Today in History (August 20th):
1741: Danish navigator Vitus Jonas Bering discovered what is now called Alaska.
1833: Birthdays: Benjamin Harrison, 23rd president of the United States;
1858: Theories by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace regarding evolution were published in British scholarly journal.
1881: Birthdays: British poet Edgar Guest;
1882: 1812 Overture by Peter Tchaikovsky was played in public for the first time.
1890: Birthdays: Horror writer H.P. Lovecraft;
1908: Birthdays: Baseball Hall of Fame member Al Lopez;
1910: Birthdays: Finnish architect Eero Saarinen;
1918: Birthdays: Author Jacqueline Susann;
1923: Birthdays: Country singer Jim Reeves;
1931: Birthdays: Boxing promoter Don King;
1933: Birthdays: Former U.S. senator and diplomat George Mitchell;
1941: Birthdays: Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic;
1942: Birthdays: Singer/songwriter Isaac Hayes;
1944: Birthdays: Former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi;
1946: Birthdays: Journalist Connie Chung;
1948: Birthdays: Rock star Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin fame;
1951: Birthdays: Science fiction writer Greg Bear;
1952: Birthdays: Musician John Hiatt;
1954: Birthdays: TV personality Al Roker;
1956: Birthdays: Actor Joan Allen;
1968: Approximately 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5,000 tanks invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring — a brief period of liberalization in the communist country.
1974: Birthdays: Actor Amy Adams.
1977: The first U.S. Voyager spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., bound for Jupiter and Saturn.
1982: U.S. President Ronald Reagan announced that a contingent of U.S. Marines would join French and Italian troops as peacekeepers in Beirut.
1986: Postal worker Patrick Henry Sherrill killed 14 fellow workers and wounded six others in the Edmond, Okla., post office before killing himself.
1990: U.S. President George H.W. Bush declared that Americans and other foreigners held by Iraq are hostages and warned he would hold Iraq responsible for their safety and well-being.
1996: U.S. President Bill Clinton signed into law an increase in the minimum wage in two steps from $4.25 to $5.15 an hour.
1997: NATO forces seized thousands of weapons being kept at police stations in Serbian Bosnia’s largest city.
1998: U.S. missiles struck sites in Afghanistan and Sudan said to be linked with terrorists. The attacks were in response to the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania 13 days earlier.
2002: A group of Iraqis opposed to the regime of Saddam Hussein took over the Iraqi Embassy in Berlin for five hours before releasing their hostages and surrendering.
2003: Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore was suspended after refusing to comply with a federal court order to remove a rock inscribed with the Ten Commandments from the lobby of the state supreme court building.
2005: In his first visit to his German homeland since becoming pope, Benedict XVI told a group of Muslims that Islam and Christianity must work together to defeat terrorism.
2007: The governor of Iraq’s southern al-Muthana province and five of his aides were killed when a roadside bomb struck their convoy. Mohammed Ali Hassan Al-Hassani was a member of the largest Shiite political group in Parliament.
2008: Spanish officials have put the death toll at 153 in the Madrid crash of a Spanair jet on takeoff. Twenty-seven people were said to have survived though injured. Observers told authorities the left jet engine was on fire as the plane took off.
2009: The Libyan convicted of the 1968 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over Scotland killing 270 people, was freed from prison on compassionate grounds. Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, who had been sentenced to life in prison in 2001, was said to be suffering from terminal prostate cancer. He died in May 2012.
2010: With U.S. combat troops leaving Iraq, the U.S. State Department announced a planned increase in civilian contractors to train police, help keep the peace and other duties. The Taliban killed at least 21 guards in a night attack on a construction site in Afghanistan’s Helmand River Valley.
2011: Two U.S. hikers who said they had wandered into Iran by mistake were sentenced to eight years in an Iranian prison for espionage. They were freed one month later and returned to the United States.
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“Who in their right mind would ever need more than 640k of ram!?” -Bill Gates, 1981
“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.” – Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” – Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943
“I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won’t last out the year.” — The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957
“But what … is it good for?” – Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” – Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp.,1977
“This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” – Western Union internal memo, 1876.
“The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?” – David Sarnoff’s associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.
“The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a ‘C,’ the idea must be feasible.” – A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith’s paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)
“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” – H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927.
“I’m just glad it’ll be Clark Gable who’s falling on his face and not Gary Cooper.” – Gary Cooper on his decision not to take the leading role in “Gone With The Wind.”
“A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make.” – Response to Debbi Fields’ idea of starting Mrs. Fields’ Cookies.
“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.” – Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.
“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” – Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.
“Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You’re crazy.” – Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil in 1859.
“Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” – Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929.
“Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.” – Marecha Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre.
“Everything that can be invented has been invented.” – Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.
“Louis Pasteur’s theory of germs is ridiculous fiction.” – Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872.
“The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon.” – Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria 1873.
“Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.” – Mae West, Movie Klondike Annie.
“Dream as if you’ll live forever. Live as if you’ll die today.” – James Dean
“When was ever honey made with one bee in a hive?” – Thomas Hood, 1799-1845
“Make use of time, let not advantage slip.” – William Shakespeare, 1564-1616
“We think too small. Like the frog at the bottom of the well. He thinks the sky is only as big as the top of the well. If he surfaced, he would have an entirely different view.” – Mao Zedong, 1893-1976
Benjamin Harrison (1833-1901) 23rd US President:
“I knew that my staying up would not change the election result if I were defeated, while if elected I had a hard day ahead of me. So I thought a night’s rest was best in any event.”
“I pity the man who wants a coat so cheap that the man or woman who produces the cloth will starve in the process.”
“We Americans have no commission from God to police the world.”
“No other people have a government more worthy of their respect and love or a land so magnificent in extent, so pleasant to look upon, and so full of generous suggestion to enterprise and labor.”
“Will it not be wise to allow the friendship between nations to rest upon deep and permanent things? Irritations of the cuticle must not be confounded with heart failure.”
“The indiscriminate denunciation of the rich is mischievous…. No poor man was ever made richer or happier by it. It is quite as illogical to despise a man because he is rich as because he is poor. Not what a man has, but what he is, settles his class. We can not right matters by taking from one what he has honestly acquired to bestow upon another what he has not earned.”
“Elvira always lied first to herself before she lied to anybody else, since this gave her a conviction of moral honesty.” – Phyllis Bottome, novelist (1884-1963)
Vocabulary