L'Art du Coutelier  (The Art of the Cutler) in 1771. Perret described a rasoir à rabot – a plane for the beard, which he had invented in 1762. Inspired by a carpenter's plane, it consisted of a wooden sleeve that enclosed the blade of an ordinary folding straight razor, allowing only a small portion of the edge to protrude, thus preventing one from accidentally slicing off a portion of one's ear while shaving.  Perret made and sold his razor guard but apparently did not patent it. http://www.razorandbrush.com/perkam.html

            1888 –Friday-  Crown Prince Wilhelm become Kaiser Wilhelm II and also became the last (probably because of the silly helmet with the spike sticking out of the top) emperor of the German Empire.  The 2^nd Reich had been established by his father and namesake in 1871. Wilhelm, the grandson of Queen Victoria, via her daughter, Victoria Adelaide Mary, who married Frederick III would  force the departure from office of Otto von Bismarck, his grandfather's long-serving chancellor, adviser, and architect of the Second Reich by 1890. Bismarck, as Europe's senior statesman and diplomat, had engineered the security of Germany through a complicated series of alliances.

            1898 – Wednesday - Happy Birthday to yet another “father of”……Hubertus Strunghold,  German-American physiologist, known as the "father of space medicine."…..at least until they found out he was a war criminal.  Strughold was brought to the United States at the end of World War II  and subsequently played an important role in developing the pressure suits worn by early American astronauts. In 1949 Strughold was made director of the department of space medicine at the School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph Air Force Base, Texas. Randolph's Aeromedical Library was named after him in 1977, but whoops…….Strunghold suffered a Kurt Waldheim monment as documents from the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal linked him to medical experiments in which inmates from Dachau concentration camp were tortured and killed. In May 2006, Strughold's name was removed from the International Space Hall of Fame at the New Mexico Museum of Space History for the same reason. http://www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/S/Strughold.html

            1902 –Sunday- Minor League's most lopsided baseball game as Corsicana Oil Cities, just edged out Texarana Basket Makers, 51to 3.  Justin Clark of Corsicana hit 8 home runs in the game. Every Corsicana batter except the pitcher, had at least one homer and five hits. In addition to Clarke, second baseman William (Alec) Alexander and left fielder Ike Pendleton each had eight hits. In all, 127 batters came to the plate for the two teams, yet the box score said the game was played in two hours and 10 minutes. One pitcher, identified as C.B. DeWitt, pitched the entire game for Texarkana.

            1904 –Wednesday-  1000 people died as a fire aboard the steamboat General Slocum in New York City's East River (which isn’t really a river, it’s part of the Hudson River Estuary). Even though it was a Wednesday, this was billed as a Sunday School Picnic.  The General Slocum was an excursion ferry built in 1891 with a rated capacity of three thousand passengers. On June 15, 1904, the ferry was chartered by St. Mark's Lutheran Church in the East Village. Some 1,358 members of Kleindeutschland (Little Germany), the tightly knit German immigrant community then surrounding Tompkins Square on the Lower East Side were sailing to Huntington Long Island. It caught fire just past Hell’s Gate – where the East River, Harlem River and Long Island Sound cause nasty undercurrents and tides.  Due to faulty fire hoses, inaccessible lifeboats, and lifejackets that had rotted, or were filled with iron to meet weight requirements, and, just to complete the disasterous stew, the actions of an inexperienced and, some say, and cowardly crew 1,021, almost 90-98% of whom were women, children and infants, were killed.

            1909 –Tuesday-  Benjamin Shibe, co-owner of the  Philadelphia Atheletics, patented the cork center baseball. This ushered in the era of the “live ball”. It would be  introduced in the 1910 World Series and used in all games beginning in 1911 and led to an offensive explosion, extending base hits from singles to doubles, and doubles to triples. The Sporting News reported that Shibe claimed that the greatest value to the new ball was that it lasted longer. Shibe is probably more famous for building the first steel and concrete stadium, modestly known as Shibe Park.

            1916 – Thursday- Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto
Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto
Mata ahoo Hima de
Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto
Himitsu wo Shiri tai
You're wondering who I am
(Secret, secret, I've got a secret)
Machine or mannequin
(Secret, secret, I've got a secret)
With parts made in Japan
(Secret, secret, I've got a secret)
I am the modren man ….Styx………….Happy Birthday, Herbert A. Simon, American social scientist and mensch, who’s interest in how people make decisions made him a pioneer in the development of computer artificial intelligence. In 1956, Simon and colleague Allen Newell, produced the computer program, The Logic Theorist, a computer program that could discover proofs of geometric theorems……which would have really helped Professor Sy Yentz when he score a 48 on his Geometry Regents Exam.  It was the first computer program capable of thinking, and marked the beginning of what would become known as artificial intelligence

            1919-Sunday- Capt. John Alcock and Lt. Arthur W. Browne in a converted Vickers Mimy IV  bomber, successfully completed the first, non-stop, transatlantic, airplane flight. Note, Charles Lindbergh’s 1927 flight was the first solo transatlantic flight. They flew from Newfoundland to Clifden, Ireland in 16 hr 12 min and won the £10,000 prize offered by the newspaper, The London Daily Mail. The prize was presented by Winston Churcill.  They then spent four hours waiting for a gate to become available and then three more going through passport control.  Actually, they and crashed and the plane sank into a bog during the  “landing”  at Clifden .  In addition to the Daily Mail prize, both airmen received the KBE and were offered 'jobs for life' by Vickers. This did not work out so well for Alcock as he was killed in a flying accident later that year on December 18th, 1919.

            1938-Wednesday-  In the first night game in New York major league history, Cincinnati Red Johnny Vander Meer pitched his second consecutive no-hit, no-run game, a 6-0 win over the Brooklyn Dodgers. Vander Meer is the only pitcher in baseball history to throw two back-to-back no-hitters.  On June 11, Vander Meer pitched a Saturday afternoon game for the Reds against the Boston Braves. He didn’t allow a hit in nine innings, and of the 28 batters he faced, he walked three and struck out four. The final out was made by future Dodger, NY Giant and Chicago Cubs manager, Leo Durocher. In all probability, Vander Meer’s record of two consecutive no-hitters is the baseball record least likely to be broken, as to do so would require a pitcher to throw three consecutive no-hitters, a nearly unimaginable feat unless it was against the Mets. Vander Meer would go on to a 15-10 record for 1938 en route to a career won loss record of 119 – 121.

            1948 –Tuesday-  Lou Costello:[Larry Talbot's called about Mr. McDougal's packages and is turning into the wolf, growling and snarling] Mr. McDougal, will you stop gargling your throat?

[growling continues]

Lou Costello: :Hey, you're gonna have to get your dog away from the phone, I can't hear a word you're saying.

[growling and snarling continues]

Lou Costello:You're awful silly to call me all the way from London just to have your dog talk to me.

[hears the snarling and barks in response] The premiere of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, actually Bud Abbott Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein. Directed by Charles Barton and co-starring Lon Chaney Jr. as the Wolf Man, Bela Lugos as guess who, and Glen Strange as Frankenstein’s Monster, this was THE classic horror movie spoof.  It also launched a series of “Meet The”  movies, none of which quite came up to the quality of Citizen Kane. 1949 would see  Abbott and Costello Meet the Killer, Boris Karloff  and then 1951 Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man  followed by 1952 Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd (Charles Laughton at the nadir of his career), then to 1953 Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll, and 1955 Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops, and lastly, 1955 Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy

            1969 – Sunday- What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! ….. Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 303–312 ……Great moments in cultural history as the trailer park imitation of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In, Hee Haw, the country music equivalent of Masterpiece Theater was unleashed on the viewing public. Although the program ran for only two years, it was a hit with audiences and was in the Top 20 when CBS dropped it, deciding that the show was just too sophisticated for the network's image. This, from the network that gave us, You’re in the Picture, Me and the Chimp, Petticoat Junction,  and Hogan’s Heroes. Hosted by country singers, beady-eyed, Roy Clark and Buck Owens, the program featured top country musicians and insipid stunts,  recycled jokes, and cleavage. The show went into syndication after the network dropped it, becoming highly successful and running until 1992.

            1985 –Saturday-  U.S. Navy diver Robert D. Stethem was killed by the Muslim terrorist hijackers of Flight 847. Hezbollah hijackers seized the TWA flight in Athens. Identifying Robert Dean Stethem as an American serviceman, they brutally beat and tortured the 23-year-old Stethem before shooting him. Then, they threw his body off the plane. TWA Flight 847 was hijacked en route from Athens to Rome and forced to land in Beirut, Lebanon, where the hijackers held the plane for 17 days. They demanded the release of the 17 Kuwaii terrorists as well as the release of 700 fellow Shiite Muslim terrorists held in Israeli prisons and in prisons in southern Lebanon run by the Israeli-backed South Lebanon Army. Imad Mughniyah, a senior officer with Hezbollah, was secretly indicted for the TWA hijacking in 1987, along with three others. One of those indicted, Mohammed Ali Hamadei, was arrested in Frankfurt, Germany. In 1989 he was convicted in a German court and sentenced to life in prison.  Imad Mugniyah remained at large and on the FBI's Most Wanted List for 19 years, until he was killed in a car bombing in Damascus, Syria on Feb. 12, 2008.

            1990-Friday- In case you were discussing bioremediation at dinner last night, or, you used it for six consecutive answers on Jeopardy, it’s the use of biological agents, such as bacteria or plants, to remove or neutralize contaminants, as in polluted soil or water.  So on this day, the first use of bioremediation  in open waters was to treat an oil slick was attempted.  The slicker was the supertanker Mega Borg, sister ship of the Bjorn Borg,  following an explosion and fire on  June 8 The incident occurred south-southeast of Galveston and spilled 5.1 million gallons of oil    The bioremediation tests were conducted on Jun 15 and 18 with the distribution of 100-lbAE BioSea Process, developed by Alpha Environmental, Inc. which contained oil-metabolizing bacteria and nutrients. The results of the tests were inconclusive, or it was just to oily to make a judgement.  However, there were some unanticipated side effects, development of television news readers with rictus grins.

             1991-Saturday-   Mt. Pinatubo on the island of Luzon in the Phillipines erupted.  This was the 2^nd largest volcanic eruption of the 20^th century- The largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century was the 1912 eruption of Katmai-Novarupta in Alaska.  Millions of tons of sulfur dioxide and the ash cloud were discharged into the atmosphere, resulting in a decrease in the temperature worldwide over the next few years.  This has been the geological description of “a pain in the ash” as millions of people sulfered the consequences.

            1992 –Monday-  U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle doomed his presidential hopes and insured his place in history as a dim bulb when he  instructed a student to spell "potato" with an "e" on the end during a spelling bee. The Quaylester had relied on a faulty flash card that had been written by the student's teacher.

            1994- Caveat emptor A Disney Day as The Lion King, and its ancillary action figures had its premiere just one year before, 1995,   Pocahontas and its ancillary action figures.

            2002 –Saturday-  Near earth asteroid 2002 MN missed the Earth by 75,000 miles (120,000 km), about one-third of the distance between the Earth and the Moon. Fortunately, Bruce Willis, Billie Bob Thornton, and Ben Affleck were available to walk forward in slow motion with determined looks on their faces and the asteroid left the neighborhood.  But not before leaving a deposit of asteroid dust that filtered to Earth creating humanoid travelers who get up to walk around while the flight attendants are carting food in the aisles and need to get their magazine/laptop/iPod/pillow/dead pet.. out of the overhead bin, where they have already crushed your bag as they jammed their’s in,  just as you are falling asleep

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16.     1657-The first pendulum clock waspatentedby its inventor, ChristiaanHuygens

            1884-The firstgravity-powered American roller coaster (invented by La Marcus Thompson) thatwas commercially successful was put in operation at Coney Island,N.Y

                        1893 -Cracker Jack(s)was/were invented by R.W. Rueckheim.The popcorn, peanuts, and molassesconfection was introduced at the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago's FirstWorld Fair. The Gnus highly recommendsThe Devil in the White CitybyErik Larson, a wonderful history of the amazing inventions and innovations ofthis world's fair juxtaposed with the activities of serial murderer H.HHolmes.

            1890 -Happy Birthday,comedian Stan Laurel of the famous team; Laurel&Hardy, born Arthur StanleyJefferson in Ulverston, England

            1903 -Ford Motor Companywas incorporated

            1903-Same day,a busycorporate day as Pepsi Cola registered its trademark.

            1909-"We Shell Overcome".Happy Birthday, Archie F. Carr, Americanbiologistwho was recognized as the foremost authorityon turtles

            1911-TheComputing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) was incorporated. It became IBM in1924.

                        1939-  Showers of hundreds of tiny frogs fell on Trowbridge, England.  We assume no one croaked.

            1963-  Valentina Terechkova became the first woman in space aboard the spacecraft Vostok 6.  She made 48 orbits of Earth before returning safely.

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17.     1775 -The Battle of Bunker Hill (and Breed's Hill)British General WilliamHowelanded his troops on the Charlestown peninsula overlooking Boston and leadthem against Breed's Hill, a fortified American position just below Bunker Hill.As the British advanced in columns against the Americans, Patriot GeneralWilliam Prescott reportedly told his men, "Don't one of you fire until you seethe whites of their eyes!"Ifthe British had been wearing sunglasses, history would have taken a differentturn.

            1867-Joseph Lister in Glasgow, Scotland became the first surgeon to perform surgery under antiseptic conditions

            1869-  Henry Kelsey became the first explorer to see a musk ox.  He described it as  an “ ill-shapen beast ".  The first musk-ox described Henry as “a hairy little wart”.

1870- Happy Birthday, George Cormack, co-inventor of Wheaties cereal. In 1921, Cormack a health clinician in Minneapolis, while mixing a batch of bran gruel for his patients, spilled some of the mix on a hot stove where it sizzled into a crisp flake, he took it to the Washburn Crosby Company.   They refined it.  The name Wheaties was chosen by a company wide contest won by Jane Bausman. Numerous other entries included Stick Between Your Teeth When Eaten Dry Flakes,  Soggy Phlem Phlakes, and  Manure Flakes.

1947- The first around the world passenger airline was begun by Pan Am Airways leaving and finishing in New York. The fare to travel around the world was $1700.

1967-  Mariner V was launched for its mission to Venus.

1970 - Edwin Land patented the Polaroid camera.

1972 - During the night, five men were arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate, an office-hotel-apartment complex in Washington, D.C. On August 9, 1974  Richard Nixon became the first president in U.S. history to resign. On September 8, his successor, President Gerald Ford, pardoned him from any criminal charges.

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18.     1815- The Battle of Waterloo. Napoleon wasdefeated by an army led by the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo in Belgium. Thebattle was described as "close run thing" by Wellington. It could have goneeither way but Prussian reinforcements arrived just as Napoleon was putting hiselite "guard" into the field.

            1926-Happy Birthday, AllanR. Sandage, U.S. astronomer who (with Thomas A. Matthews) discovered, in 1960,the first optical identification of a quasi-stellar radio source.This starlikeobject is a strong emitter of radio waves. We know it as aQuasar.

            1942 -Happy Birthday,Paul McCartney of the Beatles.

            1965-The first largesolid-fuel rocket - a Titan 3C - rocket was launched into orbit. Compared to aliquid-propellant rocket, a solid-propellant rocket has fewer parts, simplerconstruction, is safer and more reliable, and yet it can develop greater power(thrust) than a liquid-propellant rocket of the samesize.

            1983-  Sally Ride ( sister of Joy ) became the first American woman in space aboard  what would become the ill-fated shuttle Challenger, 20 years and 2 days after Valentina Terechkova's flight.

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19.     240 BC,Eratosthenes, a Greekastronomerandmathematician, estimated the circumference of theearth.

            1623-  Happy Birthday, Blaise Pascal, French physicist and mathematician.

            1783- Happy Birthday, Friedrich Surturner, German chemist who discovered morphine (1806) while trying to isolate the portion of opium that caused sleep. He named the  white crystalline alkaloid after Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams

            1885- The Statue of Liberty arrived in New York Harbor.  There was no one there  to sign for the package so it had to be shipped back to France....oh we're just kidding.

            1933 Happy Birthday, Viktor I. Patsayev, Soviet cosmonaut, on the Soyuz 11 mission, on which he, mission commander Georgy Dobrovolsky, and flight engineer Vladislav Volkov remained in space a record 24 days and created the first manned orbital scientific station by docking their spacecraft with the unmanned Salyut station launched two months earlier. They died in cabin depressurization of Soyuz 11 during its return trip to earth.

            1941- Cheerios whole grain oat cereal was invented to provide a more convenient and better tasting alternative to cooked oatmeal.

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20.     1782-  The bald eagle became the official symbol of the United States.  The eagle later joined Hair Club for Raptors, had a nice little feather transplant, a little “comb over” and……….This was  the Great Seal of the United States and there had been six years of discussion (some things never change).  The Great Seal was deemed a better idea than the Great Walrus, the Great Penguin and the Great Narwal.

            1789 – The “Tennis Court Oath”……”I will not double fault”….actually it was In Versailles, France, the deputies of the Third Estate, which represent commoners and the lower clergy, meet on the Jeu de Paume, an indoor tennis court, in defiance of King Louis XVI's order to disperse. They took a historic oath not to disband until a new French constitution had been adopted.  Louis eventually accepted their demands for a National Assembly, then went back on his word and surrounded Versailles with troops.  Three weeks later, the Third Estate stormed the Bastille (they thought there was ammunition stored there) and the French Revolution had begun.

            1791 – Two years later, on the same day as the “Tennis Court Oath”, King Louis XVI of France attempted to flee the country in the so-called Flight to Varennes, but was caught. Their destination was the fortress town of Montmédy in northeastern France, a Royalist stronghold from which the King hoped to initiate a counter-revolution using Austrian troops. They were only able to make it as far as Varennes where, without an escort of soldiers, Louis was recognized by a local post master named Drouet – Louis picture was on the currency and Drouet recognized him.  The royal family was then sent back to Paris under guard. 

            1837 - Queen Victoria, the longest serving monarch in British history, ascended the throne following the death of her uncle, King William IV. She would rule until her death in 1901.

            1863 - West Virginia was admitted to the Union as the 35th state. When Virginia voted to secede after the outbreak of the Civil War, the majority of West Virginians (they originally wanted to call it Kanawha) opposed the secession. It is a  multi-nicknamed state, Mountain State, Switzerland of America, Panhandle State (panhandle????  They greet you at the airport and ask for money?)  The state animal is the black bear, the bird is the cardinal, the flower is the “Big Laurel”, the insect is the honey bee, and state “soil” is Monongahela Silt Loam

1875- "Crime and Punnettment", Happy Birthday, Randolf Punnett, English Mendelian geneticist who, with the English biologist William Bateson, were among the first English geneticists. Punnett devised the "Punnett" square to depict the number and variety of genetic combinations

1893 – “Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks and when she was done she gave her father forty one”….Someone killed 32 year old Lizzie Borden’s father and stepmother. Her father, Andrew, and her stepmother, Abby, were killed in their own home by multiple blows with an axe; their skulls were crushed and mutilated to the point where they were barely recognizable. Astonishingly, given that it was between 9:30 and 11:00 am and that Lizzie and the family maid Bridget were both at home, no one either heard or saw anything amiss. A jury in New Bedford, Mass., found Lizzie Borden innocent of the ax murders of her father and stepmother after deliberating for only one hour. The question remained: who did kill Andrew and Abby Borden?

1939 -The He-176 experimental rocket airplane - the world's first to be propelled solely by a liquid-fuelled rocket - flew for first time, at Peenemunde, Germany. Built by Ernst Heinkel,  it was a built almost entirely out of wood with a fixed, tricycle undercarriage. The 50-second flight of the He-176 was not spectacular, but it did provide "proof of concept" for rocket propulsion. The He-176 was given to the German Technical Museum in Berlin, where it was destroyed during a WW II air raid.

1947- Gangster, Benjamin “Bugsy Siegel” was killed at the home of his mistress, Virgina Hill – who was conveniently away from home at the time-. Bugsy was talking to an associate on the telephone when someone fired three shots through a window. One of the bullets went through his eye.  Siegel had brought gambling (and the mob) to Las Vegas but was not making money.  At about the time Bugsy was “whacked”, associates of “Boss of all Bosses”, Lucky Luciano, walked into Siegel’s casino, The Flamingo, and announced that Luciano was now in charge.  Now one was ever arrested for the crime

1948- Ed Sullivan,  a New York newspaper columnist opened a new televison  show – then called Toast of the Town. Among the first guests were the comedy team of  Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis and the writing team of  Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II 

1975- The movie "Jaws" was released.  Directed by Steven Spielberg based on Peter Benchley’s book about the great white shark that took up “feeding” off of Long Island, NY, the movie changed the horror/thriller genre forever.  People were afraid to go in the water, many were afraid to take baths.

1986-  Chernobyl fall-out, landing in Scotland caused a temporary halt to the slaughter and movement of lambs ( “Tell me about the lambs Clarice” Hannibal Lecter.) Fallout in Great Britain from the Chernobyl accident was greatest where the passage of the cloud coincided with heavy rainfall in north Wales, Cumbria, parts of Scotland and Northern Ireland. Ultimately this resulted in a giant mutant bowl of haggis that attacked Tokyo.

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21.     Summer arrives with the solstice at 7:00  p.m.  EDT. Summer begins in the Northern Hemisphere, and the days begin to get shorter as the Sun reaches its furthest point north and begins its southerly movement. Today, the Sun is 73 1/2 degrees above the horizon as opposed to 26 1/2 degrees in winter.

            1781-Happy Birthday, Simeon-Denis Poisson, French mathematician known for his work on definite integrals, advances in Fourier series, electromagnetic theory, and probability and his ability to whistle the 1812 Overture with a mouth full of saltine crackers. He is also known for the Poisson's integral, Poisson's equation in potential theory, Poisson brackets in differential equations, Poisson's ratio inelasticity, and Poisson's constant in electricity, Poisson Ivy, Poisson Oak, Poisson darts...........

            1788- The Constitution was ratified as New Hampshire became the 9th (of 13) state to ratify it as dictated by Article VII, The Constitution was now the law of the United States.

            1808-You could say he "boron through the difficulties", the isolation of the element boron was announced by French chemist, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, nine days ahead of Englishman Humphry Davy who independently separated boron and made his announcement on June 30, 1808. Gay-Lussac missed out on the credit for boron in 1808 he announced what was probably his single greatest achievement: from his own and others' experiments he deduced that gases at constant temperature and pressure combine in simple numerical proportions by volume, and the resulting product or products—if gases—also bear a simple proportion by volume to the volumes of the reactants….got it?

He also traveled to an altitude of 7,000 meters in a hydrogen filled balloon to study gases.

            1810 and 1940 – A social note….On this day future presidents Zachary Taylor and Richard Nixon married the women who would become their first ladies.  Taylor married Margaret Smith (five years older than the 26 year old president to be) and Nixon married Patricia Ryan.  Further note trivia fans, one of Taylor’s daughters, Sarah, married future Confederate President Jefferson Davis, making Taylor, Davis’ father-in-law……for a brief time. She died three months after the marriage.

            1813- Napoleon had invaded and conquered Spain then installed his brother, Joseph Bonaparte as King.  On this day 80,000 allied (British, Portuguese, and Spanish) troops under the command of British general Arthur Wellesley, later better known as the Duke of Wellington, easily defeated the 66,000-man army of Joseph Bonaparte and Marshal Jourdan at Vitoria, 175 miles northeast of Madrid. By October, the Iberian Peninsula was liberated, and Wellesley launched an invasion of France. The allies had penetrated France as far as Toulouse when news of Napoleon's abdication reached them in April 1814, ending the Peninsular War.  Napoleon was exiled to the island of Elba but he would escape a year later and meet Wellington at Waterloo.

 1834-Cyrus McCormick received a patent for his reaping machine, recognized as the first such practical machine. It combined all the steps that earlier harvesting machines had performed separately. His timesaving invention allowed farmers to more than double their crop size A lack of humor resulted in comments about "the grim reaper".

            1859-Andrew Lanergan, of Boston, Mass., received the first rocket patent for "an improvement in exhibition rockets. He put the fuse inside the rocket. Rockets had been around for a while, they were used during the Mexican War of 1846, but Lanergan was the first for whom the idea “took off” and he patented it.

            1876- Happy Birthday, Willem H. Keesom, Dutch physicist who was a pioneer in cryogenics and was the first to solidify helium (helium, as you know is at the back of the footium) under pressure in1926. In 1932, he produced a temperature just two degrees above absolute zero (-272° C or -457.6° F).

             1893- The first Ferris wheel opened at Chicago's Columbian Exposition, America's third world's fair. It was invented by George Washington Ferris, a Pittsburgh bridge builder, for the purpose of creating an attraction like the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Again, Professor Sy Yentz recommends, The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, a wonderful history of the amazing inventions and innovations of this world's fair juxtaposed with the activities of serial murderer H.H Holmes.

            1916- Happy Birthday, Joseph C. Bamford English inventor and industrialist who invented and manufactured the JCB construction machine with a hydraulically operated shovel on the front and an excavator arm on the back…..the back hoe.  The company, JCB now makes over 160 types of machines for construction, industry, and agriculture…..lots of hoes.

             1948- The first long playing phonograph record was produced. The record, Britney Spears salutes Louis Armstrong, was an immediate hit and shot to the top of the charts.  The second long playing record, Britney’s Child Rearing Hints Samba, did not fare as well.      

            2004-Michael Melvil piloted Space Ship One into space, becoming the first person to do so in a privately developed aircraft.  Take-off occurred at about 9:45 a.m. ET, with SpaceShipOne tucked under the White Knight carrier craft that would take it up to 47,000 feet. It then powered skyward and outside the Earths atmosphere and  the vehicle and pilot spent about three minutes in freefall microgravity. -Aside to reader.  What would you do when you first experienced microgravity?- Well, "As I got to the top I released a bag of M&Ms in the cockpit. It was amazing," said Melvill, 62.

Meanwhile, on the same day, back on Earth........

            2004-Cosmologist Stephen Hawking reversed himself on his Black Hole theory and concluded that information can in fact be retrieved from black holes. Black Holes reportedly then sent information for Dr. Hawking’s attention stating “nyah nyah, nyah”.

            2005-Sort of like a sailboat in space except you didn't have to lean over the side to balance it, the world's first solar sail spacecraft placed in orbit to test controlled flight was launched on a Volna rocket fired from a Russian submarine submerged in the Barents Sea. The non-profit U.S. Planetary Society financed the four million dollar project, built in Russia by the Lavochkin Association and the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy. It was designed for experiments in controlled flight while in orbit, achieved by rotating each sail to change its pitch and to test the possibility of propulsion, though very small, provided by the impact of light radiation

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            22.     1611- Explorer, Henry Hudson was set adrift by mutineers After spending awinter trapped by ice in present-day Hudson Bay, the starving crew of theDiscoverymutinied and set him, his teenage son, and seven supportersadrift in a small, open boat. Hudson and the eight others were never seenagain.

 1633-Galileo Galileiwasforcedby the Inquisition to "abjure, curse, anddetest" his Copernican heliocentric views. He secretly had his fingers crossedbehindhis back.

                        1832-A pin manufacturingmachine was patented byJohnIreland Howe.The machine,invented in Derby, Ct., wouldshape pins in one operation instead of the18 separate steps required for hand production.

            1969-  The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire when an oil slick on the      surface ignited.

            1973-The first Skylabcrew of astronauts splashed down safely after a then record 28 days in space.The Skylab itself was launched onMay 14,1973.

              1977- The former planet now designated Dwarf Planet, Pluto, had a moon, Charon (pronounced Sharon), discovered. In Greek mythology, Charon was the name boatman who rowed people across the river Styx to Pluto’s kingdom. The moon was probably ultimately responsible for the demotion of Pluto since what was thought to be one object, Pluto was really two objects, Pluto and Charon.  This meant that Pluto was a lot smaller than previously believed and ultimately led to the stigma of “Dwarf Planet”

            1999- the first demonstration of brain signals from live rat directly controlling a robot arm was published by Nature Neuroscience.  The robot immediately began searching for cheese.

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23.     1714-  Puritan theologian Cotton Mather                       (brother of  Mind Over Mather),           accepted the Sun-centered theory of the universe.  He was criticized by Puritan     moralist Samuel Sewall who considered            the topic to be too controversial.

            1775-The firstAmerican-made book was advertised in Philadelphia, Penn. TitledImpenetrableSecret or (The DaVinci Code), the book was printed and sold by Story andHumphreys.

            1784 -  At Baltimore MD., E.D Warren, a  young boy, volunteered to go up in a tethered balloon built by Peter Carnes (who was too heavy to be lifted by the balloon).  It was the first “"manned” balloon flight in America.  After the balloon landed, the boy disappeared in the crowd.  He was never seen again.

1848- "The joy of sax".....Adolphe Sax was awarded a patent for the saxophone.

1851-    William Kelly received a patentfor inventing pig iron,  a processfor taking the wrinkles out of

            pigs.........No we’re just kidding.  It’s really a process of converting iron to steel.

           1868- Christopher Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule of Milwaukee, Wisconsin received a patent for an invention they called a "Type-Writer"

           1894- Happy Birthday, Alfred Kinsey, American zoologist  and student of human sexual behaviour who wrote The Sexual Behavior of the Human Male.

           1928- In Germany, a rocket-powered auto built by Opel was wrecked in a test after reaching a speed of 156 mph.......today one drives this speed in the slow lane of the German autobahns

          1931- Aviators Wiley Post and Harold Gatty took off from New York on the first flight around the world in a single-engine plane. 

          1964- Several years after the height of its popular use, inventor Arthur Melin obtained a patent for the hula-hoop.

            1982- A record low temperature of -117ºF. was recorded at the South Pole.  This had a chilling effect on the "Fun in the Sun Barbecue and Picnic" scheduled for that day.

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24.     1494-  Cornbeef and Cabot ......Explorer John Cabot discovered New Foundland, which he didn’t name New Foundland.  He named it           Prima Vista.

            1771-  Happy Birthday chemist, E.I.                             Dupont, born near Paris, France. "Better           living through chemistry".

1812 -  Napoleon's Grande Armee invaded Russia following the rejection of his Continental System by Czar Alexander I. The enormous army, featuring some 500,000 soldiers and staff, included troops from all the European countries under the sway of the French Empire. The Russians refused to fight a decisive battle (other than the indecisive Borodino-which was Napoleon's last best chance for victory) and instead retreated behind a scorched earth policy leaving Napoleon bereft of supplies so far from home.  He found Moscow deserted and unable to sustain his army through the horrible Russian winter.  In retreat, he was constantly attacked resulting in a humiliating defeat and return to France and ultimately, his first exile.

1901 - The first major exhibition of Pablo Picasso's artwork opens at a gallery on Rue Lafitte in Paris

1915- Happy Birthday, Fred Hoyle, English astronomer who coined the term "Big Bang." He became Britain's best-known astronomer in 1950 with his broadcast lectures on the nature of the universe. He didn't believe in the theory but  used "big bang" sarcastically. He never accepted that theory for the origin of the universe. He did however, according to Bill Bryson in A Short History of Nearly Everything (they best, most accessible complete science book you'll ever read) believe that humans evolved with their nostrils pointing down so that cosmic germs would not fall from space into our noses.1930—  The first successful detection of airplanes by radar took place.

            1945-  The Federal Communications Commission allotted 13 T.Vchannels        for commercial broadcasting.  The emphasis is on the commercials.

             1947-  The first reports of flying saucers came from Mt. Rainier, Washington.

1965-  The Federal Trade Commission announced it would require cigarette packages to carry a warning that cigarettes are dangerous to your health..

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25.     1867-Barbed wire was patentedby Lucien B. Smith of Kent, Ohio

            1876- General George A. Custer made his last stand at Little Big Horn river in Montana in a battle with the Sioux led by Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. Custer, who was reckless to a fatal fault, never comprehending the overwhelming odds against him  (6,000 warriors to around 250 for Custer, believing that the Indians were "on the run", and thinking that between himself and Major Reno – who had already retreated- he could "double them up" in short order.  Wrong!

1894 – Happy Birthday,  Hermann Oberth German scientist - who has often been considered along with the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and the American Robert Goddard, one of the three founding fathers of rocketry and modern astronautics. Interestingly, although these three pioneers arrived at many of the same conclusions about the possibility of a rocket escaping the earth’s gravitational pull, they seem to have done so without any knowledge of each other’s work.   Born in Transylvania in 1894, Oberth was a visionary who was inspired by the works of Jules Verne.  Oberth studied rockets and wrote many books devoted to the possibility of achieving spaceflight. He was the first to conceive of rocket "stages" - allowing vehicles to expend their fuel and lose dead weight

1951- At 4:35 pm, the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) televised the one-hour premiere of commercial color television with a program named (appropriately) Premiere. Of course no one could watch it since the system was not compatible with existing black-and-white TV sets and  failed commercially.

        1953-  Horace C. Boren ( yes, these are the Boren details ), became the first passenger to fly around the world in less than 100 hours, arriving at Idlewild (now Kennedy) airport after 99 hours 16 minutes of flying time.  Of course his luggage arrived a month later and it took him almost as long to pass through
Customs at the airport….and don’t get me started about the cab ride to Manhattan…….

           1994- The capture of the first live Vu Quang ox in Vietnam, a previously unknown species of mammal, was reported in the London newspaper The Times. Its existence was first discovered during May 1992 from remains in hunters' villages, including several skulls with horns. This was the first discovery of new large mammal species since the Okapi  in 1910.

         1997- The Russian space-station Mir suffered a near-fatal accident when a Progress ferry being docked via remote control by Russian cosmonaut Vasily Tsibliyev accidentally rammed into the Spektr science module, putting a hole in the pressure vessel and damaging its solar arrays beyond use. 

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26.     1284-  According to legend, this is the day the Pied Piper of Hamelin ( inGermany ) lured the children of the town to a mountain where they disappeared. This was in revenge for the village’s failure to pay him 1,000 guilders for getting rid of the rats.  He played “Mariah Carey sings the best of  Kermit the Frog”.

1498- The toothbrush was invented in China

1541 - Francisco Pizarro, the governor of Peru and conqueror of the Inca civilization, was assassinated in Lima by Spanish rivals.

1721-  The first smallpox inoculations in America.  They were identical to  those used for  years by African tribesmen.  Cotton Mather’s slave Onesimus, told him about the practice.

1824-    Happy Birthday, Lord Kelvin (William Thompson), born in Northern Ireland.  Developed the  Kelvin scale for measuring temperature.

 1730-  Happy birthday, Charles Messier, ( brother of Ranger hockey  star, Mark Messier )astronomer who mapped sky objects until the map was so untidy that it was described as“the more, the Messier ".

1807 - Lightening struck a gunpowder factory in the city of Kirchburg, Luxembourg with the expected results.  Over 300 people were killed in what may have been the most deadly lightening strike in history.

1819- The first US patent for a velocipede, a predecessor of the bicycle, was issued to William K. Clarkson Jr. of New York. Unfortunately, that's about all we know of it since a fire at the Patent Office in 1836 destroyed the patent record.

1894- The first U.S. patent for a gasoline-driven automobile was issued to Karl Benz of Germany

1898- Happy Birthday, Willy Messerschmitt,  German aircraft engineer and designer, His Me109 set a world speed record in 1939, and during World War 2 the "messerchmitt" was the principal German fighter plane.  In 1944 he produced the Me262 fighter, the first jet plane flown in combat

1917 - In what would be a decisive moment of World War I, the first 14,000 U.S. infantry troops of the American Expeditionary Force under the command of General John (Black Jack) Pershing, landed in France at the port of Saint Nazaire.

1959- In a ceremony presided over by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Queen Elizabeth II, the St. Lawrence Seaway was officially opened. The seaway created a navigational channel from the Atlantic Ocean to all five (HOMES is the mneumonic for you Great Lakes fans) of the Great Lakes. The seaway, composed of a system of canals, locks, and dredged waterways, stretches nearly 2,500 miles, from the Atlantic Ocean through the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Duluth, Minnesota, on Lake Superior.

1974- At 8:01 a.m., a package of Wrigley's chewing gum with a bar code printed on it passed over a scanner at the Marsh Supermarket, Troy, Ohio, and became the first product ever loggedunder the new Universal Product Code (UPC) computerized recognition system. Invented by IBM, and approved for use in 1973, the UPC is a 12-number bar code representing the manufacturer's identity and an assigned product number.

1976- The CN tower in Toronto, Canada, the world's tallest self-supporting structure, opened to the public. At a height of 1815 feet 5 inches it is the tallest free-standing structure in the world. The tower construction began 6 Feb 1973 and was completed 40 months later in 1976.

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            27.1829-    British chemist and  mineralogist, James Smithson died leaving a fortune to establish Smithsonian

            Institution in Washington D.C.

            1847-New York and Bostonwere linked by telegraph wires

            1880-  Happy birthday,  Helen Keller,deaf, mute, and blind woman who became an author and lecturer.

            1929-  Color television was demonstrated for the first time at Bell          Laboratories, NY.

            1939 "Frankly, My Dear..." On this day in 1939, one of the most famous scenes in movie history was filmed--Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara parting in Gone with the Wind. Director Victor Fleming also shot the scene using the alternate line, "Frankly, my dear, I just don't care," in case the film censors objected to the word "damn." The censors approved the movie but fined producer David O. Selznick $5,000 for including the curse. 

        1978 - Seasat, an experimental U.S. ocean surveillance satellite was launched. Each day, Seasat made 14 orbits of  the Earth, and in a period of 36 hours was able to monitor nearly 96% of the oceanic surface.

            1978- On the same day as Seasat was launched, the first pen with truly erasable ink, the Gillette Eraser Mate, was invented.

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28.     1873 -Happy Birthday, Alexis Carrel, French scientist, surgeon, biologist, who received the1912 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for developing a method of suturingblood vessels. He moved to the United States in 1905. He did notable work on the problem of keeping tissue alive after removal from a living organism. The mos tfamous example was a piece of tissue from the heart of a chicken embryo, which was kept alive from 1912 to 1946.......thanks to modern chemical mutations, the tissue has evolved into Tom Cruise.        

            1886-Henri Moissan's discovery of fluorine gas was announced at the Paris Academy of Science, two days after his first successful experimentto isolate the element, which he tested with silicon to find it burst into flame.

            1965-The first commercial telephone conversation over a satellite took place over Early Bird  I between America and Europe. It had capacity for 240 voice circuits or one black and white TV channel.

            1992- Drs. Starzl and Tzakis at the University of Pittsburgh transplanted a baboon’s liver into a 35-year old man, the first successful transplant of an animal organ into a human being.  The patient later died of an overdose of bananas.

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29.     1858-Happy Birthday, Panama Canal engineer George Washington Goethals

            1861; "Hold the mayo".  Happy Birthday, Dr. James Mayo, American surgeon came from a family of surgeons. He practiced with his father, Dr. William Worrell Mayo, and brother, Dr. Charles Mayo. They specialized in surgery, pioneering the concept of group practice. Based in Rochester, Minn., their practice eventually developed into the Mayo Clinic, whose own building opened in 1914

            1868- Happy Birthday, George E. Hale, American astronomer known for his development of important astronomical instruments. The 200" Hale Telescope at Mt. Palomar Observatory is named for him.

          1971 – Death of Soyuz 11 crew - Capsule recovered June 29, 1971 23:17 GMT, but when the hatch was opened it was found that the crew had perished due to a loss of cabin atmosphere. A pressure equalization valve was jerked loose at the jettison of the Soyuz Orbital Module. The valve was not supposed to open until an altitude of 4 km was reached. The three-man crew did not have space suits. The Soyuz was thereafter redesigned to accomodate only two crew, but in spacesuits. The actual Soyuz 11 Prime Crew was Leonov, Kubasov, and Kolodin. Dobrovolskiy, Volkov, Patsayev were their backups (and support crew to Soyuz 10). Kubasov was grounded by physicians few days before launch, and the back-up crew ended up going instead.

             1994- An oxymoron? No,  the first near-complete fossil of a pygmy mammoth skeleton  was found in rapidly eroding sea cliffs on Santa Rosa Island, one of the Channel Islands of California. This is the only full sized skeleton of the species anywhere in the world, and the first to be dated. Scientists estimate the age by radiocarbon dating at 12,840 years old.

           1995- The space shuttle Atlantis docked with the Russian space station Mir for a mission which lasted until July 4, 1995 that included the exchange of Russian crew members.

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30.     1893- The Excelsior, a blue-white diamond was discovered in South Africa.  It weighed 969 carats.  The largest diamond ever found was the Cullinan, or Star of Africa.  It weighed 3,025 carats and was cut into 105 separated stones including the two largest cut diamonds in the world.

                 1879- The first electric company, California Electric Light Company was organized in San Francisco to provide and sell electric energy.

            1905-A unique way to beatthe rush hour traffic, the first balloon landing on a building took place inToledo, Ohio, as the mid-point of a round-trip flight by A. Roy Knabenshue. Hehad travelled for 25 minutes a distance of 3 miles to the 10-story building,where he landed, took a 15-min break, and then returned to his startingpoint.       

            1908- Known as the Tunguska Event, a comet may have fallen in Central Siberia.Millions of trees were destroyed as theobject cut a  swath through the forests.  No  rock fragments were found. 

We’re still not sure what it was.  A meteorite would have left a crater, although some think the meteorite might have vaporized before impact.  The first scientific expedition for which records survive was not made until 1927 by Russian mineralogist Leonid Kulik.

1953 - The first Chevrolet Corvette, a white convertible with a red interior, was produced in Flint, Michigan.

1967- Major Robert Lawrence, was the first African-American to qualify for training in the US space program. His career was cut short only a few months later, when he died on 8 Dec 1967 on a training flight in a Starfighter jet that crashed at Edwards Air Force Base, California.  It was not until August 30, 1983 that Guion S. Bluford became the the first African-American in space.

1971-  The 3-man crew of Soyuz 11 died in a                           capsule failure during reentry to the Earth’s atmosphere. Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev were launched into space aboard Soyuz 11 on a mission to dock and enter Salyut 1, the Soviet space station . On June 30, they left Salyut 1 and began reentry procedures. When they fired the explosive bolts to separate the Soyuz 11 reentry capsule from another stage of the spacecraft, a critical valve was jerked open. The capsule was suddenly exposed to the nearly pressureless environment of space. As the capsule rapidly depressurized, Patsayev tried to close the valve by hand but failed. Minutes later, the cosmonauts were dead.

             1972- The first "leap second day", one second was added to the world's time in order to keep the super-accurate atomic clocks in step with the Earth's rotation.

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Bonus Gnus

Lyme disease Lyme disease is a mild to serious bacterial disease that is transmitted by ticks.  Since its first recognition in the northeastern United States (it is named for Lyme, Conn.), the disease is now known to occur in midwestern and western states as well as in many other countries.  The tiny ticks, or genus Ixodes, infest animals such as white-footed mice and white-tailed deer.  When a human is bitten by a tick, the tiny spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi enters the bloodstream.  Within a month a painless rash may appear, often accompanied by severe headaches, fatigue, chills, and fever. Severe inflammation of the heart muscle or nervous system may follow in the next few months, causing heart problems, meningitis, and severe migratory pains.  In some cases, neither of these stages is observed. Within two years, however, arthritic attacks may develop that can  become chronic if untreated.  Scientists have recently found that humans may have a genetic predisposition that increases their susceptibility to chronic arthritis. Antibiotics used in the early stages of the disease are effective. .                        

 Repeat after me, "There's no place like home. There's no place like home. There's no place like home....."