History Notes this week of Feb 9

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.

1554: Death of Lady Jane Grey, cousin of Edward VI (Henry VIII’s son and heir), who held the throne of England for nine days based on the deathbed will of the 15 year old Edward. The will itself, her attendant claim, and the stronger counter-claim by Henry’s daughter Mary triggered a succession crisis that ended in a conviction of treason against both Lady Grey and her husband Lord Guilford Dudley.

1587: Death of Mary, Queen of Scots (b.1542). executed on allegations of treason against Elizabeth I. She was, in fact, deeply entwined in several conspiracies seeking to depose Elizabeth and re-impose Catholic rule to Great Britain. She had family connections to the French throne, who threatened military action but sent none. The more aggressive Spanish throne was actually deep in planning to perform multiple assassinations, including a regicide, in order to un-do Henry VIII’s work of creating a nominally Protestant kingdom. Elizabeth’s counselor, Francis Walsingham, penetrated the Spanish plans and captured documents signed by Mary that directly implicated her in the plot. Her fate was thus sealed. At her execution, the axe man picked up her head to present it to the crowd, but it fell back to the platform, with the executioner left holding only her red hair, which was actually a wig that disguised her short, grey locks.

1693: In the colony of Virginia, the College of William and Mary is granted a Royal Charter from King William III and Queen Mary II. No word yet about what the monarchs instructed regarding the name for their athletic team’s mascot.

1733: British General James Oglethorpe settles the 13^th British colony in North America, Georgia, specifically formed to be a haven for Britain’s poor, especially those confined in debtor’s prison. Essentially, Georgia was settled by prisoners. 

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. Most importantly, 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

1775:  British Parliament formally declares Massachusetts to be in rebellion. 

1809: Birth of Abraham Lincoln (d.1865), born in a log cabin, in Hardin County, Kentucky. 

1809: Birth of British naturalist Charles Darwin (d.1882), whose observations of flora, fauna and fossils during the 4 ½ year circumnavigation voyage of HMS Beagle led him to develop the theory of natural selection as the means by which species adapted to their environments. He followed up his initial publication of On the Origin of Species with the explosive culmination of evolutionary theory in The Descent of Man, the: is mankind the current end point of essentially random natural processes or the end result of a creative God?

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.

1825: John Quincy Adams is elected to the Presidency by the House of Representatives.  In the four-way race for president during the November election, none of the other three candidates was able to secure a majority of electoral votes. Adams actually finished second in the original electoral count behind Andrew Jackson, who had a plurality, but not the required majority, thus sending the election to the House, per the rules laid down in the 12th Amendment to the Constitution.

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. A couple examples: 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.

1893: Birth of Omar N. Bradley (d.1981), “The Soldier’s General” in World War II. Patton’s deputy in North Africa, he vaulted over his former boss to lead the American armies swarming ashore at Normandy. After passage of the National Security Act of 1948, he was named the first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had the distinction of being the United States’ last surviving 5-star general.

1904: First shots of the Russo-Japanese War, a torpedo attack by Japanese warships against the Russian fleet anchored at Port Arthur, Manchuria. The bitter 18 month conflict centered on Russian desires for a warm-water seaport for their Pacific fleet, and the Japanese Empire’s equal determination to prevent such a force from establishing a presence so near the Japanese homeland.

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. 

1923: Birth of USAAF aviator Chuck Yeager (d.2020), first man to fly faster than Mach 1.0 and survive. 

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” 

1935: Crash of the U.S. Navy rigid airship USS Macon (ZRS-5) off the coast of Big Sur, California. The Navy was heavily invested in the technology of lighter-than-air vessels for reconnaissance and patrol, but the loss of Macon and the earlier losses of USS Akron (ZRS-4) and USS Shenandoah (ZR-1) sealed their fates.

1942: Continuing their South Pacific juggernaut, Japan initiates an invasion of Singapore.

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, successfully 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.

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.

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

1959: The Soviet Union launches the R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile- the world’s first- creating yet another layer of technical anxiety and competition between themselves and the U.S. The launch was the core issue in the “missile gap” controversy that dominated the 1960 presidential election between Vice President Richard Nixon and Senator John Kennedy.

1961: A trio hunting for geodes near Olancha, California, finds a likely nodule that they tentatively date at 500,000 years old. When they cut through the stone to hopefully find a beautiful crystal geode inside, they instead find what appears to be a 1920s vintage Champion spark plug. The Coso Artifact immediately generates a firestorm of controversy over geological dating methods. Wikipedia reports that other researchers, more certain than most, conclude that the dating method is infallibly accurate, therefore the spark plug was most likely the result of:
        1) An ancient, advanced civilization like Atlantis;
        2) A pre-historic visit by extraterrestrial travelers;
        3) Human time-travelers dropping something from their period.

1964: The Beatles perform their first gig on the Ed Sullivan Show.

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