I thought I had a great idea for a trivia question. The date of the first artificial Earth satellite is well known, October 4th, 1957. But I knew that some of those early satellite missions were fairly short. So what, I wondered, was the last date on which there was no artificial satellite in Earth orbit?
It turns out I was slightly wrong in a couple ways. Sputnik 1 transmitted for only 21 days, but that’s because the batteries ran out. It continued to orbit until January 4th, by which time Sputnik 2 had already been launched. Similarly with Sputnik 2 and Explorer 1. The last day without an artificial satellite was October 3rd, 1957, and it seems likely that there will always be something man-made circling over our heads for as long as there are people down here to know about them.
But it got me thinking about other famous (or not so famous) lasts. What things are there that ended on known dates? I suppose there were the last confederate war widow, and the last passenger pigeon. Will we track the last veterans and widows of other wars (four of the Doolittle Raiders are still alive)? Will we someday destroy the last remaining laboratory samples of the smallpox virus?
What are some other good examples that have gone, or will go the way of all things; either famous, or that only a few will notice?
The world’s last telegram service shut down in India in 2013. The last telegram was sent on July 14, 2013. (The last telegram in the United States was sent on January 27, 2006.)
Here’s one, posed by one of my college computer science profs, that would probably be understood mainly by assembly language programmers:
Figure out how to write a macro, using whatever conditional assembly pseudo-ops your assembler offers, that assembles to something different the last time it is called (as opposed to all the other times it is called).
The last Civil War widow didn’t die until 2008. Her name wasMaudie Celia Hopkins from Arkansas. Oddly enough, she didn’t even know she had the title until a few years before her death because there was a much more celebrated case of Alberta Martin from Alabama that died in 2004. It was only after the media made a spectacle out of Alberta Martin’s passing that the family of Maudie Hopkins realized that they had an even more current claim.
My own great-great grandfather, William Henry James, was one of the very last surviving Civil War soldiers but he wasn’t the last by far even though he didn’t die until 1949 at 100 years old. I have a copy of Life magazine from 1949 with him and the few remaining ones spread over a couple of pages. The absolute last surviving Civil War veteran was Albert Woolson and he didn’t die until 1956.
One of the oddest pieces of trivia that exists is that John Tyler, 10th president of the United States, born in 1790, still has two living natural grandsons. They aren’t mutants. It is just that the whole family had a talent for living really long and procreating extremely late in life. However, I doubt those are the only two cases of such a thing happening in the world. At some point in the near future, we are going to be left with the only person in the world with a true grandparent that was born in the 1700’s.