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 process to make potash more efficiently.
The first US patents didn’t come from a patent office because there wasn’t one — at least not yet. Instead, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, and the Attorney General looked at the applications and decided whether to grant the patents. As you might expect, they didn’t do that very often — in fact, they only issued two more patents in 1790; one for a new way to make candles and the third for a machine to mill flour.
It was flowers, not flour, that played a role in Daniel Defoe’s day on July 31, 1703. This was years before he wrote Robinson Crusoe, and his writings at the time were mostly political pamphlets. He also wrote about topics from religion to marriage to ghost stories, but it was the political tracts that got people stirred up and sold the best — and those were also the ones that kept getting him in trouble. His latest problem was a pamphlet that was supposed to be a satire, but offended the authorities, who put him in a pillory for the day.
The political bosses expected the same thing to happen to Defoe that usually happened; crowds would gather, jeer, and throw rotten vegetables at the poor sap in the stocks. But Defoe was by then pretty well known, and all the commoners enjoyed his pamphlets. So they pelted him, all right — with flowers.
By July 31, 1948, they’d cut down the wildflowers along with the grass at Idlewild Field in New York. That was the day the New York International Airport was dedicated — the one we’re familiar with as JFK. Air travelers everywhere raised a toast — just like sailors in the Royal Navy did on July 31, 1970. In their case, though, it wasn’t a celebratory toast — they were saying farewell to the long British naval tradition of a daily ration of rum.
To be honest, ending the rum ration was probably a good idea. By 1970 the navy included jet pilots, and rum probably doesn’t help when you’re landing a jet. You could see more incidents like the one on July 31, 1973, at Logan Airport in Boston. It was foggy, and a Delta Air jet crashed while trying to land. Nobody claimed the pilot had been drinking, though.
A crash like that would get the full attention of the Massachusetts governor, and between 2007 and 2015 that would have been Deval Patrick. But in 1973 he was busy celebrating his 17th birthday on July 31. By the time he got to the Governor’s office, he certainly knew that he shared his birthday with William Weld, who was also a Massachusetts governor (1991-1997).
Weld’s first year in office was 1991, the same year that the Hungarian tennis player Réka Jani was born — on July 31. And thanks to some strange connection between professional tennis and Massachusetts governors, Evonne Goolagong, who was one of the top rated tennis players in the 1970s, celebrates her birthday today too.
Goolagong was born in 1951, the year that the last narrow-gauge passenger railway in the US closed. Goolagong is from Australia, of course, and on July 31, 1865, the world’s first narrow-gauge passenger railway opened in Queensland. Unlike the US version, the Australian trains are still running. And so is Evonne Goolagong; she’s running the Goolagong National Development Camp that teaches tennis in Australia. There’s also an Evonne Goolagong Park in New South Wales, where the landscaping team probably uses potash to fertilize the greenery. It’s not expensive — that patent expired more than two centuries ago on July 31.
