Author: Major Dan

A Brief History On June 10, 1943, Hungarian-Jewish inventors Laszlo and György Biro were granted a patent in Britain for the successful modern ballpoint pen.  Prior to their invention, attempts to make ballpoint pens failed to find the balance between ink that would be liquid in the pen and yet dry quickly on paper. Digging Deeper American John J. Loud had invented a ballpoint pen half a century before the Biro brothers, but his attempt, like others, was not successful. Laszlo was the genius behind the mechanics of the workable pen, while György made the ink work properly.  The brothers…

A Brief History On June 9, 1973, Secretariat, often called “Big Red,” won the final round of horse racing’s Triple Crown, the Belmont Stakes, by an unprecedented and unequaled 31 lengths!  In fact, Secretariat won the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont all in record times that still stand 50 years later! Digging Deeper Secretariat was a big, strong horse, 16 ¾ hands high and weighing in at 1155 pounds.  With a stride of 24 feet 11 inches, he could cover ground at a top speed of 49 miles per hour carrying a jockey, even faster if unburdened.  His…

A Brief History On June 8, 1959, the US Navy teamed up with the United States Post Office Department to attempt to resurrect the concept of sending mail via rocket or missile. Digging Deeper The submarine, USS Barbero, was employed to launch a Regulus cruise missile, normally armed with a nuclear warhead but this time carrying Post Office containers, from the Atlantic Ocean to Naval Station Mayport in Florida. The 22-minute flight of the missile accurately delivered the commemorative “mail” enclosed, each piece addressed to President Eisenhower and other government officials.  While the test was technically successful, no such program…

A Brief History On June 7, 1938, the government of Nationalist China, at war with the Japanese invaders in the Second Sino-Japanese War, destroyed the embankments of the Yellow River, creating a massive flood in order to halt the advance of the Japanese Army. Digging Deeper The event called “The 1938 Yellow River Flood” was part of a war strategy of “scorched earth” policy, leaving little or nothing for the invaders to use in their conquest.  Described as the “largest act of environmental warfare in history,” the resulting flood killed between 500,000 and 900,000 Chinese civilians and created about 3…

A Brief History On June 6, 2002, high above the Mediterranean Sea, an asteroid estimated at about 10 meters in diameter exploded in the upper atmosphere with a similar effect to a 26 kiloton nuclear bomb, a larger blast than either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs.  What is really scary is that scientists failed to detect the approach of this chunk of space stuff and there would have been no warning had it hit the surface of the Earth! Digging Deeper Known as “The 2002 Eastern Mediterranean event,” another scary “what if” scenario involved the tense military stand-off happening between…