Friday, August 12

This Day In History

• 1851   Isaac Singer was granted a patent on his sewing machine.
  
• 1865   Joseph Lister became the first doctor to use disinfectant during surgery. Hmm. Joseph Lister. That name rings a bell. Yep. Same Joseph Lister as the one whose name is on those bottles of Listerine mouthwash.
  
• 1877   Thomas A. Edison finished figuring out his first phonograph. Edison handed the model of his invention to John Kreusi with instructions on how to build it. Kreusi, a confident man, bet the inventor $2 and said that there was no way that the machine would ever work. He lost the bet.
  
• 1898   Hawaii was formally annexed to the United States.
  
• 1918   Regular air-mail service began between New York City and Washington, DC.
  
• 1944   Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., eldest son of Joseph and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, was killed with his co-pilot when their explosives-laden Navy plane blew up over England during World War II.
  
• 1953   The Soviet Union conducted a secret test of its first hydrogen bomb.
  
• 1960   The first balloon satellite, Echo 1, was launched by the United States from Cape Canaveral, Fla.
  
• 1966   John Lennon apologized at a news conference in Chicago for remarking ''the Beatles are more popular than Jesus.''
  
• 1972   The last American combat ground troops left Vietnam.
  
• 1977   The space shuttle Enterprise passed its first solo flight test by taking off atop a Boeing 747, separating and then touching down in California's Mojave Desert.
  
• 1985   The world's worst single-aircraft disaster occurred as a crippled Japan Air Lines Boeing 747 on a domestic flight crashed into a mountain, killing 520 people.
  
• 1992   The United States, Mexico and Canada agreed to form a free-trade zone that would remove most barriers to trade and investment and create the world’s largest trading bloc: The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
  
• 1994   Woodstock '94 opened in Saugerties, N.Y.
  
• 1998   Swiss banks agreed to pay $1.25 billion as restitution to Holocaust survivors to settle claims for their assets.
  
• 2000   The Russian nuclear submarine Kursk and its 118-man crew were lost during naval exercises in the Barents Sea.
  

Happy Birthday To

• 1753   Thomas Bewick (illustrator [of books]: Fables of Aesop, History of Quadrapeds, British Birds; died Nov 8, 1828)
  
• 1849   Abbott Thayer (artist: created camouflage pattern for military; died in 1921)
  
• 1911   Jane Wyatt (Emmy Award-winning actress: Father Knows Best)
  
• 1927   Porter Wagoner (singer)
  
• 1939   George Hamilton (actor)