It’s incredible to think this is now the way many people user their “phone”.
“Watson, text me, I need you!”
Have a drink to celebrate!
I usually try to do a bit of a repeal-day celebration, and make some kind of clever cocktail. I missed it this year (and really, several of the last couple years, since we’ve had children), but I still enjoy it as a tradition. It’s a constitutional right!
We hereby impose a 1-clever-cocktail-per-day penalty on you for missing the deadline.
http://ethw.org/Milestones:Reception_of_Transatlantic_Radio_Signals,_1901
On 12 December 1901, Guglielmo Marconi and his assistant, George Kemp, heard the faint clicks of Morse code for the letter “s” transmitted without wires across the Atlantic Ocean. This achievement, the first reception of transatlantic radio signals, led to considerable advances in both science and technology. It demonstrated that radio transmission was not bounded by the horizon, thus prompting Arthur Kennelly and Oliver Heaviside to suggest, shortly thereafter, the existence of a layer of ionized air in the upper atmosphere (the Kennelly-Heaviside layer, now called the ionosphere).
Planck presented this latest formulation at a meeting of the German Physical Society on October 19, 1900, which was hailed as indisputably correct. But to Planck, it was simply a “lucky guess,” and he set about deriving the formulation from first principles. By December 14, 1900, he had succeeded in doing so, but only by introducing what was to prove a revolutionary concept in physics: the oscillators comprising the black body and re-emitting the radiant energy incident upon them could not absorb this energy continuously, but only in discrete amounts, or quanta of energy.
On this date in 1972, the last manned lunar mission ended when Apollo 17 splashed down in the Pacific. To date, Eugene Cernan, who died in January of this year, and Harrison Schmitt, who is now 82, remain the last humans to have walked on the Moon.
A day early, but this way you’ll be prepared and can celebrate all day - 50th of
The really scary/amazing part about it being 50 years since 1967? (to those of us who can remember 1967, anyway) - in 1967 it was only 50 years since the state of the art in film was:
On Dec. 23, 1888, Vincent Van Gogh gave himself a bit too close of a shave.
December 24, 1968:
It’s Christmas Eve! There was that nice Bible reading that Jason posted, and the first national Christmas tree lighting back in 1923. Unfortunately, the KKK was also founded on this day back in 1865.
December 28, 1895 is a date that should be near and dear to Tom Chick’s heart. On that date in Paris, Louis and Auguste Lumiere screened the first commercial movie in history. The untitled film – a series of scenes of everyday French life – was shot and shown by means of the brothers’ invention called the Cinematographe, a combination camera and projector. Unlike Edison’s Kinetoscope, which required viewing the moving images through a peephole, the Cinematographe could project the images onto a screen. Although the Cinematographe was a commercial success, the brothers soon left the movie business, thinking it had no future.
First, Rasputin’s would-be killers gave the monk food and wine laced with cyanide. When he failed to react to the poison, they shot him at close range, leaving him for dead. A short time later, however, Rasputin revived and attempted to escape from the palace grounds, whereupon his assailants shot him again and beat him viciously. Finally, they bound Rasputin, still miraculously alive, and tossed him into a freezing river.
Dude was badass.
The HBO movie was pretty good, if you have the time and can find it.
Alan Rickman. Sold!
On Jan. 8, 1962, Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, the Mona Lisa, began a three-week exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where it was seen by an estimated 500,000 people. This was followed by an exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. For it’s trip to the U.S., the painting was sealed in a special air and watertight case and then placed aboard the ocean liner SS France. The masterpiece’s arrival in New York Harbor apparently generated all the hoopla of a visiting head of state.