| Halley's Comet, officially designated 1P/Halley and also referred to as Comet Halley after Edmond Halley, is a comet that can be seen every 75-76 years. It is the most famous of all periodic comets. Although in every century many long-period comets appear brighter and more spectacular, Halley is the only short-period comet that is visible to the naked eye, and thus, the only naked-eye comet certain to return within a human lifetime. |
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| In 1345, at one hour after noon on March 20, there was a major conjunction of three planets in Aquarius. Albertus Magnus said that the conjunction of Mars and Jupiter causes a great pestilence in the air, especially when they come together in a hot, wet sign, as was the case in 1345. For Jupiter, being wet and hot, draws up evil vapors from the earth and Mars, because it is immoderately hot and dry, then ignites the vapors, and as a result there were lightnings, sparks, noxious vapors and fires throughout the air. |
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| The Dutch East India Company was established on March 20, 1602, when the Estates-General of the Netherlands granted it a 21-year monopoly to carry out colonial activities in Asia. It was the first multinational corporation in the world and it was the first company to issue stocks. It remained an important trading concern for almost two centuries, until it became bankrupt and was dissolved in 1798. |
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| In 1800, Alessandro Volta dated a letter announcing his invention of the voltaic pile to Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, London. "On the electricity excited by the mere contact of conducting substances of different kinds" described his results of stacking sandwiches of copper and zinc metal discs between pads of moist material. The letter had to pass from Italy, through France, which was then at war with Britain, so Volta sent the message in two parts. When the first pages arrived, Banks showed them to Anthony Carlisle, a London surgeon, who with William Nicholson immediately began trying to repeat Volta's experiments. By 2 May 1800, they stumbled upon electrolysis of water. |
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| Louis XVIII left Paris about midnight on the 19th. Napoleon entered Paris after escaping from Elba with a regular army of 140,000 and a volunteer force of around 200,000 beginning his "Hundred Days" rule. | ![]() |
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| In Martin v Hunter’s Lessee in 1816 whereby the state of Virginia, via its highest state court, claimed that state governments and the federal government were equal and therefore the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction over the highest court of a state. Marshall stated that every state had lost part of its sovereignty when it accepted the Constitution and therefore all states were subject to the rulings of the Supreme Court. |
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| Published in 1852, “Uncle Tomís Cabin” tells the story of a Christian slave, Uncle Tom, who is sold by a Kentucky family burdened by debt. Finally, sold again, he dies under the lash of the henchman of a cruel overseer, Simon Legree, who wants Uncle Tom to accept him instead of God as his master. Stowe, a member of a family of prominent abolitionists and ministers, also recounts the flight of a family of runaways on the Underground Railroad. 300,000 copies were quickly sold and many northerners were shocked by its contents. |
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| Booth had joined (1859) the Virginia militia company that assisted in the capture of John Brown, but he did not enter Confederate service in the Civil War. Instead, he continued with his theatrical career in the North. For some six months in 186465 Booth, an egomaniac, laid plans to abduct Lincoln and carry him to Richmond, a scheme that was frustrated when Lincoln failed to appear (March 20, 1865) at the Soldier’s Home near Washington, DC. where Booth and his six fellow conspirators lay in wait.Booth would later assassinate the President while Lincoln was attending a performance at Ford’s Theatre in the nation’s capital. |
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| The Jesse James gang rob the Southern Deposit Bank in Russellville, Kentucky of $14000. George Sheperd initiated this robbery, bringing in his cousin Oll. George invited his wife's first-cousin, and his war-time comrade, John Jarrette. Jarrette, in an account published after the Northfield robbery, is blamed for having led Cole Younger into crime by bringing him into this robbery. Detective Bligh, from whom most of the identifications of the robbers comes, later decided Frank and Jesse James were involved. During the war, when Frank James followed Quantrill into Kentucky, Jesse James stayed in Missouri with the Sheperds. |
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| In 1886, America's first demonstration of the alternating-current system provided lighting along Main Street at Great Barrington, MA. The power came from the first AC power plant in the U.S. to begin commercial operation. Thus its creator, George Westinghouse, now thirty-nine years old, began a new direction in his career. |
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| Look around antique stores and you may find some of the old -- and possibly still working -- Dayton Scales. There were other famous scales, too, that were direct from Ohio, ‘the birthplace of weights and measures’. Remember Toledo Scales for weighing fruit and produce in grocery stores? | ![]() |
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| In 1900, Nikola Tesla received a patent for the wireless transmission of electric power. Tesla stated that it is practicable to distribute power from a central plant in unlimited amounts, with a loss not exceeding a small fraction of one per cent in the transmission, even to the greatest distance, twelve thousand miles to the opposite end of the globe. | ![]() |
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| In 1916, Einstein's Theory of General Relativity was published as an academic paper titled "Die Grundlagen der allgemeinen Relativitästheorie." This theory accounted for the slow rotation of the elliptical path of the planet Mercury, which Newtonian gravitational theory failed to do. Fame and recognition came suddenly in 1919, when the Royal Society of London photographed the solar eclipse and publicly verified Einstein's general theory of relativity. |
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| USS Jupiter was converted into the first U.S. aircraft carrier at the Navy Yard, Norfolk, VA, for the. purpose of conducting experiments in the new idea of seaborne aviation, a field of unlimited possibilities. Her name w as changed to Langley on April 21, 1920; she was classified CV-1 and commissioned March 20, 1922, Comdr. Kenneth Whiting in command. | ![]() |
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| Cummins' first successful engine design, the Model F [(1924)], was originally used for marine applications, but came to be used in other applications. In 1930, one of Cummins' engines was installed in a racecar which broke the Indy 500 record for completing the race with no pit stops. |
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| All-around female athlete Babe Didrickson pitches the first inning for the Philadelphia Athletics in a spring training exhibition game against the Brooklyn Dodgers. She gives up one walk but no hits. Two days later she pitches again, this time one inning for the St. Louis Cardinals against the Red Sox. She is less successful this time, giving up four hits and three runs in the first inning. Bill Hallahan relieves her. Didrickson does not have an at bat in either game. She will also play several games for the House of David this season. Didrickson is the 2nd of only two females to play exhibitions with a ML team (1B Lizzie Murphy played for an AL all-star team on August 14, 1922). |
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| In 1934, the first test of a practical radar apparatus was made by Rudolf Kuhnold in Kiel Harbour, Germany, Chief of the German Navy Signals Research Department. His 700-watt transmitter worked on a frequency of 600 megacycles, had a receiver and had disk reflectors. It received echoes from signals bounced off the battleship Hesse, anchored 600 yds away. In an October test, it picked up echoes from a ship seven miles away. Radar was to be an important asset in the coming WW II, but ironically it was the U.S. and Great Britain, that took Kuhnold's pioneering work and developed it into a reliable detection system. Kuhnold may thus be described as the man who won the Battle of Britain for the English! |
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| General Douglas MacArthur pledged he would return in 1942 as he left the Philippine Islands during World War II. Japanese forces were about to conquer the Philippines, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt had ordered MacArthur to relocate to Melbourne, Australia. MacArthur returned at the head of an American army in 1944 and freed the Philippines from Japanese control. | ![]() |
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| On the evening of March 18 there were several lava flows on Gran Cono. The following day, at 11 AM, the northern flows reaches Fosso della Vetrana and, in the evening, the first houses of Massa and S. Sebastiano. The villages are invaded by the lava flows that reaches a distance to 1.5 km from the central Cercola on the 22nd. | ![]() |
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| The blue whale is the largest known creature to have ever lived growing to lengths of 30 m and weighing as much as 180 metric tons. It weighs 15 times as much as the heaviest recorded elephant -- 12,200 kg. The tongue of this enormous creature alone weighs as much as an elephant and its heart is approximately the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, weighing 1000 kg. Its aorta is so large a person could crawl in it. On the average this monstrous creature eats 3600 kg of food each day. |
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| With a Musicians Union ban lifted, Eugene Ormandy conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra on CBS TV in the first symphony concert to be televised in the United States. Assisted by affiliate WCAU-TV, Channel 10, in Philadelphia. The concert was televised live. Ninety minutes later, NBC-TV carried TV’s second symphonic concert. This one was from Carnegie Hall in New York City. Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra performed compositions by Richard Wagner. |
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| In an effort to prevent the decline of baseball in small towns and cities throughout the country, Senator Edwin C. Johnson offered a bill to give all ball clubs the sole right to ban radio and/or television broadcasts of major league games in their own territories. The bill was intended to restore the equity between large communities and the small areas and was in direct response to the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department who had prohibited teams from banning any broadcasts in 1949. |
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| In 1949 Stafford moved to Columbia and recorded the two biggest hits of her career, 1952's "You Belong to Me" and 1954's "Make Love to Me." Stafford gained her own television program during the mid-'50s, and also recorded the first LP by Jonathan and Darlene Edwards (a pseudonym), American Popular Songs. | ![]() |
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| The largest single volcanic eruption in the twentieth century, according to some, occurred thirty miles away from the nearest human settlement. The eruption continued for a full year, from September 1955 to October 1956. The most destructive explosion, however, was at 5:11 p.m. on March 20. A metalworker named Sorokin, who lived in Kamaki village 40 miles away, saw a huge jet of fire ejected from the mountain at a 30 degree angle, along with smoke and ash that filled the sky with darkness. The amount of ash ejected from Mount Bezymianny was enough to cover all of Paris 49 feet deep! |
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| "Are You Lonesome Tonight" spent a massive four week stint at the top of the chart at the start of the year, setting up a year when we'd see a total of four Elvis chart-toppers. The King's next chart topper of the year was "Surrender", a lesser known Elvis hit gave him yet another four weeks at No. 1. | ![]() |
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| The title was taken from one of Ringo's sayings. "Hard Day's Night" was another Ringo expression made into a song. The Beatles wrote this for the movie Help, which was at one point titled "Eight arms to hold you." In the first few takes of this song, the John Lennon and Paul McCartney harmonized an opening rather than having the song begin with the guitar. | ![]() |
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| The original supermodel waif who acquired her name for her stick-like figure (a radical departure from the curvaceous ideals of previous generations), 'Twiggy' (nee Leslie Hornby) burst upon the fashion scene and revolutionized it as a teenage icon of the "swinging 60s." Though the world will never forget her larger-than-life beginnings, she modeled a mere four years (and never walked a runway) before forsaking the industry to enjoy a respectable career in film, TV and the theater. |
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| "The Happening" was from the 1967 movie of the same name which starred Anthony Quinn, George Maharis, Michael Parks, Robert Walker Jr., and Faye Dunaway. The songwriting team of Holland-Dozier-Holland co-wrote this with Frank DeVol. DeVol was the musical director for the film. | ![]() |
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| Kris Kristofferson wrote and released this in 1970 on his first album, Kristofferson. A year later, when it became a hit for Joplin, Kristofferson's album was re-released as Me And Bobby McGee to take advantage of the song's new popularity. | ![]() |
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| The Four Seasons had a series of hits from 1962-1968. In 1975, they returned to the charts with "Who Loves You," which hit #3 in the US. This was the follow-up to that song. The lead singer on the first verse was not Frankie Valli (he comes in on the second verse): drummer Gerri Polci shared the lead in "December 1963" and provided all of the lead vocal in the group's third hit from the She Loves You LP, "Silver Star," which hit #38 in the US. |
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| While still in her early teens, Joan, often called "the girl Elvis", founded the seminal all-girl rock group, The Runaways, whose hits such as "Cherry Bomb" made them an international sensation. She became the first woman in rock to own her own record label, Blackheart Records. There, her next group, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, became a staple in the Top 10 charts and claims the #28 song of all time, "I Love Rock n' Roll", which was number 1 on the Billboard charts for two months after 23 major record labels refused to give her a deal. |
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| “LIBBY DID IT!” This was the headline plastered across the front page of the Anchorage Times. On Wednesday, March 20, 1985, Libby Riddles made history. She became the first woman to win the grueling 1,049-mile Iditarod Sled Dog Race, after a daring move across Norton Sound in a deadly blizzard. The feat captured the attention of the nation. | ![]() |
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| The commissioner's office announces that Reds manager Pete Rose is under investigation for unnamed "serious allegations." Early in 1989, his job in jeopardy because of consistant second-place finishes, Rose was accused of being in massive debt to gamblers and of betting on his own team. He resorted to months of legal stratagems, challenging the Commissioner's authority, until finally agreeing on August 24 to a deal in which he dropped his suit against baseball and accepted the lifetime suspension. In return, there were no official findings announced. |
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| Considered one of the greatest players of all time, the 7ft-2in Abdul-Jabbar played center for the Milwaukee Bucks (196975) and the Los Angeles Lakers (197589), accumulating 38,387 points, the NBA's highest career total. He was famous for his "Skyhook" shot which defenders found virtually impossible to block. | ![]() |
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| Lee co-wrote and performed several songs for Walt Disney's animated 1955 movie "Lady and the Tramp." She was paid $3,500 for "Lady and the Tramp." In 1991 she won a lawsuit against Disney that allowed her to collect royalties from the 1987 videocassette release, sales of which were estimated at the time to be $90 million. | ![]() |
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| John Lennon recorded this as a demo in 1977. The other Beatles recorded around his tracks to complete song in 1994. The next year, it was released as a single. Yoko Ono agreed to release Lennon's demo to the other Beatles the day after he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Yoko got a bad rap by a lot of Beatles fans, but she has been very protective of Lennon's legacy. This is one of the few projects she has authorized on his behalf. |
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0141 6th predicted perihelion passage
of Halley's Comet
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1345 Saturn/Jupiter/Mars-conjunction; thought
"cause of plague epidemic"
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1602 United Dutch East Indian Company (VOC) forms
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1760 Great Fire of Boston destroys 349 buildings
1800 Volta’s battery announced
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1815 Napoleon enters Paris - begins 100 day rule
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1816 US Supreme Court affirms its right to review
state court decisions
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1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's
Cabin" published (Boston)
More ...
1865 A plan by John Wilkes Booth to abduct President
Abraham Lincoln foiled
More ...
1868 Jesse James Gang robs bank in Russelville
KY of $14,000
More ...
1886 First AC power plant in US begins commercial
operation, Massachusetts
More ...
1891 The first computing scale company was incorporated
in Dayton, OH
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1900 Wireless transmission of electricity patented
More ...
1916 Einstein's Theory of General Relativity
More ...
1922 USS Langley is commissioned, Navy's first
aircraft Carrier
More ...
1930 Clessie Cummins sets diesel engine speed
record of 129.39 kph
More ...
1934 Female Babe Didrickson pitches hitless inning
in exhibition game against Brooklyn Dodgers
More ...
1934 German RADAR tested
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1942 Gen MacArthur vowed - "I shall return"
More ...
1944 Mount Vesuvius, Italy explodes
More ...
1947 180-metric ton blue whale (record) caught
in South Atlantic
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1948 Musicians Union ban lifted
More ...
1953 Senator Edwin C Johnson offers a bill to ban
radio-TV broadcasts of major league games
More ...
1954 "Make Love to Me!" by Jo Stafford
topped the charts
More ...
1954 First newspaper vending machine used (Columbia
Pennsylvania)
1956 Mount Bezymianny on Kamchatka Peninsula (USSR)
explodes
More ...
1958 50" snow across the Mason-Dixon line
1961 "Surrender" by Elvis Presley topped
the charts
More ...
1965 "Eight Days a Week" by the Beatles
topped the charts
More ...
1967 Fashion model, Twiggy, arrived in the United
States for a one-week stay
More ...
1967 Supremes release "The Happening"
More ...
1971 "Me and Bobby McGee" by Janis Joplin
topped the charts
More ...
1976 "December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)"
by the Four Seasons topped the charts
More ...
1982 "I Love Rock 'n' Roll" by Joan
Jett & the Blackhearts topped the charts
More ...
1985 Libby Riddles is first woman to win Iditarod
Trail Dog Sled Race
More ...
1989 Baseball announces Reds manager Pete Rose
is under investigation
More ...
1990 Los Angeles Lakers retire Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's
#33
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1991 Court awards Peggy Lee $3 million in contract
violation suit against Disney
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1995 Beatles song, "Free As A Bird"
is released
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1995 Dow-Jones hits 4083.68 (record)