January 23, 1556: The Shaanxi Earthquake in China kills 830,000. It is the deadliest earthquake in history.
January 24, 1848: The California gold rush begins: James W. Marshall finds gold at Sutter’s Mill near Sacramento.
January 24, 1961: A B-52 carrying two hydrogen bombs breaks apart over Eastern North Carolina. The bombs are dropped and a nuclear catastrophe nearly occurs.
January 25, 1947: Thomas Goldsmith Jr. files a patent for a “Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device”, the first ever electronic game.
January 26, 1998: President Bill Clinton denies having had “sexual relations” with “that woman,” former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
Proving that not only could one get AIDS from sex, but it was also possible to get sex from aides.
-“BB”-
January 27, 1967: Astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee are killed in a fire during a test of their Apollo 1 spacecraft at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida.
January 28, 1896: Walter Arnold of East Peckham, Kent, becomes the first person to be convicted of speeding. He was fined one shilling, plus costs, for speeding at 8 mph (13 km/h), thereby exceeding the contemporary speed limit of 2 mph (3.2 km/h).
January 28, 1922: A massive snowstorm leads to the collapse of the roof of the Knickerbocker Theater in Washington DC, where crowds had gathered to watch a silent movie despite the weather. The death toll is 98 with another 133 injured.
January 28, 1986: Seven American astronauts, including America’s first “Teacher in Space”, die when the space shuttle “Challenger” explodes 73 seconds after lift-off. Investigation into the disaster revealed that unseasonably cold weather the night before the launch caused the failure of two rubber O-rings to seal a joint between the two lower segments of the right-hand solid rocket booster attached to the outside of the main fuel tank. This failure opened a path for hot exhaust gas to escape from inside the booster during the shuttle’s ascent, which in turn caused the main fuel tank to explode, destroying the rocket and shuttle vehicle.
Even more tragically, when the launch vehicle broke up in the explosion, the forward section of the shuttle (with the crew cabin) was severed in one piece. Evidence indicated that the crew most likely survived the initial breakup but that loss of cabin pressure rendered them unconscious within seconds, since they did not wear pressure suits, and death probably resulted from oxygen deficiency minutes before impact.
In an eerie coincidence, this tragedy occurred nineteen years and one day from the fire that destroyed the Apollo 1 spacecraft during testing, costing the lives of astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee.
A brief moment of silence, if you would, for the lost members – the aforementioned ‘Teacher in Space’ Christa McAuliffe, commander Francis (Dick) Scobee, pilot Michael Smith, mission specialists Ellison Onizuk, Judith Resnik, and Ronald McNair, and Hughes Aircraft engineer Gregory Jarvis.
-“BB”-
January 29, 1980: The Rubik’s Cube makes its international debut at the Ideal Toy Corp. in Earl’s Court, London.
January 30, 1969: The Beatles’ last public performance, on the roof of Apple Records in London. The impromptu concert is broken up by the police.
January 31, 1961: Ham the Chimp becomes the first hominid launched into space. Ham’s name is an acronym for the laboratory that prepared him for his historic mission—the Holloman Aerospace Medical Center, located at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.
February 1, 2002: Daniel Pearl, American journalist and South Asia Bureau Chief of the Wall Street Journal, kidnapped January 23, 2002, is beheaded and mutilated by his captors.
February 2, 1887: In Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, the first Groundhog Day is observed.
February 3, 1959: Deaths of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson, in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa.
February 4, 2004: Facebook is founded by Mark Zuckerberg.
February 5, 1958: A hydrogen bomb known as the Tybee Bomb is lost by the US Air Force off the coast of Savannah, Georgia, never to be recovered.
February 6, 1952: Elizabeth II becomes Queen of the United Kingdom and her other Realms and Territories and Head of the Commonwealth, upon the death of her father, George VI. At the exact moment of succession, she was in a tree house at the Treetops Hotel in Kenya.
February 6, 1951: The Woodbridge Train Derailment in New Jersey leaves 85 dead and about 500 injured.