This Day in History

[GordMay]

April 27

1521: Portuguese navigator, Ferdinand Magellan, was killed, during a fight with inhabitants of Mactan Island, Philippines.

1565: The first Spanish settlement in Philippines is established in Cebu City.

1773: British Parliament passes the Tea Act.

1791: Samuel F.B. Morse, inventor of an electric telegraph and the Morse Code, was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts.

1859: "Pomona" sinks in North Atlantic, drowning all 400 aboard.

1865: The “Sultana”, a steam-powered riverboat, catches fire and burns, after one of its boilers explodes. At least 1,238 [as many as 1,800] of the 2,031 passengers, mostly former [paroled] Union POWs, are killed. The worst maritime disaster in U.S. history.

1904: The Australian Labor Party [a democratic socialist party], under Prime Minister Chris Watson, becomes the first Labor government in the world, at a national level. His government only survived for four months, between April and August in 1904.

1933: Karl Jansky reports reception of cosmic radio signal, in Washington, D.C.

1940: Reichsführer of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, orders establishment of Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

1943: Polish Resistance Fighter, Witold Pilecki, escapes from Auschwitz, after having voluntarily been imprisoned there, to gain information about the Holocaust.

1945: Italian partisans capture Benito Mussolini, at Dongo (Lake Como).

1946: 1st radar installed aboard a commercial ship.

1950: South Africa passes the ‘Group Areas Act’, formally segregating races.

1953: President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed 'Executive Order 10450': ‘Hiring and Firing rules for Government Employment’. Homosexuality, moral perversion, and communism were categorized as national security threats, and could be used as a condition for firing a federal employee, and for denying employment to potential applicants.

1959: Mao Zedong resigns as Chairman of the PRC, after the disastrous failure of the ‘Great Leap Forward’.

1960: 1st atomic powered electric-drive submarine launched (“Tullibee”).

1981: Xerox PARC introduces the personal computer ‘mouse’.

2006: Construction begins on the ‘Freedom Tower’, for the new World Trade Center, in New York City.

2020: Global confirmed cases of COVID-19 pass 3 million. with the death toll at 205,000. US has 1/3 of all new cases.

[GordMay]

April 28

1760: French forces besieging Quebec, defeat the British, in the second Battle on the Plains of Abraham. Also known as the Battle of Sainte-Foy, during the Seven Years' War (called the French and Indian War in the United States), was a victory for the French, under the Chevalier de Lévis, over the British army, under General Murray. The battle was notably bloodier than the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, of the previous September, with 833 French casualties to 1,124 British casualties.

1770: British Captain James Cook, aboard the “Endeavour”, lands at Botany Bay in Australia.

1789: Captain William Bligh, of the British ship HMS “Bounty”, and 18 of his men, were set adrift in a 23-foot open boat, by mutinous sailors, led by the master's mate Fletcher Christian. Captain Bligh, and his fellow loyal crew, made it after a 47-day voyage to Timor, in the Dutch East Indies, and returned to England and reported the mutiny. The Mutineers eventually settled in Pitcairn Island and Tahiti.

1848: Slavery abolished in French colonies.

1902: Using the ISO 8601 standard Year Zero definition for the Gregorian calendar, preceded by the Julian calendar, the one billionth minute since the start of January 1 Year Zero occurs at 10:40 AM, on this date.

1932: A yellow fever vaccine for humans is announced.

1937: 1st commercial flight across Pacific, operated by Pan Am.

1940: SS-Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) Rudolf Höss (not Hess, different Nazi) becomes commandant of concentration camp Auschwitz.

1947: Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl, and five others, set out in a balsa wood craft, known as “Kon Tiki:, to prove that Peruvian Indians could have settled in Polynesia. They arrived in Polynesia three and a half months later.

1965: The U.S. Army and Marines invade the Dominican Republic, stay until October 1966.

1996: In Australia's worst massacre in modern history, Martin Bryant shoots and kills 35 in Port Arthur, Tasmania. Leads to a compulsory gun buy back program, and major changes to gun control laws.

2003: Apple launched the ‘iTunes Store’, which gave users the ability to purchase and download music from the Internet, directly to their iTunes library; in 2010 the store sold its 10 billionth song.

2004: The first Abu Ghraib torture pictures are published. The images, aired in a 60 Minutes II report, showed gross human rights violations, including torture and murder, committed by U.S. soldiers and CIA personnel in the Baghdad prison.

2018: Indian government announces electricity has now reached every Indian village.

2019: American diver, Victor Vescovo, makes the deepest dive ever. to the bottom of the Mariana trench at 10,927m (35,849ft), and finds a plastic bag.

2020: US confirmed cases of COVID-19 pass 1 million, while death toll, of 58,365, surpasses that of US soldiers killed in Vietnam War .

[GordMay]

April 29

1429: Joan of Arc leads French forces to victory, over English, at Orleans, during the Hundred Years' War.

1587: Sir Frances Drake sails into Cadiz Spain, and sinks Spanish fleet.

1701: Drenthe, Netherlands, adopts Gregorian calendar, tomorrow is May 12, 1701.

1769: Scottish engineer James Watt's patent for a steam engine, with a separate condenser, enrolled (Patent 913).

1781: French fleet occupies Tobago, during American War of Independence.1781: French fleet stops the Britain from seizing the Cape of Good Hope

1813: Ist US Rubber patent, granted to Jacob F. Hummel.

1852: The first edition of Peter Roget's Thesaurus is published.

1864: Battle of Gate Pa [Pukehinahina]; 1,700 British troops suffer their worst defeat of the New Zealand Wars, at the hands of 230 entrenched Maori warriors, in Tauranga.

1901: Japanese Emperor Hirohito born.

1902: Congress extends the ‘Chinese Exclusion Act’ (of 1882), prohibiting immigration of Chinese laborers, from territories to the mainland, a rule clearly aimed at Chinese in the Philippines.

1913: Gideon Sundback, of Hoboken, patents the all-purpose zipper.

1927: Construction of Charles Lindburgh’s ‘Spirit of St. Louis’ is completed.

1928: Laszlo Belady, creator of the Belady algorithm [used in optimizing the performance of computers], is born. Belady worked at IBM for 23 years, in software engineering, before joining the Mitsubishi Electronics Research Laboratory, in the mid-1980s.

1945: The Nazi concentration camp of Dachau is liberated, by U.S. Seventh Army, freeing 31,601 people.
1945: A day before committing suicide, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun marry.

1963: Typhoon ‘Olive’, with 110 MPH Winds, destroyed 95% of the homes, on the Island of Saipan, and all electric power and telephones were down. There were no reported deaths, but most of the population of the Island are now homeless.

1975: The U.S. embassy, in Vietnam, is evacuated [‘Operation Frequent Wind’], as North Vietnamese forces fight their way into Saigon.
1975: Charles McMahon and Darwin Judge are the last two United States servicemen killed in Vietnam.

1978: Japan's Naomi Uemura, traveling by sled dog, became the first person to reach the North Pole alone.

1990: Wrecking cranes began tearing down the Berlin Wall, at the Brandenburg Gate.

1991: Tropical Cyclone strikes the Chittagong district in Bangladesh, with winds in excess of 150 MPH, and a 20 foot storm surge, killing 139,000 people, and leaving 10 million homeless.

1992: Four Los Angeles police offices are acquitted, of charges, stemming from the beating of Rodney King. 55 people died, in the ensuing riots. The officers did face a second trial, a year later, on federal charges of violating Rodney King's civil rights, 2 were found guilty and faced prison sentences of two years.

1994: Ferry boat smashes into Mombasa Harbor Kenya, kills over 300.

1997: ‘Chemical Weapons Convention’ of 1993 comes into force, outlaws production, stockpiling, and use of chemical weapons, among its signatories. It has, so far, been ratified by some 190 countries.

2004: Dick Cheney and George W. Bush testify before the 9/11 Commission in a closed, unrecorded hearing in the Oval Office

2018: Sweden's official ‘Twitter’ account confirms Swedish meatballs actually originated in Turkey.

2019: Over 700 people infected with measles in the US, highest number for 25 years.

2020: A mile-wide asteroid, named ‘1998 OR2', passes within 3.9 million miles of Earth.

[GordMay]

April 30

1492: Christopher Columbus is given royal commission, by Spanish monarchs Isabella I and Ferdinand II, to equip his fleet to the New World.

1633: Galileo Recants. Under threat of torture, the astronomer Galileo Galilei recants his belief that the Earth revolves around the Sun (heliocentrism). In 1615, The Roman Inquisition had determined that heliocentrism contradicted the Holy Scripture, citing Biblical passages such as:
Psalm 93:1, 96:10, and 1 Chronicles 16:30 - "the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved."
Psalm 104:5 - "the Lord set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved."
Ecclesiastes 1:5 - "And the sun rises and sets and returns to its place."
Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) supported heliocentrism, and appeared to attack Pope Urban VIII. For this indiscretion, Pope Urban VIII had him brought before the Roman Inquisition. Under threat of torture, Galileo recanted. He was sentenced to house arrest for life, and publication of any of his works was forbidden.
As late as 1990, the Church still showed support for Galileo's prosecution, as evidenced in a speech by Cardinal Ratzinger (who later became Pope Benedict XVI), in which he stated, "Her (the Roman Catholic Church) verdict against Galileo was rational and just, and the revision of this verdict can be justified only on the grounds of what is politically opportune."
However, in 1992, the Catholic Church admitted they were wrong, in this decision.

1777: German mathematician & astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauss born. The magnetic unit of flux density "Gauss" is named for him. He also devised the method of least squares, used in statistics.

1789: George Washington is inaugurated as the first U.S. president.

1798: US Department of the Navy forms.

1803: Chancellor Robert Livingston and James Monroe sign Louisiana Purchase Treaty, in Paris, at a cost of 15 million dollars, doubles the size of the USA [adds 828,000 square miles].

1812: Louisiana became the 18th state in the United States.

1857: Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler born. He coined the term "Schizophrenia" (1908, schizo=split, phrene=mind). He also coined the terms "ambivalence" (1911) and "autism" (1912).

1878: Louis Pasteur lectures, at the French Academy of Science, in favor of his theory that many diseases are caused by tiny organisms. He was met with skepticism by many scientists of the day.

1897: English physicist Joseph John Thomson, amid much skepticism, announces his discovery of the elementary particle, the electron, which is 1000 times smaller than the atom. He was later awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.

1900: Hawaii becomes a U.S. Territory.
1900: Railroad engineer Casey Jones dies, heroically, in a train wreck, at Vaughn, Mississippi, while driving ‘Cannonball Express’ (immortalized in"Ballad of Casey Jones").

1945: Adolf Hitler commits suicide, along with his new wife Eva Braun, in the Fuhrerbunker in Berlin, as the Red Army captures the city. Admiral Karl Donitz becomes his successor.

1955: Element atomic number 101, ‘Mendelevium’, announced.

1980: Juliana, Queen of the Netherlands, abdicates; Princess Beatrix Wilhelmina Armgard becomes Queen.

1989: World Wide Web (WWW) is first launched in the public domain, by CERN scientist Tim Berners-Lee.

1993: The World Wide Web source code is released by CERN, making the software freely available to all.

2013: Apple offers the largest bond offering, from a private company, of $17 Billion.

[GordMay]

May 1

1006: Supernova observed by Chinese and Egyptians, in constellation Lupus.

1682: Louis XIV & his court inaugurate Paris Observatory.

1753: Publication of ‘Species Plantarum’, by Carolus Linnaeus, and the formal start date of plant taxonomy adopted by the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature.

1759: British fleet occupies Guadeloupe, West Indies, capturing it from France.

1898: US Admiral George Dewey commands "You may fire when you are ready, Gridley", as US rout Spanish fleet at Manila.

1915: British liner “Lusitania” leaves NYC for Liverpool. A week later it would be torpedoed, and sunk, by a German U-boat.

1930: The planet ‘Pluto’ is officially named, by 11 year-old Venetia Burney.

1943: German plane sinks the British ship SS “Erinpura”, in the Mediterranean, with the loss of 799 lives.

1949: Gerard Kuiper discovers ‘Nereid’:, (2nd satellite of ‘Neptune’).

1956: A doctor in Japan reports an "epidemic of an unknown disease of the central nervous system", marking the official discovery of ‘Minamata disease’.

1960: Russia shoots down Francis Gary Powers' “U-2" spy plane, over Sverdlovsk.

1961: The first major airplane hijacking, within the United States, occurred when a man forced a commercial airliner, en route from Miami to Key West, Florida, to detour to Cuba.

1964: Dartmouth Professors Launch "Timesharing" System ‘BASIC’. Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny launched a timesharing system at Dartmouth College using their simple, user-friendly language, BASIC. Kurtz and Kemeny wanted to create a language their students could learn quickly, for use on the timesharing system, which allows several users to run their programs at the same time, on one processor.

1967: Elvis Presley married Priscilla Beaulieu. (They divorced in 1973.)

1979: Home rule introduced to Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland).
1979: Marshall Islands (in Pacific) become self-governing.

1981: Radio Shack releases Model III TRSDOS 1.3.

1986: Russian news agency Tass reports Chernobyl nuclear power plant mishap.

1994: Three-time World Formula 1 Drivers champion, Ayrton Senna of Brazil, is killed in a 309 kmh crash, whilst leading the San Marino Grand Prix at Imola, in Italy.

2018: Scotland is the first country in the world to introduce a minimum price on alcohol.

2019: ‘Wikileaks’ co-founder Julian Assange sentenced to 50 weeks in jail, for breaching his bail conditions, in London.

[GordMay]

May 2

1497: John Cabot's expedition departs Bristol, searching for new lands across the Atlantic.

1519: Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, Leonardo da Vinci, died in Cloux, France.

1611: The King James Version of the Bible was first published.

1670: King Charles II gives royal charter, founding the Hudson's Bay Company.

1729: Russian wife of Peter III of Russia, Catherine the Great born.

1780: William Herschel discovers 1st binary star, ‘Xi Ursae Majoris’.

1797: A mutiny in the British navy spreads from Spithead to the rest of the fleet.

1829: After anchoring nearby, Captain Charles Fremantle of HMS “Challenger”, declares the Swan River Colony, in Australia.

1892: Manfred, baron von Richthofen (the “Red Baron”), Germany's top aviator and leading ace in World War I, was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland).

1927: U.S. Supreme Court's "Buck v. Bell", permits forced sterilizations of various "unfits", by states' authorities, where such surgeries are practiced for eugenic reasons.
➥ https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/274/200

1956: US Lab detects high-temperature microwave radiation from Venus.

1969: The British ocean liner “Queen Elizabeth II” departed Southampton, on her maiden voyage to New York.

1974: Former US Vice President Spiro Agnew disbarred.

1981: Radio Shack re-releases Model III TRSDOS 1.3, with 2 fixes.

1982: The British submarine HMS “Conqueror” sinks the Argentinian cruiser “General Belgrano”, by two ‘Tigerfish’ torpedoes. About 368 lives were lost in the attack, more than half of the total number of Argentinian casualties during the Falklands War.

1983: Microsoft Corp. announced the two-button Microsoft Mouse, which it introduced to go along with its new Microsoft Word processor. Microsoft built about 100,000 of these fairly primitive units, for use with IBM and IBM-compatible personal computers, but sold only 5,000, before finding success in a 1985 version that featured, among other improvements, near-silent operation on all surfaces.

1997: Mercury Mail announces its 1 millionth internet subscriber.

2000: U.S. President Bill Clinton announced that highly accurate GPS would be made available to the public; the satellite signals had previously been degraded for nonmilitary use [selective availability].

2011: The ‘2011 E. coli O104:H4' outbreak strikes Europe, mostly in Germany, leaving more than 30 people dead, and many others sick from the bacteria outbreak.

2018: E. coli outbreak, linked to Romaine lettuce grown in Yuma, Arizona, reports the first fatality, with 121 cases across 25 US states.

2019: Facebook bans Alex Jones (InfoWars), Milo Yiannopoulos (ex-Breitbart), Louis Farrakhan (Nation of Islam), Paul Nehlen and Laura Loomer for hate speech.

[GordMay]

May 3

1374 BC: Solar eclipse (2m 07s) seen at Ugarit, by Mesopotamian astronomers. "On the day of the new moon, in the month of Hiyar, the Sun was put to shame, and went down in the daytime, with Mars in attendance."

1481: Ottoman sultan Mehmed the Conqueror born.

1494: European explorer Christopher Columbus encountered the island of Jamaica, which he named Santiago.

1621: Lord Chancellor Sir Francis Bacon, the highest legal officer in the land, accused of "Bribery and Corruption", charges to which he pleaded guilty.

1661: Johannes Hevelius observes 3rd transit of Mercury ever to be seen.

1678: French conquering fleet at Curacao, 1200 die.

1715: Edmond Halley observes total eclipse phenomenon, "Baily's Beads".

1841: New Zealand proclaimed a colony independent of New South Wales.

1898: Golda Meir, a founder and the fourth prime minister (1969–74) of Israel, was born in Kiev, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire.

1945: Allies arrest German physicist Werner Heisenberg.

1945: German ship "Cap Arcona", laden with prisoners, sunk by Royal Air Force, in East Sea, 5,800 killed.

1978: First unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail ("spam") is sent, by a Digital Equipment Corporation marketing representative, Gary Thuerk, to every ARPANET address on the US west coast.

1999: A tornado produces the highest wind speeds ever recorded. The F5 tornado hitting parts of Oklahoma City, caused the record wind speed of about 301 mph (484 km/h). 45 people were killed, 665 injured.

2008: A tropical cyclone has devastated parts of the Irrawaddy region of Burma/Myanmar, with three out of four buildings reportedly blown down in many areas of the country. Burma has declared Irrawaddy, and four other regions, including the main city Rangoon, to be disaster areas. The world's richer nations have all offered aid to the region, but the current military backed leaders of Burma are still hesitant to allow foreign aid workers in to the country to distribute the much needed aid. After 3 weeks more than 75,000 have been identified as dead, with still a further 50,000 missing, which could well take the death toll to over 100,000 making it one of the worst natural disasters in modern times.

2016: A wildfire forced the evacuation of Fort McMurray, Alberta, the capital of Canada's tar sand industry, and the surrounding area; ultimately, more than 80,000 people fled the blaze, which caused billions of dollars in losses.

2018: 'Kilauea' volcano on Big Island, Hawaii, begins erupting, forcing the evacuation of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park and residential areas.

2019: Cyclone ‘Fani’ strikes Odisha State, India and Bangladesh, killing 33 people after one of the biggest human evacuations ever - 1.2 million in India in 24 hours.

[GordMay]

May 4

1626: Peter Minuit landed in Manhattan, which he later bought for $24 worth of cloth and brass buttons.

1634: Johan van Walbeeck's fleet departs from Holland, to Curaçao, West Indies. Van Walbeeck became the first director/governor of the Netherlands Antilles.

1783: William Herschel reports seeing a red glow, near lunar crater, ‘Aristarchus’.

1878: Thomas Edison's Phonograph shown for 1st time at Grand Opera House.

1904: Construction begins, by the United States, on the Panama Canal.

1910: Wilfrid Laurier passes the Naval Service Act, which creates the Royal Canadian Navy.

1932: Al Capone enters Atlanta Penitentiary, convicted of income tax evasion.

1942: Battle of Coral Sea begins (1st naval battle fought solely in air) between Japanese, US, and Australian navies and air forces.

1957: Alan Freed hosts "Rock n' Roll Show", 1st prime-time network rock music radio show.

1970: Ohio National Guardsmen open fire on student anti-Vietnam war protesters, at Kent State University, killing four, and wounding nine others.
➥

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YX95QSKBODo

1972: "The Don't Make A Wave Committee," a fledgling environmental organization founded in Canada in 1971, officially changes its name to the "Greenpeace Foundation".

1995: German electronics company, Escom AG, paid $10 million for the rights to the name, patents and intellectual property of Commodore Electronics Ltd. A pioneer in the personal computer industry, Commodore halted production in 1994 and declared bankruptcy. Escom AG planned to resume production of Commodore personal computers, including its most recent model, the Amiga. The company later sold its Amiga rights.

1998: A federal judge in Sacramento, California, gives "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski four life sentences, plus 30 years, after Kaczynski accepts a plea agreement, sparing him from the death penalty.

[GordMay]

May 5


1818: Karl Marx born.

1821: Napoleon Bonaparte dies, in exile, on the island of St. Helena.

1952: G. W. A. Dummer, an English electrical engineer, foresees the fabrication of all electronic components of a circuit or system, in a single block of semiconductor material. Several special-function devices were developed at Bell Labs and RCA, before Jack Kilby at TI demonstrated a general-purpose concept "integrated circuit", in 1958.

1961: Alan Shepard, Jr., made a 15-minute suborbital flight, in the Freedom 7 spacecraft, becoming the first U.S. astronaut to travel in space.

2000: The Sun, Earth, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn align - Earth's moon is also almost in this alignment - leading to Doomsday predictions of massive natural disasters, although such a 'grand confluence' occurs about once in every century.

[GordMay]

May 6

1527: Spanish and German Imperial troops sack Rome, ending the Renaissance. Libraries are destroyed, the Pope is captured, and thousands are killed.

1794: Haiti, under Toussaint Louverture, revolts against France.

1851: Dr John Gorrie patents a "refrigeration machine".

1860: Giuseppe Garibaldi's Mille sets sail, from Genoa to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.

1877: Oglala Lakota Chief ‘Crazy Horse’ surrenders to U.S. troops, in Nebraska. Crazy Horse, along with White Bull, Hump, Chief Gall and others, brought General George Custer to his end, at ‘Little Bighorn’ [Greasy Grass], Montana.

1882: Chinese Exclusion Act: US Congress ceases Chinese immigration, over President Chester A. Arthur's veto.

1889: ‘Exposition Universelle’ (World's Fair), in Paris, opens with the recently completed Eiffel Tower serving as the entrance arch.

1902: British SS “Camorta” sinks off Rangoon; 739 die.

1937: German airship “Hindenburg” explodes in flames at Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 35 of the 97 on board, and 1 on the ground. Ends the Age of Zeppelins.

1942: US General Jonathan Wainwright surrenders Corregidor & Philippines to Japanese Armies, after a 27-day siege.

1949: The ‘EDSAC’ performed its first calculation. Maurice Wilkes had assembled the machine [the first practical stored-program computer] at Cambridge University (an earlier machine at the University of Manchester was too small for practical purposes). His ideas grew out of the Moore School lectures he had attended three years earlier, at the University of Pennsylvania. For programming the EDSAC, Wilkes established a library of short programs called subroutines, stored on punched paper tapes. It performed 714 operations per second.

1954: English athlete Roger Bannister becomes first to run a sub-4 minute mile, recording 3:59:4 at Iffley Road Track, Oxford.

1962: 1st nuclear warhead fired, from Polaris submarine “Ethan Allen”.

1994: Channel tunnel, linking England & France, officially opens. Stretching 31.4 miles under the sea, the “Chunnel” was hailed as one of the “seven wonders of the modern world", by the American Society of Civil Engineers. It took six years to build at a cost of £4.65 billion – £12 billion ($17 billion) in today’s money. The average depth of the tunnel is 50 metres below the seabed, and the lowest point 75 metres below. To accomplish the task, 11 boring machines were used, each as long as two football pitches. They weighed a total of 12,000 tonnes, which is more than the Eiffel Tower. One of the machines remains buried under the sea while another, amazingly, was sold on eBay in 2004 for £40,000 ($57,000).

1998: Steve Jobs introduced Apple's first ‘iMac’, a personal computer that became hugely successful, and helped revive the struggling company.

2002: Entrepreneur Elon Musk founds ‘SpaceX’.

2008: Chaiten Volcano erupts in Chile, forcing the evacuation of more than 4,500 people.

2013: Wal-Mart becomes the largest company, by revenue, on the Fortune 500 list.

2020: UK becomes the first European country to report over 30,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19.

[GordMay]

May 7

973: Holy Roman Emperor, Otto I, born.

1660: Isaack B Fubine, of Savoy, in The Hague, patents macaroni.

1711: Scottish philosopher David Hume, known for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism, was born in Edinburgh.

1765: HMS “Victory” launched; Admiral Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar, 40 years later.

1867: Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel patents dynamite, in England, the first of three patents he would receive for the explosive material.

1877: Hunkpapa Lakota Chief Sitting Bull enters Canada, after the Battle of Little Bighorn.

1895: Otto Steiger was issued a patent, for his ‘Millionaire’ calculating machine. For the next 40 years, Switzerland's Hans Egli manufactured 4,700 machines, which weighed 120 pounds each. The Millionaire was notable in its ability to perform direct multiplication, which meant a user could multiply a number by a single digit, with a single rotation of the handle.
1895: Alexander Popov demonstrates the world's first radio receiver. The Russian physicist had initially built the device as a lightning detector. He achieved the first radio transmission between two buildings the following year.

1896: American criminal H.H. Holmes, who was considered the first known serial killer in the United States, was hanged. He confessed to 130 murders, though some believe the real number exceeded 200.

1902: ‘La Soufrière’ volcano, on St Vincent, kills 1,680 people.

1915: The German submarine “U-20" torpedoes the passenger ship “Lusitiania”, sinking her in 21 minutes with 1,978 people on board - 1198 lives lost.

1945: Unconditional German surrender to the Allies, signed by General Alfred Jodl, at Rheims, effectively ending World War II in Europe.

1946: ‘Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering’ (later renamed ‘Sony’) is founded, by Ibuka Masaru and Morita Akio, with around 20 employees.

1952: The concept of the integrated circuit, the basis for all modern computers, is first published, by Geoffrey Dummer.

1954: French troops surrender to Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap, of the Vietminh, at Dien Bien Phu.

1960: USSR announces Francis Gary Powers confesses to being a CIA spy.

1982: IBM releases ‘PC-DOS’, version 1.1.

1984: $180m out-of-court settlement reached in ‘Agent Orange’ suit.
During the Vietnam War the US Air Force engaged in a program of herbicidal warfare known as 'Operation Ranch Hand'. For ten years the Air Force sprayed forests in South Vietnam, affecting some 5 million acres of forest, or some 20% of all the forests in South Vietnam. There were several chemicals used, but the most famous was ‘Agent Orange’ (There were also Agents Green, Pink, Purple, Blue and White). The idea behind using the chemicals was to destroy foliage, acting as a potential cover, for the Viet Cong insurgents, who used trails through the forest for supply lines and camps.

1994: Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream" is recovered, 3 months after it was stolen.

1998: Mercedes-Benz buys Chrysler for $US40 billion, and forms DaimlerChrysler, in the then largest industrial merger in history.

2007: Ehud Netzer, of Hebrew University, announces he has discovered the tomb of ‘Herod the Great’, at Herodium, West Bank.

2012: Paeleoclimatological research claims dinosaur flatulence may have warmed the earth.
“Could methane produced by sauropod dinosaurs have helped drive Mesozoic climate warmth?.” ~ by David M. Wilkinson, Euan G. Nisbet, & Graeme D. Ruxton
➥ https://www.cell.com/current-biology...822(12)00329-6

2015: Underwater explorers discover a silver ingot, of Captain William Kidd's treasure, near Madagascar.

2019: Hackers seize control of the computer system of the US city of Baltimore, demanding a ransom, in Bitcoins, to unlock them.

[GordMay]

May 8

1348: Ship from Bordeaux, carrying the plague, lands in Melcombe Regis (now Weymouth), Dorset.

1541: Hernando de Soto discovers [first European sighting] the Mississippi River, which he calls ‘Rio de Espiritu Santo’.

1792: British Captain George Vancouver sights and names Mt Rainier, Washington.

1873: English economist, civil servant, philosopher John Stuart Mill died.

1886: Atlanta pharmacist John Pemberton [Jacob's Pharmacy] sells the first Coca-Cola [contained cocaine].

1899: Ernest Rutherford publishes his discovery of two different kinds of radiation [Alpha and Beta Particles].

1902: Mount ‘Pelée’, on the French overseas island of Martinique, erupts, wiping out the city of Saint-Pierre, killing 30,000, and leaving only two survivors.

1903: French painter Paul Gauguin, died [aged 54] at Hiva Oa, French Polynesia.

1919: 1st transatlantic flight take-off, by a US Navy seaplane.

1927: The ‘White Bird’ and its crew mysteriously disappear. French aviators, Charles Nungesser and François Coli, had taken off from Paris, in their Levasseur PL.8 biplane, in an attempt to make the first non-stop transatlantic flight. Their disappearance remains a mystery. Charles Lindbergh succeeded two weeks later.

1933: Mahatma Gandhi [Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi] begins a hunger strike [21-day fast], to protest British oppression [salt tax] in India.

1942: Aircraft carrier USS “Lexington” sunk by Japanese air attack, in Coral Sea.

1958: President Dwight Eisenhower orders the National Guard out of [ordered the National Guard be federalized, taking them out of the Governor's control, and ordered the US Army to support the integration of the school] Little Rock, as Ernest Green becomes the first black to graduate from an Arkansas public school.

1959: 3-deck Nile excursion steamer springs a leak, panicking passengers, who capsized ship. 200 drown just yards from shore.

1967: Heavyweight Boxing Champion Muhammad Ali is indicted, for refusing induction into U.S. Army.

1973: Indians, holding South Dakota hamlet of Wounded Knee, for 10 weeks, surrender.

1978: Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler climb Mount Everest, without supplemental oxygen supply.

1979: Radio Shack releases TRSDOS 2.3.

1980: World Health Organization announces smallpox has been eradicated, following a global vaccination program.

1995: The New York Times announced it would join eight other newspaper publishers, in the ‘New Century Network’, with the goal of linking local online news services into a national network, on the World Wide Web. The popularity of online news has grown, along with the Web itself. Now, The New York Times, and many other newspapers, publish their entire content online every day.

2014: World's oldest astrolabe [c. 1498], from Portuguese shipwreck, of explorer Vasco da Gama, found near Al Hallaniyah Island, Oman.

2018: Largest-ever wave [at 23.8m] recorded in the South Hemisphere, at Campbell Island, by New Zealand scientists.

[GordMay]

May 9

1386: Treaty of Windsor, between Portugal and England [oldest diplomatic alliance in the world still in force].

1502: Christopher Columbus departs, from Cádiz, Spain,, on his 4th and final trip to the New World.

1785: British inventor Joseph Bramah patents beer-pump handle.

1788: British parliament accepts abolition of slave trade.

1837: The Louisville and New Orleans packet, the "Ben Sherrod", burns, in the Mississippi River, below Natchez, Mississippi; 175 die.

1914: Happy Mother's Day! US President Woodrow Wilson proclaims’ Mother's Day’.

1922: The International Astronomical Union formally adopt Annie Jump Cannon's ‘stellar classification system’, which with only minor changes, is still used today.

1926: 1st flight over the North Pole claimed by Richard E. Byrd and co-pilot Floyd Bennett. Later discovery of Byrd's diary suggests they may have turned back, 150 miles short of the pole, due to an oil leak.

1927: Canberra replaces Melbourne, as the capital of Australia, and the Australian Parliament convenes there for the first time.

1941: The German submarine “U-110" is captured at sea, along with its ‘Enigma machine’, its cipher keys, and code books, that allowed codebreakers [Alan Turing et al] to read German signal traffic, during World War II.
British destroyers HMS “Bulldog”, HMS “Broadway”, and HMS “Aubrietia” attacked “U-110", embarking on what was later called ‘Operation Primrose’. The U-boat was seriously damaged, and its crew surrendered, when it was thought to be sinking. Fifteen men from the boat were killed and 32 were captured. The capture of the “U-110" was successfully kept a secret, as the boat sunk the next day. The Germans continued to use their codes, assuming their confidential material sank as well.

1945: Norwegian nazi collaborator Vidkun Quisling arrested.
1945: Hermann Goering is captured, by the United States Army.

1962: Laser beam successfully bounced off Moon for 1st time.

1967: The National Center for Atmospheric Research, a pioneer in investigating weather patterns and other atmospheric phenomena using computers and other technology, dedicated its new building in Boulder, Colorado. The building stemmed from a $100,000 grant from the Max C. Fleishmann Foundation, and was designed by renowned architect I.M. Pei.

1974: US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee begins formal hearings, on Nixon impeachment.

1980: 35 motorists die, as a Liberian freighter, MV “Summit Venture”, rams ‘Sunshine Skyway’ Bridge, over Tampa Bay.

1992: ‘America’s Cup’ finals begin in San Diego.

1995: Kinshasa, Zaire under quarantine, after an outbreak of Ebola virus.

2018: Oldest viral DNA, a form of hepatitis B, reported discovered, in 7,000 year old skeleton, found in Germany.

2019: French adventurer Jean-Jacques Savin (72) successfully crosses the Atlantic Ocean, in a barrel, arriving in Martinique.

2020: American singer and pianist Little Richard, whose hit songs of the mid-1950s were defining moments in the development of rock and roll, died at age 87.

[GordMay]

May 10

1497: Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci leaves for his first voyage to the New World (disputed).

1503: Christopher Columbus discovers Cayman Islands.

1534: French navigator Jacques Cartier reaches Newfoundland.

1624: Dutch admirals Jacob Willekens and Piet Heyn conquer Salvador da Bahia (Brazil).

1773: To keep the troubled East India Company afloat, Parliament passes the Tea Act, taxing all tea in the American colonies.

1775: Second Continental Congress, in Philadelphia, names George Washington Supreme Commander.
1775: The Green Mountain Boys, under the joint command of Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold, captured the British-controlled Fort Ticonderoga, during the American Revolution.

1797: 1st US Navy ship, the "United States," is launched.

1801: First Barbary War: The Barbary pirates, of Tripoli, declare war on the United States of America (1st US foreign war).

1940: Winston Churchill succeeds Neville Chamberlain, as British Prime Minister.

1954: Texas Instruments Introduces New Transistor. A silicon-based junction transistor, perfected by Gordon Teal, of Texas Instruments Inc., brought the price of this component down to $2.50. A Texas Instruments news release from May 10, 1954, read, "Electronic ‘brains’ approaching the human brain in scope and reliability came much closer to reality today with the announcement by Texas Instruments Incorporated of the first commercial production of silicon transistors kernel-sized substitutes for vacuum tubes."

1960: US atomic submarine USS “Triton” completes 1st submerged circumnavigation of the globe.

1994: Nelson Mandela sworn in, as South Africa's 1st black president.
1994: American serial killer John Wayne Gacy, whose murders of 33 boys and young men in the 1970s shocked his suburban Chicago community, was executed.

2000: India's population reaches 1 billion, baby girl Aastha, born at Delhi's Safdarjung Hospital, chosen as symbolic billionth.

2017: USGS releases a report, saying that some glaciers in Montana have receded by 85%, in the last 50 years. This means that many of them are no longer technically glaciers - they need to be larger than 25 acres.
➥ https://www.usgs.gov/news/glaciers-r...change-montana

2019: Taxi service ‘Uber’ becomes a public company, opening on the New York Stock Exchange.

2020: Global confirmed cases of COVID-19 rise above 4 million, with death toll above 270,000, according to Johns Hopkins.

[GordMay]

World record for the fastest non-tornado wind speed on Earth [407km/h]

On Wednesday, April 10, 1996, Barrow Island, which is off the coast of western Australia, measured the highest wind speed ever recorded on Earth (not including tornadoes).

Tropical Cyclone Olivia battered the tiny island with winds as high as 407 km/h [220 knots]. This beat the previous record from April 12, 1934, when 372 km/h winds were recorded at the 6,288-foot summit of Mount Washington, in Washington, N.H.

On the Australian island, the anemometer captured the unthinkable 407 km/h gust. The anemometer was owned by the private company Chevron, so the data wasn't made public right away.

Australia's Bureau of Meteorology didn't register the data immediately because the validity was questioned.

It would take 14 years, but finally, the wind speed was authenticated, and it now holds the world record for the fastest non-tornado wind speed on Earth.

On May 3, 1999, a 512 km/h gust was recorded, making it the fasted wind speed ever documented. The wind gust was a part of a tornado that destroyed an area near Oklahoma City. The F5 tornado killed 36 people and caused $1 billion worth of damage.

More ➥ Severe Tropical Cyclone Olivia