Sept 4- 476 CE: Romulus Augustulus, the last emperor of the Roman Empire, abdicates the throne and flees to Naples, marking the formal end of the empire’s 500-year history. 1888: American inventor George Eastman patents the first roll-film camera and registers the name “Kodak” as a trademark. 1957: Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus calls out the National Guard to prevent nine black students from entering Little Rock’s all-white Central High School. 2012: Scientists at the University of Manchester (England) unveil a “magic” carpet with fiber optic threads designed to track footsteps and prevent falls, particularly among “elderly” walkers.
Sept 5- 1774: The First Continental Congress meets at Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia, with delegates from 12 of the 13 colonies, including Samuel Adams from Massachusetts and future US presidents George Washington and John Adams, gathering to discuss responses to increasing British aggression. They agreed to implement a trade boycott and called for each colony to form and train its own militia. 1781: A fleet of 24 French ships defeats the British in the “Battle of the Chesapeake,” trapping forces led by General Charles Cornwallis in Virginia and hastening the end of the American Revolution. 2019: 74-year old Erramatti Mangamma gives birth to twins in Hyderabad, India; the oldest mother in history!
Sept 6- 1901: President William McKinley is shot by anarchist Leon Czolgosz while visiting the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo, NY. He would die eight days later from an infection resulting from his gunshot wounds, and Vice President Theodore Roosevelt would succeed him. 1916: The first modern supermarket in the United States is established by Clarence Saunders in Memphis, TN. The “Piggly Wiggly” at 79 Jefferson Avenue would officially open for business five days later after construction issues were resolved! 1992: Gay Kelleway becomes the first (and only) female jockey to win England’s Royal Ascot race. She was also the first jockey in history to carry a miniature television camera in her helmet. (Maybe the horse ran faster because he knew he was on TV)?
Sept 7- 1888: Edith Eleanor McLean is the first baby to begin her life in an incubator, at State Emigrant Hospital in Ward’s Island, NY. Born two months premature and weighing just 2 pounds, 7 ounces, the baby was placed inside a “hatching cradle” heated by a 55-gallon water drum. 1940: The German Luftwaffe bomb the city of London for the first of 57 consecutive nights in a campaign known as “The Blitz.” 41 planes were shot down that first night by British forces. 1979: The Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, better known as ESPN, debuted at 7:00 p.m. EDT to an audience estimated at thirty thousand viewers. Nearly 45 years later, the “Worldwide Leader in Sports” reaches more than 100 million US households and countless millions more around the globe. DA-DA-DA, DA-DA-DA!
Sept 8- 1504: Michelangelo’s sculpture of David, widely regarded as one of the most detailed and accurate artistic depictions of the human body, is unveiled in Florence, Italy. 1941: The 28-month Siege of Leningrad ends as Russian forces repel the Nazi army. More than one million Russians died during the preceding two years. 1966: The television show “Star Trek,” starring William Shatner as Captain Kirk and Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock, premieres on NBC. 2022: Queen Elizabeth II dies at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, ending her record reign of Great Britain of more than 70 years.
Sept 9- 1776: The Second Continental Congress officially adopts “The United States of America” as the country’s name, replacing “United Colonies.” 1817: Alexander Twilight receives a BA degree from Middlebury College in Vermont. He is believed to be the first African-American to earn a college degree. 1850: California joins the US as the 31st state, bypassing status as a “territory,” having qualified for statehood in record time as a result of the discovery of gold the previous year and the huge numbers of Americans migrating to the area. 1956: Elvis Presley appears on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time. 1972: The USSR’s Olympic Basketball Team pulls off a stunning upset, beating the USA 51-50 for the Gold Medal. The game was mired in controversy as officials allowed the game’s final three seconds to be replayed three times, resulting in the last-second win by the Soviets!
Sept 10- 1894: London taxicab driver George Smith achieves the dubious distinction as the first person to be charged and fined for drunk driving! 1924: Nathan Leopold, Jr. and Richard Loeb are found guilty of murder by a jury in Chicago, IL, ending the trial for what was called “the crime of the century.” The two University of Chicago students had kidnapped and murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks, hoping to demonstrate that their “superior intellect” enabled them to commit a “perfect crime” without consequences. Both men received 99-year prison sentences. 2008: The Large Hadron Collider, located at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland is powered up for the first time. (And because my specialty is history, not physics, I will leave it at that!)
The Large Hadron Collider uses superconducting magnets to smash sub-atomic particles together at enormous energies. CERN
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