An odd thing happened on October 11, 1976. A promotion was awarded to an officer in the US Army. On the face of it, that seems like something that happens all the time, but this time the promotion was posthumous. Which is not something that happens all the time, but it’s certainly not unprecedented or odd. So what was odd about this particular promotion? It wasn’t simply posthumous — the officer had been dead for 177 years, the promotion was to a rank that had just been invented, and the promotion itself wasn’t delivered by the Army; it was a law passed by Congress.
The officer was George Washington, and according to Public Law 94-479, his rank (up until 1976) had been Lieutenant General. It may have been some sort of technicality, really, because when the Continental Army was created on June 14, 1775, Washington wasn’t named its Lieutenant General; he was appointed “General and Commander in Chief.”
As Commander in Chief (or possibly Lieutenant General) of the Continental Army, but not an admiral, Washington wasn’t directly involved in the events of October 11, 1776, when there was a naval battle on Lake Champlain. It was either the Battle of Valcour Island or the Battle of Valcour Bay, and it was probably the first battle fought by the United States Navy. On another technicality, the US Navy had (sort of) come into existence on October 13, 1775 when Congress bought two ships.
It was October 11, 1890 when, faced with all these technicalities to sort out, the Daughters of the American Revolution was formed. It’s technically an educational organization, but to be a member you have to (again, technically) be descended from somebody who had something to do with the US Revolutionary War.
October 11 continued its reign in the history of technicalities in 1950, when the “field-sequential color television system” (promoted by the CBS network) was the first to be approved for broadcasting. Outside of CBS, practically nobody thought the system was a good idea. It was a partially mechanical process that employed a spinning disk with red, green and blue filters. There was one disk in the camera, capturing a scene in those colors in sequence, and then another disk in the receiver. So, yes, if you were one of the lucky few to own a monochrome TV in 1950, CBS expected you to buy a new set if you wanted to see the shows being broadcast in color — even if you only wanted to see them in monochrome.
Nobody would build the sets, so CBS actually bought their own factory and by 1951 was offering them for sale. At least they were technically offered for sale. They only ever built 200 of them, and they may have shipped only half of those to customers when the whole operation was shut down on October 21, 1951. It was technically shut down because of all the resources that would be needed for the Korean War, which had just started. But meanwhile, RCA — which was the leading TV manufacturer of the day — had introduced their “NTSC” color system that was fully electronic AND compatible with the monochrome sets already in use. So you can make up your own mind about why CBS really shut down their project.
On October 11, 1958, NASA launched its first space probe, Pioneer 1 — but just like CBS, had to shut down the program sooner than they expected. That was because Pioneer 1 was technically a failure; the satellite never reached a stable orbit. In the 1950s the US was far from the leader in, well, nearly any area of technology. But by October 11 ten years later, that deficit had (technically) been surpassed when the first manned launch of the Apollo program, Apollo 7, succeeded.
The US space program was still technically behind the Soviets in some other areas though, including diversity. It took until 1984 for the first US woman astronaut — Kathryn Sullivan — to do a space walk. Svetlana Savitskaya had already managed it for the USSR — and for that matter, had been the second woman in space, too, after Valentina Tereshkova, who flew a solo mission all the way back in 1963. She’s still the only woman to fly a solo mission in space, and also still the youngest woman in space.
It also seem slightly odd when you realize that Valentina Tereshkova achieved the rank of Major General of the USSR Air Force — so technically, until October 11, 1976, she outranked George Washington.
