A Brief History On February 8, 1879, Scottish Canadian inventor and engineer Sandford Fleming proposed the adoption of Universal Standard Time at The Royal Canadian Institute. Fleming proposed that the world be divided into 24 time zones, each 15 degrees of longitude in breadth and sequentially one hour behind the preceding time zone. All land within each time zone would be set to the same time. Up until this time, clocks in every city and town had been set to local time based on each location’s position on the Earth, creating no standards of keeping time and mass confusion when…
Browsing: February 8
A Brief History On February 8, 1960, the Hollywood Walk of Fame was officially opened with the placement of the first 8 brass and terrazzo stars in the famous sidewalk. The Walk of Fame would almost immediately become a tourist favorite and a treasured honor to have one’s name placed in the sidewalk at Hollywood Blvd. and Vine St. in Hollywood, California. Digging Deeper Administered by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, the attraction gets about 10 million visitors per year. Now having over 2500 stars (no, we are not going to list them!), the inaugural class of 8 plaques included…
A Brief History In the night of February 8-9, 1855, the fresh snow of Devon, England was marked with mysterious, bipedal, cloven-hoofed tracks often referred to as “The Devil’s Footprints.” (Please click on the link for an informative video.) Digging Deeper The tracks were especially unusual in nature in that they were said to have stretched for 40 to 100 miles over the south-western tip of England and to have gone right over tall objects such as buildings and haystacks rather than going around them. Mostly in a straight line, the prints were about 4 inches long by 3 inches wide, with a stride…
A Brief History On February 8, 1993, General Motors Corporation announced a lawsuit against NBC’s Dateline “news” show for falsely portraying Chevrolet pickup trucks as fire hazards! Digging Deepr Digging deeper, we find the announcement accompanied by a 2+ hour rebuttal to the November 1992 show where Dateline showed Chevrolet trucks exploding from side impacts. It turns out, however, that Dateline could not get the trucks to burst into flame by broadsiding them with another vehicle, so they used explosives to make their “news” happen! The show generated much disgust and hatred toward General Motors and encouraged lawsuits against them, although…
