I wish we did, because it’s fucking annoying when he history-bombs us like that.
February 4, 1789: The first US electoral college chooses George Washington as President and John Adams as Vice-President. It and the reelection are the only unanimous electoral-college outcomes to date. (I THINK they were both unanimous.)
EDIT: Still February 4 in Hawaii.
February 5:
1783-Sweden recognized the independence of the United States of America (but the 1 Amendment did not take effect until December 15, 1791 - That said, or implied, that the Straight Dope Message Board shall make no rule abridging the freedom of speech.)
1897-The Indiana House of Representatives voted 67 to 0 to define pi as 3.2. (The IN Senate killed it.)
1971-U.S. astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell stepped onto the surface of the moon after Ignatz had witnessed their blastoff from Earth.
1950-(day not specific) The first remote intended to control a television was developed by Zenith Radio Corporation in 1950. The remote, called “Lazy Bones”, was connected to the television by a wire. A wireless remote control, the “Flashmatic”, was developed in 1955 by Eugene Polley. These allowed the viewer to switch away from content that they found fucking annoying.
Jesus fucking christ!!! :mad:
Let’s make it a one event per day --per player --rule, please. Part of the challenge is to select the most interesting item from among several.
×××××
February 6, 1938: Rogue waves wash hundreds of beachgoers into dangerous surf in Australia on what became known as Black Sunday. Heroic efforts by the lifesavers on Bondi Beach keep the death toll to only 5.
**February 7, 1812 **:The last and probably the largest in a series of major New Madrid earthquakes occurs in Missouri, destroying the town of New Madrid. Estimates put this quake anywhere from 7.8 to as high as 8.8 on the Richter scale. These quakes were felt as far away as Norfolk, Virginia. This area was not very populated at the time. A bit different today.
February 7, 2013: Mississippi officially certifies the Thirteenth Amendment, becoming the last state to approve the abolition of slavery. The Thirteenth Amendment was formally ratified by Mississippi in 1995.
February 8, 1944: The German merchant ship SS Petrella is torpedoed by a British submarine. Approximately 2670 Italian POW’s who were being transported die.
February 8, 1945: Mikhail Devyataev escapes with nine other Soviet inmates from a Nazi concentration camp in Peenemünde on the island of Usedom by hijacking the camp commandant’s Heinkel He 111.
****February 9, 1742: Sir Robert Walpole, often referred to as the first British prime minister, is enobled as the first Earl of Orford.
February 10, 1996: IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov in chess for the first time.
February 10, 1942 - Glenn Miller’s Chattanooga Choo Choo, recorded in 1941, was honored with the first “gold record” after it passed the 1,200,000 mark just nine months later, on a Chesterfeld radio broadcast which aired from New York City. It was a framed, gold-lacquered stamper, which later became symbolic for a million-record sales.
1943 - nothing happened of note
February 11, 1893: The *SS Naronic * departs Liverpool bound for New York, and is never seen again. The fate of the ship is never determined, despite four(!) different notes-in-a-bottle supposedly from the ship found afterwards, two on each side of the Atlantic.
February 11, 1812 - Before he became VPOTUS under President James Madison, Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry (pronounced with a hard G) signed a redistricting law favoring his Democratic-Republican party - giving rise to a newspaper cartoon in the form of a salamander which got called a Gerrymander (which should be pronounced with a hard G-per this alumnus of the Elbridge Gerry Elementary School in the Gerrymander’s right talon).
February 11, 1990: Nelson Mandela is released after 27 years imprisonment in South Africa.
February 11, 1938: BBC Television produces the world’s first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of the Karel Čapek play R.U.R., that coined the term “robot”.
**February 12, 1944 **: The SS Oria, a German steamboat carrying Italian POW’s, sinks during a storm. Over 4000 die, making this one of the deadliest single ship disasters ever in the Mediterranean Sea.
February 12, 1924: George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue received its premiere in a concert titled “An Experiment in Modern Music”, in Aeolian Hall, New York, by Paul Whiteman and his band, with Gershwin playing the piano.
February 12, 1999: US President Bill Clinton is acquitted by the Senate in his impeachment trial.
February 13, 2004: The Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announces the discovery of the universe’s largest known diamond, white dwarf star BPM 37093. Astronomers named this star “Lucy” after The Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”.
February 13, 1945 - The bombing of Dresden was a British/American aerial bombing attack on the city of Dresden, the capital of the German state of Saxony, that took place during the Second World War in the European Theatre. In four raids over 3 days starting on 13 February 1945, 722 heavy bombers of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city. The bombing and the resulting firestorm destroyed over 1,600 acres (6.5 km2) of the city center. An estimated 22,700 to 25,000 people were killed, although inflated casualty figures have been promulgated over the years.
(Coincidentally, Ignatz had dusted off his dvd of the 1972 film based on Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse Five [Schlacthof–funf] and learned that this was the historic date.)