This Day in History

[Tayana42]

Mrs. GordMay

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by jimbunyard

Who is Margaret Susan May [nee Wicks]?
I live a sheltered life.

Maggie May [Peggy Sue] is my bride.

[GordMay]

November 17
1970: Douglas Engelbart receives the patent [1] for the first computer mouse ["x,y position indicator for a display system”].
Engelbart, whose work beginning in the 1950s, led to his patent for the computer mouse, the development of the basic graphical user interface (GUI), and groupware, won the 1997 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, for his “inspiring vision of the future of interactive computing and the invention of key technologies to help realize this vision.”

“Historic Firsts: "Father of the Mouse" ➥ https://dougengelbart.org/content/view/162/

[1] “US Patent 3,541,541" ➥ https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?PageNu...F3%2C541%2C541

"A.M. Turing Award" ➥ https://amturing.acm.org/award_winne...rt_5078811.cfm

“The Mother of All Demos” ➥ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

[GordMay]

On November 19, 1863 President Abraham Lincoln delivers the "Gettysburg Address", at the dedication [consecration] of the Soldiers' National Cemetery, at the site of the Battle of Gettysburg.

Originally Posted by Lincoln

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

[GordMay]

On November 19, 1820, the American whaler “Essex”, which hailed from Nantucket, Massachusetts, is attacked by an 80-ton sperm whale, 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America.

The 238-ton Essex was in pursuit of sperm whales, specifically the precious oil and bone that could be derived from them, when an enraged bull whale rammed the ship twice, and capsized the vessel.

The 20 crew members escaped in three open boats, but only five of the men survived the harrowing 83-day journey to the coastal waters of South America, where they were picked up by other ships.

Most of the crew resorted to cannibalism during the long journey, and at one point men on one of the long boats drew straws to determine which of the men would be shot in order to provide sustenance for the others.

Three other men who had been left on a desolate Pacific island were saved later.

Herman Melville’s classic novel, Moby-Dick (1851), was inspired, in part. by the story of the Essex.

More about ➥ A.D. Blake Marine Art -

[GordMay]

On November 22, 1963, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, is assassinated, while traveling through Dallas, Texas, in an open-top convertible.
Three shots rang out at 12.30pm. The first is believed to have missed the motorcade. The second tore through the President’s throat, and went on to injure Governor Connally. The third shot completed the assassination.
In film shown around the world [1], Jackie Kennedy was seen cradled her dying husband as the limousine sped to the emergency room at Parkland Hospital.
Lee Harvey Oswold was later arrested for the murder, but is shot shortly after, by nightclub owner Jack Ruby.
JFK’s body was taken from the hospital to the presidential aircraft, Air Force One, and a flight to Washington. Before takeoff, a judge was called aboard and there, watched by the slain leader’s close advisers, and Jackie Kennedy, still wearing her heavily bloodstained pink suit, Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in, as the 36th President of the United States.
After a 10-month investigation, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald assassinated Kennedy and that he acted entirely alone. It could not say, however, why he did it. The commission may have been certain of its findings, but the general public was not. Polls conducted from 1966 to 2004 found that up to 80 per cent of Americans believed that there was a plot or cover-up.

[1] Abraham Zapruder’s silent colour footage, of 486 frames, lasted just 26 seconds. The section of the Zapruder film, which records this event, was not released for years after the assassination, due to its gruesome nature. It was first seen in a heavily criticised showing, by ABC News in 1975. Nearly 25 years later, the government paid the Zapruder family $16 million to preserve the film in the National Archives.
Later enhanced by experts, it clearly shows the President’s head exploding, as a bullet rips through it, brain matter scattering around. Jackie Kennedy, who had been cradling her wounded husband at the time of the devastating shot, then clambered on to the back of the car, it is now believed desperately to retrieve a chunk of the President’s brain.

[GordMay]

November 23:

1869: The clipper “Cutty Sark” is launched, In Dumbarton, Scotland, one of the last clippers ever built, and the only one still surviving.
➥ https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics...hina-tea-years

1942: Chinese steward, Poon Lim begins 133 days adrift, after British ship SS “Benlomond” torpedoed by german U-boat, and he is the sole survivor.
➥ https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/...a-wooden-raft/

1976: Apneist Jacques Mayol is the first man to reach a depth of 100m undersea, without breathing equipment [free dive].
The record for deepest no-limit freediving is 214m (702ft), held by Austrian world champion Herbert Nitsch, who set the record on 14 June 2007 in Spetses, Greece.
➥ Jacques Mayol — Teammayol

2007: MS “Explorer”, a cruise liner carrying 154 people, sank in the Antarctic Ocean south of Argentina after hitting an iceberg near the South Shetland Islands. All passengers and crew were rescued. The evacuees drifted for 5 hours, until they were picked up by the Norwegian ship MS “Nordnorge”.
➥ https://www.csmonitor.com/World/2009...6s08-wogn.html

[GordMay]

On November 24, 1859, British naturalist Charles Darwin publishes his groundbreaking scientific work: “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, The preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life”. [1]

The idea of organic evolution was not new. It had been suggested earlier by, among others, Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin, a distinguished English scientist, and Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, who in the early 19th century drew the first evolutionary diagram - a ladder leading from one-celled organisms to man. However, it was not until Darwin, that science presented a practical explanation for the phenomenon of evolution.

Most scientists quickly embraced the theory that solved so many puzzles of biological science, but orthodox Christians condemned the work as heresy. Controversy over Darwin’s ideas deepened with the publication of "The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex" (1871), in which he presented evidence of man’s evolution from apes.

Subsequent developments in genetics and molecular biology led to modifications in accepted evolutionary theory, but Darwin’s ideas remain central to the field.

[1] ➥ https://www.vliz.be/docs/Zeecijfers/...of_Species.pdf

Or ➥ http://darwin-online.org.uk/converte...ginNY_F382.pdf

[GordMay]

November 26

1941: The Japanese First Air fleet departs from Hitokappu Bay [now Kasatka Bay], on Iturup, in the Kuril Islands, en route to its December 7 attack, on Pearl Harbor.

Vice-Admiral Chuichi Nagumo leads the Japanese Fleet, an aircraft carrier strike force [including six aircraft carriers, two battleships, three cruisers, nine destroyers, eight tankers, 23 fleet submarines, five midget submarines, & 441 planes], toward Pearl Harbor, with the understanding that should “negotiations with the United States reach a successful conclusion, the task force will immediately put about and return to the homeland.”

Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto conceived the Pearl Harbor attack, and Captain Minoru Genda planned it.

The attack killed 2,403 U.S. personnel, including 68 civilians, and destroyed or damaged 19 U.S. Navy ships, including 8 battleships.

The Japanese lost 29 aircraft and 5 midget submarines in the attack. One Japanese soldier was taken prisoner, and 129 Japanese soldiers were killed. Out of all the Japanese ships that participated in the attack on Pearl Harbor only one, the "Ushio", survived until the end of the war.

The three aircraft carriers of the U.S. Pacific Fleet were out to sea on maneuvers. The Japanese were unable to locate them, and were forced to return home with the U.S. carrier fleet intact.

➥ https://www.cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wiki...arl_Harbor.htm

➥ https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/p...ct-sheet-1.pdf

[GordMay]

November 27

1493: Christopher Columbus returns to La Navidad colony, finding it destroyed by the 1st native American uprising against Spanish rule. Taíno cacique Caonabo led his people to attack the settlement after the brutal treatment they received from the garrison who disobeyed Columbus's orders.
➥ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/histo...umbus-8026921/

1770: On this day, a frail twelve-year-old boy stepped voluntarily into this seething world of filth, fear and uncertainty, determined to make his way in the world. He was the sixth of eleven children born to the wife of a clergyman in the rural UK village of Burnham Thorpe, Norfolk. His name was Horatio Nelson, and he was to become one of England’s greatest-ever military leaders and a national hero. After enlisting he was appointed a midshipman and began officer-training aboard HMS Raisonable – a 64-gun ship-of-the-line captured from the French.
➥ https://www.onthisday.com/articles/h...-national-hero

1868: Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer's 7th Cavalry kills Chief Black Kettle and massacrers about 100 Cheyenne (mostly women and children) on the Washita River.
➥ https://www.history.com/this-day-in-...-washita-river

1895: Through the will, drawn up by Alfred Bernhard Nobel, the Swedish chemist, engineer, and industrialist, who invented dynamite and other, more powerful explosives, the Nobel Prizes were established on this day.
➥ https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred-no...nobels-will-2/

2015: "Holy grail" of shipwrecks the “San Jose”, sunk 1708, is confirmed found by an international team off the coast of Colombia.
➥ https://www.artandobject.com/news/gl...ail-shipwrecks

[GordMay]

November 30

1487: The first German Beer Purity Law (Reinheitsgebot), is promulgated in Munich, by Albert IV, Duke of Bavaria, stating beer should be brewed from only three ingredients: water, malt and hops. This law was later changed to add yeast, once Louis Pasteur discovered its fermenting powers [in 19TH Century].
This 1487 law paved the way for the reunified Bavarian law of 1516, which made it a punishable crime to have more than Barley, hops, and water.
➥ Reinheitsgebot: German Beer Purity Law

1965: Ralph Nader’s “Unsafe at Any Speed” hits bookstores.
On November 30, 1965, 32-year-old lawyer Ralph Nader publishes the muckraking book: "Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile”. The book became a best-seller right away. It also prompted the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966, seat-belt laws in 49 states (all but New Hampshire), and a number of other road-safety initiatives.
➥ Unsafe at any Speed

[GordMay]

December 1

1959: The Antarctic Treaty was signed by 12 countries* [now 54], making the Antarctic continent a demilitarized zone, to be preserved for scientific research.
Since entering into force, on June 23, 1961, the Treaty has been recognised as one of the most successful international agreements. Problematic differences, over territorial claims, have been effectively set aside, and as a disarmament regime, it has been outstandingly successful. The Treaty parties remain firmly committed to a system that is still effective in protecting their essential Antarctic interests. Science is proceeding unhindered.
* Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
➥ https://www.ats.aq/e/antarctictreaty.html

[GordMay]

December 2

1942: The Atomic Age began at 3:36 p.m. on Dec. 2, 1942; quietly, in secrecy, on a squash court, under the west stands of old Stagg Field, at the University of Chicago.

Chicago Pile-1 was the world’s first nuclear reactor to go critical.

Scientists, led by Enrico Fermi, and in collaboration with Leó Szilárd, conducted the world's first controlled, self-sustaining, nuclear chain reaction. That initial chain reaction was too weak to power even a single light bulb.

Chicago Pile Number One [CP-1], consisted of 40,000 graphite blocks, that enclosed 19,000 pieces of uranium metal and uranium oxide fuel. The scientists of what was then called the Metallurgical Laboratory, or “Met Lab,” had arranged the graphite in layers within a 20 x 6 x 25 foot wooden framework.
Cadmium [an excellent neutron absorber] control rods were interspersed throughout the uranium-graphite pile. Withdrawing the rods would increase neutron activity in the pile, leading to a self-sustaining chain reaction. Re-inserting the rods would dampen the reaction. At every step of the process Fermi calculated the expected neutron emission, and slowly removed a control rod to confirm his expectations. As a safety mechanism, the control rods could quickly be inserted, if something started going wrong, to shut down the chain reaction.

A single random neutron was enough to start the chain reaction process, once the physicists assembled CP-1. The first neutron would induce fission on a uranium nucleus, emitting a set of new neutrons. These secondary neutrons hit carbon nuclei in the graphite, and slowed down. Then they’d run into other uranium nuclei, and induce a second round of fission reactions, emit even more neutrons, and on and on.

Upon successful completion of the experiment, a coded message was transmitted to President Roosevelt: “The Italian navigator has landed in the new world.”

Their experiment was a key step in the Manhattan Project. to develop the atomic bomb, during World War II.

➥ https://www.atomicarchive.com/histor...stpile_01.html

➥ https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/1...chain-reaction

[Alan Mighty]

Originally Posted by GordMay

December 2

1942: The Atomic Age began at 3:36 p.m. on Dec. 2, 1942; quietly, in secrecy, on a squash court, under the west stands of old Stagg Field, at the University of Chicago.

Chicago Pile-1 was the world’s first nuclear reactor to go critical.

And of course this planet had earlier fission nuclear reactors.

One (or four, depending on how you count) ran for a few hundred thousand years after going critical about 1.7 billion years ago. That's Precambrian, in the Paleoproterozoic Era.

Located in Oklo, Gabon.

Kept more or less secret until about 50 years ago. Francis Perrin, a French nuclear physicist, spilled the beans on the long-kept secret.

https://ans.org/pi/np/oklo/
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news...uclear-reactor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natura...ission_reactor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Perrin_(physicist)

[GordMay]

Fascinating, new [to me] information.
Thanx Alan!
Though, not [deliberately] "Kept more or less secret".

Originally Posted by Alan Mighty

And of course this planet had earlier fission nuclear reactors.

Originally Posted by Alan Mighty

One (or four, depending on how you count) ran for a few hundred thousand years after going critical about 1.7 billion years ago. That's Precambrian, in the Paleoproterozoic Era.

Located in Oklo, Gabon.

Kept more or less secret until about 50 years ago. Francis Perrin, a French nuclear physicist, spilled the beans on the long-kept secret.

https://ans.org/pi/np/oklo/
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news...uclear-reactor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natura...ission_reactor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Perrin_(physicist)