| Myles Standish was an English-born professional soldier hired by the Pilgrims as military advisor for Plymouth colony. Arriving on the Mayflower, he worked on colonial defense. Later, he served as Plymouth's representative in England, and served as assistant to the governor and as the colony's treasurer. He was also one of the founders of the town of Duxbury, Massachusetts in 1632. On February 17, 1621 he was appointed the first commander of Plymouth colony. |
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| Central postal organization came to the colonies only after 1691 when Thomas Neale received a 21-year grant from the British Crown for a North American postal service. Neale never visited America. Instead, he appointed Governor Andrew Hamilton of New Jersey as his Deputy Postmaster General. |
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| On Tuesday, February 17, 1801, on the 36th ballot in the House, Jefferson- thus- received the votes of 10 states (Maryland and Vermont added to his previous 8 state total), leaving Burr with only 4 states (all in New England) and 2 states (Delaware and South Carolina) blank. |
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| The "Draisienne" and it was basically a wheeled hobby horse with no pedals. It was a simple wood frame on carriage wheels that was operated like a child's scooter - pushing along the ground with the foot, coast down hills, get off and push up hills. In 1817 he rode it for 14 km (9 miles), and the following year he exhibited it in Paris. Although von Drais called his device a Laufmaschine (“running machine”), draisienne and velocipede became more popular names. |
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| On August 29, 1862 , while moored to a steamer, the submarine was accidently pulled over on its side and sank, drowning five members of her crew. During diving trials on October 15, 1863, she failed to surface. Horace Lawson Hunley, who was directing her operation, and the rest of her men were drowned. H.L. Hunley was again raised and repaired. With a third crew, and under orders to only operate on the surface, she began a series of attempts to attack United States Navy ships on blockade duty off Charleston. H.L. Hunley approached the steam sloop of war USS Housatonic and detonated a spar torpedo against her side. The Federal ship sank rapidly, becoming the first warship to be lost to a submarine's attack. |
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| In 1859 construction of the canal was begun by the Universal Suez Ship Canal Company. It took 10 years to build. On February 17, 1867 first ship passed through the canal. Giuseppe Verdi wrote the opera “Aida” for the opening ceremony. |
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| The first meeting of National Congress of Mothers was held February 1719 in Washington DC. Two hundred were expected; 2,000 attended. Founders Alice McLellan Birney and Phoebe Apperson Hearst elected president and first vice president respectively. |
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| It is difficult to imagine that Madama Butterfly, with its beautiful harmonies and poignant story, was such an utter disaster that lasted, in its original two-act version, but one performance. One critic called Madama Butterfly a "diabetic opera, the result of an automobile accident." |  |
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| Alice married Nicholas Longworth of Cincinnati on February 17, 1906, when theirs became a most brilliant White House wedding. She went on to become one of the most outspoken women of the century, dazzling the public when her much sought-after opinion was expressed. |
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| As soon as Curtiss had a successful hydroplane, he contacted Captain Pond, of the USS Pennsylvania to ask when he could make a demonstration flight. The ship was anchored in San Diego harbor at the time and the Captain immediately replied, "Come on over." After the pre-flight inspection, Curtiss' workers helped start the engine and turn the plane around. Curtiss took off and flew to the Pennsylvania and landed along side. A crane hook was lowered. Curtiss arranged a previously prepared wire sling around the engine at the center of the upper wing in preparation for being hoisted aboard. |
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| The marriage took place three years after Chic Young’s popular strip first debuted in U.S. newspapers. Later, "Blondie" became a hit on radio, television and in films, as well. After a long and harrowing courtship, flapper Blondie Boopadoop and millionaire heir and playboy Dagwood Bumstead finally tie the knot in Chic Young's comic strip of February 17, 1933. Dagwood Bumstead Dagwood's father promptly disinherited him. |
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| The first driving course was offered at State College High School in State College, Pennsylvania, giving birth to the American tradition of driver's education. The course, like today's courses, provided both classroom and behind-the-wheel instruction. Students who completed Amos Neyhart's course received State of Pennsylvania driver's licenses. |
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| Joe DiMaggio, drawing $43,500 from the Yankees, trades in his salary for the $50 a month as an army enlisted man. DiMag, in his customary quiet style, gives no notice to the club. He spends the next two years playing for touring military teams. |  |
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| After completing jet refresher training in the F9F at Cherry Point, NC, Williams joined VMF-311 in Korea. He flew 37 combat missions and had a narrow escape when he crash-landed a flak damaged aircraft. Several missions were flown with John Glenn. Among the decorations he received was the Air Medal with two Gold Stars for meritorious achievement. Williams returned to the States and relieved from active duty on July 28, 1953. |
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| "Secret Love," from the motion picture, "Calamity Jane", stayed at the top of the music charts for three weeks. In the film, Doris Day played the title lead opposite the late Howard Keel. It won the 1953 Academy Award winner for Best Song. Doris Day recorded this in less than 15 minutes. The liner notes from her A Day at the Movies compilation tell how she rode her bicycle to the studio, did one take (that was with the full live orchestra in those days) and the musical director was "grinning from ear to ear." |
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| Johnny Hart was inspired to draw cavemen through the chance suggestion of one of his General Electric coworkers and took to the idea "because they are a combination of simplicity and the origin of ideas". The name for the strip was suggested by his wife, Bobby. Hart describes the title character as similar to himself, playing the "patsy". The other major characters—Peter, Wiley, Clumsy Carp, the Fat Broad, the Cute Chick, Curls, Thor, and Grog—were patterned after friends, a relative, and GE co-workers. |
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| It was out of a rock & roll involvement of Bob Thiele's that the McGuire's found the song that they would be most closely associated with. In 1957, they came upon "Sugartime," a quasi-novelty tune brought back by Thiele from Norman Petty's Texas studio, where Thiele had been working with Buddy Holly. "Sugartime" was difficult to record and difficult to finish, but the resulting single went to number one and stayed there for weeks, quickly earning a gold record award. |
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| Vanguard 2 was an earth-orbiting satellite designed to measure cloud-cover distribution over the daylight portion of its orbit. The spacecraft was a magnesium sphere 50.8 cm in diameter. It contained two optical telescopes with two photocells. A command receiver was used to activate a tape recorder that relayed telescope experiment data to the telemetry transmitter. Both transmitters functioned normally for 19 days. |
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| Brian and Mike had penned "Surfin'," which would become The Beach Boys first single release on the Candix label. Thanks to a remarkable chain of events, they made their first recording and miraculously scored their first chart record. Their California garage band sound and an original song about a local fad had immediate teen appeal, and "Surfin'" reached the Top 3 on L.A. radio hit-lists. |
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| "Duke of Earl" song stayed at the tippy-top for three weeks. It hit #1 on the rhythm & blues charts, as well. "Duke of Earl" was Chandler’s biggest hit out of a half-dozen he recorded. His only other million seller came with "Groovy Situation" in 1970. Curtis Mayfield wrote several hits for Chandler, including "Just Be True", "What Now" and "Nothing Can Stop Me". Chandler’s real name is Eugene Dixon. He owned his own record label, Mr. Chand, from 1969 to 1973, though "Groovy Situation" was recorded in 1970 for Mercury. |
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| Paul McCartney was sitting at a bus shelter waiting for John Lennon to meet him on Penny Lane, a
street near their houses. While sitting there Paul jotted down the things he saw, including a barber's shop with
pictures of its clients and a nurse selling poppies for Remembrance Day.
Strawberry Field was a Salvation Army home in Liverpool where John Lennon used to go. He had fond memories of the place that inspired this. John's aunt Mimi did not like John going to Strawberry Fields, as it was basically an orphanage and she thought they would lead John astray. |
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| After writing hits for other artists, Mauriat's own success in America was sparked off in 1968 when his enormous international hit version of "L'Amour Est Bleu" ("Love Is Blue") was Luxembourg's entry in the 1963 Eurovision Song contest. It spent five weeks in the number 1 spot. |  |
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| On February 17, 1972, a crowd of thousands gathered on the White House lawn for a historic
send-off. For Richard Milhous Nixon, the trip to Beijing would be the journey of a lifetime.
From February 21 to February 28, 1972, U.S. President Richard Nixon traveled to Beijing, Hangzhou and Shanghai. It was the first time a U.S. president had visited the People's Republic of China, which at the time did not maintain diplomatic relations with the U.S. At the conclusion of his trip, the United States and the PRC Governments issued the Shanghai Communiqué, a statement of their foreign policy views. In the Communiqué, both nations pledged to work toward the full normalization of diplomatic relations. |
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| "Crocodile Rock" tells the story of a guy in the '50s and '60s who frequented a restaurant where the patrons, especially him, loved an obscure dance called the Crocodile Rock. This was the first of many #1 singles by Elton John in the US. His first in the UK came in 1976 with Kiki Dee ("Don't Go Breaking My Heart"). His first solo #1 in the UK was "Sacrifice" in 1990. |  |
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| Stewart was known for his soulful blues and folk ballads, but this gave him a new look. Stewart gained many new fans with this, but alienated most of his old ones, who had no interest in Disco. |  |
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| NASA, in conjunction with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Science Foundation and industry groups, has conducted three airborne campaigns, over the Antarctic in 1987, over the Arctic in 1989 and the over the Arctic and northern mid-latitudes in the winter of 1991-92. |
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| "Opposites Attract" was written by Oliver Leiber, who is the son of legendary songwriter Jerry Leiber of Leiber and Stoller fame. Oliver Leiber also wrote Abdul's hits "Forever Your Girl" and "It's Just The Way That You Love Me." |  |
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| In 1996, world chess champion Gary Kasparov defeated Deep Blue, IBM's chess-playing computer, by winning a six-game match 4-2, in a regulation-style match held in Philadelphia, as part of the ACM Computer Science Conference. Deep Blue is an improved version of the older Deep Thought, augmented by parallel special-purpose hardware. Deep Blue uses a selectively deepening search strategy, using improvements of the alpha-beta search strategy, with powerful evaluation functions. Transposition tables help avoid unnecessarily calculating the same position more than once. Two powerful databases further augment Deep Blue's play. Deep Blue would defeat Kasparov - the first time the grandmaster ever lost a six-game match in championship play. |
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| More than 8,900 people flapped their arms and legs on Bismarck's state Capitol grounds in an attempt to reclaim the snow angel record of 3,784 set by students at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, MI. The Guinness World Records' snow angel category was created in 2003 when 1,791 people made snow angels at Bismarck. |  |
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1621 Miles Standish appointed first commander
of Plymouth colony
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1691 Thomas Neale granted British patent for American
postal service
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1776 First volume of Gibbon's "Decline &
Fall of the Roman Empire" published
1801 House breaks electoral college tie, chooses
Jefferson President over Burr
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1817 First US city lit by gas (Baltimore)
1818 Baron Karl von Drais de Sauerbrun patents
"draisine" (early bicycle)
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1827 Chester Stone patented a washing machine
1864 Confederate sub "HL Hunley" sinks
Union ship "Housatonic"
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1867 First ship passes through Suez Canal
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1876 Sardines first canned (Julius Wolff-Eastport,
ME)
1883 A Ashwell patents free-toilet in London
1897 National Congress of Parents & Teachers
(PTA) organizes (Washington, DC)
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1904 Giacomo Puccini’s opera "Madama
Butterfly" premieres at La Scala
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1906 Theodore Roosevelt's daughter Alice marries
in the White House
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1911 First amphibian flight to & from a ship,
by Glenn Curtiss, San Diego
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1931 First telecast of a sporting event in Japan
(baseball)
1933 Blondie Boopadoop marries Dagwood
Bumstead
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1934 First high school auto driving course offered
(State College, PA)
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1936 State record low temperature of -58°
in McIntosh, SD
1943 New York Yankee Joe DiMaggio, enlists into
the US army
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1953 Baseball star/pilot Ted Williams uninjured
as plane shot down in Korea
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1954 Doris Day’s single, "Secret Love",
became the #1 tune in the U.S.
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1958 Comic strip "BC" first appears
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1958 "Sugartime" by McGuire Sisters
topped the charts
More ...
1959 First weather satellite launched, Vanguard
2, 21.6 lbs
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1962 Beach Boys introduced a new musical style
with their hit "Surfin"
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1962 Gene Chandler hit #1 with
"Duke of Earl"
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1964 US Supreme court rules - 1 man 1 vote (Westberry
vs Sanders)
1967 Beatles release "Penny Lane" &
"Strawberry Fields"
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1968 Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame,
Springfield MA, opens
1968 "Love Is Blue" by Paul Mauriat
topped the charts
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1972 President Richard Nixon departed on his historic
trip to China
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1973 "Crocodile Rock" by Elton John
topped the charts
More ...
1979 "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?" by Rod
Stewart topped the charts
More ...
1989 6-week study of Arctic atmosphere shows no
ozone "hole"
More ...
1990 "Opposites Attract" by Paula Abdul
& the Wild Pair topped the charts
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1996 World chess champion Garry Kasparov beat
IBM supercomputer "Deep Blue,"
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2007 Bismarck reclaims snow angel record
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