August 1, 1893: Henry Perky patents shredded wheat.
August 1, 1800: The Acts of Union are passed, merging the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (since 1921, a century ago, “Great Britain and Northern Ireland”).
August 3, 1492: Columbus sets sail from Palos, Spain for the “Indies.”
Same day: All Jews are expelled from Spain.
August 5, 1914: The American Traffic Signal Company installs a traffic signal system on the corner of East 105th Street and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio. It has two colors, red and green, and a buzzer, based on the design of James Hoge, to provide a warning for color changes. The design allows police and fire stations to control the signals in case of emergency.
August 9, 1930: Betty Boop makes her cartoon debut in Dizzy Dishes.
August 9th, 1995
26 years ago as I type this, the city of San Francisco went from being the epicenter of the 1960s counterculture to the epicenter of 2000s technocratic capitalism when Jerry Garcia died the same day the Netscape IPO occured, effectively creating the commercial internet as well as changing America’s economic and social trajectory.
August 9, 1974: Brought down by the Watergate Scandal and advised by Congressional leaders of his own party that he was likely to be convicted in the Senate if impeached by the House, Richard M. Nixon, Republican of California, resigned as President of the United States. He was succeeded by Gerald R. Ford, Republican of Michigan, whom he had named as Vice President pursuant to the 25th Amendment less than a year earlier. Nixon is still, to date, the only President ever to resign.
August 10, 1932: A 5.1 kilograms (11 lb.) chondrite-type meteorite breaks into at least seven pieces and lands near the town of Archie in Cass County, Missouri.
August 11, 1942: Actress Hedy [sic] Lamarr and composer George Antheil receive a patent for a Frequency-hopping spread spectrum communication system that later became the basis for modern technologies in wireless telephones, two-way radio communications, and Wi-Fi.
August 13, 1876: The premiere of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen at the recently completed Bayreuth Festspielhaus.
August 14, 1975: The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the longest-running release in film history, opens in London.
August 14, 1935: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law.
August 14, 1945: President S Truman announced that Imperial Japan had surrendered unconditionally, ending World War II.
August 15, 1969 : Woodstock opens.
(I was there.)
August 17, 1915: Jewish American Leo Frank is lynched in Marietta, Georgia after a 13-year-old girl is murdered. Today, the consensus of researchers on the subject holds that Frank was wrongly convicted.
August 20, 2008: Spanair Flight 5022, from Madrid, Spain to Gran Canaria, skids off the runway and crashes at Barajas Airport. Of the 172 people on board, 146 die immediately, and eight more later die of injuries sustained in the crash.
I was in the Barajas Airport when this occurred.
August 21, 2017: A total solar eclipse traverses the continental United States.
August 23, 1305: Sir William Wallace was executed for high treason at Smithfield, London. He was played by Mel Gibson in the Oscar-winning but highly fictionalized film about his life, rebellion and death, Braveheart.
August 23, 1991: The World Wide Web is opened to the public.
August 24, 1967: Led by Abbie Hoffman, the Youth International Party (“Yippies”) temporarily disrupts trading at the New York Stock Exchange by throwing dollar bills from the viewing gallery, causing trading to cease as brokers scramble to grab them.
August 25, 1835: The New York Sun began “The Great Moon Hoax,” a series of six articles about the supposed discovery of life and even civilization on the Moon. The discoveries were falsely attributed to Sir John Herschel, one of the best-known astronomers of his time.