Today is the anniversary of Flight 19, the five US Air Force bombers that disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle. They were on a training mission and reported that their compasses had stopped working and they’d gotten lost. Although they knew they were due east of Florida, where they’d taken off, for some reason they didn’t simply fly west. None of them ever found, and a search plane sent out to look for them also disappeared without a trace. The search plane might have simply exploded; it was a flying boat model that was prone to accumulating flammable fuel vapor inside. But the bombers didn’t have any such issues, and there were five of them. At various times since, divers and submersibles have claimed to have identified the wreckage of one of the planes on the ocean floor, but it’s always turned out to be some other aircraft. There have been quite a few planes lost in that area — which is probably why it’s still called the Bermuda Triangle.
“Bermuda Triangle” isn’t an official designation; it’s just a vaguely defined, roughly triangular area with Bermuda in the northeast corner, Miami at the western end, and Puerto Rico at the southeast point. Depending on who’s describing it, of course, the points of the triangle might be in different places. It supposedly affects ships as well as airplanes, but Christopher Columbus sailed right through it during his 1492 voyage, when he became the first European to set foot on Haiti, on December 5. He managed to make it back, too. Maybe it was because in 1492 his navigational instruments were so primitive that he didn’t expect to know where he was anyway.
December 5 was a day of good news in 1848 when President James Polk announced to Congress that all those rumors were true, they’d discovered gold in California! It was the start of the California Gold Rush that brought over 300,000 people to the territory and made it eligible to become a US State, which it did just two years later. So much gold was dug up that it affected the economy of the entire world. Gold was literally money back then, and suddenly there was a lot more of it. Silver was considered money too, but since there was suddenly so much gold available, silver became rarer (relatively) and much more valuable, so silver coins were worth more than their face value. As a result of that, silver coins disappeared from circulation in the US. The gold rush also gave California its nickname: The Golden State, its motto Eureka, and the state seal, which depicts the gold rush (among other things).
The first gold miners mostly found gold by just panning for it in streams, but as all the easy-to-find gold was scooped up, much more destructive methods were used. All in all, the gold rush was something of an ecological disaster for the area. There was another ecological disaster starting December 5, 1952 in London: the Great Smog. London had been known for its polluted air since the 1200s, but the Great Smog was the worst ever. The air became so toxic that as many as 12,000 people died. It was primarily due to coal, which people used to heat their houses, and was also burned at five coal-burning electric plants near the city. The weather also contributed; it had been unusually cold for the preceding week or two, so more coal was being burned. Then a temperature inversion settled over the city, trapping all the air in one place. The smog was so dense that visibility, even during the day, was reduced to a few feet. At the time, Londoners weren’t particularly upset; this seemed like just another spell of “pea soup” fog that London was famous for. The aftereffects were more noticeable; it led to both research and regulation including the Clean Air Act of 1956.
The Great Smog has made the jump to video; it’s been featured in the shows The Crown and Doctor Who. That gives it something in common with the California Gold Rush besides just December 5. The gold rush was also depicted in the 1932 movie Gold Rush Mickey, starring Mickey Mouse as a piano player during the gold rush. It opened on November 12, not December 5, but the fifth was an important day around the Disney Studios — it’s Walt Disney’s birthday.
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