History Notes this week of Feb 10

399BC: Socrates is sentenced to death. A glass of hemlock seals his fate in the presence of his students. Do you ever wonder about this? Me too. Socrates was one of the leading intellectual lights of classical Athens. As a philosopher, he questioned almost everything and everyone, forcing men- not just students, but political leaders- to confront their own false thinking. Socrates called himself  “Athens’ gadfly” (like the fly that stings a horse into action). Eventually, his annoyances became too much for the Administration, and he was convicted at a kangaroo court of: 1) “corrupting youth” and, 2) “failing to honor Athens’ gods.”

270AD: Traditional date of the martyrdom of one of the Roman Church fathers, Valentinus. There are really only two known facts about him: 1) his name, and; 2) his burial place north of Rome. His most common identity is either as a priest in Rome or a bishop of Terni, not far inland from Rome itself. The most detailed account of his activities indicates he was persecuted by Emperor Claudius II, for officiating at the marriage of Christian couples, which was illegal at the time. Claudius himself became friends with Valentinus until the priest tried to convert the Emperor himself to Christianity, at which point  his vocation became treason. Conventional stoning failed to kill him, and the execution ended with his beheading. 

600AD: Pope Gregory the Great issues a decree that confirms, “God bless you” is the correct response to a sneeze.

1542: Death of Catherine Howard (b.1523), Henry VIII’s fifth wife and first cousin to Anne Boleyn; executed for adultery. She is beheaded at age 19 after only 17 months of marriage to the mercurial king.

1564: Birth of Galileo Galilei (d.1642) in Pisa, Italy. Italian natural philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who made fundamental contributions to the sciences of motion, astronomy, and strength of materials and to the development of the scientific method. His formulation of (circular) inertia, the law of falling bodies, and parabolic trajectories marked the beginning of a fundamental change in the study of motion. His insistence that the book of nature was written in the language of mathematics changed natural philosophy from a verbal, qualitative account to a mathematical one in which experimentation became a recognized method for discovering the facts of nature. Finally, his discoveries with the telescope revolutionized astronomy and paved the way for the acceptance of the Copernican heliocentric system, but his advocacy of that system eventually resulted in an Inquisition process against him.

1763: Signing of the Treaty of Paris, which ends the fighting known in the New World as the French and Indian War. France lost territories in North America: everything west of the Mississippi went to her ally Spain in compensation for Spain’s loss of Florida to Great Britain. France lost everything east of the Mississippi, including all of French Canada, to Great Britain. They also lost most of their Caribbean islands to l’Albion perfide, thus confirming Britain’s absolute colonial dominance of the North American theater.

1778: John Paul Jones, Commanding Officer of the sloop of war USS Ranger, receives the first official salute of the US flag* by a foreign power in Quiberon, France.

1779: Death of Captain James Cook (b.1728), during his third voyage of discovery in the Pacific Ocean. He was initially greeted as a god by the natives of Hawaii, who lavished him and his crew with every type of assistance during their earlier month-long stay on the island. Only a week or so after their departure, HMS Resolution suffered problems with her rigging, which necessitated the ship’s return for repairs. The islanders were not happy to see them again, and on this day attempted to steal a longboat from Cook’s shore party. A scuffle ensued, and dozens of the islanders descended on Cook and beat him to death as the rest of the crew vainly fought them off until they could themselves escape. After the event, the Hawaiians honored Cook’s body with full royal rites and ceremony.

1797: A Royal Navy fleet of 15 ships of the line (plus 5 frigates) under Admiral Sir John Jervis, meets, splits and soundly defeats a Spanish fleet of 27 ships of the line (plus 7 frigates) at the Battle of Cape Saint Vincent. The decisive victory allowed the RN to resume its patrols in the Mediterranean, and brought fame and fortune to Jervis, including ceremonial swords, gold medals, promotion, knighthood, and a huge share of prize money. His young commander Horatio Nelson was recognized for his display of tactics and courage during the battle, leading a boarding party to capture the Spanish ship San Nicholas, with which his own ship Captain was entangled. Seizing the opportunity to double the capture, Nelson then ordered a second boarding party to continue with him across to the similarly entangled San Jose, which also surrendered to Nelson. Nelson himself was knighted into the Order of Bath and made Rear Admiral, and given command of the RN force that went on to repeated victories against the French throughout the Mediterranean theatre, most notably at the Battle of the Nile 18 months hence. 

1804: American naval captain Stephen Decatur leads a daring nighttime raid in Tripoli harbor. He and a hand-picked cadre of men re-board and set fire to the former American frigate USS Philadelphia, which grounded last October and was subsequently captured by the Pasha of Tripoli. The raid climaxes by burning the ship to the waterline to prevent its use by the Barbary pirates. None other than Horatio Lord Nelson called Decatur’s work “The most bold and daring act of the Age.” Decatur himself returned to the United States a national hero. 

1812: Massachusetts Governor Eldridge Gerry signs a redistricting bill designed to favor his Democratic-Republican political party. The unusual shape of the ensuing districts, one in particular that was shaped like a salamander, prompted widespread derision and anger, and eventually the coining of a new verb to describe the act: gerrymandering.

1818: Birth of the great abolitionist and spellbinding public speaker, Frederick Douglass (d.1895).

1847: Birth of Thomas Alva Edison (d.1931), the inventor dubbed “The Wizard of Menlo Park,” who held 1,093 U.S. patents on a plethora of gadgets and processes that in many respects define the 20^th century. He began his professional life as a telegrapher, becoming very familiar with the physics and practical application of electricity, which in turn fed his mind with scores of ideas, many of which paid off handsomely: the stock market ticker, the kinetoscope motion picture process, phonographic sound recording and, of course, the carbon-filament incandescent light bulb. One of his most important works was the establishment of his industrial research laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where he and a core staff pursued any and every lead enroute to the next big thing. 

1898: The American battleship USS Maine mysteriously blows up in Havana harbor. In the United States, William Randolph Hearst leads the journalistic hysteria in demanding a declaration of war with Spain, not only to avenge the loss of the ship and its sailors, but to free Cuba and the Philippine Islands from the yoke of Spanish colonial oppression. The “Splendid Little War” that follows gives us Colonel Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders’ charge up San Juan Hill, the battle of Manila Bay (“You may fire when your are ready Gridley…”) and new American possessions of Cuba, the Philippine Islands and Puerto Rico.

1906: Launch of HMS Dreadnaught, the first modern battleship, whose innovations were so overwhelming that she immediately made all earlier warships completely obsolete. The scramble to compensate for Britain’s sudden advantage triggered a naval armaments race- particularly with Germany- that was one of the proximate triggers for the Great War eight years hence. Dreadnaught’s technical innovations centered on her design as an “all big gun” platform: ten 12” guns mounted in five turrets with only minimal secondary armament, as opposed to the conventional bristling of multiple layers of secondary and tertiary guns. She was also the first warship to be powered by steam turbines, giving her a speed in excess of 21 knots, unheard of in an age of 12 knot capital ships. For naval historians, HMS Dreadnaught set the marker that decisively defined the end of the transition from sail to steam, and set the standard for all the naval innovations to come. There is the pre-Dreadnaught era, and the Dreadnaught era, which lasted to the rise of aircraft carriers in the early 1930s. 

1923: Birth of USAAF aviator Chuck Yeager (d.2020), first man to fly faster than Mach 1.0 and live to talk about it. His steely nerves made him an ideal test pilot in the transition period between props and jets and into high-performance supersonic flight.

1924: King Tut’s tomb is opened, three months after its discovery by explorer Howard Carter. Earlier, on November 26, 1922, Carter made the famous “tiny breach in the top left hand corner” of the doorway, and was able to peer in by the light of a candle and see that many of the gold and ebony treasures were still in place. He did not yet know at that point whether it was “a tomb or merely a cache”, but he did see a promising sealed doorway between two sentinel statues. When Lord Carnarvon asked him if he saw anything, Carter replied: “Yes, I see wonderful things”.

1933: President-elect Franklin Roosevelt survives an assassination attempt in Miami. An unemployed bricklayer named Guiseppe Zangara shouts “Too many people are starving!” and fires six shots toward FDR, who had just finished a speech from the back of his car. Five people were hit, including the mayor of Chicago, who was mortally wounded. Zangara was executed for the killing on March 5^th, a mere four weeks after the event.

1939: Launch of the German battleship Bismarck. World War II battleship was 823 ft long, weighed 41,700 tons, and had a speed of 30 knots. The Bismarck had eight 15-inch guns and was considered a fearsome combination of size, speed, and firepower.

1941: Birth of North Korea’s “Dear Leader” Kim Jong Il (d.2012).

1942: 36 hours after getting underway from their Atlantic naval base in Brest, France, the German pocket battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, and more than 40 escort ships tie up in Williamshaven and other German seaports, completing a dramatic “Channel Dash” mere miles from Britain’s south coast. The meticulously planned** Operation Cerberus caught British channel defenses completely flat-footed, with uncoordinated radar tracking and ambiguous command coordination between fighters and bombers doing nothing to mitigate the German advantage from deteriorating daylight weather conditions. Even the massive shore batteries at Dover failed to score a hit after hundreds of rounds fired. The Luftwaffe provided continuous air cover over the fleet, maintaining an effective air offence of 32 bombers and 252 fighters with on-station reliefs. The butcher’s bill for the British included severe damage to a destroyer and several motor torpedo boats, the loss of 42 aircraft, and 250 men killed or wounded. The Germans suffered damage to all three capital ships, the loss of 22 aircraft, and 36 deaths (13 sailors + 23 aircrew). In the end the dramatic tactical success of the Dash failed to translate into strategic success in the North Sea theater, with all three ships subsequently isolated and damaged beyond operational capability.

1942: Singapore falls to Japanese forces. Continuing their juggernaut throughout the western Pacific region, the Japanese army’s Malay Peninsula campaign ends with the surrender of over 60,000 British and Imperial forces defending Singapore. The defenders realized that virtually all of Singapore’s defenses were designed to repel an attack from seaward. The Japanese arrived instead from the landward approaches and entered the island opposed only by small arms fire across the single small bridge connecting it to the mainland.

1945: An overnight Allied air raid on Dresden ignites a literal firestorm, killing upwards of 300,000 civilians (some estimates climb toward 500,000), many of whom had just recently fled to Dresden from the fighting along the Russian front. Dresden’s casualty count is higher than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. 1600 acres of the central city is pulverized to rubble in the 13-hour raid (132200FEB45-141030FEB45).

1945: Three years after its loss to the Japanese, American forces re-take the island fortress of Corregidor in Manila Bay.

1945: President Franklin Roosevelt meets with Ibn Saud, King of Saudi Arabia, aboard USS Quincy (CA-71) in the Great Bitter Lake of the Suez Canal. The meeting formally established diplomatic ties between the new Arab kingdom and the United States.

1950: Birth of the great Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz, 9-time Olympic gold medalist, including 7 at the 1972 games in Munich. 

1956: At the 20^th Soviet Party Congress, General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev gives a four-hour speech entitled “The Personality Cult and its Consequences.” Given behind closed doors, it is often referred to as the “Secret Speech,” although it gained wide and official circulation in the months that followed. In it, Khrushchev repudiates the methods and results of Stalin’s stewardship of the Soviet state, in particular, the perversion of leadership into a cult of personality, and the wholesale abuses of individuals and groups who opposed his rule. Although the speech was intended to lift Soviet Russia into a new, more open environment, the bureaucracy that underlay Stalin’s power stayed in place through 1990.

1959(a): Fidel Castro is sworn in as Prime Minister of Cuba after forcing former dictator Fulgencio Batista into exile in the Dominican Republic. The event is the culmination of the three-year guerrilla campaign that Castro, his brother Raul and Che Guevarra, the hard-line Argentine Marxist, led from the Sierra Maestra mountains. Fidel’s dictatorship was the first Communist government in the Western Hemisphere.

1959(b): Birth of tennis great John McEnroe. 

1971: Great Britain officially adopts the decimal system for their currency, dropping the ancient pound-shilling-pence (“LSD”) denominations.

1972: Wilt Chamberlain scores his 30,000^th point in a game against the Phoenix Suns, completed in 941 games. Five of the remaining six players with that point total took well over a thousand games to get there; the sixth, Michael Jordan, took 960.

1996: Chess Grand Master Garry Kasparov loses his first match to the IBM Deep Blue supercomputer.