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History on August 1

1774 – British scientist Joseph Priestley re-discovered oxygen (the gas), verifying the discovery of it by German-Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele.

1834 – Slavery was abolished in the British Empire with the Slavery Abolition Act.

1980 – Cinemax launched

1981 – MTV network debuted on cable television, actually playing music videos 24 hours a day. The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” was the first video shown, followed by Pat Benatar’s “You Better Run”.

1957 – The United States and Canada formed the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). Due to the wrong number on a Sears ad misprint, a child called to check on where Santa was that evening (December 24), and NORAD has been tracking Santa every Christmas Eve, since its inception.

1966 – China’s Cultural Revolution began, with purging (killing) the remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society, and to re-impose Maoist thought as the dominant ideology within the Party. About 1.5 million people were ‘purged’.

1980 – Vigdis Finnbogadottir was elected President of Iceland, the world’s first democratically elected female head of state.

1984 – Lindow Man was found in a bog, at Lindow Moss, Cheshire, in northwest England.

1610 – Henry Hudson sailed into what is now known as Hudson Bay (he thought he had made it through the Northwest Passage, and reached the Pacific Ocean).

1776 – The official signing of the United States Declaration of Independence took place. Matthew Thornton from New Hampshire signed it on November 4, 1776.

1790 – The first United States Census was conducted. There were 3,929,214 people counted that year.

1869 – Japan’s samurai, farmer, artisan, merchant class system (Shinokosho) was abolished as part of the Meiji Restoration reforms.

1870 – Tower Subway, the first underground tube railway, opened in London, England.

1873 – The Clay Street Hill Railroad began operating the first cable car in San Francisco’s famous cable car system.

1937 – The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 was passed in America, making marijuana and all its by-products illegal.

1941 – Frank Bass was electrocuted in Alabama on August 2nd, 1941 for burglary, and was among the last to have been executed for this crime in the United States.

1973 – The Summerland Disaster occurred when a fire spread through the Summerland leisure center in Douglas on the Isle of Man. Fifty people were killed and eighty seriously injured in the fire, started by some boys smoking in a closet.

1990 – Iraq invaded Kuwait, leading to the Gulf War.

1492 – Christopher Columbus set sail from Palos de la Frontera, Spain.

1852 – Harvard University won the first Boat Race against Yale University. The race was the first American intercollegiate athletic event

1900 – The Firestone Tire and Rubber Company was founded.

1936 – Jesse Owens won the 100-meter dash, beating ‘the world’s fastest man’ Ralph Metcalfe at the Berlin Olympics.

1946 – Santa Claus Land, the first modern themed amusement park, opened in Santa Claus, Indiana, United States.

1958 – The nuclear submarine USS Nautilus traveled under the Arctic ice cap.

1977 – Tandy Corporation announced the TRS-80, one of the world’s first mass-produced personal computers. The basic model originally shipped with 4 KB of RAM.

70 – The Second Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans.

1693 – Celebratory date for Dom Perignon’s invention of Champagne.

1790 – A tariff act created the need for the Revenue Cutter Service, later renamed The United States Coast Guard.

1892 – The father and stepmother of Lizzie Borden were found murdered in their Fall River, Massachusetts home. Lizzie was acquitted of the crime.

1858 – The Billboard Hot 100 is published for the first time. The first number-one song of the Hot 100 was “Poor Little Fool” by Ricky Nelson.

1944 – Anne Frank was arrested in Amsterdam by German Security Police following a tip-off from an informer who was never identified

1977 – US President Jimmy Carter signed legislation creating the United States Department of Energy.

1987 – The Federal Communications Commission rescinded the Fairness Doctrine, which had required radio and television stations to present controversial issues “fairly”.

1305 – William Wallace, who led the Scottish resistance against England, was captured by the English near Glasgow. Mel Gibson starred in a dramatization of the story in Braveheart.

1620 – The Mayflower departed from Southampton, England, headed towards North America.

1861 – In order to help pay for the war effort, the United States government levies the first income tax as part of the Revenue Act of 1861 (3% over $800)

1882 – The Standard Oil of New Jersey was established. Standard+Oil=SO=Esso, now Exxon.

1888 – Germany’s Bertha Benz drove from Mannheim to Pforzheim and back in the first long-distance automobile trip

1914 – Cleveland, Ohio, installed the first electric traffic light.

1926 – Harry Houdini performed one of his greatest stunts, spending 91 minutes underwater in a sealed tank before escaping.

1957 – American Bandstand debuted on the ABC television network, with host Dick Clark. The show began locally on Philadelphia television station WFIL-TV Channel 6 (now WPVI-TV) in 1952.

1981 – US President Ronald Reagan fired 11,359 striking air-traffic controllers who ignored his order for them to return to work.

2001 – Cable network Odyssey was renamed to Hallmark Channel

1787 – 60 copies of the Constitution of the United States were delivered to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

1890 – At Auburn Prison in New York, William Kemmler was the first person to be executed by electric chair.

1926 – Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim across the English Channel.

1926 – In New York, New York, the Warner Bros.’ Vitaphone sound system premiered with the movie Don Juan starring John Barrymore, with music and sound effects.

1945 – Hiroshima, Japan was largely destroyed when the atomic bomb “Little Boy” was dropped by the B-29 Enola Gay.

1956 – The DuMont Television Network made its final broadcast, A Boxing Match from the St. Nicholas Arena series.

1964 – Prometheus, a bristlecone pine and the world’s oldest tree, at least 4862 years old, was cut down in Nevada.

1966 – In a post-fight interview, Howard Cosell honors Muhammad Ali’s wishes to no longer be referred to as Cassius Clay, making his new name more acceptable by everyone.

1986 – Rain fell a record 13 inches of rain in a single day in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

1988 – Yo! MTV Raps premiered on MTV

1996 – NASA announced that the ALH 84001 meteorite, thought to originate from Mars and found in Antarctica, contained evidence of primitive life-forms.

2012 – NASA’s Curiosity rover landed on the surface of Mars.

1782 – George Washington ordered the creation of the Badge of Military Merit to honor soldiers wounded in battle. It is later renamed to the more poetic Purple Heart.

1909 – Alice Huyler Ramsey and three other women became the first women to complete a transcontinental automobile trip, taking 59 days to travel from New York, New York to San Francisco, California. Alice drove the whole trip.

1930 – Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, two accused African-American criminals were taken from jail by a mob and lynched. Lawrence Beitler took a picture of the mob and bodies, inspiring Abel Meeropol to write a poem, “Bitter Fruit.” It was later rephrased as “Strange Fruit” and recorded by Billie Holiday.

1944 – IBM announced the first program-controlled calculator, the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, known best as the Harvard Mark I. It used 765,000 components and hundreds of miles of wire and weighed about 5 tons.

1955 – Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering (became Sony in 1958) sold its first transistor radios in Japan.

1959 – The Lincoln Memorial design on the U.S. penny went into circulation. It replaced the “wheat” design and was minted until 2008.

1975 (Typhoon) Nina, China

1978 – The US Government made funds available to offer federal assistance for the Love Canal Disaster

1992 – Growing Pains actress Tracy Gold was hospitalized for anorexia and is written out of most of the final episodes for the series

2007 – High School Musical 2 aired on The Disney Channel

1786 – Mont Blanc on the French/Italian border was climbed for the first time by Jacques Balmat and Dr. Michel-Gabriel Paccard.

1876 – Thomas Edison received a patent (#180,857) for his mimeograph (Autographic Printing).

1908 – Wilbur Wright made his first flight at a racecourse at Le Mans, France; the Wright Brothers’ first public flight.

1963 – In England, a gang of 15 train robbers stole £2.6 million in banknotes in the Great Train Robbery. They were later caught.

1969 – At a ‘zebra crossing’ in London, photographer Iain Macmillan took one of the most famous photographs of all time, the cover of the Beatles album, Abbey Road.

1974 – President Richard Nixon, in a nationwide television address, announced his resignation from the office of the President of the United States, effective noon the next day.

1989 – STS-28 Mission: Space Shuttle Columbia took off on a secret five-day military mission. It landed at Edwards Air Force Base, California, on August 13. That’s all we know.

1991 – The Warsaw Radio Mast was the world’s tallest structure until its collapse today. It was 2,120 feet tall and was built 1970-1974.

1483 – Opening of the restored Sistine Chapel in Rome. Renaissance painters Sandro Botticelli, Pietro Perugino, Pinturicchio, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Cosimo Roselli contributed. Michelangelo added his work on the ceiling in 1508-1512.

1854 – Henry David Thoreau published Walden or Life in the Woods.

1892 – Thomas Edison received a patent (#480,567) for a two-way telegraph.

1930 – Betty Boop made her cartoon debut in Dizzy Dishes.

1942 – Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi was arrested in Bombay by British forces, launching the Quit India Movement.

1944 – Nagasaki, Japan was decimated when an atomic bomb, Fat Man, was dropped by the United States B-29 Bockscar.

1969 – Followers of Charles Manson murdered pregnant actress Sharon Tate (wife of Roman Polanski), Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, Jay Sebring and Steven Parent. Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were killed by the same crew the following day.

2104 – Michael Brown, an 18-year-old African American male in Ferguson, Missouri, was shot and killed by a Ferguson police officer, sparking protests and unrest in the city.

1519 – Ferdinand Magellan set sail from Seville, Spain to circumnavigate the globe.

1675 – The foundation stone of the Royal Greenwich Observatory in London, England was laid.

1846 – The Smithsonian Institution was chartered by the United States Congress.

1873 – Louvre Museum opened in France.

1932 – An 11-pound chondrite-type meteorite broke into several pieces and landed near the town of Archie in Cass County, Missouri.

1948 – Candid Camera made its television debut, after being on radio for a year as Candid Microphone.

1949 – The US Department of War was replaced with the United States Department of Defense.

1971 – The Society for American Baseball Research is founded in Cooperstown, New York.

1977 – In Yonkers, New York, 24-year-old postal employee David Berkowitz (the “Son of Sam”) was arrested for a series of killings in New York City.

1984 – Red Dawn, starring Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen, became the first-ever PG-13 movie to be released in theaters.

1995 In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were indicted for the bombing. Michael Fortier pled guilty in a plea bargain for his testimony.

3114 BC – The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, used by several pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilizations, began. This was the calendar that caused the Friday, December 21, 2012 fears.

1858 – The Eiger in the Bernese Alps was ascended for the first time by Charles Barrington, along with Christian Almer and Peter Bohren.

1929 – Babe Ruth became the first baseball player to hit 500 home runs in his career with a home run at League Park in Cleveland, Ohio.

1942 – Actress Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil received a patent (#2,292,387) for a Frequency-hopping communication system which later became the basis for modern technologies like wireless telephones and Wi-Fi.

1965 – The Watts Riots begin in the Watts area of Los Angeles, California.

1984 – “We begin bombing in five minutes” – US President Ronald Reagan joked while preparing to make his weekly Saturday address on National Public Radio.

1991 – Nickelodeon aired the first episodes of “Doug”, “Rugrats” and “Ren & Stimpy”

30 BC – Cleopatra VII Philopator, the last ruler of the Egyptian Ptolemaic dynasty, committed suicide, by means of an asp bite.

1851 – Isaac Singer is granted a patent (#8,294) for his sewing machine.

1960 – Echo 1A, NASA’s first successful communications satellite, was launched.

1977 – The first free flight of the Space Shuttle Enterprise.

1981 – The IBM Personal Computer was released.

1990 – Sue, the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton found to date, was discovered by paleontologist Sue Hendrickson in South Dakota.

1994 – Major League Baseball players went on strike, forcing the cancellation of the 1994 World Series.

1521 – Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés captured Aztec leader Tlatoani Cuauhtémoc and conquered the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan.

1868 (Earthquake & Tsunami) Arica, Chile

1918 – Opha Mae Johnson was the first woman to enlist in the United States Marine Corps.

1942 – Walt Disney’s fifth full-length animated film, Bambi, was released in theaters.

1961 – East Germany closed the border between the eastern and western sectors of Berlin with the Berlin Wall.

1969 – The Apollo 11 astronauts were released from a three-week quarantine to enjoy a ticker-tape parade in New York, New York.

1997 – South Park aired for the first time on Comedy Central

1888 – An audio recording of English composer Arthur Sullivan’s “The Lost Chord”, one of the first recordings of music ever made, was played during a press conference introducing Thomas Edison’s phonograph in London, England.

1893 – France became the first country to introduce motor vehicle registration.

1935 – Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act.

1936 – Rainey Bethea was hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky in the last public execution in the United States.

1945 – Japan accepted the Allied terms of surrender in World War II

1959 – Founding and first official meeting of the American Football League.

1975 – The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the longest-running release in film history, opened at the USA Theatre in Westwood, Los Angeles, California.

1980 – Lech Walesa led the first strike at the Gdansk, Poland shipyards.

1994 – Inside The Actors Studio made its debut on Bravo

2000 – Dora the Explorer premiered on Nick Jr

2010 – The first-ever Youth Olympic Games were held in Singapore.

2013 – Egypt declared a state of emergency as security forces killed hundreds of demonstrators supporting former president Mohamed Morsi.

1483 – Pope Sixtus IV consecrated the Sistine Chapel and dedicated it to the Virgin Mary.

1519 – Panama City, Panama, was founded.

1549 – Jesuit priest Francis Xavier came ashore at Kagoshima, Japan.

1843 – Tivoli Gardens, one of the oldest still intact amusement parks in the world, opened in Copenhagen, Denmark. It may be best known for its wooden roller coaster, Rutschebanen, or Bjergbanen (the Mountain Coaster), built in 1914

1868 (Earthquake) Ecuador

1914 – The Panama Canal opened with the transit of the cargo ship SS Ancon.

1935 – Entertainer Will Rogers and pilot Wiley Post were killed after their aircraft developed engine problems during takeoff in Barrow, Alaska.

1939 – The Wizard of Oz premiered at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, California.

1947 – India gained Independence from the British Indian Empire.

1965 – The Beatles played at Shea Stadium in New York. It is considered the first major rock concert. There were only a few hundred watts of sound for the band, who did not have monitors to hear each other and could not be heard over the screaming of 60,000 fans.

1969 – The Woodstock Music & Art Fair opened in upstate New York. Tickets for the three-day event were $18 in advance and $24 at the gate, and there was sufficient sound for the 500,00 attendees. BTW – There were no reported incidents of violence at the original Woodstock.

1973 – The United States’ bombing of Cambodia ended.

1977 – The Big Ear, a radio telescope operated by Ohio State University as part of the SETI project, received a radio signal from deep space – “6EQUJ5.” The event was named the “Wow! signal” from the notation made by Jerry Ehman on the project. The signal appears to have come to the northwest of the globular cluster of M55 in the constellation Sagittarius, near the Chi Sagittarii star group.

1992 – Nickelodeon began airing their Saturday night programming known as SNICK

1858 – President James Buchanan inaugurated the new transatlantic telegraph cable by exchanging greetings with Queen Victoria in the United Kingdom.

1896 – Skookum Jim Mason, George Carmack, and Dawson Charlie discovered gold in a tributary of the Klondike River in Canada, starting the Klondike Gold Rush.

1920 – Ray Chapman of the Cleveland Indians is hit on the head by a fastball thrown by Carl Mays of the New York Yankees, and died early the next day.

1927 – The Dole Air Race from Oakland, California, to Honolulu, Hawaii. Six participating planes crashed or disappeared, only two made it to Hawaii.

1930 – The first color sound cartoon, called Fiddlesticks, was made by ex-Disney cartoonist Ub Iwerks. It appeared in the music video for Eminem’s song “The Real Slim Shady.” Ub went back to work for Disney in 1940.

1954 – The first issue of Sports Illustrated was published.

1989 – A solar flare from the Sun created a geomagnetic storm that affected micro chips, leading to a halt of all trading on Toronto’s stock market.

1807 – Robert Fulton’s North River Steamboat left New York, New York, to Albany, New York, on the Hudson River, inaugurating the first commercial steamboat service in the world.

1896 – Bridget Driscoll was run over by a Benz car in the grounds of The Crystal Palace, London. She was the UK’s first pedestrian motoring fatality.

1907 – Pike Place Market, in Seattle’s historic district, opened.

1908 – Fantasmagorie, the first animated cartoon, created by Emile Cohl, was shown in Paris, France.

1953 – The first meeting of Narcotics Anonymous took place in Southern California.

1958 – Pioneer 0, America’s first attempt at lunar orbit, is launched using the first Thor-Able rocket and failed.

1959 – Kind of Blue by Miles Davis, the best-selling jazz recording of all time, was released.

1969 – Hurricane Camille (Category 5) hit the U.S. Gulf Coast, killing 256 people.

1977 – The Soviet icebreaker Arktika became the first surface ship to reach the North Pole.

1978 – Double Eagle II became the first balloon to cross the Atlantic Ocean when it landed in Miserey, France near Paris, 137 hours after leaving Presque Isle, Maine.

1990 (Earthquake) Izmit, Turkey

2005 – Weeds premiered on Showtime

2008 – American swimmer Michael Phelps became the first person to win eight gold medals in one Olympic Games.

History on August 18

1587 – Virginia Dare, granddaughter of Governor John White of the Colony of Roanoke, becomes the first English child born in the Americas to Ananias and Eleanor Dare. She and the rest of the colonists at Roanoke disappeared at some point before August 18, 1590. The only clue was the word “Croatoan” carved into a post.

1868 – French astronomer Pierre Janssen discovered helium.

1903 – German engineer Karl Jatho allegedly flew his self-made, motored gliding airplane four months before the first flight of the Wright brothers.

1958 – Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel Lolita was published in the United States.

1977 – Steve Biko was arrested at a police roadblock under the ‘Terrorism Act No 83 of 1967’ in King William’s Town, South Africa. He died from injuries that occurred during his arrest. Peter Gabriel released a tribute to him, “Biko”, which became a hit in 1980.

2005 – A massive power blackout hits the Indonesian island of Java, affecting almost 100 million people, the one of the largest and most widespread power outages in history, and lasted just over six hours.

295 BC – The first temple to Venus, the Roman goddess of love, beauty, and fertility, was dedicated by Quintus Fabius Maximus Gurges

1612 – The “Samlesbury witches”, three women from the Lancashire village of Samlesbury, England, were put on trial, accused of practicing witchcraft, with all three of the Samlesbury women acquitted.

1692 – In Salem, Province of Massachusetts Bay, five people, one woman and four men, including a clergyman, are executed after being convicted of witchcraft at the Salem Witch Trials.

1812 – American frigate USS Constitution defeated the British frigate HMS Guerriere off the coast of Nova Scotia, Canada, earning the nickname “Old Ironsides”.

1848 – The New York Herald published the news to the East Coast of the US about the Gold Rush in California.

1909 – The first automobile race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

1934 – The first All-American Soap Box Derby was held in Dayton, Ohio.

1960 – With Korabl-Sputnik 2, the Soviet Union launched the satellite with the dogs Belka and Strelka, 40 mice, two rats, and a variety of plants. All of the creatures survived

1964 – Syncom 3, the first geostationary communication satellite, was launched.

1991 – Black groups target Hasidic Jews on the streets of Crown Heights in New York, New York for three days after two black children were hit by a car driven by a Hasidic man.

1000 – The foundation of the Hungarian state by Saint Stephen.

1858 – Charles Darwin first published his theory of evolution through natural selection in The Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London

1882 – Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture debuted in Moscow, Russia.

1920 – The first commercial radio station, 8MK “Detroit News Radiophone” (now WWJ), began operations in Detroit, Michigan.

1938 – Lou Gehrig hits his 23rd career grand slam, a record that stood until 2013 years when it was broken by Alex Rodriguez.

1975 – NASA launched the Viking 1 planetary probe toward Mars.

1977 – NASA launched the Voyager 2 spacecraft towards the outer solar system..

1883 – An F5 tornado strikes Rochester, Minnesota, leading to the creation of the Mayo Clinic.

1888 – The first practical adding machine in the United States was patented (#’s 388,116-388,119) by William Seward Burroughs.

1911 – The Mona Lisa was stolen by a Louvre employee, Vincenzo Peruggia. It was returned in 1913.

1957 – The Soviet Union successfully conducted a long-range test flight of the R-7 Semyorka, the first intercontinental ballistic missile.

1961 – Motown released what would be its first #1 hit, “Please Mr. Postman” by The Marvelettes.

1979 – Soviet dancer Alexander Godunov defected to the United States.

1992 – Ruby Ridge was the site of a deadly confrontation and siege in northern Idaho in 1992 between Randy Weaver, his family and his friend Kevin Harris, and agents of the United States Marshals Service (USMS) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). It resulted in the death of Weaver’s son Sammy, his wife Vicki, and Deputy U.S. Marshal William Francis Degan.

1994- HBO aired a concert special featuring Barbara Streisand and it was her first public concert in 27 years

565 – Columba, an Irish missionary, reported seeing a monster in Loch Ness, Scotland.

1791 – Haitian Slave Revolution in Saint-Domingue began. It ended with the founding of the Republic of Haiti in 1804.

1831 – Nat Turner’s slave rebellion began just after midnight in Southampton County, Virginia, leading to the deaths of more than 50 whites and several hundred African Americans who were killed in retaliation for the uprising.

1851 – First America’s Cup was won by the yacht ‘America.’

1902 – Cadillac Motor Company was founded.

1952 – The French penal colony on Devil’s Island is permanently closed.

1963 – American Joe Walker reached an altitude of 66 miles in an X-15 test plane.

1989 – Nolan Ryan struck out Rickey Henderson to become the first Major League Baseball pitcher to record 5,000 strikeouts.

2003 – Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore was suspended after refusing to comply with a federal court order to remove a rock inscribed with the Ten Commandments from the lobby of the Alabama Supreme Court building.

2004 The Edvard Munch Museum’s versions of ‘Madonna’ and ‘The Scream’ were stolen by masked men wielding firearms. The thieves forced the museum guards to lie down on the floor while they snapped the cable securing the paintings to the wall and escaped in a black Audi A6 station wagon, which police later found abandoned. Both paintings were recovered by the Oslo Police on 31 August 2006.

2007 – The Texas Rangers beat the Baltimore Orioles 30-3, the most runs scored by a team in modern MLB history.

79 – Mount Vesuvius began stirring, on the feast day of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire.

1305 – Sir William Wallace was executed for high treason at Smithfield in London.

1775 – King George III delivered his ‘Proclamation of Rebellion to the Court of St. James’s’ stating that the American colonies have proceeded to a state of open and avowed rebellion.

1948 – World Council of Churches was formed.

1966 – Lunar Orbiter 1 took the first photograph of Earth from orbit around the Moon.

1973 – A bank robbery went wrong in Stockholm, Sweden, turned into a hostage crisis; over the next five days the hostages begin to sympathize with their captors, leading to the term “Stockholm syndrome”.

1991 – Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web opened the WWW to new users.

1996- The Price Is Right celebrated its 25th anniversary special on CBS

1998 – That 70’s show premiered on FOX

2007 – The skeletal remains of Russia’s last royal family members Alexei Nikolaevich, Tsarevich of Russia, and his sister Grand Duchess Anastasia were discovered near Yekaterinburg, Russia.

2011 (Earthquake) Virginia/East Coast, USA

79 (Volcano Eruption) Mount Vesuvius erupted. The cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae were buried in volcanic ash, although some scholars believe it was October 24th.

1215 – Pope Innocent III declared Magna Carta invalid.

1456 – The printing of the Gutenberg Bible was completed.

1635 – Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635, Colonial USA

1662 – The Act of Uniformity requires England to accept the Book of Common Prayer.

1682 – William Penn received the area that is now the state of Delaware, and added it to his colony of Pennsylvania.

1690 – Job Charnock of the East India Company establishes a factory in Calcutta, essentially founding the city.

1891 – Thomas Edison applied for his patent (#589,168) the motion picture projector (kinetograph). It was approved on August 31.

1932 – Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the United States non-stop, from Los Angeles to Newark, New Jersey.

1979 – The Facts of Life premiered on NBC.

1998 – First radio-frequency identification (RFID) human implantation was tested in the United Kingdom.

1609 – Galileo Galilei demonstrated his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers.

1835 – The New York Sun perpetrated the Great Moon Hoax a six-part article falsely attributed to Sir John Herschel, one of the best-known astronomers of his time.

1916 – The United States National Park Service was created.

1944 – Paris was liberated by the Allies.

1950 – President Harry Truman ordered the US Army to seize control of the country’s railroads to avert a strike.

1994 – My So-Called Life premiered on ABC

2012 – Voyager 1 spacecraft entered interstellar space beyond our solar system becoming the first man-made object to do so.

2013 – At the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards, Miley Cyrus created a controversy by ‘Twerking’ during a performance with Robin Thicke.

1498 – Michelangelo began his work to carve the Pieta, depicting the body of Jesus on the lap of his mother Mary after the Crucifixion.

1789 – The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was approved by the National Constituent Assembly of France.

1791 – John Fitch was granted a United States patent (# X28) for the steamboat.

1883 (Volcano Eruption & Tsunami) Krakatoa began. It was one of the deadliest and most destructive volcanic events in recorded history, with at over 36,000 deaths being attributed to the eruption itself and the tsunamis it created. Small eruptions, mostly of mud, continued into October 1883.

1976 – While camping in Allagash, Maine Jim Weiner, Jack Weiner, Charles Foltz, and Charles Rak claimed to have been abducted by ‘four-fingered beings’ that performed experiments on them including alien probing.

410 – The sacking of Rome by the Visigoths ended after three days.

1813 – French Emperor Napoleon I defeated a larger force of Austrians, Russians, and Prussians at the Battle of Dresden.

1859 – Petroleum was discovered in Titusville, Pennsylvania leading to the world’s first commercially successful oil well.

1893 – Sea Islands Hurricane, Georgia, South Carolina.

1939 – First flight of the turbojet-powered Heinkel He 178, the world’s first jet aircraft, in Germany.

1962 – The Mariner 2 unmanned space mission was launched to Venus by NASA.

2003 – The first 6-party talks, involving South and North Korea, the United States, China, Japan, and Russia, convened to find a resolution to the security concerns as a result of the North Korean nuclear weapons program.

2003 – Mars made its closest approach to Earth in nearly 60,000 years, passing just 34,646,418 miles away.

2011 (Hurricane) Irene strikes the United States east coast, killing 47 people.

1609 – Henry Hudson discovered the Delaware Bay.

1789 – William Herschel discovered another Saturn moon, Enceladus.

1830 – The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad’s (B&O) new ‘Tom Thumb’ steam locomotive races a horse-drawn car, presaging steam’s role in US railroads.

1833 – The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 received Royal Assent, abolishing slavery through most the British Empire.

1845 – The first issue of Scientific American magazine was published.

1898 – Caleb Bradham invented the carbonated soft drink that would later be called “Pepsi-Cola”.

1955 – Black 14-year-old Emmett Till was brutally murdered in Mississippi, for ‘flirting’ with a white woman, galvanizing the nascent American Civil Rights Movement.

1963 – At the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his I Have a Dream speech

1996 – Charles, Prince of Wales, and Diana, Princess of Wales got divorced.

1758 – The first American Indian reservation was established, at Indian Mills, New Jersey.

1831 – Michael Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction, opening the door to electric generators.

1885 – Gottlieb Daimler patented the world’s first internal combustion motorcycle, the Reitwagen.

1898 – The Goodyear tire company was founded.

1922 – The first radio advertisement (for an apartment complex) was broadcast on WEAF-AM in New York City.

1949 – The Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb, known as First Lightning or Joe 1, at Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan.

1958 – United States Air Force Academy opened in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

1966 – The Beatles performed their last concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco.

1967 – ABC’s The Fugitive finale (part 1) was one of the most-watched episodes of the decade.

1982 – The synthetic chemical element Meitnerium, atomic number 109, was first synthesized at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, Germany.

1991 – Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union ended all activities of the Soviet Communist Party.

2005 (Hurricane) Katrina devastated the US Gulf Coast, from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle, killing an estimated 1,836 people.

1835 – Melbourne, Australia was founded.

1836 – The city of Houston, named after former General Sam Houston, was founded by Augustus Chapman Allen and John Kirby Allen.

1945 – Hong Kong was liberated from Japan by the British Armed Forces.

1963 – The Moscow to Washington hotline between the leaders of the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union went into operation.

1967 – Thurgood Marshall was confirmed as the first African American Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

1984 – The Space Shuttle Discovery took off on its maiden voyage.

1993- David Letterman premiered his late-night talk show on CBS.

1999- Countess Vaughn left the series Moesha for her own spinoff series The Parkers with Monique. She was the first African-American comedienne to receive a spin-off TV show.

2003 – While being towed across the Barents Sea, the decommissioned Russian submarine K-159 sank, taking nine of her crew and 800 kg of spent nuclear fuel with her.

1803 – Lewis and Clark started their expedition to the west by leaving Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

1888 – Mary Ann Nichols was murdered, the first of Jack the Ripper’s confirmed victims.

1897 – Thomas Edison received his patent (# 589168) for his Kinetoscope, the first movie projector.

1962 – Trinidad and Tobago became independent from Britain.

1965 – The Aero Spacelines Super Guppy aircraft made its inaugural flight.

1997 – Diana, Princess of Wales, her companion Dodi Fayed (with driver Henri Paul) died in a car crash in Paris.

2006 – Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream, stolen on August 22, 2004, was recovered in a raid by Norwegian police.

August 1st History, Facts and Trivia

August 1st History Highlights