This Day in History

[GordMay]

September 5

1698: Russian Tsar Peter the Great imposes a tax on beards.

1774: First Continental Congress convenes, in response to the British Parliament’s enactment of the Coercive Acts, in the American colonies, the first session of the Continental Congress convenes at Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia. Fifty-six delegates, from all the colonies except Georgia, drafted a declaration of rights and grievances, and elected Virginian Peyton Randolph as the first president of Congress. Patrick Henry, George Washington, John Adams and John Jay were among the delegates.

1717: Britain's King George I issues Proclamation "For Suppressing Pirates in the West Indies", granting pirates who surrender a pardon (re-issued 1718).

1877: Oglala Sioux leader, Crazy Horse, is fatally bayoneted, by a U.S. soldier, after resisting confinement in a guardhouse, at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. A year earlier, Crazy Horse was among the Sioux leaders who defeated George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry, at the Battle of Little Big Horn.

1879: George Washington De Long, American Arctic Explorer, and commander on board the “Jeannette”, becomes trapped with his crew in pack ice, during his attempt to reach the North Pole.

1910: Marie Curie demonstrates the transformation of radium ore to metal, at the Academy of Sciences, in France.

1946: Amon Göth, former head of Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, found guilty of imprisonment, torture, and extermination of individuals and groups of people, the first conviction of homicide, at a war crimes court.

1958: Martin Luther King Jr. is arrested in an Alabama protest, for loitering, and fined $14 for refusing to obey police.

1960: 1960 Cassius Clay [Muhammad Ali] beats 3-time European champion Zbigniew Pietrzykowski, of Poland, by unanimous points decision, to win Olympic light heavyweight [175-pound] boxing gold medal at the Rome Games.

1966: Jerry Lewis' 1st Muscular Dystrophy Labor Day telethon raises $1 million.

1969: Lt. William Calley is charged with six specifications of premeditated murder, in the death of 109 Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, at My Lai, in March 1968. Reportedly, the killing was only stopped when Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, an aero-scout helicopter pilot, landed his helicopter between the Americans and the fleeing South Vietnamese, confronting the soldiers, and blocking them from further action against the villagers. The incident was subsequently covered up, but eventually came to light a year later. He was found guilty of personally murdering 22 civilians, and sentenced to life imprisonment, but his sentence was reduced to 20 years by the Court of Military Appeals, and further reduced later to 10 years by the Secretary of the Army. Calley was paroled by President Richard Nixon, in 1974. All [13] others charged eventually had their charges dismissed, or were acquitted by courts-martial.

1972: Palestinian terrorists [‘Black September’] attacked the Olympic Village in Munich, West Germany, during the Summer Olympic Games, taking hostages, and eventually killing 11 members of the Israeli team.
➥ https://www.history.com/news/olympic...oned-cancelled

1978: Israel's Menachem Begin and Egypt's Anwar Sadat, begin discussions on a peace process, with and Jimmy Carter, at Camp David, Md.

1980: World's longest road tunnel opens; Switzerland's St. Gotthard Tunnel stretches 10.14 miles (16.224 km), from Goschenen to Airolo.

1982: Eddie Hill sets propeller-driven boat water speed record of 229 mph.

1996: Hurricane ‘Fran’ comes ashore near Cape Fear, NC. It will kill 27 people, and cause more than $3 billion in damage.

2000: Tuvalu, a group of nine coral islands in the west-central Pacific, with a population of about 10,000, became the 189th member of the United Nations.

2001: Evidence provided for black hole theory. Scientists described an observation of energy flares, that provided strong evidence of the theorized black hole, at the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy.

2003: Hurricane ‘Fabian’, with winds in excess of 125 mph, has struck the tiny island of Bermuda, creating havoc on the island, as power cuts affect more than 25,000 homes, and flying debris and downed trees blocking roads.

2007: Apple has launched it's latest product, the ‘iTouch’, a mixture between an iPhone and an iPod, which has built in wi-fi, and a web browser, allowing the device to download music, via the onboard wi-fi iTunes store, prices have been announced as $299, with 8 gigabytes of memory.

2009: A boat carrying some fifty-seven tourists, sank while crossing Lake Ohrid. in Macedonia. Fifteen passengers died as a result, and reports say that overcrowding, on the boat meant for forty-five people, could be a cause.

2014: World Health Organization estimates 1,900 people have died from the Ebola virus, out of 3,500 infected in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal, and Sierra Leone.

2017: Hurricane ‘Irma’ becomes the most powerful hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Basin region, with winds of 185mph (280km/h). ‘Irma’ hit: Barbuda, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Martin, Anguilla, and the Virgin Islands, as well as in the mainland USA. Hurricane ‘Maria’ formed just two weeks later, hitting some of the same areas, and devastating Puerto Rico.

[GordMay]

September 6

3114 BCE: Date Maya/Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar starts dating from (as corresponds to the Julian Calendar).

1492: Christopher Columbus' fleet leaves Gomera, Canary islands.

1522: One of Ferdinand Magellan’s five ships, the “Victoria”, arrives at Sanlúcar de Barrameda, in Spain, thus completing the first circumnavigation of the world. The Victoria was commanded by Basque navigator Juan Sebastian de Elcano, who took charge of the vessel after the murder of Magellan in the Philippines in April 1521. Only Elcano and 21 others, of the original 265 men that set out, survived.

1622: Spanish silver fleet disappears off Florida Keys; 1,000s die.

1716: 1st lighthouse built in north America (Boston).

1888: Queen Victoria grants William Mackinnon's Imperial British East Africa Company political & commercial rights.

1899: Carnation processes its first can of evaporated milk.

1901: US President William McKinley is shot by Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist, at the Pan-American Exposition, in Buffalo, New York, and died eight days later.

1907: The luxury liner “Lusitania” leaves London, for New York, on her maiden voyage.

1914: French and British forces launched an offensive, against advancing Germans, in the First Battle of the Marne, during World War I.

1941: All Jews over age 6, in German territories, ordered to wear a yellow star of David.

2017: Hurricane ‘Irma’ makes landfall on Caribbean islands of Barbuda, Sint Maartens, and British Virgin Islands. Prime Minister Gaston Browne reports 95% of buildings in Barbuda damaged.

[GordMay]

September 7

1251 BCE: A solar eclipse, on this date, might mark the birth of legendary Heracles, at Thebes, Greece.

1191: Third Crusade: Richard I of England defeats Saladin, in the Battle of Arsuf.

1630: The town of Trimountaine, in Massachusetts, is renamed Boston. It became the state capital.

1776: The American submersible craft “Turtle” attempts to attach a time bomb, to the hull of British Admiral Richard Howe’s flagship, “Eagle”, in New York Harbor. It was the first use of a submarine in warfare.

1812: Battle of Borodino: Napoleon Bonapartre wins a pyrrhic victory, against Russian General Mikhail Kutuzov, in the most ferocious battle of the Napoleonic era, 70,000 are killed.

1813: The earliest known printed reference to the United States by the nickname "Uncle Sam", occurs in the Troy Post. The name is linked to Samuel Wilson, a meat packer from Troy, New York, who supplied barrels of beef to the United States Army, during the War of 1812. Wilson stamped the barrels with “U.S.” for United States, but soldiers began referring to the grub as “Uncle Sam’s.”

1860: Giuseppe Garibaldi entered Naples, Italy, and proclaimed himself ‘Dictator of the Two Sicilies’.

1871: British warship HMS “Captain” capsizes, in Bay of Biscay, 500 killed.

1888: Edith Eleanor McLean is 1st baby to be placed in an incubator [State Emigrant Hospital on Ward’s Island, NYC].

1911: Guillaume Apollinaire is arrested, for stealing the Mona Lisa.

1923: Interpol forms in Vienna.

1927: Philo Farnsworth demonstrates the first use of his electronic television, in San Francisco.

1936: Boulder Dam (now Hoover Dam) begins operation.

1953: Nikita Krushchev elected first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

1977: U.S. agrees to transfer Panama Canal to Panama [Torrijos-Carter Treaties], at the end of the 20th century. President Carter had also signed the Neutrality Treaty, which guaranteed the permanent neutrality of the canal, and gave the United States the right to use military force, if necessary, to keep the canal open. This treaty was used as rationale for the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, which the saw the overthrow of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.

1999: A 5.9 magnitude earthquake rocks Athens, rupturing a previously unknown fault, killing 143, injuring more than 500, and leaving 50,000 people homeless.

2001: The US Federal Trade Commission approves Chevron's bid to buy Texaco.

2004: Hurricane ‘Ivan’ damages 90% of buildings, on the island of Grenada; 39 die in the Category 5 storm.

2008: US Government assumes conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the country's two largest mortgage financing companies, during the subprime mortgage crisis.

[GordMay]

September 8

1429: Joan of Arc, a French peasant girl, who believed she was acting under divine guidance, attempted to oust the duke of Burgundy, and take Paris for newly crowned King Charles VII.

1504: One of the world’s most beloved works art, “David,” the 17-foot-tall, 12,000-pound marble masterpiece, by Michelangelo Buonarroti, is unveiled to the public, in Florence, Italy’s Piazza della Signoria.

1565: Spanish explorers found St. Augustine, Florida, the first permanent European settlement, in what is now the United States.

1628: Dutch privateer, Piet Heyn, captures Spanish silver fleet, in the Bay of Matanzas, Cuba.

1664: Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant surrenders New Amsterdam, the capital of New Netherland, to an English naval squadron, under Colonel Richard Nicolls. Five years later, New Amsterdam’s name was changed to New York, in honor of the Duke of York [later James II], who organized the mission.

1760: The French surrender the city of Montreal to British General Jeffrey Amherst.

1860: Excursion steamer "Lady Elgin" sinks, after being rammed in a storm, on Lake Michigan, drowning about 300. Largest loss of life on the Great Lakes.

1900: One of the deadliest hurricanes in U.S. history hits Galveston, Texas, killing more than 6,000 people [perhaps 12,000]. A Category 4 hurricane, the storm brought with it an enormous storm surge [15 feet higher than the mean tide], and, by 3 p.m., water had covered nearly the entirety of Galveston Island.

1914: HMS [formerly RMS] “Oceanic”, sister ship of RMS “Titanic”, sinks off Scotland.

1923: Honda Point Disaster: nine US Navy destroyers run aground off the California coast. Seven are lost.
➥ https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval...s-chain-errors

1930: The American company, 3M, began marketing a transparent adhesive tape, that later became known as Scotch® tape.

1934: Luxury passenger ship “Morro Castle”, bound for New Jersey, catches fire, 133 die.

1935: Louisiana senator Huey Long [“Kingfish”] is shot, allegedly by Dr. Carl Weiss, dying about 30 hours later.

1941: Siege of Leningrad [formerly St. Petersburg], by German, Finnish, and eventually Spanish troops, begins. The siege of Leningrad, lasted a grueling 872 days, and resulted in the deaths of some one million of the city’s civilians and Red Army defenders.

1945: Korea is partitioned, at the 38th parallel, by the Soviet Union and the United States.

1955: The United States, Australia, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, the Philippines, Pakistan, and Thailand sign the mutual defense treaty that established the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization [SEATO].

1965: Hurricane ‘Betsy’ kills 75, in Louisiana & Florida.

1974: President Gerald Ford pardons his disgraced [resigned the U.S. presidency on August 8] predecessor, Richard M. Nixon, for any crimes he may have committed, or participated in, while in office.

2003: The Recording Industry Association of America [RIAA] begins suing individual sharers of copyrighted mp3 files. A little more than three weeks after announcing its new legal strategy, the RIAA announced that 52 of the 261 individuals, named in the initial round of lawsuits, had reached cash [± $3 per song] settlements. Within the next 20 months, the RIAA sued a further 11,195 individuals, reaching financial settlements with 2,484.

2019: Typhoon ‘Faxai’ makes landfall near Tokyo, Japan, with winds of up to 210km/h ]130mph].
2019: Cargo ship “Golden Ray” catches fire and capsizes, in St Simons Sound, off coast of Georgia, trapping four crew inside.

[GordMay]

September 9

1000: Battle of Svolder, Baltic Sea: King Olaf Tryggvason, of Norway, on board the “Long Serpent”, is defeated, in one of the greatest naval battles of the Viking Age. He leaps overboard, to his death, before capture.

1087: William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, and King of England, dies in Rouen, while conducting a war which began when the French king made fun of him, for being fat.

1754: William Bligh, the English vice-admiral, who commanded the HMS “Bounty”, at the time of the famous mutiny, was born.

1776: The Continental Congress formally declares the name of the new nation to be the “United States” of America, replacing the term “United Colonies,” which had been in general use.

1841: Great Lakes steamer "Erie" sinks off Silver Creek NY, kills 300.

1886: The Berne International Copyright Convention, for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, is finalized.

1888: Easter Island/Rapa Nui, in the Pacific, is annexed by Chile.

1919: The Boston Police Strike began, after the city denied the police's right to unionize.

1926: National Broadcasting Company created, by Radio Corporation of America.

1932: Steamboat SS “Observation” explodes, in NYC’s East River (71 killed).

1945: 1st "bug" in a computer program discovered, by Grace Hopper, a moth was removed with tweezers from a relay, & taped into the log.

1956: Elvis Presley makes first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show”. After earning big ratings for “The Steve Allen Show,” the Dorsey Brothers “Stage Show”, and “The Milton Berle Show,” Sullivan finally reneged on his Presley ban, signing the singing star to an unprecedented $50,000 contract, for three appearances.

1965: Hurricane ‘Betsy’, the first hurricane to exceed $1 billion in damages (unadjusted), makes its second landfall, near New Orleans.

1971: Attica Prison Riot; the 4-day riot leaves 39 dead.

1976: Mao Zedong, who led the Chinese people through a long revolution, and then ruled the nation’s communist government from its establishment in 1949, dies, at age 82.

1988: US “Stars & Stripes H3" defeats NZ's “KZ-1" at the 27th America's Cup: NZ appeal in court but eventually lose.

2001: At 01:46:40 UTC, the time on the Unix clock, in milliseconds, passes 1 billion, since January 1, 1970, which Unix systems recognize as zero-time.

2015: Apple unveils the ‘iPad Pro’, and ‘iPhone 6S’, in San Francisco.

[GordMay]

Canada's deadliest natural disaster

On Saturday, September 9, 1775, a hurricane hit Newfoundland. The hurricane killed around 4,000 people, making it the deadliest natural disaster, in Canadian history.

On Aug. 27, 1775, the hurricane hit North Carolina. A letter from North Carolina that recounted, "We had a violent hurricane ... which has done a vast deal of damage here, at the Bar, and at Matamuskeet, near 150 lives being lost at the Bar, and 15 in one neighbourhood at Matamuskeet."

The hurricane also hit Virginia. Between the two states, 163 people died.

Then the storm hit Newfoundland. It's unknown if the storm that hit the province was indeed the "1775 Newfoundland hurricane" or remnants from a previous system.

Newfoundland was hit hard, especially the fisheries. They "received a very severe stroke from the violence of a storm of wind, which almost swept everything before it," said Commodore Governor Robert Duff. "A considerable number of boats, with their crews, have been totally lost, several vessels wrecked on the shores," he added.

Approximately 4,000 sailors died, most of them from England and Ireland. The storm surged reached levels as high as 30 feet.

This is the first Atlantic Canada hurricane to be recorded. It's also the eight-deadliest in the Atlantic Ocean's history.

The deadliest storm in Atlantic history occurred five years later, dubbed the "Great Hurricane" of 1780, in which 22,000–27,501 people died.

More ➥ https://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJourn...e4cafcd0a931e9

[GordMay]

September 10

1588: Thomas Cavendish returns to England, becoming the third man to circumnavigate the globe.

1608: Having survived capture by Indians (reputedly through the efforts of Pocahontas, a chief's daughter), John Smith became president of Jamestown colony, the first permanent English settlement in North America.

1813: In the first unqualified defeat of a British naval squadron in history, U.S. Captain Oliver Hazard Perry leads a fleet of nine American ships to victory, over a squadron of six British warships, at the Battle of Lake Erie, during the War of 1812.

1823: Simón Bolívar named President of Peru.

1945: Prime Minister of Norway, Vidkun Quisling, sentenced to death, for collaborating with Nazis.

1953: Swanson sells its 1st ‘TV dinner’.

1961: 14 spectators are killed, during the Italian Grand Prix, when Baron Wolfgang von Trips, driving a Ferrari, goes off the track, onto a grass-covered embankment filled with spectators.

1962: Rod Laver completes his first Grand Slam, defeating fellow Queenslander Roy Emerson [6-2, 6-4, 5-7, 6-4], at the US National Championship Men's Tennis, Forest Hills, NY.

1963: President John F. Kennedy federalizes Alabama's National Guard, to prevent Governor George C. Wallace from using guardsmen, to stop public-school desegregation.

1967: Gibraltar votes [12,138 to 44] to remain a British dependency, instead of becoming part of Spain.

1977: At Baumetes Prison, in Marseille, France, Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian immigrant, convicted of torture and murder, becomes the last person executed by guillotine.

1990: The star of the ‘Free Willy’ movies, Keiko, an orca (or killer whale), is back in Iceland, where he was captured in 1979. Having never fully adapted back to life in the wild, Keiko died from pneumonia [2003], in a Norwegian Fjord, aged 27.

2002: Switzerland, traditionally a neutral country, joins the United Nations, becoming the 190th member nation.

2003: Sweden's foreign minister, Anna Lindh, is stabbed while shopping, and dies the next day.

2008: Scientists successfully flip the switch, for the first time, on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) lab, in Geneva, kicking off, what many called, history’s biggest science experiment.

2011: At least 187 people died, after a ferry carrying 800 people, sunk off the coast of the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar.

2017: Hurricane ‘Irma' makes landfall, in the Florida Keys, as a category 3 hurricane. ‘Irma’ was the most powerful hurricane ever recorded in the open Atlantic region, and was extremely destructive to several countries it hit: Barbuda, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Martin, Anguilla, and the Virgin Islands, as well as in the mainland USA.

[GordMay]

Hurricane ‘Betsy’ was the first hurricane to cause more than $1 billion in damage

On August 27, 1965, Hurricane 'Betsy' formed in the Atlantic Ocean. The storm was erratic, and people were not prepared. So, when the storm hit, it caused over $1 billion in damage, the first hurricane to do so.

Betsy started on Aug. 23, as a disturbance near Cape Verde. On Aug. 27, A United States Navy plane spotted the tropical wave, and classified it as moderate intensity. Over the next few days, the hurricane continued to intensify. On Aug. 31, Betsy stalled, and didn't progress in intensification or speed.

On Sep. 2, Betsy picked up speed and quickly turned into a Category 3 hurricane. On Sep. 4, the hurricane reached its first peak as a Category 4 storm, with winds reaching 220 km/h.

On Sep. 5, a high-pressure ridge caused Betsy to make a clockwise loop, and head towards Florida and The Bahamas. The hurricane continued to lose and gain strength. On Sep. 8, Betsy made landfall over Florida.

On Sep. 9, Betsy strengthened into a Category 4 storm. The next day, the hurricane made landfall over Louisiana. Betsy quickly lost strength and finally dissipated on Sep. 13.

The Bahamas, Florida, and Louisiana received the most severe damage. All three areas received Category 3 level winds.

In total, 81 people died, as a result of Betsy. The storm caused $1.42 billion (1965 USD) worth of damage.

[GordMay]

September 11

1649: Massacre of Drogheda, Ireland - Oliver Cromwell kills 3,000 royalists.

1773: Benjamin Franklin writes "There never was a good war or bad peace".

1792: The French Blue gem (later the Hope Diamond) is stolen, with other French crown jewels, from Royal storehouse in Paris, during Reign of Terror.

1886: 6th America's Cup: “Mayflower” (NY Yacht Club) beats “Galatea” (Royal Northern & Clyde Yacht Club, Scotland), for 2-0 series victory.

1916: The Quebec Bridge's central span collapses during reconstruction, killing 11 men.

1940: Hitler begins operation ‘Seelöwe’ (Sealion - aborted invasion England).

1941: Construction began on the Pentagon.

1945: Physician Willem J Kolff performs the first successful kidney dialysis, using his artificial kidney machine, in the Netherlands.

1971: Former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, one of the most significant figures of the Cold War, and certainly one of the most colorful, dies.

1973: 1973 Chilean President Salvador Allende, the 1st elected Marxist president of a South America country, is deposed in a (CIA inspired) military coup d'état, led by general Augusto Pinochet

1978: The last known person dies of smallpox - medical photographer Janet Parker, through infection in a laboratory, in Birmingham, England.

1992: Hurricane ‘Iniki’ hits Kauai Hawaii; 3 die & 8,000 injured.

2001: At approximately 8:45 a.m., on a clear Tuesday morning, an American Airlines Boeing 767, loaded with 20,000 gallons of jet fuel, crashes into the north tower of the World Trade Center, in New York City ...

2002: Through extreme and coordinated effort, The Pentagon is rededicated, after repairs are completed, exactly one year after the 9-11 attack on the building.

2007: Russia tests the largest conventional weapon ever, the Father of all bombs.

2008: A major fire erupted in the Channel Tunnel, which runs under the English Channel and connects England with France, and the Chunnel (as it was sometimes called) did not resume full service until early the following year.

2012: The US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, is stormed, looted and burned down, killing five people, including the US ambassador.

2019: Water detected for first time on planet outside out solar system, on exoplanet K2-18b 110 light-years away, in findings published in "Nature Astronomy".

[GordMay]

September 12

0490: Athenian and Plataean Hoplites, commanded by General Miltiades, drive back a Persian invasion force, under General Datis, at Marathon.

1609: Henry Hudson sails into what is now New York Harbor, aboard his sloop “Half Moon”.

1624: 1st submarine publicly tested, on London’s Thames river, for King James I.

1755: Giacomo Casanova is sentenced to 5 years imprisonment, in Venice, without trial, for affront to religion, and common decency.

1787: American statesman George Mason suggests the addition of a Bill of Rights to the Constitution, modeled on previous state declarations, but the motion is defeated.

1792: Court martial begins for captured instigators of the mutiny on the Bounty, on board HMS”Duke”, in Portsmouth harbour, presided over by Vice-Admiral Samuel Hood. Three of them were hanged.

1824: Moreton Bay Penal Settlement, established at Redcliffe, Queensland, with about 30 convicts (modern Brisbane, Australia).
➥ https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-mome...ng-of-brisbane

1846: Poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning elope.

1857: 423 die when "Central America" sinks off Cape Romain, SC.

1895: “Defender” (US) beats “Valkyrie III” (England), in 10th America's Cup.

1933: Leó Szilárd, waiting for a red light, on Southampton Row, conceives idea of a nuclear chain reaction.

1940: Four teens, following their dog down a hole, near Montignac, France, discover 17,000 year old drawings, now known as the Lascaux Cave Paintings.

1942: A German U-boat “ U-156" sinks a British troop ship, the “Laconia”, killing more than 1,400, including Italian POWs.

1953: Senator John F. Kennedy, the future 35th president of the United States, marries Jacqueline Bouvier, in Newport, Rhode Island.

1958: US Supreme Court orders the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas to integrate.
1958: Jack Kilby demonstrates his first integrated circuit (IC) to his supervisor.

1959: The Soviet Union launched Luna 2, the first space probe to hit the Moon.

1965: Hurricane ‘Betsy’ strikes Florida & Louisiana, kills 75.

1970: Supersonic airliner Concorde lands, for the 1st time, at Heathrow airport.

1974: Emperor Haile Selassie I, of Ethiopia, was deposed by the Derg, a committee of revolutionary soldiers.

1988: Hurricane ‘Gilbert’ slams into Jamaica, killing hundreds of people. The storm went on to cause death and destruction in Mexico, and spur a batch of tornadoes in Texas.
➥ https://www.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/...2e05e92f985dcd

1990: East and West Germany, along with the UK, US and USSR, the Allied nations that had occupied post-WWII Germany, sign the final settlement for reunification of Germany.

2001: Article V [collective defense clause], of the NATO agreement, is invoked for the first and only time, in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States of America.

2003: Country music legend Johnny Cash dies, aged 71.

2011: In New York City, the 9/11 Memorial Museum opens to the public.

2014: Politician Ian Paisley, who was a militant Protestant leader, in the factional conflict that divided Northern Ireland, from the 1960s until the early 21st century, died at age 88.

2018: Oldest known human drawing discovered, a hashtag-like abstract drawing with red ochre, 73,000 years old, in Blombos Cave, South Africa published in "Nature".
➥ https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06664-y

[GordMay]

The SS Central America sank, carrying 578 people, and 30,000 pounds of gold

On Saturday, Sept. 12, 1857, the SS “Central America” sank, after getting caught in a Category 2 hurricane, off the coast of the Carolinas.



The steamer, also known as the Ship of Gold, was 280 feet long, that operated between Central America and the United States.

On Sept. 3, 1857, the SS “Central American” was travelling from Colón, Panama to New York City, with 477 passengers, and 101 crew aboard. The ship was also holding about 10 tonnes of gold.

First, the ship stopped in Havana, and then continued northward. On Sept. 9, the steamer got caught in a Category 2 hurricane. By Sept. 11, the wind destroyed the ship's sail, and the boiler showed signs of failing. The ship also started to take on water. A leak sprung in one of the ship's seals, which proved to be the tipping point for the steamer's fate.

The crew flew the ship's flag upside down, which is a distress signal in the U.S. No one came to rescue the crew or passengers.

The crew and passengers tried to remove the water from the ship, but couldn't keep up with the rising floods. The storm battered the ship for a second time.

On Sept. 12, those aboard the SS “Central American” spotted two other ships. A total of 153 passengers made their way to lifeboats. The storm continued to produce heavy winds and rough water. At 8 p.m., the ship sank.

Fifty-three people were saved from the water, and 425 people [423?] were killed.

There was approximately US$625 million (2021 value) worth of gold on the ship.

On Sept. 11, 1988, the ship was located by the Columbus-America Discovery Group of Ohio.

Around $100-150 million worth of gold was recovered from the ship.

After legal complications, the majority of the gold was awarded to the team who discovered it.

[GordMay]

September 13

0122: Building begins on Hadrian's Wall, which marked the northern limit of Roman Britain.

1501: Michelangelo begins work on his statue of David, his masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture.

1759: Under the command of General James Wolfe, the British beat French forces, under the Marquis de Montcalm, at Plains of Abraham, leading to the surrender of Quebec [& ultimately, Canada] to the British. Both commanding officers died from wounds sustained during the battle.

1845: English chemist Michael Faraday discovers the 'Faraday effect', the influence of a magnetic field on polarized light.

1848: American railroad foreman Phineas Gage suffered a traumatic brain injury, when an iron rod shot through his skull, and obliterated the greater part of the left frontal lobe of his brain; he survived, with apparently no lasting physical damage, though some claimed that his personality had changed.

1907: “Lusitania” arrives in New York City, after record 5 day crossing of Atlantic.

1931: A major hurricane has devastated Belize, in British Honduras, with at least 700 dead, and they are requesting assistance, in the form of medical supplies. The first ships from Great Britain and America are starting to arrive, and reports are coming in that very little is left standing in the city, with bodies laying in the streets.

1940: Mussolini’s forces, under Marshal Graziani, cross the Libyan border, invading Egypt.

1955: Swiss inventor George de Mestral is granted a patent, for what would become known as ‘Velcro’.

1956: IBM introduces the worlds first production hard disk, the ‘IBM 305', which stored five megabytes of data, and weighed over a ton.

1971: Massacre at Attica prison riot. Thirty-nine people were killed, in the disastrous state police assault, including 29 prisoners, and 10 prison employees [hostages].

1988: ‘Gilbert’ is strongest (26.13 barometer) hurricane, in Western Hemisphere.

1993: Public unveiling of the ‘Oslo Accords’, an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement initiated by Norway, signed by Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Shimon Peres, and PLO official Mahmoud Abbas.

2001: Civilian aircraft traffic resumes in the U.S., after the September 11 attacks.
2001: Osama bin Laden has been named as prime suspect, behind the terrorist attacks on the United States, two days ago, by the Secretary of State Colin Powell.

2014: At least 8 people are killed, after the ferry MV “Maharlika II” sinks, off the Philippines coast.

2017: Nursing home inhabitants rescued, after losing their air-conditioning, in aftermath of Hurricane ‘Irma’ in Hollywood, Florida, 11 die.

[GordMay]

September 14

1321: Dante Alighieri dies of malaria, just hours after finishing writing ‘Paradiso’.

1769: German geographer, explorer, Alexander von Humboldt born.

1812: One week after winning a bloody victory over the Russian army, at the Battle of Borodino, Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grande Armée enters the city of Moscow, only to find the population evacuated, and the city burning.

1814: Francis Scott Key pens a poem, after Fort McHenry successfully withstood a British attack, which is later set to music, and in 1931 becomes America’s national anthem, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’.

1849: Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, known chiefly for his development of the concept of the conditioned reflex, was born.

1901: President McKinley dies of infection, from gunshot wounds, inflicted by Leon Czolgosz, on September 6. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt is sworn in, as the 26th President of the United States.

1938: ‘Graf Zeppelin II’, world's largest airship, makes its maiden flight.

1956: IBM introduces the ‘RAMAC 305' [Random Access Method of Accounting and Control], 1st commercial computer with a hard drive that uses magnetic disk storage, weighs over a ton. One of the last vacuum tube computers, manufactured by IBM.
Or, was it yesterday?

1960: Iraq, Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia form OPEC.

1968: Maggie Wicks marries Gord May.

1969: Male voters, of Swiss Canton Schaffhausen, reject female suffrage.

1975: Elizabeth Ann Seton is canonized, by Pope Paul VI, at the Vatican in Rome, becoming the first American-born Catholic saint.
1975: Rembrandt's oil painting, ‘The Night Watch’, slashed & damaged by an unemployed school teacher, in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

1978: The Provisional Irish Republican Army explode over 50 bombs, in towns across Northern Ireland, over the next 5 days, injuring 37 people.

1982: Princess Grace of Monaco, the American-born former film star Grace Kelly, dies at the age of 52, from injuries suffered after her car plunged off a mountain road [after suffering a stroke], near Monte Carlo.

1998: Telecommunications companies MCI Communications and WorldCom complete their $37 billion merger, to form MCI WorldCom.

1999: Kiribati, Nauru, and Tonga join the United Nations.

2000: Microsoft Launches Windows ME. The Millennium Edition was the last of the operating systems of the Windows 9x series.

2015: 14 yr old Texan, Ahmed Mohamed, arrested at school when home-made clock assumed to be a bomb.

2017: Bodleian Library reveals earliest evidence of the zero symbol, in 3rd or 4th Century Bakhshali (Pakistan) manuscript, through carbon dating.

[Tayana42]

Happy anniversary!

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by Tayana42

Happy anniversary!

Somebody actually reads this thread.
Thank you.
It was the luckiest day of my life.