Today in history

[dlbpharmd]

July 29

1588 The Spanish Armada is sighted off the coast of England.

1602 The Duke of Biron is executed in Paris for conspiring with Spain and Savoy against King Henry IV of France.

1603 Bartholomew Gilbert is killed in Virginia by Indians, during a search for the missing Roanoke colonists.

1693 The Army of the Grand Alliance is destroyed by the French at the Battle of Neerwinden.

1830 Liberals led by the Marquis of Lafayette seize Paris in opposition to the king's restrictions on citizens' rights.

1848 A rebellion against British rule is put down in Tipperary, Ireland.

1858 Japan signs a treaty of commerce and friendship with the United States.

1862 Confederates are routed by Union guerrillas at Moore's Mill, Missouri.

1875 Peasants in Bosnia and Herzegovina rebel against the Ottoman army.

1915 U.S. Marines land at Port-au-Prince to protect American interests in Haiti.

1921 Adolf Hitler becomes the president of the Nationalist Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazis).

1945 After delivering parts of the first atomic bomb to the island of Tinian, the U.S.S. Indianapolis is sunk by a Japanese submarine. The survivors are adrift for two days before help arrives.

1981 Prince Charles marries Lady Diana.

[dlbpharmd]

July 30

1619 The House of Burgesses convenes for the first time at Jamestown, Va.

1787 The French parliament refuses to approve a more equitable land tax.

1799 The French garrison at Mantua, Italy, surrenders to the Austrians.

1864 In an effort to penetrate the Confederate lines around Petersburg, Va. Union troops explode a mine underneath the Confederate trenches but fail to break through. The ensuing action is known as the Battle of the Crater.

1919 Federal troops are called out to put down Chicago race riots.

1938 George Eastman demonstrates his color motion picture process.

1940 A bombing lull ends the first phase of the Battle of Britain.

1960 Over 60,000 Buddhists march in protest against the Diem government in South Vietnam.

1965 President Lyndon Johnson signs the Medicare Bill into law.

1967 General William Westmoreland claims that he is winning the war in Vietnam, but needs more men.

1975 Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa disappears, last seen coming out of a restaurant in Bloomingfield Hills, Michigan.

[Damelon]

July 30, 2003: Last Vee-Dub Marks the End of an Automotive Era

2003: The last "old style" Volkswagen Beetle rolls off a Mexican assembly line.
Born in Germany in 1938, the Volkswagen Type 1 was built to fit Adolf Hitler's specifications for a "people's car" that could accommodate two adults and three children while costing no more than 990 Reichsmarks. Production was under way but relatively few cars were built prior to the start of World War II.
The Volkswagen saw duty with the German army, its air-cooled engine proving particularly effective on the arid steppes of the Eastern Front and in the North African desert. Both the Wehrmacht's Kubelwagen (roughly the equivalent of the American Jeep) and its amphibious Schwimmwagen were built on the Type 1 chassis.
Following the war, Volkswagen's plant at Wolfsburg, Germany was reopened and the Type 1 went into mass production as a civilian automobile. The one-millionth Type 1 rolled off the Wolfsburg assembly line in 1955.
The Type 1 was introduced to the U.S. market in 1949 where it became known affectionately as the Vee-Dub and was soon a top seller, despite being underpowered and noisy. (Although it was superior in all respects to other comparable foreign cars like the Citroen 2CV and Morris Minor.) While it had its drawbacks, it also had the advantage of being durable, easy to customize and a cinch to repair.
The 1967 model underwent some significant changes, receiving a larger engine size and increased horsepower among other things, and is generally recognized by aficionados as the vintage Vee-Dub year. (Maybe not coincidentally, 1967 was the first year that Volkswagen itself began marketing its car by its popular nickname, "Beetle.")
In 1972, the Beetle surpassed the Ford Model T as the best-selling car of all time.
Still, by the early '70s the Beetle was in decline, facing new competition from increasingly efficient Japanese cars that also eschewed the Vee-Dub's simplicity for more bells and whistles. The last German-made Beetle left Wolfsburg in 1978 and production shifted mainly to Brazil and Mexico, where the car remained popular.
But it was all over by 2003, and on July 30 the last original Beetle, No. 21,529,464, rolled off the line at Puebla, Mexico, and was promptly shipped to the Volkswagen company museum in Wolfsburg.

[dlbpharmd]

July 31

904 Arabs capture Thessalonica.

1703 English novelist Daniel Defoe is made to stand in the pillory as punishment for offending the government and church with his satire The Shortest Way With Dissenters.

1760 Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, drives the French army back to the Rhine River.

1790 The U.S. Patent Office opens.

1882 Belle and Sam Starr are charged with horse stealing in the Indian territory.

1875 Former president Andrew Johnson dies at the age of 66.

1891 Great Britain declares territories in Southern Africa up to the Congo to be within their sphere of influence.

1904 The Trans-Siberian railroad connecting the Ural mountains with Russia's Pacific coast, is completed.

1917 The third Battle of Ypres commences as the British attack the German lines.

1932 Adolf Hitler's Nationalist Socialist German Workers' Party (Nazis) doubles its strength in legislative elections.

1944 The Soviet army takes Kovno, the capital of Lithuania.

1971 Apollo 15 astronauts take a drive on the moon in their land rover.

[dlbpharmd]

August 1

902 The Aghlabid rulers of Ifriqiyah (modern day Tunisia) capture Taormina, Sicily.

1096 The crusaders under Peter the Hermit reach Constantinople.

1464 Piero de Medici succeeds his father, Cosimo, as ruler of Florence.

1664 The Turkish army is defeated by French and German troops at St. Gotthard, Hungary.

1689 James II's 15-week siege of Londonderry, Ireland, ends in failure. It was a shaken and demoralized English column that returned to its northern Irish base at Newry on the evening of May 28, 1595.

1740 Thomas Arne's song "Rule Britannia" is performed for the first time.

1759 British and Hanoverian armies defeat the French at the Battle of Minden, Germany.

1790 The first enumeration by the U.S. Census Bureau is completed. It shows a population of 3,939,326 located in 16 states and the Ohio territory. Virginia is the most populous state with 747,610 inhabitants. The census compilation cost $44,377.

1791 Robert Carter III, a Virginia plantation owner, frees all 500 of his slaves in the largest private emancipation in U.S. history.

1798 Admiral Horatio Nelson routs the French fleet in the Battle of the Nile at Aboukir Bay, Egypt.

1801 The American schooner Enterprise captures the Barbary cruiser Tripoli.Often venturing into harm's way, America's most famous sailing ship, the Constitution, twice came close to oblivion.

1834 Slavery is abolished throughout the British Empire.

1864 Union General Ulysses S. Grant gives general Philip H. Sheridan the mission of clearing the Shenandoah Valley of Confederate forces.

1872 The first long-distance gas pipeline in the U.S. is completed.
Designed for natural gas, the two-inch pipe ran five miles from Newton Wells to Titusville, Pennsylvania.

1873 San Francisco's first cable cars begin running, operated by Hallidie's Clay Street Hill Railroad Company.

1880 Sir Frederick Roberts frees the British Afghanistan garrison of Kandahar from Afghan rebels.

1893 A machine for making shredded wheat breakfast cereal is patented.

1914 Germany declares war on Russia.

1937 The Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany becomes operational.

1939 Synthetic vitamin K is produced for the first time.

1941 The Grumman TBF Avenger torpedo plane makes its first flight.

1942 Ensign Henry C. White, while flying a J4F Widgeon plane, sinks U-166 as it approaches the Mississippi River, the first U-boat sunk by the U.S. Coast Guard.

1943 Over 177 B-24 Liberator bombers attack the oil fields in Ploesti, Rumania, for a second time.

1944 The Polish underground begins an uprising against the occupying German army, as the Red Army approaches Warsaw.

1950 Lead elements of the U.S. 2nd Infantry Division arrive in Korea from the United States.

1954 The Geneva Accords divide Vietnam into two countries at the 17th parallel.

1964 Arthur Ashe becomes the first African-American to play on the U.S. Davis Cup tennis team.

[Damelon]

Aug. 1, 1774: All I Need Is the Air That I Breathe

1774: Oxygen gas is discovered for at least the third time. This one sticks, however, when its latest discoverer, Joseph Priestly, publishes a paper on the subject that appears to predate the claims of priority made by Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Antoine Lavoisier.
In any case, Priestly did isolate the element oxygen, reportedly on this date, calling it "dephlogisticated air" and describing it as "five or six times better than common air for the purpose of respiration." He tested the pure oxygen on a couple of mice and when they did not die as expected, he tried it out himself:
"The feeling of it to my lungs was not sensibly different from that of common air, but I fancied that my breast felt peculiarly light and easy for sometimes afterwards. Who can tell but that, in time, this pure air may become a fashionable article in luxury. Hitherto, only two mice and myself have had the privilege of breathing it."
Priestly delivered his oxygen paper the following year and then included it as part of his Experiments and Observations on Air, published in 1776. It's largely on the basis of this paper and this book that Priestly's claim of priority lies. Since then, Priestly's status has been challenged by others arguing that Polish alchemist Michael Sendivogius described oxygen as early as 1604.
Whether he was or wasn't the true discoverer of oxygen, Priestly's place in history is secure. Tinkering with air was only one of his pursuits. In the realm of political science and theology, Priestly will be remembered as a fervent humanist, an influential advocate of religious tolerance and civil rights.
Which, in the end, makes breathing the air a lot sweeter.

[Damelon]

Apropos considering I rode on the line last week.

Aug. 2, 1873: San Francisco's First Cable Car Conquers Nob Hill

1873: Andrew Hallidie tests the first cable car in San Francisco.
Hallidie is said to have conceived his idea in 1869 while watching a team of horses being whipped as they struggled to pull a car up wet cobblestones on Nob Hill. They slipped and were dragged to their deaths.
It so happened that Hallidie's father held the British patent for wire-rope cable and when the son came to the Gold Rush fields he put it to use hauling ore-laden cars from mines. So it wasn't too much of a stretch for him to envision horseless cable cars carrying passengers up the steep slopes of San Francisco's hills.
He formed the Clay Street Hill Railroad and was awarded a contract to build the city's first cable-car line up Nob Hill. Fourteen months later, on Aug. 2, the first cable car made its way up Clay Street. It was an unqualified success. Regular passenger service began a month later and cable cars have been operating in San Francisco ever since.
A number of cable-car lines and companies sprang up in the wake of Hallidie's success. At its high-water mark, prior to the great earthquake and fire of 1906, 53 miles of cable-car track stretched to virtually every corner of town.
A vast underground pulley system moves a cable at a steady 9 mph, pulling the cable cars along the tracks. The operator, or gripman, uses a lever to grip the cable moving beneath the street.
In the late 1940s and '50s, there was move to dismantle San Francisco's cable-car system, backed largely by politicians who were in the pockets of the oil and tire companies that had a vested interest in seeing buses replace cable. The system would have probably vanished if not for the efforts of one San Franciscan in particular, Frieda Klussmann, who founded the Citizens' Committee to Save the Cable Cars and battled City Hall every step of the way.
When the issue finally made it to the ballot, San Franciscans voted overwhelmingly to keep their cable cars. Today, three lines -- the Powell & Hyde, Powell & Mason, and California Street cable -- continue to operate in the City by the Bay.

[dlbpharmd]

August 2

216 BC Hannibal Barca wins his greatest victory over the Romans at Cannae. After avidly studying the tactics of Hannibal, Scipio Africanus eventually bested his Carthaginian adversary.

47 BC Caesar defeats Pharnaces at Zela in Syria and declares, "veni, vidi, vici," (I came, I saw, I conquered).

1552 The treaty of Passau gives religious freedom to Protestants living in Germany.

1553 An invading French army is destroyed at the Battle of Marciano in Italy by an imperial army.

1589 During France's religious war, a fanatical monk stabs King Henry II to death.

1776 The Continental Congress, having decided unanimously to make the Declaration of Independence, affixes the signatures of the other delegates to the document.

1802 Napoleon Bonaparte is proclaimed "Consul for Life" by the French Senate after a plebiscite from the French people.

1819 The first parachute jump from a balloon is made by Charles Guille in New York City.

1832 Troops under General Henry Atkinson massacre Sauk Indian men, women and children who are followers of Black Hawk at the Bad Axe River in Wisconsin. Black Hawk himself finally surrenders three weeks later, bringing the Black Hawk War to an end.

1847 William A. Leidesdorff launches the first steam boat in San Francisco Bay.

1862 Union General John Pope captures Orange Court House, Virginia.

1862 The Army Ambulance Corps is established by Maj. Gen. George McClellan.

1876 Wild Bill Hickok is shot while playing poker.

1914 Germany invades Luxembourg.

1918 A British force lands in Archangel, Russia, to support White Russian opposition to the Bolsheviks.

1923 Vice President Calvin Coolidge becomes president upon the death of Warren G. Harding.

1934 German President Paul von Hindenburg dies and Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor.

1943 Lt. John F. Kennedy, towing an injured sailor, swims to a small island in the Solomon Islands. The night before, his boat, PT-109, had been split in half by the Japanese destroyer Amagiri.

1950 The U.S. First Provisional Marine Brigade arrives in Korea from the United States.

1964 U.S. destroyer Maddoxis reportedly attacked by North Vietnamese patrol boats.

1965 Newsman Morley Safer films the destruction of a Vietnamese village by U.S. Marines.

1990 Iraqi forces invade neighboring Kuwait.

[iQuestor]

good stuff. Loved reading about Hannibal.

[dlbpharmd]

August 3

1347 Six burghers of the surrounded French city of Calais surrender to Edward III of England in hopes of relieving the siege.

1492 Christopher Columbus leaves Spain on his voyage to the new world.

1546 French printer Etienne Dolet, accused of heresy, blasphemy and sedition, is hanged and burned at the stake for printing reformist literature.

1553 Mary Tudor, the new Queen of England, enters London.

1610 Henry Hudson of England discovers a great bay on the east coast of Canada and names it for himself.

1692 French forces under Marshal Luxembourg defeat the English at the Battle of Steenkerke in the Netherlands.

1805 Mohammed Ali becomes the new ruler of Egypt.

1807 The trial of Aaron Burr begins. He is accused of plotting the secession of New England.

1864 Federal gunboats attack but do not capture Fort Gains, at the mouth of Mobile Bay, Alabama.

1882 Congress passes the Immigration Act, banning Chinese immigration for ten years.

1908 Allan Allensworth files the site plan for the first African-American town, Allensworth, California.

1911 Airplanes are used for the first time in a military capacity when Italian planes reconnoiter Turkish lines near Tripoli.

1914 Germany declares war on France.

1916 Sir Roger Casement is hanged for treason in England.

1945 Chinese troops under American General Joseph Stilwell take the town of Myitkyina from the Japanese.

1958 The first nuclear submarine USS Nautilus passes under the North Pole.

1967 President Lyndon B. Johnson announces plans to send 45,000 more troops to Vietnam.

[Damelon]

Aug. 3, 1492: Columbus Sets Out to Discover ... a Trade Route

1492: Christopher Columbus, sailing for the Spanish crown, weighs anchor for the new world.
From his flagship Santa Maria, Columbus commanded a squadron that included the caravels Nina and Pinta. The original purpose of the voyage was not to discover new lands but to open up a trade route to the "Indies," or Asia, that would allow Spanish merchantmen to bypass the hostile Muslim fleets sailing out of the Middle East.
Columbus tried to interest the Portuguese in his scheme but they took a pass and he would have been spurned by Spain, too, had that nation's centuries-long war with the Moors been going badly. Fortunately for Columbus, the Spaniards were winning handily and victory was in sight. When the last Moorish stronghold fell at Granada, Spain was feeling expansive. And Columbus, the sailor from Genoa, was ready and waiting.
He never did find that alternate route around the Muslims, but on Oct. 12, 1492 Columbus did make landfall in what is today the Bahamas and the course of history was changed forever.
Although it's long been known that other outsiders reached North America well before Columbus, his landfall remains the most significant, for good and ill, because it opened up the sea lanes to the first permanent back-and-forth traffic of Europeans, their armies, their priests and their commerce.

[dlbpharmd]

August 4

1265 King Henry III puts down a revolt of English barons lead by Simon de Montfort.

1578 A crusade against the Moors of Morocco is routed at the Battle of Alcazar-el-Kebir. King Sebastian of Portugal and 8,000 of his soldiers are killed.

1717 A friendship treaty is signed between France and Russia.

1789 The Constituent Assembly in France abolishes the privileges of nobility.

1790 The Revenue Cutter service, the parent service of the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard, is organized.

1864 Federal troops fail to capture Fort Gaines on Dauphin Island, one of the Confederate forts defending Mobile Bay.

1875 The first Convention of Colored Newspapermen is held in Cincinnati, Ohio.

1879 A law is passed in Germany making Alsace Lorraine a territory of the empire.

1914 Germany invades Belgium causing Great Britain to declare war on Germany.

1942 The British government charges that Mohandas Gandhi and his All-Indian Congress Party favor "appeasement" with Japan.

1944 RAF pilot T. D. Dean becomes the first pilot to destroy a V-1 buzz bomb when he tips the pilotless craft's wing, sending it off course.

1952 Helicopters from the U.S. Air Force Air Rescue Service land in Germany, completing the first transatlantic flight by helicopter in 51 hours and 55 minutes of flight time.

1964 The U.S.S. Maddox and Turner Joy exchange fire with North Vietnamese patrol boats.

[dlbpharmd]

August 5

1391 Castilian sailors in Barcelona, Spain set fire to a Jewish ghetto, killing 100 people and setting off four days of violence against Jews.

1763 Colonel Henry Bouquet decisively defeats the Indians at the Battle of Bushy Run in Pennsylvania during Pontiac's rebellion.

1762 Russia, Prussia and Austria sign a treaty agreeing on the partition of Poland.

1815 A peace treaty with Tripoli--which follows treaties with Algeria and Tunis--brings an end to the Barbary Wars.

1858 The first transatlantic cable is completed.

1861 Congress adopts the nation's first income tax to finance the Civil War.

1864 The Union Navy captures Mobile Bay in Alabama.

1892 Harriet Tubman receives a pension from Congress for her work as a nurse, spy and scout during the Civil War.

1914 The British Expeditionary Force mobilizes for World War I.

1914 The first electric traffic signal lights are installed in Cleveland, Ohio.

1915 The Austro-German Army takes Warsaw, in present-day Poland, on the Eastern Front.

1916 The British navy defeats the Ottomans at the naval battle off Port Said, Egypt.

1921 Mustapha Kemal is appointed virtual ruler of the Ottoman Empire.

1941 The German army completes taking 410,000 Russian prisoners in Uman and Smolensk pockets in the Soviet Union.

1951 The United Nations Command suspends armistice talks with the North Koreans when armed troops are spotted in neutral areas.

1962 Actress Marilyn Monroe dies under mysterious circumstances.

1974 President Richard Nixon admits he ordered a cover-up for political as well as national security reasons.

[dlbpharmd]

August 6

1497 John Cabot returns to England after his first successful journey to the Labrador coast.

1863 The CSS Alabama captures the USS Sea Bride near the Cape of Good Hope.

1888 Martha Turner is murdered by an unknown assailant, believed to be Jack the Ripper, in London, England.

1890 William Kemmler becomes the first man to be executed by the electric chair.

1904 The Japanese army in Korea surrounds a Russian army retreating to Manchuria.

1914 Ellen Louise Wilson, the first wife of the twenty-eighth president, Woodrow Wilson, dies of Barite's disease.

1927 A Massachusetts high court hears the final plea from Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italians convicted of murder.

1942 The Soviet city of Voronezh falls to the German army.

1945 Paul Tibbets, the commander of Enola Gay, drops the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. It was the second atomic bomb, dropped on Nagasaki, that induced the Japanese to surrender.

1965 President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act, outlawing the literacy test for voting eligibility in the South.

[danlo]

1945 Paul Tibbets, the commander of Enola Gay, drops the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. It was the second atomic bomb, dropped on Nagasaki, that induced the Japanese to surrender.

a moment of silence please...

[dlbpharmd]

August 7

1782 General George Washington authorizes the award of the Purple Heart for soldiers wounded in combat.

1864 Union troops capture part of Confederate General Jubal Early's army at Moorefield, West Virginia.

1888 Theophilus Van Kannel of Philadelphia receives a patent for the revolving door.

1906 In North Carolina, a mob defies a court order and lynches three African Americans which becomes known as "The Lyerly Murders."

1916 Persia forms an alliance with Britain and Russia.

1922 The Irish Republican Army cuts the cable link between the United States and Europe at Waterville landing station.

1934 In Washington, the U.S. Court of Appeals rules that the govenment can neither confiscate nor ban James Joyce's novel Ulysses.

1936 The United States declares non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War.

1942 The U.S. 1st Marine Division under General A. A. Vandegrift lands on the islands of Guadalcanal and Tulagi in the Solomon islands. This is the first American amphibious landing of the war.

1944 German forces launch a major counter attack against U.S. forces near Mortain, France.

1964 Congress overwhelmingly passes the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, allowing the president to use unlimited military force to prevent attacks on U.S. forces.

1966 The United States loses seven planes over North Vietnam, the most in the war up to this point.

1973 A U.S. plane accidentally bombs a Cambodian village, killing 400 civilians.

[Damelon]

Yesterday's

Aug. 6, 1945: 'I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Worlds'

1945: The United States becomes the first (and remains the only) country ever to use an atomic weapon in warfare, obliterating the Japanese city of Hiroshima and instantly killing 70,000 people. (Many thousands more would die later from the effects of radiation poisoning.) Three days later, the port city of Nagasaki is destroyed by a second atom bomb with the ultimate loss of 140,000 lives. Japan surrenders shortly thereafter, ending World War II.
Several countries, including Nazi Germany, had pursued the development of an atomic weapon but none matched the U.S. Manhattan Project in terms of the resources, energy or scientific manpower devoted to making the bomb a reality.
The atomic age dawned with the discovery of fission in a Berlin laboratory in 1938, news that alarmed many émigré scientists who had come to the United States to escape Nazism. Fearing that Germany might be first to actually develop this ultimate weapon, they appealed to President Roosevelt to make nuclear research a high priority. After some initial skepticism, FDR was persuaded and a joint civilian-military committee was formed, which led to the establishment of the Manhattan Project.
Development of the bomb followed two paths, one using uranium-235, which occurs naturally, and the other man-made plutonium. In the end, both were built and used: The uranium-based "Little Boy" was dropped on Hiroshima, while the plutonium-based "Fat Man" laid waste to Nagasaki.
How heavily populated cities came to be chosen as the targets remains a matter of controversy. The scientists involved in developing the bomb favored demonstrating their weapon to the Japanese in an isolated area but military and political planners rejected the idea, arguing that the shock of total destruction would have a more profound impact.
The United States maintains to this day that the decision to drop the bomb was made primarily to avoid the necessity of invading the Japanese home islands, an undertaking that would have resulted in enormous casualties on both sides. But that argument ignores the deterioration of Japanese resolve by that point in the war. Although the emperor's government rejected the Potsdam Declaration in late July, which called for an immediate and unconditional surrender, the Japanese had been sending out peace feelers through the Soviet Union, and early signs of starvation, even on the main island, were apparent.
Many historians believe that the real U.S. motive for dropping the bomb was to end the war quickly before the Russians could become involved, thereby denying them a postwar stake in the Pacific -- and, by practical example, to send a message to Stalin.
Whatever the reasons, the bombs were dropped and most of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project later expressed remorse for what they had wrought.

And today's

Aug. 7, 1991: Ladies and Gentlemen, the World Wide Web

1991: The world wide web becomes publicly available on the internet for the first time.
The web has changed a lot since Tim Berners-Lee posted, on this day, the first web pages summarizing his World Wide Web project, a method of storing knowledge using hypertext documents. In the months leading up to his post, Berners-Lee had developed everything necessary to make the web a reality, including the first browser and server.
His historic post appeared on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, ending a journey that began back in 1980, when Berners-Lee was at CERN, an international particle physics lab located near Geneva, Switzerland. There, working with collaborator Robert Cailliau, Berners-Lee began the Enquire project, the forerunner to what would become the web.
The project, which made hypertext a chief communications component for the first time, was intended to facilitate the sharing of information among researchers across the broader internet.
Today's web is far more powerful and sophisticated than the research tool developed by Berners-Lee and Cailliau but continues operating on basically the same principles they established a quarter of a century ago.

[Damelon]

Aug. 8, 1576: Brahe's Palatial Gateway to the Heavens

1576: The cornerstone is laid for Tycho Brahe's Uraniborg observatory on an island east of Copenhagen.
Brahe was one of the preeminent astronomers of the pre-telescopic period and his observatory on the then-Danish (now Swedish) island of Hven is one of the last "primitive," i.e., lacking a telescope, facilities ever built. Nevertheless, some first-rate work was accomplished there, including establishing the moon's annual variation and determining, to within a few seconds, the accurate length of a year.
He was less successful in determining the Earth's relationship to the other planets and the sun. He rejected both the Aristotelian and Copernican models in favor of his own Tychonian planetary model, which places the Earth at the center of the universe, with the sun orbiting the Earth while the other planets orbit the sun.
From Uraniborg, Brahe accurately measured the positions of 777 stars, getting a lot of legwork out of the way for future astronomers. The red-brick observatory, which featured a number of turreted towers and balconies meant to serve as instrument platforms, also contained a library, several laboratories, living quarters for Brahe and his family and facilities for visiting astronomers.
Brahe abandoned Uraniborg in 1597 and the building was destroyed shortly after the astronomer's death in 1601. The gardens that Brahe installed around his observatory are in the process of being restored by the Swedish government.

[dlbpharmd]

August 8

1306 King Wenceslas of Poland is murdered.

1570 Charles IX of France signs the Treaty of St. Germain, ending the third war of religion and giving religious freedom to the Huguenots.

1636 The invading armies of Spain, Austria and Bavaria are stopped at the village of St.-Jean-de-Losne, only 50 miles from France.

1648 Ibrahim, the sultan of Istanbul, is thrown into prison, then assassinated.

1786 Jacques Balmat and Dr. Michael-Gabriel Baccard become the first men to climb Mont Blanc in France.

1844 Brigham Young is chosen to head the Mormon Church, succeeding Joseph Smith.

1863 Confederate President Jefferson Davis refuses General Robert E. Lee's resignation.

1876 Thomas Edison patents the mimeograph.

1899 The first household refrigerating machine is patented.

1925 The first national congress of the Ku Klux Klan opens.

1937 The Japanese Army occupies Beijing.

1940 The German Luftwaffe attacks Great Britain for the first time, begining the Battle of Britain.

1942 U.S. Marines capture the Japanese airstrip on Guadalcanal.

1944 U.S. forces complete the capture of the Marianas Islands.

1945 The Soviet Union declares war on Japan.

1950 U.S. troops repel the first North Korean attempt to overrun them at the battle of Naktong Bulge, which continued for 10 days.

1963 The "Great Train Robbery"

1974 President Richard Nixon resigns from the presidency as a result of the Watergate scandal.

[Damelon]

Aug. 9, 1995: When the Future Looked Bright for Netscape

1995: Netscape Communications stages a successful initial public offering, making it one of the first companies to capitalize on the growing World Wide Web.
The company, whose premium product was the Navigator web browser (originally called Mosaic Netscape 0.9), saw its stock shoot up to $75 per share on the first day of trading, a near-record at the time for any stock's opener.
Netscape Communications, founded by Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark, took wing and at one time held 88 percent of the browser market. And, in fact, Netscape made it clear that it intended to make its browsers available across all computer platforms, a declaration that got Microsoft's attention since it represented a direct threat to Redmond.
After allegedly failing to reach an agreement with Netscape over a division of the browser market, Microsoft went over to the attack. Its own browser, Internet Explorer, came bundled with the Windows 95 operating system and subsequent upgrades of IE were offered for free.
As it had done with Windows when faced with competition from Apple's OS, Microsoft essentially built IE to include all the features available on Navigator in order to erase any qualitative edge Netscape may have held.
Its initial sheen gone, Navigator quickly lost ground to IE and eventually slipped into irrelevancy. Netscape itself shriveled up like a snail caught in the sunlight and, in 1998, was acquired by AOL, where it continues to exist as a subsidiary, hosting a Digg-like news portal and continuing to tinker with alternative browsers