A Brief History On September 3, 1935, Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah was the scene of an historic automobile event, the first ever car to achieve a documented speed of over 300 mph. Sir Malcolm Campbell, motor journalist and race car driver, piloted a Rolls-Royce V-12 powered Campbell-Railton Blue Bird to a new land speed world record, a record he himself already held since March of 1935 in the same car. Digging Deeper Campbell had set new world land speed records in his Blue Bird five times, and in other cars four more times, making him a nine time world…
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A Brief History On September 2, 1963, CBS Evening News made TV history by becoming the first major nightly news show to be 30 minutes long instead of only 15 minutes. Prior to this event, the evening news was 15 minutes of local and 15 minutes of national news. Digging Deeper Other big changes to TV news include NBC switching its national news shows to color in 1966, quickly matched by rivals ABC and CBS. Still, a majority of Americans watched the news in black and white until 1972 when color TVs finally became the majority. Cleveland’s Dorothy Fuldheim became…
A Brief History On August 30, 1974, the third World Population Conference was held in Bucharest, Romania. The first such conference was held in Geneva, Switzerland in 1927, the idea of birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, under the aegis of the League of Nations. Experts in health, food supply, fertility and other relevant subjects met to examine how many humans the Earth could sustainably host. Subsequent conferences have been arranged by the United Nations starting in 1954. Digging Deeper The conference spawned the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, a subject fraught with religious, moral, and ethnic considerations. …
A Brief History On August 29, 1915, US Navy salvage crews raised the submarine, F-4, from the seabed off Honolulu where she had sunk with all hands on March 25, 1915, the first USN sub lost and another in a long list of Naval “Oops Moments.” Digging Deeper Tiny by today’s standards, the F-4 was only 142 feet and 7 inches long with a beam of 15 feet, with a crew of only 21 on the day she sank. Her original name had been USS Skate, although it was changed before her launch. Interesting trivia regarding her salvage is that…
A Brief History On August 24, 1998, science fiction and conspiracy theory met science fact when the first successful human implant of a radio tracker was tested in the UK. Digging Deeper Called “Radio-frequency identification, “or “RFID,” the device consists of a miniaturized radio transponder that when interrogated by a RFID “reader” sends identifying information to that reader, usually a coded number that is interpreted as whatever identity of person is assigned to the implant. Far from the conspiracy theory systems that allow satellites to observe and report on the location and movement of people with implants, for the device…
