Today is the anniversary of the opening of the Mount Washington Cog Railway. It was the first “rack railroad” in the world that used gears to make it possible to climb such a steep grade. The whole thing was a tourist attraction right from the start; there’s really no reason to visit the top of Mount Washington except to look around.
At the time Sylvester Marsh came up with the idea, in 1952, everybody thought it was nuts and would never work. The state legislature gave him a charter to go ahead and build it anyway though, on the basis that even if it wasn’t going to work, but at least it would provide some jobs for a while and it wasn’t going to do any major harm.
All of the engines were steam-powered until 2008, when they started introducing biodiesel engines, cutting the fuel costs by 60%. Like all diesel locomotives, they’re actually propelled by electric motors, which operate on the principle of electromagnetic induction. Michael Faraday discovered induction on August 29, 1831. And of course diesel engines themselves operate by internal combustion — the same principle used in the Reitwagen, the world’s first internal combustion motorcycle. It was patented by Gottlieb Daimler on August 29, 1885.
The motorcycles and cars starting to appear in the late 1800s didn’t have rails with cogs, so they needed something else to provide traction. On August 29, 1898, the Goodyear Tire Company was founded to solve that exact problem by providing rubber tires.
The proliferation of cars meant that more roads were needed, and roads need bridges. Unfortunately, not all bridges are well designed or built, and it was August 29, 1907 that the Quebec Bridge across the Saint Lawrence River collapsed during construction. And that was just the first time. The Saint Lawrence River needed an exceptionally long span, and the Quebec Bridge — which wasn’t finished until 1919 — is still the longest steel cantilever bridge in the world. But nobody can say it was easy to build. In 1917 it failed again during construction, when they were trying to raise the last, center section into place. That particular chunk of the bridge is still sitting at the bottom of the river.
The F4 submarine isn’t at the bottom of the Pacific — not any more. It was the first US Navy submarine sunk in an accident, in 1914. It had been only a mile away from its harbor in Hawaii, though, so it wasn’t too deep. On August 29, 1915 it was raised in order to investigate what had happened. But when the investigation ended, the F-4 was moved to Magazine Loch in Pearl Harbor, where it settled into the mud. It’s still there, somewhere under Submarine Base Mooring S14.
Speaking of stuff in oceans, on August 29, 1965, the Gemini 5 space capsule splashed down in the Atlantic. One of the objectives of the Gemini program was to find out how the conditions of space, including radioactivity, affected humans. The astronauts (Cooper and Conrad) were fine — but that’s possibly because they didn’t encounter any Meitnerium, a substance that’s incredibly radioactive. There were a couple of reasons why they didn’t find any — for one thing, it wasn’t synthesized until 1982. And for another, the stuff is so radioactive that when it does come into existence — no matter how much of it there is — within about 9 seconds it disappears because it turns into pure radiation. It would disappear right before your eyes, except that would be the last thing you ever saw. The stuff is spectacularly dangerous.
August 29 has a lot to do with physically going up mountains, under oceans, across rivers, or into space. But on August 29, 1997, those things might all have become a bit less attractive — that’s the day Netflix was founded. In 1997, computers and networks weren’t up to streaming video, but the US Postal Service saved the day; when it was launched, Netflix was service that let you rent DVDs through the mail.
It took ten years for technology to begin to catch up, but in 2007 Netflix started offering streaming media. It was pretty glitchy at first, but nowadays you can just click on a title and watch an Ingrid Bergman role, a Richard Attenborough film, or even a Michael Jackson video any time you want. And you might want to do that this very evening, because just like Temple Grandin and Neil Gorsuch, all those people’s birthdays are today.
