1       New Year’s Day - The world’s most widely celebrated holiday.  The celebration of the new year is the oldest of all holidays. It was first observed in ancient Babylon about 4000 years ago. In the years around 2000 BC, the Babylonian New Year began with the first New Moon  after the Vernal Equinox first day of spring, the Vernal Equinox . The Babylonian new year celebration lasted for eleven days! That’s a long time to stand in Times Square!  The Romans continued to observe the new year in late March, but their calendar was continually tampered with by various emperors so that the calendar soon became out of synchronization with the  path of the sun. A calendar correction by  the Roman senate, in 153 BC, declared January 1 to be the beginning of the new year. But egotistical Roman leaders couldn’t leave well enough alone so tampering continued until Julius Caesar, in 46 BC, established what has come to be known as the Julian Calendar. It again established January 1 as the new year. But in order to synchronize the calendar with the sun, Caesar had to let the previous year last for 445 days. A few hundred years later, as Christianity became more widespread, the early church began having its own religious observances concurrently with many of the pagan celebrations, and New Year’s Day “joined the party” so to speak.

            1431 – Happy Birthday, Pope Alexander VI, the “Borgia Pope” – 1492 – 1503.  Alexander (Rodrigo Borgia of Spain) was the father of Cesare Borgia and Lucretia Borgia (he had four children in all) , remembered more for his sordid personal life than his support of Rennaissance art and attemps to restore order to the city of Rome.

            1449 – Happy Birthday, Lorenzo di Medici, Italian banker, statesman and polititian. Called “Il Magnifico”, Lorenzo was de facto ruler of Florence . He made Florence the most powerful state in Italy. Many Renaissance artists worked at his court, including Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.  Machiavelli, also from Florence called Lorenzo 'the greatest patron of literature and art that any prince has ever been'. He died at age forty three in 1492.

            1660 – “This morning (we living lately in the garret,) I rose, put on my suit with great skirts, having not lately worn any other, clothes but them. Went to Mr. Gunning's chapel…………..” - Samuel Pepys started his diary. Pepys (rhymes with “peeps”) was twenty seven when he started the diary which ran through 1669. The diary has proven to be an unparalleled insight into the lives, trends and thoughts abounding in seventeenth century London including the great fire of London in 1666, the plague, and the restoration of King Charles II.

            1735 - Revere ware (yes he was a silversmith too). Happy Birthday, Paul Revere member of Sons of Liberty and participant in Boston Tea Party and famous for his”1 if by land, 2 if by sea” ride - At 10 pm on the night of April 18, 1775, Revere received instructions from Dr. Joseph Warren to ride to Lexington to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams of the British approach- on which he didn’t have Revere ware but Revere wear. Revere was immortalized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in

“Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere…”

 1797 - Albany became the capital of New York state, replacing New York City.  The State legislature had first met in Albany in 1780.  Surprisingly, considering the miserable weather, Albany is the fourth oldest city (behind Santa Fe, St. Augustine, and Hampton, Virginia), and the second oldest state capital (behind Santa Fe) in the United States.

            1801- The first asteroid, Ceres, was discovered by Italian astronomer and Theatine monk, Guiseppe Piazzi of Palermo. He found Ceres, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Piazzi named it Ceres Ferdinandea, in honor of Sicily’s patron Roman goddess (of agriculture), and his patron, the king. It revolves around the Sun in 4.6 years and has a diameter of about 960 km (600 miles). The discovery of Ceres followed that of the planet Uranus, made in 1781 by the British astronomer William Herschel (1783-1822). Piazzi's discovery confirmed the so-called "Titius-Bode's law", which assumed the existence of a "fifth planet" between the orbit of Mars and Jupiter. Of course the “fifth planet” is in thousands of pieces called asteroids but that would be quibbling. Now with the demotion of Pluto to dwarf planet, Ceres has been promoted from asteroid to dwarf planet.   Stay tuned….

            1808 - The importation of slaves into the United States was  banned. As part of a compromise, The U.S Constitution had prevented Congress from banning the trade until 1808. Although the Constitution prohibited Congress from abolishing the slave trade individual states were free to take that initiative whenever they pleased. New Jersey and Rhode Island led the way in 1787, with Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York soon following. By 1806, South Carolina was the only state that had not restricted the slave trade

            1810- Happy Birthday, Charles Ellet Jr. , American engineer who built the first wire-cable suspension bridge in America, across the Schuylkill River at Fairmont, Penn., near Philadelphia. Ellet was shot and died of his wounds at the Battle of Memphis in 1862.

            1818 - Mary Shelley novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus was published. Frankenstein was begun in the summer of 1816, and finished over the course of 1817, when Mary and her husband, Percy,  were living near Windsor, England. The novel appeared in three volumes;

            1859- Happy Birthday, Michael J. Owens, American glass manufacturer who invented the automatic glass bottle making machine. In Toledo, Ohio, his mechanization of the glass-blowing process eliminated child labor from glass-bottle factories. In 1904 he had a machine capable to producing four bottles per second. Owens’ machines could be built with from six to twenty arms, each blowing a bottle. We, of course know many famous bottles;  the Bottle of Waterloo, the Bottle of Gettysburg, the Bottle of the Bulge………

            1863 – President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing all slaves the rebelling southern states.

            1864 – Happy Birthday,  Alfred Stieglitz, American photographer and husband of the artist Georgia O’Keefe. Stieglitz’ photographs of the flatiron building in New York City are Professor Sy Yentz favorite photos.

            1876-Happy Birthday, Harriet Brooks, Canadian nuclear physicist who while working with Ernest Rutherford was probably the first to observe the recoil of the atomic nucleus as nuclear particles were emitted during radioactive decay. This  “recoil” of course would result in giant mutant animals including lizards, caterpillars, and Madonna,  who would attack the city of Tokyo.  Brooks studied the 'emanations' from the radioactive element radium. At the time it wasn't known what these emanations were. She concluded that the emanation was a gas, and reckoned that its atoms were a little smaller than those of its radium 'parent'. The gas eventually came to be called radon.  Like her contemporary, Marie Curie, she died of leukemia caused by working with radioactive materials.

            1892 - Ellis Island opened to begin processing immigrants into the United States. Ellis Island, just off southern Manhattan in New York City, had been known in the 1600s as Gull Island by the Mohegan tribe, and was a mere two to three acres. After being discovered for its rich oyster beds in 1628, Dutch settlers renamed it Oyster Island. Following the hanging of one “Anderson the Pirate” in 1765, the island was again renamed, this time known as Gibbet Island after the instrument used to hang him. Finally on January 20, 1785, Samuel Ellis purchased the property and gave it his name, which remains the name of the island till today. The island was purchased by the federal government in 1808.  The island was increased to 14 acres using landfill in preparation for its use as an immigration center.  Oh yes, the first immigrant to be processed was fifteen year old Annie Moor.

             1896-German scientist, Wilhelm Röntgen  continued the announcement  his discovery of x-rays by  sending copies of his manuscript and some of his x-ray photographs to several famous physicists and friends, including Lord Kelvin in Glasgow and Henre Poincare in Paris. Rontgen had originally announced the discovery locally on December 28. Rontgen had found invisible rays that could go through black paper, and later, other materials, since he didn’t know what they were, he called them X-rays.

            1898 - Happy birthday New York City. The five boroughs of New York became the city of New York this day. It was called ‘the consolidation’ and the five boroughs were fused into The Big Apple.  To this day residents of Manhattan consider themselves superior to those of the “outer boroughs”.  Everyone else looks down on the Bronx and believes that they milk cows and take in the harvest in Staten Island (Richmond). Queens, of  course is impossible to navigate – they have 67 Road next to 67 Street next to 67 Place, next to 67 Avenue and none of the road/place/avenue/streets are straight and no one snow plows them in the winter anyway.  Most of the residents of Queens are people who got lost trying to travel through it.  Brooklyn (Kings County) was a separate city before the consolidation, was dragged kicking and screaming (barely 50% of Brooklynites voted for consolidation) into the new city,  and has never recovered from the loss of the Dodgers. The Bronx was originally part of Manhattan (that’s why Manhattan College is in the Bronx) but became a separate county in 1914.  In 1975 the borough of Richmond, which everyone had been calling Staten Island anyway, was officially named Staten Island…

            1902 - The first Rose Bowl game was played in Pasadena, California, with the University of Michigan just edging out Stanford University by a score of 49-0.

            1903- The first transpacific cable from the U.S. was landed at Honolulu, Hawaii and the first message was telegraphed to President Theodore Roosevelt in Washington. The message was “Wow, it’s warm and sunny here.  Not many tourists.  Beach-front condos available. We should make this a state”. The cable ship Silvertown had laid 2,620 miles of cable since leaving San Francisco, California, on December 14, 1902.

            1908 – William Howard Taft’s “New Year’s Rockin Eve”…..no, no, no Professor Sy Yentz has his Auld Lang Synish sense of humor… For the first time, a ball was dropped in New York City's Times Square to signify the start of the New Year at midnight. Celebrations had originally begun in 1904 to celebrate the opening of the New York Times tower …and the New Year…. but the City had banned fireworks displays so in 1908, the ball was …well it wasn’t dropped…it was lowered by hand. The original ball, constructed of iron and wood and adorned with 100 25-watt light bulbs, was 5 feet in diameter and weighed 700 pounds

             1909 -London astronomers, based on the work of American Percival Lowell( the same Percival Lowell who believed the lines on Mars were “canals”)  hinted of sightings of a planet beyond Neptune. Of course now we know they are wrong.  There used to be a planet beyond Neptune, it was called Pluto, but now it is not a planet. It was voted out by just 424 astronomers who remained for the last day of a meeting of the International Astronomical Union in Prague in 2006.

            1915 – Aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid), invented by Felix Hoffman in 1897,  was sold for the first time without the need of a prescription. It had been available since 1900 in tablet form. The pills were manufactured by Bayer pharmaceuticals in Germany. The medicine had previously been used in powder.

            1919 – Happy Birthday,  J. D. Salinger, hermitish American novelist. Author of Catcher in the Rye. 

            1928- The Milam Building in San Antonio, Texas. All 21 stories of it became the first high-rise office building, in the world with air-conditioning installed during construction. The air conditioning system, built by Carrier, had a central refrigeration plant in the basement that supplied cold water to small air-handling units on every other floor.          Professor Sy Yentz believes that like many offices he has worked in, the air conditioning only worked during the winter.

            1934 – In what should be recognized as a holy day for the movie industry, Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay became a United States federal prison. Some include: Alcatraz: The Whole Shocking Story (1980), Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), Escape From Alcatraz (1979), The Rock (1996), Terror at Alcatraz (1982) and lots of Al Capone movies.   

            1935 - Bucknell University (the Bisons) , of Lewisburg, Pa. – in its only Orange Bowl appearance  won the first Orange Bowl 26–0 over the University of Miami (Hurricanes).

            1937- Safety glass, first invented by French chemist Edouard Benedictus in 1909, became mandatory for the windshields of cars- note that windshield wipers also became mandatory this year. Safety glass shatters into tiny pieces rather than breaks into large slabs that might cut off one’s head in an accident. Safety glass is a glass sandwich in which a layer of clear, flexible plastic is bonded between two layers of glass. Benedictus had discovered safety glass in another of those serendipitous science accidents.  He dropped a beaker.  It didn’t break. He discussed this with his assistant (note; Professor Sy Yentz has dropped thousands of glasses and they always break).  His assistant recalled that the flask had contained a small amount of liquid plastic (celluloid), which had evaporated leaving a transparent layer of plastic on the inside of the flask. When the flask hit the floor, the layer of plastic held the shards together, preventing it from shattering.

            1937 – On the same day that shatterproof glass windshields became mandatory, The first Cotton Bowl game was  played in Dallas, Texas. The Horned Frogs of Texas Christian University (TCU) defeated  the Warriors of  Marquette University, in Milwaukee 16–6.

            1942 – As the tide of World  War II began to turn in favor of the Allies,  President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill issued a declaration, signed by representatives of 26 countries, calling themselves  the “United Nations.” The signatories of the declaration promised to create an international postwar peacekeeping organization.  Well, that’s sure worked out well.

            1951 – The first pay-per-view television was instituted by the Zenith Radio Corporation in Chicago. Just like today when we can cultural highlights like Saw 3 or any Lindsay Lohan movie, the company sent movies over the airway via scrambled signals. 300 families participated in the test  and they would send telephone signals to decode the movies for $1 each. Three movies offered were April Showers with Jack Carson, Welcome Stranger with Bing Crosby, and Homecoming with Clark Gable and Lana Turner. During the four-week test, families ordered more than 2,600 movies.

            1953 – Hank Williams kaput. Country singer  Hank Williams Sr., 29, Your Cheatin Heart, Jambalaya,  died of a drug and alcohol overdose while en route to a concert in Canton, Ohio. Williams got into the backseat of the Cadillac for the trip armed with vitamin B shots and  a bottle of whiskey. When the chauffeur  was stopped for speeding, the policeman noticed twhat looked like a dead man in the back seat.  Williams was taken to a West Virginian hospital and he was officially declared dead at 7:00 a.m. on January 1, 1953. He had died in the back of the Cadillac, on his way to a concert.  Ironically, the last single released in his lifetime was I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive.

            1966- All US cigarette packages began carrying the health warning: Caution: Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health.

            1995 The “Draupner wave” was the the name given to of the first freak wave (no hurricane, no earthquake, no giant fat person doing a cannonball)  to be detected by a measuring instrument. It  occurred at the Draupner oil platform in the North Sea off the coast of Norway Prior to this measurement, such freak waves were known to exist only through anecdotal evidence provided by those who had encountered them at sea. The wave had a height of approximately 30ft.  Note; freak waves are also distinguishable by their nose rings, lip rings, “goth” appearance and love for the music of Metallica.

             1996- Tree snail Kaput!  The last Polynesian Tree Snail died at the London Zoo. A protozoan disease of the digestive gland is thought to have been responsible for the extinction of this last individual of the species. As often happens when non-native species are imported to solve a problem, the cure is worse than the disease so when residents of Raiatea, near Hawaii  began importing predatory snails from Florida (these snails would do anything to get beach front land)  in 1986 to eat another kind of pest snail, but the predators attacked the native snails. By 1991 they had driven the species to the brink of extinction. Scientists captured the last known P. turgida individuals to try to save them through captive breeding which, of course, didn’t work.  The snail’s final words were “it all happened so fast….”

            2000- Greenwich Electronic Time - known as GeT - was initiated to act as an international standard for all electronic commerce. All e-mail messages and e-commerce transactions already carry a “time stamp” based on Co-ordinated Universal Time - the modern equivalent of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). The clocks in computers have software which converts e-mail and message dates into local time. GeT provides a single time standard for worldwide Internet traders and users around the world.

            2000- A notable event that didn’t happen.  There was no Y2K millennium bug wreaking havoc on computers and other electronics.  The non-event was preceded by months of hand wringing and dire predictions.

            2008 -The first outdoor National Hockey League game held in the United states occurred as The Buffalo Sabres hosted the NHL Winter Classic against the Pittsburgh Penguins, Pittsburgh won 2-1 in a shootout. Pittsburgh won on a goal by “wunderkind” Sidney Crosby.  The game, attended by 76,000 maniacs, was played in a snow storm. Buffalo? January? Lake effect snow?  Duh!.  Surprisingly, this was better than an exhibition hockey game played in Las Vegas (what were they thinking? !!) in September 1991 in 85˚ temperatures. During the game, the crowd and players were attacked by swarms of flying insects.  Really! We don’t make these things up.

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2.        1492 – The Moorish Muslims surrendered the city of Grenada to the forces of Christian King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.  The Muslims had conquered parts of Spain, as part of their continuous attacks on Europe, in the 13^th century.

             1788 -Georgia, became the 4^th state to enter the United States of America. Georgia, named after King George II (one of the “German Georges”, the first George – there were four in all- didn’t speak English and was imported from Hanover) was established under a charter to James Oglethorpe under the condition that it be named after George. Georgia was to be inhabited by the "worthy poor" of London. The "worthy poor" included the debtors and other homeless people. As it happened, however, this plan was never fully realized.  When the ship Anne sailed for the new colony on November 16, 1732, not one of the 114 colonists aboard had been released from debtors' prison to make the voyage

             1813- In York, England 66 persons went on trial for offenses connected with Luddism. Within days, seventeen of them had been executed. Luddites, who took their name from Ned Ludd (who may or may not have existed) had launched a campaign to destroy the factory machinery (usually sewing) they blamed for their unemployment. Nowadays “luddite” has evolved to mean someone opposing new technologies or technological progress and many of us who are thisclose to destroying a computer or TV, or car, or any other machinery are potential luddites. Luddites of the world unite!

            1839- French pioneering photographer Louis Daguerre took the first photograph of the moon. Yes……and you knew this was coming…… a city worker objecting to Daguerre’s taking his picture, pulled down his pants and poof! The first picture of a moon. Oh, Daguerre also took the first picture of Earth’s natural satellite, the Moon.

            1842 – Charles Ellet’s (see his birthday, January 1, 1810 above) first wire suspension bridge was opened to pedestrian traffic over the Schuylkill River in  Fairmount, Pennsylvania.

            1870- Work began clearing the site for the Brooklyn Bridge connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn – which at that time were two separate cities. The five boroughs of New York would not be incorporated until January 1, 1898- see above.In June 1869, the New York City Council and the Army Corps of Engineers approved engineer John  Roebling's design. Later that month, while examining locations for a Brooklyn tower site, Roebling's foot was crushed on a pier by an incoming ferry. Roebling later died of tetanus as a result of the injuries. Immediately following Roebling's death, his son, Washington, took over as chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge. The job was completed on May 24, 1883.     

            1890- President Benjamin Harrison appointed Alice Sanger as the first female White House staffer. Sanger, the first woman  to work at the White House not as a maid, was hired as a stenographer.

                1905 - Russian fleet surrendered at Port Arthur. This turning point in the Russo -Japanese War, came as Port Arthur, the Russian naval base in China, surrendered to Japanese naval forces under Admiral Heihachiro Togo, Japan’s greatest naval hero. Ah the lessons of history…… in February 1904 Japan had launched a surprise naval attack on Port Arthur, decimating the Russian fleet. Thirty seven years later the same thing happened to the U.S Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor.

            1920- Happy Birthday, (No accurate records exist of his date of birth. He celebrated  January 2, 1920, which was the latest possible date, but it might have been as early as 4 October 1919.) Isaac Asimov, scientist, educator, and incredibly prolific writer (approximately 500 books including works on Shakespeare, the Foundation Trilogy, I Robot and Caves of Steel) who was born in Petrovichi,  Russia.  It was Asimov who coined the word “robotics”.

            1941- The Andrews Sisters recorded the song, “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” on Decca Records. The song, which became a classic World War II hit, gained popularity and recognition in Buck Privates, one of Abbott and Costello better movies……before they met Frankenstein of course.

            1941 – And on the same day, Happy Birthday, Donald P. Keck,
American research  physicist, who with his colleagues at Corning Glass, Dr. Robert Maurer and Dr. Peter Schultz, invented fused silica optical waveguide.  We know it as optical fiber. Optical fiber (fiber optics) refers to the medium and the technology associated with the transmission of information as light pulses along a really really really  thin glass or plastic wire or fiber. Optical fiber carries much more information than conventional copper wire and is in general not subject to electromagnetic interference and the need to retransmit signals. Most telephone company long-distance lines are now of optical fiber.

                1959 - Luna 1, the first spacecraft to reach the vicinity of the Moon and to orbit the Sun, was launched by the U.S.S.R. Actually, it was an “oops” as a malfunction in the ground-based control system caused an error in the rocket's burntime, and the spacecraft ended up flying by the Moon. Approaching it at 5,900 km at the closest point, Luna 1 became the first object launched by mankind to reach heliocentric orbit (orbit around the Sun) . It was then dubbed a "new planet" and renamed Mechta. Its orbit lies between those of Earth and Mars.

             1960-  British astronomer,  John Reynolds set the age of solar system at 4,950,000,000 years.............and we thought it didn’t look a day over 4,9490,000,000 year old! No, he didn’t count the candles on a birthday cake…. he detected the xenon isotope (note- isotopes are different forms of atoms of the same element. They have the same number of protons in their nuclei but a different number of neutrons )of mass 129 trapped in meteorites, and from that discovery inferred that the extinct radioactive isotope iodine-129 (half-life 16 million years and probably generated in a pre-solar supernova) was present when the meteorites formed. This indicated that the meteorites appeared in the early history of the solar system.

            1974 – Tex Ritter kaput. The singing cowboy (he sang the title song in the great western High Noon)  died of a heart attack at the age of 67. Sadly, his son, John, who became a significant television star in Three’s Company, also died of a heart attack in 2003.

             1975- With the energy crisis in crisis mode, President Richard Nixon signed legislation requiring states to limit highway speeds to 55 mph….of course everyone really paid attention to that one

            1975- Kenneth C. Brugger discovered the long-unknown winter destination of the monarch butterfly in the mountains of Mexico. They were driven to the mountains by high prices and loud tourists in Acapulco and Cancun. Each fall, monarch butterflies, driven by a circadian (internal) clock, head point south and flutter up to 2,000 miles to Mexico.

            1994 - The Chrysler Corporation introduced the incredibly ugly Neon, a compact car. Add this to the long list of reasons that American auto manufacturing is falling behind in  the world market.  In fact, five years later Chrysler, now Daimler-Chrysler, discontinued the entire Plymouth line (Professor Sy Yentz’ first car was a 1958 Plymouth convertible with push button transmission) and Neon became the Dodge Neon. The Dodge Neon went to that big junkyard in the sky in 2005.

            1995 - The most distant galaxy yet discovered was found by scientists using the Keck telescope in Hawaii. It is estimated to be 15 billion light years away and was cleverly named 8C 1435+63. That’s so we don’t mix it up with 8C 1435+62. We, on Earth have been visited by residents of that galaxy.  You see them on reality TV shows all the time.

            2004 - Stardust successfully flew past Comet Wild 2 (pronounced "Vilt-2"), collecting samples that it would return to Earth two years later.  Paul Wild (Astronomical Institute of Berne, Switzerland) had discovered the comet on January 6 and 8, 1978. The Stardust flew within 240 kilometers (149 miles) of the comet and caught sample of comet particles while taking detailed pictures of Wild 2's pockmarked surface and comet resident Barbara Walters.

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3.        106 B.C – Happy Birthday, Cicero, Roman statesman, orator, philosopher and author.  Marcus Tullius Cicero began public life as a lawyer, became a politician – elected as Consul in 63 B.C and then lost out in the power struggle following the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C.  He was killed in 43 B.C when the triumvirate of Marc Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus assumed power.

            1521- Pope Leo X (Giovanni Di Medici, son of Lorenzo -Il Magnifico- Di Medici of Florence), issued the papal bull Decet Romanum Pontificem, which excommunicated Martin Luther from the Catholic Church and contributed mightily to the start of Protestantism. Note; papal bulls received more attention than previously attempted papal chickens, papal goats and papal donkeys.

                1777- The Battle of Princeton, the mother of Chauncy Poofcakes bopped the chief admissions officer in the head with her teacup in a rage over the level of acceptable SAT  scores.  No no no no, Professor Sy Yentz has his academic sense of humor. It was really a stroke of strategic genius by General George Washington (who had a lengthening record of losing battles) as he managed to evade a general battle  with General Charles Cornwallis while winning several encounters with the British rear guard, as it departed Princeton for Trenton, New Jersey.

            1823 – Happy Birthday, Robert Whitehead, British engineer who invented the modern torpedo while working for the Austrian Navy in 1864.  He designed a projectile that was driven by compressed air and was designed to strike a ship's unprotected hull below the waterline

            1861 – Delaware rejected a proposal to secede from the U.S.  This was just two weeks after South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union. Among the reasons for not seceding: it was so small no one would notice it was gone……no, no, no Professor Sy Yentz has his separate sense of humor.  Actually, the legislature was controlled by Unionists.

            1871 – Henry Bradley received the American patent for oleomargarine (margarine). Margarine was created in 1870 by Frenchman, Hippolyte Mège-Mouriez .  Mège-Mouriez used margaric acid, a fatty acid component isolated in 1813 by Michael Chevreul and named because of the  pearly drops that reminded him of the Greek word for pearl -- margarites…..how appetizing!

             1888- Grasping at straws.  Marvin Chester Stone (brother of Blarney Stone, Rosetta Stone and Kidney Stone) made his contribution to western civilization by  inventing the artificial drinking straw. Pre Stone – drinkers used natural rye grass straws.  Post Stone, the artificial drinking straw made of manila paper and covered  with paraffin.  Stone was already a manufacturer of  paper cigarette holders so he liked figuring out new things to do with paper.  

           1892 – Happy Birthday, J.R.R Tolkien, English author, born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

            1919- New Zealand born physicist, Ernest Rutherford succeeded in splitting the atom. Well, he didn’t actually split the atom.  In 1911, Rutherford had developed the theory of atomic nuclei, that all the positive charge and most of the mass of an atom must be contained in a tiny nucleus at the atom's centre. In 1919 he discovered that the nuclei of certain light elements, such as nitrogen, could be "disintegrated" by the impact of energetic alpha particles coming from some radioactive source, and that during this process fast protons were emitted. Patrick Blackett later proved, with the cloud chamber, that the nitrogen in this process was actually transformed into an oxygen isotope, so that Rutherford was the first to deliberately transmute one element into another. Another major step towards atomic energy and another outcome of Einstein’s E=MC² equation of 1905.

            1920- The Boston Red Sox officially announced the sale of pitcher/outfielder Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees……the deal had been secretly agreed to on December 26…….  Boston owner, Broadway show producer, Harry Frazee was trying to raise money for his production of  a show, No, No Nanette.  While he did produce the show he also produced the key piece to the greatest sports franchise of all time….the New York Yankees.

            1924 - Two years after British archaeologist Howard Carter and his workmen discovered the tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamen near Luxor, Egypt, they found the greatest treasure of the tomb—a stone sarcophagus containing a solid gold coffin that held the mummy (but not the daddy) of the boy-king Tutankhamen. (Tut to his friends.)

            1929- The New York Yankees announced that they would put numbers on the back of the team uniforms (to help with player identification from the stands).  Babe Ruth - #3, Lou Gehrig, # 4, …………The initial numbers indicated batting order.  Gehrig batted third, Ruth, fourth.  Earl Coombs was the lead of batter and had #1, Bob Meusel followed Ruth in the batting order and wore # 5.

            1952 – “Just the facts ma’am”.  Dragnet, starring the scintillating effervescent Jack Webb as Sgt. Joe Friday, made its debut.  The documentary style police drama ran from 1952 – 1959 and then reincarnated from 1967-70.

            1953 - Frances Bolton and her son, Oliver, both from Ohio, became the first mother-son combination to serve at the same time in the United States Congress. Frances, elected as a Republican by special election, in 1940, to fill the vacancy caused by the death of her husband, Chester C. Bolton, was reelected to the fourteen succeeding Congresses and served from February 27, 1940, to January 3, 1969. Oliver served the 11 Congressional District in Ohio from 1953 – 1957 at which time incurred the wrath of his mother for “staying out past 11 p.m” and was sent home.

            1957 -The world’s first electric watch was introduced in Lancaster, PA by the Hamilton Watch Company.  The watch, which came with a really long cord…no, no no it didn’t…..it was battery powered.  It was also obsolete by 1969, having been replaced by quartz watches.

            1959 - Alaska (49^th state) entered the United States of America.  The territory had been purchased on March 30, 1867 by William Seward from Russia for $7.2 million dollars, about two cents an acre. A check for $7,200,000.00 was issued on August 1, 1868 and made payable to Edouard de Stoeckl, the Russian Minister to the United States. Suggested state nickname, “The 372 people, lots of moose, many bears and salmon, with entire state  covered with snow State”.

            1967- Jack Ruby, usually described as the Dallas nightclub owner (but a pimp and small-time crook with mob connections) who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy, died of cancer in a Dallas hospital. The Texas Court of Appeals had recently overturned his death sentence for the murder of Oswald and was scheduled to grant him a new trial.

            1980- Conservationist Joy Adamson, author of Born Free, featuring “Elsa the Lioness” was killed in Kenya by a servant  who had been fired by Adamson claiming she owed him money.  Initially, the death was blamed on mauling by a lion. However, Adamson's body had been found on a road near her camp by her assistant, Pieter Mawson, and her injuries were caused by stabs from a sword like weapon and head injuries, not by a lion's fangs and claws. The “lion” had also opened her tent and stolen the contents of a trunk.

            1999- The U.S. Mars Polar Lander was launched for its trip to Mars. On December 3, 1999, the Mars Polar Lander was in the final minutes of slowing itself down, ready to make a self-controlled touch down. Kaput!  It was never heard from again. Nobody knows for sure exactly what happened. Attached to the Mars Polar Lander was a pair of small hitchhiking devices, the Deep Space 2 Mars Microprobes—Scott and Amundsen—which were to be ejected at high altitude to fall and penetrate beneath the Martian surface. They too failed and went kaput. Lately suspicion for the disappearance has fallen on Martian immigrant, Rosie O’Donnell.

            2000 – The last daily Peanuts comic strip was published. Creator, Charles Schultz retired and died shortly afterwards on Feb. 12, the day before his last Sunday comic strip was published.

            2004 – The first of the two Mars Rover landers, Spirit, landed on Mars.  Rover would follow on January 24.  They had been launched in June and July 2003 and landed on opposite sides of the Red Planet.  They returned to Earth in 2005 and attacked Tom Cruise’s house in Staten Island launching the War of the Worlds.   No, actually, they are still active and sending geological information about Mars.

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4.        -Look for the Quadrantid meteor shower tonight.  For those of you who wish to be outside on a Januay night, the source of the Quadrantid meteor shower was unknown until Dec. 2003 when Peter Jenniskens of the NASA Ames Research Center found evidence that Quadrantid meteoroids come from 2003 EH1, an "asteroid" that is probably a piece of a comet that broke apart some 500 years ago.

          46 BC -  In one of the vary rare defeats of his military career, Julius Caesar was defeated by Titus Labienus in the Battle of Ruspina.  Following his victory over Pompey at Pharsalus (during the Civil War) Caesar moved his army to Africa to secure Rome’s “breadbasket”. However, he lost most of his supplies during a storm at sea and the army was forced to forage for replacements.  While they were foraging, Labienus, a former general for Caesar, attacked. Caesar's own account of the battle describes Ruspina as a fighting retreat conducted in good order. Other accounts are less generous and estimate that the Romans may have lost as much as one third of their army in the action.

            1066 – Edward the Confessor kaput. The death of King Edward the Confessor, set off the chain of events that culminated in the Battle of Hastings (October 14, 1066) after which Duke William the “Bastard” of Normandy became King William the “Conqueror” of England.  During the battle, King Harold Gowsinson (Edwards successor) was killed and William, who claimed that the Confessor had named him Successor, became King, altering the course of history. 

            1643 - Happy Birthday Isaac Newton, English physicist and  greatest brain of the last millennium.  Wait! Wasn’t Newton born on Christmas Day?  Yes he was, but it was the Julian Calendar (Old Style, OS) developed by Julius Caesar.  In 1782, a newer, more accurate calendar, the Gregorian (Pope Gregory XII) Calendar (New Style, NS) was adopted – 10 days were added and Newton’s birthday moved up.  We note this because sources will list Newton’s birthday and Christmas Day and other sources as January 4.  Of course this opens a can of worms for all pre 1582 days so we’ll note Isaac’s discrepancy because of his greatness and just go with consensus sources for everyone else.  He invented calculus (but didn’t tell anyone about it for 27 years. He also laid the foundation for the science of spectroscopy but kept that a secret for 30 years. Yes, in addition to being a genius he was a bit odd.  His master work, the Principia, explained mathematically, the orbits of heavenly objects and identified gravity as the moving force of the universe.  His three laws of motion were in the book.  It is a great book from the greatest of minds and it is so obtu