Browsing: Sports

A Brief History On June 25, 1947, boxer Jimmy Doyle of Los Angeles, California had the opportunity of his life by getting to fight the legendary Sugar Ray Robinson for the welterweight boxing world championship in Cleveland, Ohio. Unfortunately for Jimmy, the fight did not go as planned, and proved to be the last time he would ever box or for that matter do anything else, as he was knocked out in the 9th round and never regained consciousness in the St. Vincent Charity Hospital, declared dead hours later. Digging Deeper While it is not rare for a boxer to…

A Brief History On June 18, 1815, the combined forces of the Duke of Wellington and Gebhard von Blucher defeated the French army at the battle of Waterloo. The battle is remembered by history not as a victory of the British and Prussians, but as a defeat for Napoleon Bonaparte, his final major defeat. Certain battles are known more for their vanquished than their victor, and in the past we published the article “10 Famous Defeats,” while today we examine “10 More Famous Defeats” but this time dealing with sporting events. Digging Deeper 1. Warriors blow 3-1 lead in NBA…

A Brief History On June 12, 1817, Karl Drais of Germany invented a contraption he called the “Laufmaschine,” German for “running machine” as the two wheeled single rider vehicle was powered by the rider scooting his feet along the ground. Also known as a “draisine” (German) or “draisienne” (French), this earliest form of bicycle later became known broadly as a “velocipede,” a term covering all types of bicycles and other people powered ground vehicles. Drais patented his invention in France in 1818, and the name continued to evolve to become known as “The Dandy Horse.” Digging Deeper The evolution of…

A Brief History On June 11, 1919, Sir Barton, a chestnut Thoroughbred race horse, won the Belmont Stakes, the third jewel in America’s horse racing Triple Crown, the “Big Three” horse races held in the United States each year. Sir Barton’s victory made it a sweep, the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, and the Belmont Stakes, making Sir Barton and his jockey, Johnny Loftus, the first man/horse team to win the fabled Triple Crown of horse racing. In the 99 years since then, there have been 12 more horses to win the coveted Triple Crown Trophy, the most recent being Justify…

A Brief History On May 16, 1960, a scientist at Hughes Research Laboratories in California, Theodore Maiman, operated the world’s first optical laser, a red (ruby) coherent light beam. We have published 2 articles about lasers (“November 14, 1967: The LASER is Patented” and “March 22, 1960: When Were Lasers Invented?”) and another article titled “Things That Did Not Exist (Or Were Different) on July 1, 1957” and today we list another 10 things that were not around when this author was born. (January 1957.) Digging Deeper 1. Video Games. Although rudimentary efforts to construct some sort of electronic video…