Today in History

1896 – Guglielmo Marconi gave the first public demonstration of radio at Toynbee Hall, London.

1897 – The comic strip”The Katzenjammer Kids” (Hans and Fritz), by Rudolph Dirks, appeared in the New York Journal for the first time.

1899 – George Grant patented the wooden golf tee.

1900 – Charles M. Schwab formed the United States Steel Corporation.

1901 – The first radio signal to cross the Atlantic was picked up near St. John’s Newfoundland, by inventor Guglielmo Marconi.

l aircraft, the German Junkers J1, made its first flight.

1917 – Father Edward Flanagan opened Boys Town in Nebraska. The farm village was for wayward boys. In

1979 it was opened to girls.

1925 – The “Motel Inn,” the first motel in the world, opened in San Luis Obispo, CA.

1937 – Japanese aircraft sank the U.S. gunboat “Panay” on China’s Yangtze River. Japan apologized for the attack, and paid $2.2 million in reparations.

1946 – A United Nations committee voted to accept a sixblock tract of Manhattan real estate to be the site of the UN’s headquarters. The land was offered as a gift by John D. Rockefeller Jr.

1947 – The United Mine Workers union withdrew from the American Federation of Labor.

1951 – The U.S. Navy Department announced that the world’s first nuclear powered submarine would become the sixth ship to bear the name Nautilus.

1955 – It was announced that the Ford Foundation gave

$500,000,000 to private hospitals, colleges and medical schools.

1955 – British engineer Christopher Cockerell patented the first hovercraft.

1975 – Sara Jane Moore pled guilty to a charge of trying to kill U.S. President Ford in San Francisco the previous September.

1982 – 20,000 women encircled Greenham Common air base in Britain in protest against proposed cite of U.S.

Cruise missiles there.

1983 – Car bombs were set off in front of the French and U.S. embassies in Kuwait City. Shiite extremists were responsible for the five deaths and 86 wounded. Total of five bombs went off in different locations.

1984 – In a telephone conversation with U.S. President Reagan, William J. Schroeder complained of a delay in his Social Security benefits. Schroeder received a check the following day.

1985 – 248 American soldiers and eight crewmembers were killed when an Arrow Air charter crashed in Gander, Newfoundland after takeoff.

1989 – Britain forcibly removed 51 Vietnamese from Hong Kong and returned them to their homeland.

1989 – Leona Helmsley was fined $7 million and sentenced to four years in prison for tax evasion.

1991 – At the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California, the first web server outside of Europe was installed.

1994 – The Brazilian Supreme Court acquitted former President Fernando Collor de Mello of corruption charges that had forced him to resign in 1992.

1994 – IBM stopped shipments of personal computers with Intel’s flawed Pentium chip.

1995 – The U.S. Senate stopped a constitutional amendment giving Congress authority to outlaw flag burning and other forms of desecration against the American flag.

1997 – Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the international terrorist known as “Carlos the Jackal,” went on trial in Paris on charges of killing two French investigators and a Lebanese national. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.