At 11:40 p.m. on April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg on her maiden voyage from Southampton, England to New York City. From the time of impact with the iceberg to the final sinking at 2:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912, just over two hours and 40 minutes had elapsed. Over 1500 lives were lost with her.
Posted in Anniversary, Because I Can, On This Day, Planes Trains and Automobiles
Apollo 13 was the seventh manned mission in the American Apollo space program and the third intended to land on the Moon. The craft was launched on April 11, 1970, at 13:13 CST from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida, but the lunar landing was aborted after an oxygen tank exploded two days later, crippling the Service Module (SM) upon which the Command Module (CM) depended. Despite great hardship caused by limited power, loss of cabin heat, shortage of potable water, and the critical need to jury-rig the carbon dioxide removal system, the crew returned safely to Earth on April 17.
The flight was commanded by James A. Lovell with John L. “Jack” Swigert as Command Module Pilot and Fred W. Haise as Lunar Module Pilot. Swigert was a late replacement for the original CM pilot Ken Mattingly, who was grounded by the flight surgeon after exposure to German measles.
Posted in Anniversary, On This Day, Patriotic
Dr. Robert H. Goddard, an American physicist, invented the first liquid-fueled rocket and launched it, earning him the title “father of modern rocketry,” though early gunpowder rockets were developed by the Chinese centuries earlier. Goddard pioneered key concepts like multi-stage rockets and spaceflight theory, laying the groundwork for future space exploration.
Key Contributions:
First Liquid-Fueled Rocket: On March 16, 1926, Goddard launched the first successful liquid-fueled rocket in Auburn, Massachusetts, a major step towards space travel.
Theoretical Foundations: He developed the mathematical theory for rocket propulsion and proved rockets could work in a vacuum, making spaceflight possible.
Pioneering Concepts: Goddard patented multi-stage rockets and conceived ideas for satellites and interplanetary exploration, influencing later missile and space programs.
Historical Context:
Goddard’s work, initially ridiculed by the press, became the foundation for America’s space age.
Posted in Because I Can, Gadgets, On This Day
Posted in Anniversary, Because I Can, Events, On This Day, Patriotic
On February 1, 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry on its 28th mission; all seven crew members aboard perished.
On January 28, 1986 at 11:39 EST, the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated 73 seconds into its flight after an O-ring seal in its right solid rocket booster (SRB) failed at liftoff. All seven astronauts on board were lost.
59 years ago today, January 27, 1967, tragedy struck the U.S. space program when Apollo 1 caught fire during a pre-launch test on the launch pad at Cape Kennedy, killing astronauts Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Edward H. White II, and Roger B. Chaffee.
The fire broke out inside the command module during a “plugs-out” test, where a high-pressure pure oxygen environment allowed the flames to spread in seconds. The loss of Grissom, White, and Chaffee stunned the nation and led to sweeping changes in spacecraft design, safety procedures, and testing protocols—changes that ultimately made future Apollo missions, including the Moon landings, possible.
Their sacrifice forever shaped human spaceflight.
Posted in Anniversary, Because I Can, On This Day, Patriotic
On this day in 1957, machines at the Wham-O toy company roll out the first batch of their aerodynamic plastic discs–now known to millions of fans all over the world as Frisbees.
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On December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 from London to New York explodes in midair over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 243 passengers and 16 crew members aboard, as well as 11 Lockerbie residents on the ground. A bomb hidden inside an audio cassette player detonated in the cargo area when the plane was at an altitude of 31,000 feet. The disaster, which became the subject of Britain’s largest criminal investigation, was believed to be an attack against the United States. One hundred eighty nine of the victims were American.
Posted in Anniversary, Because I Can, On This Day, Planes Trains and Automobiles
The assassination of John F. Kennedy, the thirty-fifth President of the United States, took place on Friday, November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas, USA at 12:30 p.m. CST (18:30 UTC). John F. Kennedy was fatally wounded by gunshots while riding with his wife Jacqueline in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, an employee of the Texas School Book Depository in Dealey Plaza, according to the conclusions of multiple government investigations, including the ten-month investigation of the Warren Commission of 1963-4 and the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) of 1976-9. This conclusion initially met with widespread support among the American public, but polls, since the original 1966 Gallup poll, show a majority of the public hold beliefs contrary to these findings. The assassination is still the subject of widespread speculation and has spawned numerous conspiracy theories (even the HSCA, based on disputed acoustical evidence, concluded that Oswald may have had unspecified co-conspirators), though these theories have not generally been accepted by mainstream historians and no single compelling alternative theory has emerged.
Posted in Anniversary, Because I Can, On This Day, Patriotic
The SS Edmund Fitzgerald, May 1975.
SS Edmund Fitzgerald was a cargo ship that sank suddenly during a gale storm on November 10, 1975, while on Lake Superior. The ship went down without a distress signal in 530 feet (162 m) of water at 46°59.9′N 85°6.6′W, in Canadian waters about 17 miles (15 nm; 27 km) from the entrance to Whitefish Bay. All 29 members of the crew perished. Gordon Lightfoot‘s hit song, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, helped make the incident the most famous marine disaster in the history of Great Lakes shipping.
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On November 10, 1969, “Sesame Street,” a pioneering TV show that would teach generations of young children the alphabet and how to count, makes its broadcast debut. “Sesame Street,” with its memorable theme song (“Can you tell me how to get/How to get to Sesame Street”), went on to become the most widely viewed children’s program in the world. It has aired in more than 120 countries.
This day In Radio History, Oct 30, 1938 – Panic Over War of the Worlds
A radio broadcast of H. G. Wells “The War of the Worlds”, narrated by Orson Welles, allegedly causes a mass panic.
“The War of the Worlds” was a Halloween episode of the radio series The Mercury Theatre on the Air directed and narrated by Orson Welles as an adaptation of H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds (1898) that was performed and broadcast live at 8 pm ET on October 30, 1938 over the CBS Radio Network. The episode is famous for inciting a panic by convincing some members of the listening audience that a Martian invasion was taking place, though the scale of panic is disputed, as the program had relatively few listeners.
Posted in Anniversary, Because I Can, Literary, On This Day
In 1886, the ticker-tape parade is invented in New York City when office workers spontaneously throw ticket tape into the streets as the Statue of Liberty is dedicated.
In 1929, the New York Stock Exchange crashes in what will be called the Crash of ’29 or Black Tuesday, ending the Great Bull Market of the 1920s and beginning the Great Depression.
In 1960, in Louisville, Kentucky, Cassius Clay (who later takes the name Muhammad Ali) wins his first professional fight.
In 1969, the first-ever computer-to-computer link is established on ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet.
In 1998, Space Shuttle Discovery blasts-off with 77-year old John Glenn on board, making him the oldest person to go into space. He became the first American to orbit Earth on February 20, 1962.
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U.S. Air Force Captain Chuck Yeager becomes the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound.
Yeager, born in Myra, West Virginia, in 1923, was a combat fighter during World War II and flew 64 missions over Europe. He shot down 13 German planes and was himself shot down over France, but he escaped capture with the assistance of the French Underground. After the war, he was among several volunteers chosen to test-fly the experimental X-1 rocket plane, built by the Bell Aircraft Company to explore the possibility of supersonic flight.
For years, many aviators believed that man was not meant to fly faster than the speed of sound, theorizing that transonic drag rise would tear any aircraft apart. All that changed on October 14, 1947, when Yeager flew the X-1 over Rogers Dry Lake in Southern California. The X-1 was lifted to an altitude of 25,000 feet by a B-29 aircraft and then released through the bomb bay, rocketing to 40,000 feet and exceeding 662 miles per hour (the sound barrier at that altitude). The rocket plane, nicknamed “Glamorous Glennis,” was designed with thin, unswept wings and a streamlined fuselage modeled after a .50-caliber bullet.
Because of the secrecy of the project, Bell and Yeager’s achievement was not announced until June 1948. Yeager continued to serve as a test pilot, and in 1953 he flew 1,650 miles per hour in an X-1A rocket plane. He retired from the U.S. Air Force in 1975 with the rank of brigadier general.
Posted in Anniversary, On This Day, Planes Trains and Automobiles
White Christmas is a 1954 movie starring Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye that featured the songs of Irving Berlin, including the titular White Christmas.
On this day in 1866, the Reno gang carries out the first robbery of a moving train in the U.S., making off with over $10,000 from an Ohio & Mississippi train in Jackson County, Indiana. Prior to this innovation in crime, holdups had taken place only on trains sitting at stations or freight yards.
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On October 5, 1962, the 1st James Bond film, Dr. No, premiered in London (it would arrive in the US the 8th of May of 1963).
Posted in Anniversary, Because I Can, On This Day, The Big Screen
