This Day in History

[GordMay]

February 14

Happy Valentine's Day!

±270 CE: Valentine, a holy priest in Rome, in the days of Emperor Claudius II, is said to have been executed [beheaded]. In truth, the exact origins and identity of St. Valentine are unclear. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, “At least three different Saint Valentines, all of them martyrs, are mentioned in the early martyrologies under the date of 14 February.” One was a priest in Rome, the second one was a bishop of Interamna (now Terni, Italy) and the third St. Valentine was a martyr in the Roman province of Africa."

1349: 2,000 Jews are burned at the stake, in Strasbourg, Germany.

1776: Thomas Malthus, the English economist and demographer, best known for his theory that population growth will always tend to outrun the food supply, and should be checked by stern limits on reproduction, is believed to have been born this day.

1779: Captain James Cook, the great English explorer and navigator, is killed by natives of Hawaii, during his third visit [at Kealakekua Bay] to the Pacific island group.

1797: The Battle of Cape St Vincent: British fleet under Admiral Sir John Jervis defeats larger Spanish fleet under Admiral Don José de Córdoba y Ramos, near Cape St. Vincent, Portugal. Captain Horatio Nelson distinguishes himself.

1876: Alexander Graham Bell applied for a patent, for the telephone, as did Elisha Gray. Supreme Court eventually rules Bell rightful inventor.

1919: Theoretical Physicist Albert Einstein [39] divorces Mileva Maric, after 16 years of marriage.

1924: Thomas J. Watson renames the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company [CTR]. as International Business Machines [IBM].

1929: Sir Alexander Fleming discovers Penicillin, after leaving a plate of staphylococcus bacteria uncovered, he noticed that a mold, that had fallen on the culture, had killed many of the bacteria.

1939: Germany launches the battleship “Bismarck”.

1946: The first general-purpose high-speed electronic digital computer, the ‘ENIAC’ [Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer], was demonstrated to the public, by its creators, J. Presper Eckert, Jr., and John W. Mauchly.

1989: Following the 1984 Bhopal gas leak disaster, by a Union Carbide subsidiary pesticide plant, which released 40 tonnes of methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas, killing between 2500 and 5000 people, in Bhopal. Union Carbide agrees to pay $470 million, to the government of India, who were acting as the legal representative for victims of the disaster.

1990: 3.7 billion miles away from the sun, the “Voyager 1" spacecraft takes a photograph of Earth. The picture, known as ‘Pale Blue Dot’, depicts our planet as a nearly indiscernible speck, roughly the size of a pixel.

2003: Dolly the Sheep dies, aged 6.


2005: Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim registered ‘YouTube’, a Web site for sharing videos.

[GordMay]

February 15

0399 BCE: Philosopher Socrates is sentenced to death, by the city of Athens, for corrupting the minds of the youth of the city, and for impiety.

1564: Italian philosopher, astronomer and mathematician, Galileo Galilei, is born, in Pisa, Italy.

1676: Isaac Newton writes to Robert Hooke: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants” (O.S. 5 Feb).

1882: SS “Dunedin” leaves New Zealand for Britain, with the first cargo of frozen meat.

1898: The USS “Maine” explodes, in Cuba's Havana Harbor, killing 260, of the < 400 American crew members aboard, and precipitating the Spanish-American War, which originated in the Cuban struggle for independence from Spain. In 1976, a team of American naval investigators concluded that the Maine explosion was likely caused by a fire that ignited its ammunition stocks, not by a Spanish mine, or act of sabotage.

1912: Schooner “Fram” reaches latitude 78° 41' S, farthest south, by ship.

1936: Adolf Hitler announces construction of the Volkswagen ‘Beetle’ [the People's Car, aka the Käfer/Beetle].

1954: 1st Bevatron particle accelerator in operation, at Berkeley, California.

1961: Entire US figure skating team is killed, in an air crash outside Brussels airport, in Belgium, whilst flying to World Championships, in Prague from NYC. 72 passengers, including 34 American skaters, coaches, officials, and other members of extended team are lost.

1965: Canada adopts red maple leaf flag.

1971: After 1,200 years, Great Britain abandons pence & shilling system, for decimal currency.

1982: “Ocean Ranger” oil-drilling platform lost off Newfoundland, 84 die.
➥ https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfo...nger-1.6351835

1992: Jeffrey Dahmer found sane, and guilty, of killing 15 boys.

2001: First draft of the complete human genome is published, in the journal "Nature".
➥ https://www.nature.com/articles/35057062

2008: American adventurer Steve Fossett was legally declared dead, more than five months after his single-engine airplane went missing, in Nevada. His body was recovered. later in the year.

2013: ‘Chelyabinsk meteor’ breaks up over Chelyabinsk, Russia, injuring over 1,200 people, with 26 to 33 times energy of Hiroshima bomb.
2013: Asteroid ‘2012 DA14', with a 50m diameter, comes within 27,700km of Earth, the same day as the Chelyabinsk meteor hits Siberia.

2019: US President Donald Trump declares a national emergency, to divert funds to build a border wall, after signing bipartisan spending agreement, to avoid another government shutdown.

2020: Beijing orders people returning to the city, after Lunar New Year holiday, to self-quarantine for 14 days, to prevent spread of Covid-19.

2021: The UK is the first European country to require travellers from COVID 'hotspots' to isolate in quarantine hotels, following other countries, such as Australia, NZ, and Singapore.

[GordMay]

February 16

0600: Pope Gregory the Great decrees, saying "God bless You", is the correct response to a sneeze.

1804: US Navy Lt Stephen Decatur raids Tripoli Harbor, & burns Navy frigate "Philadelphia", after it is seized by Barbary pirates

1916: The German ambassador in Washington announces that Germany will pay an indemnity, for American lives lost, on the “Lusitania”.

1923: In Thebes, Egypt, English archaeologist, Howard Carter, enters the sealed inner burial chamber of the ancient Egyptian ruler, King Tutankhamen [Tut], who lived around 1400 B.C., and died when he was still a teenager. Among the riches found in the tomb [golden shrines, jewelry, statues, a chariot, weapons, clothing, and a sarcophagus with three coffins, the inner one solid gold] the perfectly preserved mummy was the most valuable, as it was the first one ever to be discovered.

1932: 1st patent for a tree, issued to James Markham, for a peach tree.

1937: DuPont Corp patents nylon, developed by employee Wallace Hume Carothers.

1940: British search plane finds German supply ship “Altmark”, used to accommodate allied sailors, from vessels sunk by the “Graf Spee”, off Norway.

1941: Kim Jong-il, North Korean politician, 2nd Supreme Leader of North Korea, born.

1942: Bangka Island massacre: Japanese soldiers machine-gun 22 Australian Army nurses, and 60 Australian, and British soldiers, and crew members, from two sunken ships. Only one nurse and two soldiers survive.

1957; The "Toddlers' Truce", a controversial television close down, between 6 and 7 pm, abolished in the United Kingdom.

1959: Fidel Castro sworn in as the 16th Prime Minister of Cuba, after overthrowing Fulgencio Batista.

1960: US nuclear submarine USS “Triton” sets off, on underwater round-world trip.

1963: Philosopher Hannah Arendt's controversial account, of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, ‘The Banality of Evil’, is first published, in ‘The New Yorker’.

1968: First ‘9-1-1' emergency call is placed, in the United States, by Rep. Rankin Fite, the Speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives, in the town of Haleyville, AL.
999 is in use in the UK, & a number of former British colonies, and the number 112 is used in Russia, Brazil, and other nations, even sometimes routing to the same services as 911, in the U.S.

1972: Wilt Chamberlain, of the Los Angeles Lakers, becomes first player, in NBA history, to reach the career 30,000 point mark, during a 110-109 loss to the Phoenix Suns.

1978: 1st Computer Bulletin Board System [Ward & Randy's CBBS, Chicago].

1983: The Ash Wednesday bushfires, in Victoria and South Australia, claim the lives of 75 people, in one of Australia's worst ever wild-fires.

2005: The Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty aimed at reducing the emission of gases, that contribute to global warming, went into effect, following its ratification by Russia. The global warming pact was ratified by 191 countries to date - excluding the United States.

2020: America evacuates 400 citizens, from COVID-19-infected cruise ship “Diamond Princess”, quarantined in Yokohama port, Japan
2020: 'Ghost ship' cargo vessel MV “Alta” washed up on the Irish coast, near Ballycotton, by Storm ‘Dennis’, after drifting across the Atlantic from Bermuda.

[GordMay]

On Feb. 16, 1954, Ottawa, Ontario received 39.6 cm of snow, making it the snowiest day in the city's history.
Exactly 62 years later [2006], to the day, that record was broken, as Canada's capital received a generous 51.2 cm of snow.

[Alan Mighty]

Originally Posted by GordMay

February 16


1942: Bangka Island massacre: Japanese soldiers machine-gun 22 Australian Army nurses, and 60 Australian, and British soldiers, and crew members, from two sunken ships. Only one nurse and two soldiers survive.

Lt. Colonel Vivian Bullwinkel, the sole nurse who survived the massacre, and the other nurses were very likely raped (perhaps multiple times) before being machine-gunned by Nipponese soldiers. Lt. Col. Bullwinkel died in 2000.

See: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-47796046

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivian_Bullwinkel

Yesterday, the Australian ambassador to Jakarta H.E. Penny Williams visited the site of the massacre. The Australian government has the agreement of the Govt of Indonesia to establish a memorial on the site.

https://en.antaranews.com/news/21551...ar-two-tragedy

We don't forget.

[GordMay]

February 17

1801: The US House of Representatives breaks an electoral college tie, and chooses Thomas Jefferson, as President, over Aaron Burr.

1820: The US Senate passes the Missouri Compromise, an attempt to deal with the dangerously divisive issue, of extending slavery into the western territories.

1863: The “Committee for Relief to the Wounded”, a precursor of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, is founded, by a group of citizens in Geneva, Switzerland.

1864: During the American Civil War, the Confederate “Hunley” became the first submarine to sink an enemy ship, when it successfully attacked the USS “Housatonic”, in the waters off Charleston, South Carolina.

1909: Apache chief Geronimo dies, of pneumonia, at age 80, while still in captivity, at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.

1911: The First Electric Self Start was installed in a Cadillac. Up till this time and all cars needed to be started by cranking a starting handle, which was hard work, and caused multiple minor injuries, when the car backfired, during the starting process.

1915: Zeppelin “L-4" crashes into North Sea, ear the Danish coastal town of Varde. The Danish coast guard rescued 11 members of the crew, who had abandoned ship, and jumped into the sea, prior to the crash; they were brought to Odense as prisoners to be interrogated. Four members of the crew were believed drowned, and their bodies were never recovered.

1972: The 15,007,034th Volkswagen Beetle comes off the assembly line, breaking a world car production record, held for more than four decades, by the Ford Motor Company’s iconic Model T, which was in production from 1908 to 1927.

1993: The “Neptune”, a Haitian passenger ferry, sunk after it had overturned, drowning approximately 900 people.

1996: An earthquake, and an accompanying tsunami, in Indonesia, left 108 people dead, 423 injured, and 58 missing.
1996: In the final game of a six-game match, world chess champion Garry Kasparov triumphs over Deep Blue, IBM’s chess-playing computer, and wins the match, 4-2. However, Deep Blue goes on to defeat Kasparov [3.5 to 2.5], in a heavily publicized rematch the following year.

1998: In Nagano, Japan, the United States defeats Canada, 3-1, to win the gold medal in the first women's hockey tournament, held at the Winter Olympics. The win was especially sweet for the United States, which had lost four times to Canada, in the Women's World Hockey Championship, since 1990.

2006: A massive mudslide buries the village of Guinsaugonin, in the Philippine province of Southern Leyte, including burying the local elementary school, with nearly 250 children, only one of the children was rescued alive. The number of deaths, in total, in the village and surrounding area is estimated at 1,100.

2021: American radio personality, Rush Limbaugh, who was known for his ultraconservative, and often controversial views, died at age 70.


Canada beats rival U.S. to reclaim Olympic women's hockey supremacy
Canadian women win 1st hockey gold medal, since 2014, beating the U.S. 3-2. Canada won all seven games, in Beijing, outscoring opponents 57-10 along the way, including two victories over the Americans. Those 57 tournament goals surpassed the 44, of their 2010 predecessors, as the most ever. Canada suffered a shocking shootout loss to the U.S., in the 2018 final, ending a run of four consecutive gold medals, and sending the Canadians home without gold, for the first time since 1998.

[GordMay]

February 18

1294: Mongolian Emperor, Kublai Khan, died.

1519: Spanish Conquistador, Hernán Cortés, leaves Cuba, for the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, with 11 ships, and 500 men, beginning the first phase of the Spanish colonization of the Americas.

1546: Martin Luther died at age 62, in Eisleben, Saxony.

1564: Michelangelo died.

1688: Quakers, in Germantown, Pa. adopt the first formal antislavery resolution in America.

1828: More than 100 vessels destroyed in a storm, at Gibraltar.

1876: Direct telegraph link established, between Britain, and New Zealand.

1879: Sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi is awarded a patent, for his design for the Statue of Liberty.

1885: Mark Twain [Samuel Clemens] publishes “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”. Twain first introduced Huck Finn as the best friend of Tom Sawyer, hero of his tremendously successful novel “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (1876). Though Twain saw Huck’s story as a kind of sequel to his earlier book, the new novel was far more serious, focusing on the institution of slavery, and other aspects of life in the antebellum South.

1930: Pluto, once believed to be the ninth planet, is discovered at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, by astronomer Clyde W. Tombaugh.

1944: The U.S. Army and Marines invade Eniwetok Atoll, in the Pacific.

1945: U.S. Marines storm ashore, at Iwo Jima.

1967: American physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, died.

1970: Chicago 7 defendants found innocent, of inciting to riot.

1979: Snow falls in Sahara Desert.

1986: Anti-smoking ad airs, for 1st time on TV, featuring Yul Brynner: he died, of smoking-induced lung cancer, on 10th October 1985.

2001: Dale Earnhardt Sr., considered one of the greatest drivers in National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR) history, dies at the age of 49, in a last-lap crash at the 43rd Daytona 500 in Daytona Beach, Florida. Dale Earnhardt Sr.’s death made him the fourth NASCAR driver to die within a nine-month period, and eventually prompted NASCAR officials to implement a series of more stringent safety regulations, including the use of head-and-neck restraints.

2010: A relatively obscure website, called ‘WikiLeaks’, publishes a leaked diplomatic cable, detailing discussions between American diplomats and Icelandic government officials. The leak of "Reikjavik13" barely registered with the public, but it was the first, of what turned out to be nearly 750,000 sensitive documents, sent to WikiLeaks by Chelsea Manning. Manning is now considered one of the most prolific and significant whistleblowers in American history, as her leaks shed light on atrocities committed by American armed forces, painted a far grimmer picture of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and greatly embarrassed the United States’ diplomatic establishment.

2017 American activist Norma McCorvey, the original plaintiff (anonymized as Jane Roe), in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling, ‘Roe v. Wade’ (1973), which made abortion legal throughout the United States, died at age 69.

2020: Boy Scouts of America files for bankruptcy, amid hundreds of sexual abuse lawsuits, suspending those claims.

[GordMay]

February 19

1405: Mongolian/Turkic conqueror, Tamerlane, died [aged 68]. Tamerlane conquered West, South, and Central Asia, and founded the Timurid dynasty.

1473: Polish astronomer & mathematician, Nicolaus Copernicus is born in Torun, in north-central Poland. The father of modern astronomy, he was the first modern European scientist to propose that Earth and other planets revolve around the sun. Sometime between 1508 and 1514, he wrote a short astronomical treatise, commonly called the ‘Commentariolus’ [Little Commentary], which laid the basis for his heliocentric [sun-centered] system. The work was not published in his lifetime. In the treatise, he correctly postulated the order of the known planets, including Earth, from the sun, and estimated their orbital periods relatively accurately. Copernicus also delayed publication of his major astronomical work, ‘De revolutionibus orbium coelestium libri vi’ [Six Books Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Orbs], nearly all his life. Completed around 1530, it was not published until 1543–the year of his death.

1600: Peruvian stratovolcano Huaynaputina explodes, in the most violent eruption, in South American recorded history.

1807: US Vice President, Aaron Burr arrested, in Alabama, for treason; later acquitted.

1819: British explorer, William Smith, discovers the South Shetland Islands, and claims them in the name of King George III.

1847: The first rescuers reach surviving members of the Donner Party, a group of California-bound emigrants, stranded by snow, in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Of the 89 original members of the Donner Party, only 45 reached California.

1878: Thomas Edison patents [#200,521] the gramophone [phonograph], which specified a particular method [embossing] for capturing sound on tin-foil-covered cylinders.

1902: Smallpox vaccination becomes obligatory, in France.

1910: Typhoid Mary [Mary Mallon] is freed from her first periods of forced isolation, and goes on to cause several further outbreaks of typhoid, in the New York area.

1913: 1st prize inserted into a Cracker Jack box.

1942: U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the executive order allowing the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

1962: John H. Glenn, Jr., the oldest of seven astronauts selected by NASA, for Project Mercury spaceflight training (and later a U.S. senator), became the first American to orbit Earth, doing so three times.

1963: ‘The Feminine Mystique’, by Betty Friedan, is published. The book examined the many ways in which women were still oppressed by American society. In addition to scholarly research, Friedan drew on first-hand accounts from housewives to explain how women were taught that homemaking and raising children was their sole purpose in life, how the education system and field of psychology made women who sought fulfillment elsewhere seem "neurotic" and the myriad ways that women's magazines, advertisers and other elements of society reinforced women's secondary status.

1964: UK flies ½ ton of The Beatles wigs to the US.

2005: American journalist and author, Hunter S. Thompson, who created the genre known as gonzo journalism, a highly personal style of reporting, that made him a counterculture icon, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

2008: Fidel Castro formally resigned as president of Cuba; he was succeeded by his brother Raúl. Fidel was 81 years old, at the time, and had been in power for 49 years.

2018: Nigeria says 110 girls missing, presumed kidnapped by Boko Haram, after attack on school. in Dapchi, Yobe state.

[Alan Mighty]

Originally Posted by GordMay

February 19

1600: Peruvian stratovolcano Huaynaputina explodes, in the most violent eruption, in South American recorded history.

The Huayna Putina eruption in 1600 is assumed to have injected several million tonnes of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. Some experts reckon that Huayna Putina created, or at least contributed to, a significant climate change some several times the magnitude of the Pinatubo event (or Pina2bo for readers of Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock). The Little Ice Age of Europe and the decline of the Ming Empire and its replacement by the Qing have been linked to Huayna Putina. Not everyone is convinced that Huayna (new/young) Putina (fire-thrower/boiler) was the sole cause of the Little Ice Age or the decline of the Ming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huaynaputina
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

1630 birth of Shivaji, who became ruler of a clan of the Maratha on the Indian sub-continent. Shivaji led military conflict against Mughal rule, but he also formed alliance with the Mughals at time. Shivaji created or re-created a model of government that endured and revived Hindu elite and ruling culture, including the use of Sanskrit to replace Farsi/Persian, which also endured. In the 21st century, Hindu far right nationalists proclaim Shivaji as a model for their push to marginalise Islam in India and to push india towards theocracy. In 1987, Govind Pansare (d. 2015) argued in his Shivaji Kon Hota? (Who Was Shivaji?) that Shivaji was benevolent to Muslims, appointed Muslims as officers in his army, respected women, abolished slavery, and more. Didn't persuade the Hindutva. The Hindu theocracy juggernaut rolls on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shivaji
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Govind_Pansare

1942: Imperial Nippon bombed the Australian town of Darwin (named after Charles). The event is generally regarded as the single largest military attack on Australia (but that's only if you ignore the impact of the English invasion and its genocide of the Palawa and the peoples of the Murri and Koori nations, and the ecological disaster caused by the introduction of European farming and pastoral methods).

In 1942 and subsequent years, the Australian government censored news of the attack, likely to keep the Australian population ignorant of the true impact (including the response of the Australian military, a number of whom fled Darwin and its environs in what might kindly be called temporary desertion).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Darwin
https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/E84294
https://www.awm.gov.au/articles/blog...bing-of-darwin
https://lant.nt.gov.au/story/bombing-darwin#group-1
https://www.theguardian.com/australi...42-in-pictures

1948 birth of Tony Iommi. Lost the tips of a couple of fingers while working metal. Was going to give up the guitar, but a friend showed him that Django Reinhardt could make magic playing with two fingers (because his others had been burned). Iommi detuned his guitar strings to a lower pitch to lower the pain from work on the fretboard. Started a trend to detuning and a bigger/heavier sound, which some called 'metal'. Wrote 'Fairies wear boots', 'War pigs', and other gems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catego..._by_Tony_Iommi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Iommi

1990 death of Bon Scott, likely from pulmonary aspiration of his own vomit while overdosed with heroin (but officially from consumption of alcohol). Born in Scotland. Learned to drum in the local drum and pipe band (but dinnae learn the pipes! Can you believe it?). Demonstrated his vocal skills, drumming, song-writing and bagpipe playing (self-taught; his playing included while on the tray of a flatbed truck driving streets of the CBD of Melbourne) while engaged as lead vocal of AC/DC. Definitely knew how to rock. Bon rolled too! Dinnae greet none now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s...k_%27n%27_Roll)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bon_Scott


1997 death of Deng Xiaoping. A short bullet-headed man. Played a significant role in the later stages of the 2nd Sino-Nipponese War when he acted as political commissar to Liu Bocheng of the 129th division of 8th Route Army and then a most significant role in 1948 when he was again political commissar to Liu Bocheng in the 2nd Field Army in the Huaihai Campaign against the Nationalist army, winning a decisive victory for the Communist Party of China and leading to the formation of the People's Republic of China in 1949. After Mao Zedong's death, Deng provided the decisive moves and leadership that led to economic reform and significant integration of the PRC economy with the global economy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deng_Xiaoping
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huaihai_campaign

2000 death of Friedensreich Hundertwasser. Decades ago I had an opportunity to buy a collection of his prints. Regret that I was impoverished and unable to take advantage of the opportunity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friede..._Hundertwasser
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=prints+by+...ages&ia=images

[GordMay]

February 21

1431: Joan of Arc's first day of interrogation, during her trial for heresy.

1797: Trinidad, West Indies, surrenders, to the British.

1848: The ‘Communist Manifesto’ [‘Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei’], written by Karl Marx, with the assistance of Friedrich Engels, is published, in London, by a group of German-born revolutionary socialists, known as the Communist League. The political pamphlet, arguably the most influential in history, proclaimed that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”, and that the inevitable victory of the proletariat, or working class, would put an end to class society forever. The Manifesto opens with the dramatic words, “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism,” and ends by declaring: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of the world, unite!” In 1867, Marx published the first volume of his monumental “Das Kapital”, the foundation work of communist theory.

1878: The world's first telephone book is issued, by the New Haven Connecticut Telephone Company, containing the names of its 50 subscribers.

1885: The Washington Monument was dedicated, on the grounds of the Mall, in Washington, D.C.

1893: Spanish musician Andrés Segovia, who was considered the foremost guitarist of his time, was born.

1907: SS “Berlin” sinks, off the Hook of Holland (142 dead).

1916: Battle of Verdun, which would stretch on for 10 months, and become the longest conflict of World War I, begins. With a German death toll of 143,000 (out of 337,000 total casualties), and a French one of 162,440 (out of 377,231), Verdun would come to signify, more than any other battle, the grinding, bloody nature of warfare, on the Western Front during World War I.

1917: British troopship SS “Mendi” sinks, off Isle of Wight, 646 die.

1947: 1st instant developing camera demonstrated, by Edwin Land, at the Optical Society of America, in NYC.

1958: British artist, Gerald Holtom, designs Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament logo, based on blended semaphore signals for the letters N, & D; it later became an international peace symbol.
➥ https://www.britannica.com/story/whe...sign-come-from

1965: Malcolm X, [born Malcolm Little, then El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz], an African American nationalist, and religious leader, is assassinated, by Mujahid Abdul Halim, while addressing his Organization of Afro-American Unity, at the Audubon Ballroom, in Washington Heights, NYC. He was 39.

1972: Richard Nixon becomes the first US President to visit China, normalizing relations between the countries, in a meeting with Chinese leader Mao Zedong, in Beijing.

1975: Watergate figures, John Mitchell, H. R. Haldeman & John D Ehrlichman, sentenced to 2½-8 yrs, for conspiracy, and obstruction of justice.

2018: American evangelist, Billy Graham, died at age 99.

2019: Japanese spacecraft, “Hayabusa-2", touches down on asteroid Ryugu, on mission to collect rock samples.
2019: The ‘Lunar Library’, a 30 million page digital library, launched on board Israel’s “Beresheet” Lunar Lander, aiming to be stored on the Moon.

[GordMay]

February 22

1349: Jews are expelled from Zurich, Switzerland.

1632: Galileo's "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" is published.

1732: George Washington is born, in Westmoreland County, Virginia.

1819: Spanish minister, Do Luis de Onis, and U.S. Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, sign the Florida Purchase Treaty, in which Spain agrees to cede the remainder of its old province of Florida, to the United States, and defines the boundary between the US and New Spain.

1857: German physicist, Heinrich Hertz, is born.

1879: Frank Winfield Woolworth's 'nothing over five cents' shop opens, at Utica, New York.

1909: ‘Great White Fleet’, 1st US naval fleet to circle the globe, returns to Virginia.

1979: St Lucia gains independence from Britain.

1987: American artist, Andy Warhol, dies.

1995: Steve Fossett completes 1st air balloon crossing, over Pacific Ocean (9600 km).

1997: A team of British scientists, working under the direction of Ian Wilmut, at the Roslin Institute, near Edinburgh, announced the birth of Dolly the sheep, the first clone [from an adult cell] of an adult mammal.

2006: At least, six men stage Britain's biggest robbery ever, stealing £53m (about $92.5 million or 78€ million), from a Securitas depot, in Tonbridge, Kent.

2011: After enduring more than five months of tremors, Christchurch, New Zealand, and its surrounding area, were struck by a destructive magnitude 6.3 aftershock. 185 people are killed.

2014: Joaquin “El Chapo” (“Shorty”) Guzmán Loera, head of the Sinaloa cartel, the world’s biggest drug trafficking organization, is arrested, in a joint U.S.-Mexican operation, in Mazatlán, Mexico, after outrunning law enforcement for more than a decade. Guzmán would not stay incarcerated for very long. On July 11, 2015, he escaped using a tunnel that led from the prison shower—the only place where cameras couldn't see him—to a construction site about a mile away. After a six-month manhunt, Guzmán was finally captured again, in early 2016. After a lengthy court battle, he was extradited to the United States to face a 17-charge indictment. On February 12, 2019, El Chapo was found guilty on all charges. On July 17, 2019, a federal judge, in New York City, sentenced him to life in prison.

2016: 10 million people are without water, in Delhi, after caste protests, in Jat, sabotage the Munak water canal.

2021: US death toll, from COVID-19, passes 500,000, higher than US deaths in World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War combined. US President Joe Biden, and vice-president Kamala Harris, hold a candle-lighting ceremony, to mark the 500,000 COVID-19 deaths, outside the White House. "We must not grow numb to the sorrow"

[GordMay]

Happy Twosday!
It’s 2022-02-22, and it’s Tuesday, which is a lot of twos, however you write it.

[GordMay]

February 23

0303: Emperor Diocletian orders the general persecution of Christians, razing the church at Nicomedia.

1455: Johannes Gutenberg prints his first Bible (estimated date).

1540: Spanish explorer, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, begins his unsuccessful search for the fabled Seven Cities of Gold [Cibola], in the American Southwest.

1782: Engineer James Watt's patent, for a rotary motion for the steam engine [his sun-and-planet gear], is granted.

1836: During the Texas war for independence, Mexican General Antonio López de Santa Anna began a siege of the Alamo, which was captured after 13 days, and which became, for Texans, a symbol of heroic resistance.

1868: The U.S. House of Representatives voted 126–47 to impeach President Andrew Johnson, whose lenient Reconstruction policies, regarding the South, after the Civil War, angered Radical Republicans in Congress.

1874: Major Walter Clopton Winfield patents a game called "sphairistike" [lawn tennis].

1898: In France, Emile Zola is imprisoned, for writing his "J'accuse" letter, accusing government of anti-Semitism & wrongly jailing Alfred Dreyfus.

1940: Woody Guthrie writes “This Land Is Your Land”.

1941: Plutonium first produced and isolated, by American chemist Glenn T. Seaborg, at Berkeley.

1945: During the bloody Battle for Iwo Jima, U.S. Marines, from the 3rd Platoon, E Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Regiment of the 5th Division take the crest of Mount Suribachi, the island’s highest peak and most strategic position, and raise the U.S. flag. Marine photographer Louis Lowery was with them and recorded the event. Americans fighting for control of Suribachi’s slopes cheered the raising of the flag, and several hours later, more Marines headed up to the crest with a larger flag. Joe Rosenthal, a photographer with the Associated Press, met them along the way, and recorded the raising of the second flag, along with a Marine still photographer, and a motion-picture cameraman. Rosenthal took three photographs atop Suribachi. The first, which showed five Marines, and one Navy corpsman, struggling to hoist the heavy flag pole, became the most reproduced photograph in history, and won him a Pulitzer Prize. Three of the Marines seen raising the flag in the famous Rosenthal photo, were killed before the conclusion of the Battle for Iwo Jima in late March. By March 3, U.S. forces controlled all three airfields on the island, and on March 26, the last Japanese defenders on Iwo Jima were wiped out. Only 200 of the original 22,000 Japanese defenders were captured alive. More than 6,000 Americans died taking Iwo Jima, and some 17,000 were wounded.

1954: A group of children, from Arsenal Elementary School, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, receive the first injections of the new polio vaccine, developed by Dr. Jonas Salk.

1955: American businessman, Steve Jobs, cofounder of Apple Inc., and a charismatic pioneer of the personal computer era, was born.

1971: US army officer William Calley confesses, & implicates Captain Medina, during his trial for the My Lai Massacre.

2020: Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, is shot dead, by a white father and son [Gregory and Travis McMichael], William Bray [who filmed the shooting on his phone], while out for a jog in a suburb of Brunswick, Georgia. On November 24, 2021, after about a two-week trial, a Georgia jury found Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael and William ‘Roddie’ Bryan guilty of murder, aggravated assault, false imprisonment, and criminal intent to commit a felony. In a separate trial, a jury found all three men were guilty of federal hate crime charges, as well.
2020: American mathematician Katherine Johnson,whose trailblazing work at NASA became known to a wide audience, through the book “Hidden Figures”, and its film adaptation (both 2016), died at age 101.

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by Montanan

I often wonder who Pete is and why we do things for his sake . . .

➥ https://www.cruisersforum.com/forums...ml#post3582503

Today, February 26th, is “For Pete’s Sake Day”.


It was started by a former radio talk show host in Lebanon, Pa., Tom Roy and his wife, Ruth. They submitted it to publisher McGraw Hill's "Chase's Calendar of Events", about 30 years ago.
➥ https://nationaltoday.com/for-petes-sake-day/

The use of “for Pete’s sake” is relatively new, dating back to 1903 according to Oxford English Dictionary citations. This was followed by “for the love of Pete” in 1906, and “in the name of Pete” in 1942.

Replacing the words in a euphemism, to make a saying more appropriate, is known as a “minced oath.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the name “Pete” in these exclamations is chiefly a euphemism for God.

But there’s no confirmed reason why people use Pete instead of Tom, Jim, or any other name for that matter. One speculative theory is that someone replaced Jesus or God, with another religious figure - St. Peter, though there is no evidence, to necessarily, support this.

[GordMay]

On Saturday, Feb. 27, 2010, at 3:34 a.m., an 8.8-magnitude earthquake shook Chile for three minutes.

The earthquake was felt strongly in six Chilean regions, in which 80 per cent (more than 13 million people) of the population resides.

The earthquake triggered a tsunami, that destroyed coastal towns across south-central Chile. The tsunami wave even impacted areas in California, and Japan.

The earthquake caused a blackout, for 93 per cent of Chileans. President Michelle Bachelet declared a "state of catastrophe", as the army was deployed, to assist affected areas.

In Chile, 370,000 homes, and many other buildings, were damaged, as a fire broke out in the country's capital city, Santiago.

The earthquake also caused more than 1,000 landslides, in the Maule region of Chile (a major wine-producing area).

The earthquake, and the subsequent events, killed a total of 525 people, and about 9 per cent of the affected population lost their homes.

The Chilean quake cost between $4-$7 billion.

More ➥ https://www.britannica.com/event/Chi...Reconstruction