The Wright Brothers made their first flight on August 8 in 1903. Only five people were there to see it. Their first plane, the Flyer I, only flew that one day, and then a gust of wind flipped it over and wrecked it. All they had was a photograph and the reports of the handful… Continue reading

Around 1936, the US government contracted with E.M.K. Geiling, a doctor and researcher who headed the (new) pharmacology department at the University of Chicago, to look into a series of deaths that seemed to be associated with a sulfonamide drug.  Geiling had a graduate student, Frances Kathleen Oldham, who was there by accident. She’d applied… Continue reading

August 6, 1926 is the day the silent film era ended; that’s when the Warner Bros. movie Don Juan opened, using the new Vitaphone sound system. People had been used to getting their sound from radios and their visuals from movies, but those things were starting to merge. Television was first demonstrated around the same… Continue reading

The USS Maddox was a destroyer operating in the Gulf of Tonkin — next to Vietnam — in August 1964. Its mission was to “collect signal intelligence.” When somebody else’s ship does the same thing, the US calls it “spying.” Aboard the Maddox they saw North Vietnamese gunboats on their radar, and on August 4,… Continue reading

August 4 is the birthday of John Fitch. He was a fighter pilot in WWII, based in north Africa. He and his squadron slept in tents, but being fighter pilots themselves, they felt pretty vulnerable to enemy fighter planes that could strafe the camp with machine gun fire. They didn’t have many resources to protect… Continue reading

Back in 1941, Louis Koch, a retired businessman was from Evansville, Indiana, visited Santa Claus, another Indiana town. It’s not clear whether it had taken him until his retirement to first visit a town with an interesting name just 40 miles away, but maybe he’d been busy. He evidently brought some kids with him, or… Continue reading

Subway trains are older than you might think. It was August 2, 1870 that the first one opened. It was in London, and would take you on a 1300 foot journey under the Thames, near the Tower of London. In 1870 there weren’t any electric trains yet (although they were very, very close to appearing).… Continue reading

Today, August 1, would be a good day to have shredded wheat for breakfast. Why? Because August 1, 1893, is the day Henry Perky opened up an exhibit at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago to show off his “little whole wheat mattresses.” His original idea was that he’d sell the machines he’d come up… Continue reading

It’s July 31; do you have a pot full of plant ash soaking in water? You know, to make that really great fertilizer for your garden? The stuff called pot-ash? Okay, you almost certainly don’t, but even so, today’s the day in 1790, that the first US patent was issued, and it was for a… Continue reading

After WWII, there was something of a recognition in western culture that the world had gotten a great deal more organized — administratively organized — than it had been before. Time Magazine called it “the widespread 20th century malady — galloping orgsmanship.”  The same tendency was described in a book as “the tendency of all… Continue reading