Browsing: August 20

A Brief History On August 20, 1962, the NS Savannah set out on her maiden voyage, a trip from Yorktown, Virginia to Savannah, Georgia, through the Panama Canal and on to Hawaii.  This nuclear-powered cargo ship, the first of its kind, was built in New Jersey at a cost of $47 million. Digging Deeper The ship itself only cost $18 million, but adding the nuclear reactor and fuel added a whopping $29 million to the price, paid by the US government.  An allegedly “civilian” nuclear-powered icebreaker had been built by the USSR in 1957, and in all, only four nuclear-powered…

A Brief History This article presents a chronological list of notable events that happened on August 20th.  For each date below, please click on the date to be taken to an article covering that date’s event. Digging Deeper On either August 20 or September 8-10, 480 BC, the Persians defeated the Spartans in the Battle of Thermopylae. On August 20, 1858, naturalist Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution, the change of organisms over time through mutation and natural selection, in The Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London. On August 20, 1882, Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture made…

A Brief History On August 20, 1995, a horrific rail accident occurred on India’s Northern Railway.  Known as the “Firozabad rail collision,” a train carrying 2,200 sleeping passengers ran into another train that stopped after hitting a giant Nilgai antelope.  Officially 358 people died, although the count may have been higher. Digging Deeper There have been far worse rail accidents, including the “Bihar Train Disaster” in India of 1981, in which 500 to 800 people died, the 1917 “Ciurea Rail Disaster” in Romania which cost over 700 lives, and another 1917 disaster, the “Maurienne Derailment” in France, when 800 to…

A Brief History On August 20, 1858, naturalist Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution, the change of organisms over time through mutation and natural selection, in The Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London. Digging Deeper While we generally think of Darwin as the man that came up with the idea of “evolution,” there were other scientists at the time that also came to a similar conclusion, including fellow British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, whose work was published at the same time and in the same publication as Darwin’s. While most serious scientists today accept Darwin’s…

A Brief History On August 20, 2020, we finally got around to watching the third installment in the Deep Blue Sea movie franchise, the aptly named Deep Blue Sea 3.  Released on July 28, 2020, the film serves as a direct sequel to the second movie in the franchise, Deep Blue Sea 2, and like the first sequel, #3 is a direct to video release.  (Watch it “On Demand” or on a streaming site.)  Picking up where the first 2 films left off, with the genetic tinkering with of deadly sharks, the mad scientists have created intelligent killing machines that…