If yesterday was a good commemoration of enduring mysteries, then today, September 23, seems to be a good day to commemorate enduring itself. Quite a few things began today that are still around. For one thing, September 23, 1642 was the first day anyone ever became a Harvard alum — it was their first commencement. The graduates hadn’t originally enrolled in “Harvard” — it didn’t get that name until 1641, when John Harvard left the school his whole library and half his money. Harvard has been graduating students ever since.
It’s been over 300 years of endurance for Harvard, but that hardly compares to naval artillery. It was on September 23, 1338 that a French fleet defeated an English fleet at the Battle of Arnemuiden, near what’s now the Netherlands. It was the first-ever use of cannons on ships. Since the French fleet won, you might think the cannons made the difference, but actually only the English ships had cannons, and they lost anyway. And since it was the first battle of the Hundred Years’ War, the English had a lot more losing to look forward to. It’s a ridiculous oversimplification, of course, but basically the French won.
Fast-forward about five centuries and we come to September 23, 1845, when another enduring institution founded on blasting spheres into the air began. The first team to play a game we’d recognize today as baseball was founded in New York. You’ll recognize the name, too: the New York Knicks. Well, Kickerbockers to be precise, but we know perfectly well what everybody called them. The rules of organized baseball — which still endure today without too many changes — were formalized and written down at that point. They included the size of the field, the distances between the bases, and so on.
Speaking of things in the air, airmail has become an enduring means of sending letters and packages, and it all started on September 23, 1911, when Earle Ovington made the first official airmail delivery in the US. Ovington knew how significant his flight was — he carried a single sack of mail from Garden City, New York to Mineola, and in it was a letter addressed to himself from the Post Office Department that designated him as Official Air Mail Pilot #1. Besides being the first airmail delivery, the rest of the trip wasn’t particularly momentous. Mineola is less than three miles from Garden City, for one thing, and Ovington didn’t even land. He just tossed the sack of mail over the side of his open Blériot airplane from about 500 feet up. The sack broke open on impact and the postal workers had to gather up all 640 letters and 1280 postcards. But that particular kink got worked out, and air mail is, as everybody knows, still around.
If you want to visit the middle east nowadays, one of your possible destinations is Saudi Arabia. But if Frank Ovington had wanted to continue his short flight and pay a visit (assuming, of course, that he’d had an airplane capable of it, which he didn’t), it wouldn’t have had been a destination he could choose. Not by name, at least. It wasn’t until September 23, 1932 that Saudi Arabia — something else that’s still around, by all reports — came into existence after a thirty-year campaign trying to unify the tribes, sheikdoms, emirates, kingdoms, and even city-states in the region. “Campaign” in this case includes both political maneuvering and military actions. Its name comes from the ruling family, the House of Saud — the leader at the time of unification was Ibn Saud.
Back in the US, September 23, 1962 was opening day for the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts in New York. It had taken a while to get there — the project began in 1955. And not everything you’d see today was there on opening day. But the place still endures, and if you’d like to attend a performance of the New York Philharmonic orchestra, the Metropolitan Opera, or the New York City Ballet — not to mention all the visiting performances — that’s the place to go.
What else do we have from a September 23 that’s still around? Well how about the tool you might be using to read today’s news? The first version of the browser now called Mozilla Firefox was released on September 23, 2002. It was Phoenix 0.1. The Mozilla community already had one browser available, but it wasn’t a standalone — it was part of the Mozilla Application Suite — something that has actually endured too, although it’s not particularly well-known. If you want to download a copy, just search for SeaMonkey. It includes a browser, an email app, a news reader, and a web editor.
The SeaMonkey suite may not be quite state-of-the-art these days — I don’t think the web editor is even being maintained any more. But it’s an open-source, community-supported project, and anybody — including you — is welcome to pitch in and help improve it. You don’t even need any particular credentials; they won’t care whether or not you graduated from Harvard. And there’s no need to rush to send your job application by air mail, either. Just pitch your ideas to the team. Oh, and I don’t mean the kind of pitch Joba Chamberlain’s known for. Did I mention his birthday is today? He was originally drafted by the New York Knicks, you know…or no, wait, I mean the Yankees. They’ve been around for a while too.
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