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Jan 11
On this date in 1973 Baseball’s American League adopted the “designated hitter” rule which allowed another player to bat for the pitcher, starting the slow decline of the American civilization. Disco also came out of the 1970s, clearly those were the days that tried men’s souls. Popularity: 12% [?] Dec 30
On this day in 1940 California opened its first freeway. As it turns out World War II would start in less than a year. During World War II the government implemented gas rationing. So there may have been sometime that LA’s Freeways were not crowded, but not in 1940. The Arroyo Seco Parkway runs between Los Angeles and Pasadena in Southern California for a distance of approximately 8.2 miles. This National Register-eligible road is a significant historic transportation resource, linking some of the most ethnically and historically diverse communities in the Los Angeles basin. 1940s Rose Queen at Ribbon Cutting Dedicated on December 30, 1940, the Arroyo Seco Parkway was the first freeway in the West. Limited access and the prohibition of cross-traffic provided driving safety and convenience, and marked the road as a thoroughly modern invention. Alternatively termed an engineering marvel and the big ditch, the facility became the prototype of the Los Angeles Freeway system. Like other Los Angeles area freeways, the road was at its design capacity before it was even built. Consequently, the planned emergency shoulder was converted into a travel lane during construction. The new lane was surfaced with asphalt, providing the road’s characteristic two-toned pavement. Intermittent “safety bays” were added in 1949 to compensate for the lack of shoulders. Popularity: 4% [?] Oct 18
My personal understanding of the history of computer’s was rewritten with this artcicle Many encyclopedias and other reference works state that the first large-scale automatic digital computer was the Harvard Mark 1, which was developed by Howard H. Aiken (and team) in America between 1939 and 1944. However, in the aftermath of World War II it was discovered that a program controlled computer called the Z3 had been completed in Germany in 1941, which means that the Z3 pre-dated the Harvard Mark I. The Z3’s architect was a German engineer called Konrad Zuse, who developed his first machine, the Z1, in his parents’ living room in Berlin in 1938. Although based on relays, the Z3 was very sophisticated for its time; for example, it utilized the binary number system and could perform floating-point arithmetic. Popularity: 6% [?] Oct 08
On this day in history the great Chicago fire started. It may not have been started by Mrs O’Leary’s cow as legend states. But we do know that a couple of hundred people were killed and 90,000 people lost their homes. What I did not know was that on the same day the largest forrest fire in U.S. history broke out. Peshtigo Fire,. Oct. 8, 1871, in which 1,182 people were killed by a wildfire that ultimately consumed more that 1 million acres (400,000 hectares) of forest. Peshtigo—at the time an important lumbering center—and several villages were destroyed. Because the disaster occurred in a remote area and on the same night as the Great Chicago Fire, it is little remembered. Popularity: 2% [?] Sep 27
On this day in 1964 the Warren commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone to kill president John F. Kennedy. On this day in 1998 Mark McGwire hit home runs 69 and 70 to break the home run record long held by Roger Maris. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Popularity: 7% [?] |
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