History Notes this week of April 16

1446: Death of Filippo Brunelleschi (b.1377), designer and chief engineer of the dome topping the Florence cathedral. The span and weight of the dome was orders of magnitude larger than ever previously attempted, and Brunelleschi’s innovative thinking and close supervision of the project ensured its successful completion. 

1452: Birth of Leonardo da Vinci (d.1519).

1492: Genovese mariner Christopher Columbus signs a contract with the Spanish Court to find a direct ocean passage to the Indies.

1521: At the Diet of Worms ( an imperial conclave of secular and ecclesiastical nobility; Worms: a city in Germany), the monk Martin Luther is excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church for heresy and denying the authority of the pope. During his cross-examination he is repeatedly asked,“Do you recant?” (i.e., from his writings on the nature of forgiveness). In his timeless reply, he firmly responds, “Unless I am convicted by scripture and plain reason – I do not accept the authority of the popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other – my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me, Amen!“

1534: Sir Thomas More is imprisoned in the Tower of London. More was asked to appear before a commission and swear his allegiance to the parliamentary Act of Succession. More accepted Parliament’s right to declare Anne Boleyn the legitimate Queen of England, though he refused “the spiritual validity of the king’s second marriage”,and, holding fast to the teaching of papal supremacy, he steadfastly refused to take the oath of supremacy of the Crown in the relationship between the kingdom and the church in England.

1755: Publication of Samuel Johnson’s  A Dictionary of the English Language. The project was contracted for three years, but took nine, and remained the standard for our native tongue until publication of the first Oxford English Dictionary in 1928.

1770: Captain James Cook in HMS Endeavour arrives at New South Wales and begins exploration and survey of the Great Barrier Reef.

1789: George Washington leaves his Mount Vernon home, enroute to New York City for his inauguration as the first President of the United States.

1861: Union forces abandon and burn the Gosport Navy Yard in Portsmouth, Virginia. Confederate engineers poking through the smoldering wreckage are later able to salvage the lower hull of USS Merrimack and convert it into the ironclad gunboat CSS Virginia.

1867: Birth of aviator, first in flight, Wilbur Wright (d.1912).

1881: Bat Masterson’s last shootout. In support of his brother James, sheriff of Dodge City, the elder Masterson travels from Tombstone, Arizona to confront and shoot two criminals who were terrorizing the Kansas cattle town. No one was killed, although several were injured. A jury reasoned that his actions were essentially in keeping with the laws of the city at the time and fined him $8.00 for disturbing the peace.

1889: Birth of Adolf Hitler (d.1945), in the town of Braunau am Inn, in Austria-Hungary.

1894: Birth of Nikita Khrushchev (d.1971), Soviet Premiere of the 50s and 60s.

1903: Birth of Eliot Ness (d.1957). The head of  “The Untouchables” of the nascent FBI, who finally nailed Chicago gangster Al Capone on Tax Evasion charges.

1920: The League of Nations recognizes the Balfour Declaration and creates the British Mandate of Palestine from lands ceded by the Ottoman Empire at the close of the Great War.

1927: Mae West is sentenced to 10 days in jail for obscenity from her recent play Sex. She ended up serving 8 days, with 2 off for good behavior, and ate dinners with the warden, “…and I wore silk underwear while I was in jail.”

1939: Baseball player and US Navy F9F Panther pilot (WWII) Ted Williams’ first major league hit, a double. His last hit was a home run on September 28^th, 1960 at Fenway Park.

1945: Lieutenant Colonel Boris Pash, USA, seizes 1,100 tons of enriched uranium in Strassfurt, Germany. The Nazis were not collecting it to make glowing watch faces, but you probably deduced that part. It would be fair to say this capture was a close run thing in the race for atomic weapons, if not for the incipient Nazi threat, but also for the chance that our Soviet “allies” could have found it first.

1945: Soldiers of the Soviet Red Army enter Berlin.

1947: Birth of Lew Alcindor, who later became Kareem Abdul-Jabar, holder of the NBA record for points scored, six MVP awards and six NBA championships.

1951: Mickey Mantle steps on-field for his first game with the New York Yankees.

1952: First flight of Boeing’s B-52 Stratofortress. Note: one third of our nation’s nuclear triad depends on a 71 year old airplane design.

1953: USS New Jersey (BB-62) shells communist forces in and around Wonsan Harbor from Wonsan Harbor itself.

1955: Volkswagen opens its first U.S. dealership in Englewood, NJ. An invasion of Beetles follows.

1961: First day of the Bay of Pigs invasion, a failed military landing operation on the southwestern coast of Cuba in 1961 by Cuban exiles, covertly financed and directed by the United States. It was aimed at overthrowing Fidel Castro’s communist government. The operation took place at the height of the Cold War, and its failure influenced relations between Cuba, the United States, and the Soviet Union.

1964: The British press sensationally reports sentencing of “307 Years” for the 12 men involved in the August ’63 Great Train Robbery. The heist netted 2.6 million pounds in used English bank notes. The perpetrators received individual sentences ranging from 10 to 30 years.

1970: After a harrowing trip around the moon and manual course corrections made by sightings through the LM windows along the limb of the earth, Apollo 13 Commander Jim Lovell, and crew Fred Haise and Jack Swigert make a successful splashdown within sight of the recovery ship USS Iwo Jima (LPH-2). 

1972: Launch of Apollo 16, the fifth of six total Apollo flights to land on the moon. Astronauts John Young and Charlie Duke spend just under three days on the surface and collect more than 200 pounds of rock samples. Thomas Mattingly remained with the command module in lunar orbit. 

1972: Apollo 16 successfully lands on the Moon. The landing was delayed 7 hours when a control rocket failed in the command module just after Lunar Module (LM) separation. Rather than descend to the surface and risk missing the lunar ascent rendezvous, the LM crew of John Young** and Charlie Duke flew formation on Ken Mattingly in the CM until the problem was solved. The delay cut from three to two the number of excursions taken in the lunar buggy but the instrumentation set up and 212 pound haul of lunar rocks made the mission an outstanding scientific success.

1978: A Korean Air Lines jetliner is forced down by the Soviet Air Force. Deviating with a sudden turn to the east from its normal Paris-Seoul polar flight route, the aircraft was intercepted crossing into Soviet airspace. Instead of landing at the airport indicated by the Soviet fighters, the crew put the plane down with a hard landing on a frozen lake south of Murmansk. Two passengers were killed and several others injured. Soviet authorities were “amazingly unhelpful” in helping to understand the incident.

1989: A massive explosion in turret 2 of USS Iowa (BB-61) kills 47 sailors. The initial investigation did not conclusively determine the actual cause of the disaster, with potential theories ranging from a suicide by a disgruntled gunner, to unstable powder, to faulty training and procedures, to the usual leadership and management finger-pointing. A second investigation studied in great detail the condition of the powder in the silk bags, first milled in 1930’s, and came to the conclusion that improper powder storage during Iowa’s 1988 overhaul created conditions that generated highly flammable ether gas inside the bags. Iowa’s turret was cleaned and stabilized but was never fired again. The ship was decommissioned in October of 1990, was struck from the Naval Register in 2006, and is now a museum ship at the port of San Pedro, California.

1998: Death of Pol Pot (b.1925), Cambodian revolutionary, dictator, and politician who ruled Cambodia as Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea between 1976 and 1979. He was a leading member of Cambodia’s communist movement, the Khmer Rouge, from 1963 until 1997 and he served as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea[d] from 1963 to 1981. His administration converted Cambodia into a one-party communist state and perpetrated the Cambodian genocide.