1907: On Ormond Beach, Florida, Glenn Curtiss rode a motorized bicycle at more than 136 mph. Curtiss would go on to found the Curtiss Aeroplane Company, the first airplane manufacturing company in the United States.
1922: Christian K. Nelson of Onawa, Iowa, receives a patent for the Eskimo Pie, described as having an ice cream center covered in chocolate. Mmmmm.
1962: Jackie Robinson becomes the first African-American elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
1981: Lech Walesa leads millions of Polish workers in a strike for a 5-day work week.
1908: The Boy Scouts movement begins in England with the publication of Baden-Powells Scouting for Boys
1927: Young director Alfred Hitchcock's first film, The Pleasure Garden, is released in England.
1965: Sir Winston Churchill dies
1972: Japanese soldier found hiding on Guam. After 28 years of hiding in the jungles of Guam, local farmers discover Shoichi Yokoi, a Japanese sergeant who was unaware that World War II had ended.
Missed it by a few days, but in January 1984, Apple released the Macintosh. (in February 1984, Bill Gates ordered a complete rewrite of Windows to "put Mac on a PC").
Fast forward to 2006, Disney buys Steve Jobs' Pixar animation studios, and the head of Apple (with its iPod megahit) is now the largest shareholder in one of the most important media companies in the world.
1915: Transcontinental telephone service begins with a call made between New York City and San Francisco. Alexander Graham Bell in New York made the ceremonial first call to his longtime assistant Thomas Watson in San Francisco.
1924: With 14 events, including the ski jump and bobsled, the first Winter Olympics takes place at Chamonix in the French Alps.
1945: Grand Rapids, Michigan, becomes the first US city to fluoridate its drinking water, adding one part per million of fluoride to the water supply.
1848: Henry David Thoreau delivers his first draft of Civil Disobedience to his publisher. Written during the 2 years he spent living on Walden Pond, the work eventually inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
1886: Karl Benz patents the first car powered with an internal combustion engine. The car had one cylinder and had a top speed of 10 mph.
1905: In the Premier mine of Pretoria, South Africa, the largest diamond ever found is unearthed. The 3,106-carat diamond called the "Cullinan" was cut into 106 diamonds; the largest at 530 carats is called the Star of Africa.
1894: The University of Chicago and Chicago YMCA play the first college basketball game. University of Chicago wins 19-11.
1918: No jungle-shaking yells yet: The original Tarzan film, Tarzan of the Apes, is released as a silent movie.
1926: Primetime viewing begins when Scottish inventor John Logie Baird gives a public demonstration of a television. The first television program consisted of two ventriloquist dummies.
1774: James Cook sails to 71 degrees 10 degrees south at longitude 106 degrees 54 degrees west, the most southern latitude yet sailed. He was searching for Antarctica with the ships Resolution and Adventure.
1933: Hi ho, Silver! The Lone Ranger first rides onto airwaves when he is introduced on radio station WXYZ in Detroit, Michigan.
1958: The first two-way moving sidewalk transports passengers at Love Field Air Terminal in Dallas, Texas. The sidewalk, also known as a passenger conveyor, was 1,425 feet long.
1893: Thomas Edison completes the first movie studio in West Orange, New Jersey. Edison designed the building on a pivot so it could face the sunlight throughout the day.
1911: Providing plenty of storylines for future TV detective stories, the first criminal is found guilty based on fingerprint evidence. Thomas Jennings is convicted in the Criminal Court of Cook County, Illinois, of killing Clarence B. Hiller.
2003: While returning from an orbital mission, the space shuttle Columbia breaks up in the skies over north-central Texas.
1876: The oldest existing major-league professional baseball organization, the National League began play as the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs.
1880: The lights go on as the first electric street light is installed in Wabash, Indiana. The Brush Electric Light Company installed the light on the top of the town's courthouse.
1912: Becoming the first movie stuntman, Frederick Rodman Law is filmed jumping off the Statue of Liberty with a parachute.
Since today is my b-day, I thought I'd contribute a post for this thread, most especially since I happened to be born on "the day the music died," only a few hours and only a couple hundred miles away from the crash site.
1948 Tailfins Are Born The first Cadillac with tailfins was produced on this day, signaling the dawn of the tailfin era. Tailfins served no functional purpose, unless you consider attracting attention functional. General Motors increased the size of the Cadillac's "tailfeathers" every year throughout the 1950s. In 1959, the model's sales slumped dramatically, sounding the death knell for the tailfin. The 1960s, consumers announced, would be a practical decade.
1959 Plane crash kills popular musicians Rock stars Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson are killed when their chartered Beechcraft Bonanza plane crashes in Iowa a few minutes after takeoff on a flight from Mason City to Moorehead, Minnesota.
1966 Lunik 9 soft-lands on lunar surface On February 3, 1966, the Soviet Union accomplishes the first controlled landing on the moon, when the unmanned spacecraft Lunik 9 touches down on the Ocean of Storms. After its soft landing, the circular capsule opened like a flower, deploying its antennas, and began transmitting photographs and television images back to Earth. The 220-pound landing capsule was launched from Earth on January 31.
1690: Massachusetts establishes official paper currency, which will eventually help stabilize the American economy. Previously, the colonies had used a variety of unregulated coins.
1862: Not even 15 years old, Thomas Edison became the first person to print and sell a newspaper on a moving train. He printed the Grand Trunk Herald on a press in a baggage car on a train from Port Huron to Detroit, Michigan, and sold the copies himself.
1917: The United States severs diplomatic relations with Germany. When President Woodrow Wilson made the announcement, he cited Germany's policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. The same day, a German U-boat sank the American liner Housatonic without warning.
1778: France signs a treaty of alliance with the American states, which recognizes an independent United States of America and promises assistance in the American Revolution.
1911: Ronald Reagan is born and would later become the 40th president of the United States.
1971: With a 6-iron golf club head attached to a sample collecting tool, astronaut Alan Shepard hits two golf balls on the moon. The club is now on display at the US Golf Association headquarters in Far Hills, New Jersey.
1935: Charles Darrow first markets the board game Monopoly. Illustrations show the playing board, pieces, and the now-familiar symbol of Rich Uncle Pennybags.
1964: The Beatles land at Kennedy Airport, beginning their first US tour and singing the first notes of the "British Invasion" to follow. They also played "I Want to Hold Your Hand" on Ed Sullivan's show later that day.
1984: Orbiting 170 miles above the Earth, astronaut Bruce McCandless becomes the first human to fly untethered in space. After about 90 minutes of untethered flight, he returned to the shuttle Challenger.
