| Edward Wigglesworth was appointed to fill the newly created Thomas Hollis chair at Harvard College. This made Mr. Wigglesworth the first divinity professor commissioned in the American colonies. Wigglesworth was a prime favorite with Harvard students, and he and his son Edward, who succeeded, had a very great influence on New England theology. |
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| In 1722, Peter created a new order of precedence, known as the Table of Ranks. Formerly, precedence had been determined by birth. In order to deprive the Boyars of their high positions, Peter directed that precedence should be determined by merit and service to the Emperor. The Table of Ranks continued to remain in effect until the Russian monarchy was overthrown in 1917. |  |
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| James Marshall had a work crew camped on the American River at Coloma near Sacramento. The crew was building a saw mill for John Sutter. On the cold, clear morning of January 24, Marshall found a few tiny gold nuggets. An announcement by President Polk later in the year caused a national sensation and resulted in a flood of "Forty-niners" seeking wealth. |  |
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| Humphrey O'Sullivan, an Irish immigrant to US, was a trained printer, with a job in a press. His work required him to stand on the hard cold floor for hours. As a result, every evening he would go back home with aching feet. To protect his feet, O'Sullivan started bringing a small mat of rubber to work. Standing on it was more comfortable. In fact, his ingenious solution became so popular that often he would find himself without the mat - his fellow workers started borrowing his mat. When this inconvenience became a regular affair, O'Sullivan found another way of overcoming it. He made small rubber pads and nailed them to the heels of his shoes. This ensured that nobody could spoil his comfort. |
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| The 20th-century Boy Scouting movement began as a series of games and exercises to help men, primarily soldiers, learn to live in the open under difficult conditions. The program was started during the Boer War in South Africa by Sir Robert Baden-Powell. Then a colonel in the British Army, Sir Baden-Powell developed a military textbook called "Aids to Scouting" as a way of training recruits. When Sir Baden-Powell returned to England in 1903, he began to adapt his program to the training of boys. He conducted his first Boy Scout camp on Brownsea Island in 1907, and his book "Scouting for Boys" was published in 1908. In England Boy Scouts formally started Jan. 24, 1908. |
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| In 1922, the Eskimo Pie "confection", an ice cream centre covered in chocolate, was patented by Christian K. Nelson of Onawa, Iowa. The patent decribed the article as "in its simplest form, a block or brick or frozen confection within an edible container or shell. The core or center may be an ice cream, sherbet, sorbet, ice, or other material congealed by refrigeration." The shell was described as "like that used in coating chocolate candies, although preferably modified to harden at a lower temperature," and not too brittle. |
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| During World War I, the name Sankt Peterburg was seen to be too German and, on the initiative of Tsar Nicholas II, the city was renamed Petrograd on August 31 (August 18, Old Style), 1914. On January 24, 1924, three days after Lenin's death, Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honor. |  |
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| In 1925, a motion picture of a solar eclipse was taken by the U.S. Navy from the dirigible Los Angeles. The craft was at an elevation of about 4,500-ft and positioned about 19 miles east of Montauk Point, Long Island, NY. This give a view of a total eclipse of the sun that lasted just over 2-min. Four astronomical cameras and a spectrograph were used as well as two moving picture cameras. This was the first time in the U.S. that a dirigible had been used as a platform for observation of a total eclipse of the sun. |
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| The "official" birthday of the beer can is January 24, 1935. That's the day cans of Krueger's Finest Beer and Krueger's Cream Ale first went on sale in Richmond, VA. But the beer can really made its debut some 14 months earlier - just before the repeal of Prohibition. American Can Company had engineered a workable beer can. All that was needed was a brewer willing to take the pioneering plunge. The Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company of Newark, NJ signed on the dotted line in November 1933. |
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| Hailed as the “King of Swing,” Benny Goodman was one of the early innovators of that genre and the first of its bandleaders to emerge as a national icon. Goodman's orchestra was nothing short of a sensation, an obsession to some. Teens and jazz fans alike flocked to see their idol in person. Often a Benny Goodman concert approached near riot status. The ‘King of Swing’ recorded the song in a session at the Congress Hotel in Chicago. |
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| In 1948, IBM dedicated its "SSEC" in New York City. The Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator handled both data and instructions using electronic circuits made with 13,500 vacuum tubes and 21,000 relays. It occupied three sides of a 30-ft x 60-ft room. On the back wall, three punches and thirty readers provided paper-tape storage. Banks of vacuum tube circuits for card reading and sequence control and 36 paper tape readers comprising the table-lookup section occupied the left wall. Most of the right wall was filled by the electronic arithmetic unit and storage. In the center of the room were card readers, card punches, printers, and the operator's console. It was visible to pedestrians on the sidewalk outside. |
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| "Don't Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes" was written by Winston L. Moore, better known as Slim Willet. He performed the song in 1950 at Hardin Simmons University but could not get a famous record label to record it. Later, the song was heard and recorded by top artists like Ray Price (#5), Red Foley (#10) and Como. |  |
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| This was written in 1933 for the musical Roberta, starring Bob Hope. The lyrics were written by Otto Harbach and the music by Jerome Kern. Although The Platters recording has become the definitive version, recordings have been made by Artie Shaw (1941), Harry Belafonte (1950), Sarah Vaughan, and others. |  |
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| Jackie Robinson burst onto the scene in 1947, breaking baseball's color barrier and bringing the Negro leagues' electrifying style of play to the majors. He quickly became baseball's top drawing card and a symbol of hope to millions of Americans. With Robinson as the catalyst, the Dodgers won six pennants in his 10 seasons. |  |
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| Burt Bacharach and Hal David wrote this for the film Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. It was the first million-seller for the legendary songwriters. Thomas was getting over laryngitis when he recorded this. It gave the song a raspy quality that the producers of the movie liked. A few weeks later, Thomas recorded another version that was released as a single in October 1969. By January, 1970 it was a #1 hit. |
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| On January 24, 1972, two hunters captured a Japanese soldier who had been hiding in the jungles of Guam since the American forces took the island in 1944. His name was Shoichi Yokoi, and in the summer of 1944, he had retreated into the jungle rather than surrender, and had been there ever since. He resided in a cave he had dug from a bamboo thicket, and lived on a diet of nuts, mangos, papaya, breadfruit, snails, and rats. Having been a tailors apprentice before the war, he was able to fashion clothing and footwear from tree bark, and coconut husks using needles he made from nails, and buttons he made from wood. He made a calendar from a tree trunk that he notched it at every full moon, and though he had read from a leaflet that the war had ended, he was determined to avoid capture until the Imperial Japanese Army returned. |
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| As well as being Oscar nominated for the motion picture "Lady Sings the Blues," she also went on to star in the popular feature films "Mahogany" and "The Wiz." Ross returned to record-making in 1973 with the Top Ten album “Touch Me in the Morning” and its chart-topping title song. This was followed by a duet album with Marvin Gaye, Diana Marvin, that produced three chart hits. Ross acted in her second movie, Mahogany (October 1975), and it brought her another chart-topping single in the theme song, "Do You Know Where You're Going To." |
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| "(Just Like) Starting Over" was released on October 9, 1980, John Lennon's 40th birthday. It was 1 month before the album was released and 2 months before he was shot by Mark David Chapman. It didn't not reach #1 until 3 weeks after Lennon's death. |  |
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| On January 24, 1984, Apple announced the Macintosh to their Board of Directors and to the world. And the computer world has never been the same. Millions of viewers saw their first glimpse of the Macintosh computer in their famous ad during the Super Bowl. The commercial was directed by Ridley Scott, and the Orwellian scene depicted the IBM world being destroyed by a new machine, the "Macintosh." |  |
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| In 1986, the Voyager II space probe made closest approach to Uranus. The spacecraft came within 81,500-km (50,600 miles) of Uranus's cloudtops. The probe radioed thousands of images and great amounts of other scientific data on the planet, its moons, rings, atmosphere, interior and the magnetic environment surrounding Uranus. Its images of the five largest moons around Uranus revealed complex surfaces indicative of varying geologic pasts. The cameras also detected 10 previously unseen moons. It also studied the fine detail of the ring system and newly discovered two more rings. |
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| "At This Moment" was written in 1977, but no one wanted to record it, although Dionne Warwick and Olivia Newton-John came close to doing so. Billy Vera And The Beaters finally released it in 1981 as the followup to "I Can Take Care of Myself" on the Japanese-owned Alfa label. The band's second LP was issued and three weeks later, Alfa pulled out of the US and stopped distribution. |  |
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| Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity had a correction maneuver, the first after four months, on January 16, 2004, just little more than a week and 12.5 million km (7.8 million miles) before arriving at Mars. After an interplanetary cruise of more than 6 month, Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity successfully touched down on January 24, 2004 at its intended landing site Meridiani Terra. Like its sister craft, it had entered the Martian atmosphere at multiple bullet speed, slowed down by atmospheric friction and paracute, and eventually, buffered by airbags, fell down, bounced and rolled to its final landing place; Opportunity happened to end up upside-down. |
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1722 Edward Wigglesworth appointed first US divinity
professor (Harvard)
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1722 Czar Peter the Great begins civil system
More ...
1848 The California gold rush began with the
discovery during construction of a Sutter's
sawmill
More ...
1871 Charles Goodyear, Jr. patented the Goodyear
Welt, a machine for sewing boots and shoes
1899 Rubber heel patented by Humphrey O'Sullivan
More ...
1908 The first Boy Scout Troop was organized in
England by Robert Baden-Powell
More ...
1922 Eskimo Pie patented by Christian K Nelson
of Iowa (not an Eskimo)
More ...
1924 The Russian city of St. Petersburg was renamed
Leningrad
More ...
1925 Moving picture of a solar eclipse taken from
dirigible over Long Island
More ...
1935 First canned beer, "Krueger Cream Ale",
is sold by Kruger Brewing Co
More ...
1936 Benny Goodman and his orchestra recorded
"Stompin’ at the Savoy"
More ...
1947 NFL adds 5th official (back judge) &
allows sudden death in playoffs
1948 IBM SSEC Computer dedicated
More ...
1950 Jackie Robinson signs highest contract ($35,000)
in Dodger history
1952 First NFL team in Texas, Dallas Texans formerly
New York Yankees
1953 "Don't Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes"
by Perry Como
More ...
1959 "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" by The
Platters topped the charts
More ...
1962 Jackie Robinson is first Black elected to
Baseball Hall of Fame
More ...
1970 "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head"
by B. J. Thomas topped the charts
More ...
1972 Japanese soldier Shoichi Yokoi was discovered
hiding on Guam
More ...
1976 "Theme From Mahogany (Do You Know Where
You're Going To)" by Diana Ross topped the charts
More ...
1981 "(Just Like) Starting Over" by
John Lennon topped the charts
More ...
1984 Apple Computer Inc unveils its Macintosh
personal computer
More ...
1986 Voyager 2 makes first fly-by of Uranus (50,700
miles) finds new moons
More ...
1987 "At This Moment" by Billy Vera
& the Beaters topped the charts
More ...
2003 The new Department of Homeland Security officially
opened as its head, Tom Ridge, was sworn in
2004 NASA's Opportunity rover landed on
Mars
More ...