On December 7, 1787, Delaware became the first state to ratify the US Constitution. It didn’t take effect for two more years, on March 4, 1789 — a date that, oddly enough, isn’t celebrated (or even much remembered ) in the US. It can, of course, be amended, and has been 27 times. The US amendment process adds each amendment to the end of the document. Most Americans aren’t aware that this is a fairly unusual practice internationally; constitutions in many (possibly most) other countries are amended by changing the existing text, not simply adding to it.
The constitution of Monaco, for example, changed on December 7, 1962 — but the process was unlike anything in the US. Monaco is a principality, so the monarch at the time, Prince Rainier III, simply changed it himself (well, being a prince and all, he probably had some aides do the actual work). The 1962 changes shifted some powers from the prince to legislative councils, making Monaco somewhat less of a monarchy. It’s still, of course, one of the wealthiest and most exclusive places in the world, either in spite of (or because?) it’s the second-smallest sovereign state in the world (Vatican City is smaller). It’s not even a whole square mile in size.
You can’t even see Monaco in the Blue Marble, the famous photo of the earth taken from Apollo 17, the last mission to the Moon. It was launched on December 7, 1972; an event watched on TV by millions. Minute details of the launch were shown over and over in instant replay — which, by coincidence, was also launched on December 7, but in 1963, during the annual Army-Navy football game. Navy won that year, by the way, 34-14. It probably wasn’t related, but two of the three Apollo 17 astronauts had been Navy aviators. Also by the way, everybody knows Neil Armstrong was the first person to walk on the moon, but as of now, Harrison Schmitt, on Apollo 17, is the most recent.
Being the first of something can’t be changed, but being the most recent only lasts until a more recent example happens. But even the first isn’t always remembered. For instance, there was quite a significant first on December 7, 1904 that had extensive consequences. But hardly anybody remembers that the HMS Spiteful, a destroyer built for the British Navy, was the first warship to be powered by fuel oil instead of coal (or, well, it wasn’t powered by wind either). Coal was a proven source of power for steamships, and there was a fair amount of skepticism about the use of oil. So in 1904, on December 7, the HMS Spiteful and the HMS Peterel, a destroyer with the same design but powered by coal, faced off against each other to settle once and for all whether oil power was better, worse, or even made a difference at all.
HMS Spiteful won the competition handily. It didn’t sail appreciably faster, but it needed less time to get under way (10 minutes versus 90), needed three fewer crewmen in the boiler room, and one more somewhat unexpected advantage. At the end of the trials the HMS Peterel had over a ton of ash and other coal waste to get rid of, but the Spiteful had none, because burning oil doesn’t leave any ashes. The win was so decisive that the Royal Navy — followed by navies around the world — never built another coal-fired warship.
Once the first one of a sort of thing pops up, like using oil to power a ship, an unending series of the same thing appears. That happened again on December 7, 1930 in Boston when video being broadcast along with the audio from a radio show included the first television commercial. The radio show was a concert, and the commercial was for the show’s sponsor, a fur company. In the winter in Boston in the 1930s, if you were going to a live concert, I suppose you’d need a fur coat to wear.
You wouldn’t have wanted a fur coat on December 7, 1703, in southern England. In fact, if you were wearing one, you’d probably lose it. It was the day of The Great Storm, the most violent windstorm ever recorded in England. Wind gusts reached 120mph (judging from the damage), and actually toppled thousands of chimneys in London. In the countryside, hundreds of windmills were wrecked, and reportedly the wind made some of them spin so fast the wooden gears caught fire. Daniel Defoe wrote an entire book about the storm (as you might guess, the title is The Storm), and opined that the disaster was divine punishment for the British army’s poor performance fighting the Catholic armies of Spain and France. It seems like the British army was always fighting somebody in those days; the war that time was called the War of the Spanish Succession.
Speaking of succession, Spain has a constitution now, but doesn’t use the amendment system. When changes are needed, the old constitution is succeeded by a whole new one. The current Spanish Constitution was adopted in 1978. France has a constitution as well, and it does have an amendment process. They’ve used the process 24 times since 1958, when the current French Constitution (of the Fifth Republic) was adopted. The US, by the way, has the world’s oldest constitution, and also contains the longest. The containment refers to the longest constitution in the world: the Alabama state constitution. It wasn’t ratified until 1901, but it already contains nearly 800 amendments. At over 300,000 words it’s about forty times as long as the US constitution. Now that’s a constitution.
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