December 17, 2009: The ship MV Danny F II sinks off the coast of Lebanon, carrying 83 people, 10,224 sheep, and 17,932 cattle. Thirty-nine people were rescued and nine human bodies recovered. The other passengers and animals are presumed to have died.
December 17, 1903: The Wright Brothers of Dayton, Ohio take to the air over the sands of Kitty Hawk, N.C. The first powered flight, by Orville, was shorter than the length of a Boeing 747 jet aircraft.
December 18, 1892: Premiere performance of The Nutcracker by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in Saint Petersburg, Russia. In general, the performance was not a success.
December18, 1879: Painter Paul Klee is born.
December 19, 1998: President Bill Clinton is impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the second (but not the last) President of the United States to be impeached.
December 19, 1907: The Darr Mine disaster kills 239 in Pennsylvania.
December 20, 1987: In the worst peacetime sea disaster, the passenger ferry Doña Paz sinks after colliding with the oil tanker Vector in the Tablas Strait in the Philippines, killing an estimated 4,000 people (1,749 official).
December 21, 1913: Arthur Wynne’s “word-cross”, the first crossword puzzle, is published in the New York World.
December 23, 1954: The first successful human kidney transplant took place in the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston as a surgical team removed a kidney from a 23-year-old Ronald Herrick and implanted it in Herrick’s twin brother.
[Later, a man hailed a Boston cab, got in and told the cabbie to get him to a hospital. The cabbie asked, “Peter Bent?”. The man said, “No, stuck in my zipper.”]
December 23, 1972: The 16 survivors of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 are rescued after 73 days, having reportedly survived by cannibalism. Faced with starvation and death, those still alive agreed that should they die, the others might consume their bodies in order to live. With no choice, the survivors ate the bodies of their dead friends.
December 23, 1823:
Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas, more commonly known as The Night Before Christmas and ’Twas the Night Before Christmas from its first line, is first published anonymously by the Troy (NY) Sentinel. The poem is later attributed to Clement Clarke Moore, who claimed authorship in 1837.
The poem has been called “arguably the best-known verses ever written by an American”, and is largely responsible for some of the conceptions of Santa Claus from the mid-nineteenth century to today.
-“BB”-
SDMB PEDANT ALERT!!!
As someone who obsessively read the Piers Paul Ried book when he was 8, I want to note that there was a hierarchy of bodies, so that very few actual ‘friends’ and ‘family members’ were eaten. For example, I’m pretty sure Nando Parrado’s mother and sister were intact.
/ This has been a SDMB Pedant Alert.
December 24, 1968: The crew of Apollo 8 enters into orbit around the Moon, becoming the first humans to do so. They performed ten lunar orbits and broadcast live TV pictures. The three-astronaut crew were the first humans to witness and photograph an Earthrise.
December 25, 1758: Halley’s Comet is sighted by Johann Georg Palitzsch, confirming Edmund Halley’s prediction of its passage. This was the first passage of a comet predicted ahead of time.
December 25, 1776: In the late evening hours of Christmas Day, George Washington leads 2400 men, along with a substantial amount of field artillery, across the Delaware River in a surprise attack against approximately 1400 Hessian mercenary troops garrisoned in nearby Trenton. Despite weather conditions (or perhaps because of them), surprise was complete. The Hessian troops were soundly defeated with almost 900 prisoners taken, as well as equipment and arms, including a half-dozen cannon. Even more important, considering that the conflict had been up to that point a very difficult time for Washington’s armies, was the morale boost that this stunning victory provided as it served notice to the British regulars that the American colonists were not to be taken lightly.
-“BB”-
December 26, 1811: The Richmond Theatre Fire kills at least 72. Among the dead is Virginia Governor George William Smith.
December 26, 1963: The Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “I Saw Her Standing There” are released in the United States, marking the beginning of Beatlemania on an international level.
December 27, 1999: Space shuttle Discovery and its seven-member crew returned to Earth after fixing the Hubble Space Telescope.
December 27, 1999: Apollo 8 splashes down in the Pacific, after making the first crewed orbit of the Moon.
December 27, 1932: Radio City Music Hall opens in New York City. Locals refer to it as Radiocity “radi-AH-city”.