In the days after President John Kennedy’s assassination in November, 1963, Lyndon Johnson issued an executive order which renamed the Cape Canaveral area “Cape Kennedy,” in honor of the slain president.
The implementation of this order affected the names of the physical area which had been called Cape Canaveral, as well as the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (which became the Cape Kennedy Air Force Station) and the NASA Launch Operations Center (which became the Kennedy Space Center).
The name change was not popular among residents of the Cape Canaveral area (and of the city of Cape Canaveral, the name of which had been unchanged); in 1973, the names of the cape itself, and the Air Force station, were reverted to their Cape Canaveral names, while the space center retained the Kennedy name.
Alben Barkley, Democrat of Kentucky, was Vice President of the United States in 1950, having been elected with Harry S Truman in November 1948. Barkley was and is the oldest-ever Vice President, and it was during his single term that the slang term “Veep” was first widely used. His house in Paducah, Ky. is now a small museum honoring him, preserved much as it was during his lifetime (and I’ve been there).
In 2016 over 8,000 Thoroughbred foals were born in Kentucky. That represents more than one-third of all Thoroughbred foals born that year. All modern Thoroughbreds can trace their pedigree to three stallions originally imported into England in the 17th and 18th centuries.
In play: The Kentucky Derby, which will be held on September 5 of this year, is usually held on the first Saturday in May. First run in 1875, the original race was a length of 1 1/2 miles. It was shortened to 1 1/4 miles in 1896. The record for the shorter distance is held by superhorse Secretariat, set in 1973.
The honorary title of “Kentucky Colonel” is awarded to individuals by the Commonwealth of Kentucky. When the title originated in the early 19th Century, there was often a role with the state’s militia involved, but it evolved to become a purely honorary title, and became synonymous with being a well-mannered Southern gentleman.
The person who is most associated with the title of a Kentucky Colonel is likely Col. Harlan Sanders, the founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken, who was awarded the title in 1950.
Harlan Fiske Stone was appointed an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court by President Calvin Coolidge in 1925, and named Chief Justice by FDR in 1941. The house in which he was born in Chesterfield, New Hampshire no longer stands, but there is a marker on the site.
Holstein Friesian cows, which originated in Germany and the Netherlands, are recognizable for their black and white piebald pattern; Taft’s cow Pauline was a Holstein (as the breed is usually called in the US; in the UK they are known as Friesians). For the past decades this breed has dominated the global dairy industry, as it has the highest milk production of all dairy cattle worldwide.
Near the end of WWII, Nazi Germany designed a jet aircraft that ran on coal.
The Lippisch P.13a was an experimental ramjet-powered delta wing interceptor aircraft designed in late 1944 by Dr. Alexander Lippisch.
The aircraft never made it past the drawing board, but testing of wind-tunnel models showed that the design had extraordinary stability into the Mach 2.6 range.
The Convair XP-92, and later as the XF-92, was configured similarly to the Lippisch P.13a in that its large delta wing dominated its relatively shorter fuselage. Its design was used for experimental purposes, but it then led Convair to use the delta-wing on a number of designs, including the F-102 Delta Dagger, F-106 Delta Dart, and the B-58 Hustler.
The XB-70 Valkyrie was a delta-wing bomber, designed to be capable of flight at Mach 3. The XB-70 was designed by North American Aviation in the late 1950s, and though the B-70 project was cancelled in 1961, two prototypes were built in 1964, for use in experimental research.
One of the two XB-70s was destroyed after a collision with an F-104 fighter jet during an aerial photo shoot in June, 1966; the only remaining XB-70 was retired in 1969, and has been on display ever since at the National Museum of the United States Air Force, at Wright-Patterson AFB near Dayton, Ohio.
The NAA XB-70 Valkyrie was designed in the late 1950s. It was capable of cruising at mach 3+ at 70,000 feet for thousands of miles and was meant to replace the B-52.
But the high speed and performance of North American Aviation’s XB-70 was almost immediately obsoleted when SAMs began replacing high speed fighter interceptors in the late 1950s. SAMs, surface to air missiles, relied on radar, so the USAF started flying missions at low altitudes and speeds, and in this profile the XB-70 was roughly equivalent in performance to the B-52.
Thus, the XB-70 program had a short life:
1954: initial concepts
1955: initial development
1956: competing designs presented to USAF
1957: competition begins, Boeing and North American Aviation; NAA wins in December
1958: the name Valkyrie is chosen from over 20,000 submissions
1959: the “missile problem” (explained above) significantly impacts the XB-70 design and development
1960: Francis Gary Powers‘ U-2 is downed by a SAM
1961: the XB-70 bomber program is canceled by JFK; it continues in mach 3+ research
1964: first flight of the XB-70; data from many test flights contribute later to the B-1 bomber (1974, 1st flight)
1965: XB-70 reaches mach 3.02
1966: XB-70 reaches mach 3.05, then 3.06; crash w/ F-104, loss of 1 of 2 total
1968: last supersonic flight
1969: final flight, from Edwards to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is named in honor of Orville and Wilbur Wright, who used part of the land for experimental test flights beginning in 1904. The other name is in honor of Frank Stuart Patterson, who was killed in a plane crash at the site during World War I. Patterson was the son of Frank J. Patterson, a co-founder of National Cash Register.
Jacob Brodbeck, a schoolteacher in Luckenbach, Texas, is reputed to have built the first working airplane, at least a decade before the Wright Brothers. But he was disappointed with the short sustained flight, and abandoned the project. http://texaslesstraveled.com/brodbeck.html
The Lebanon Cedar (Cedrus libani) is a large evergreen, which is native to the mountains of the Eastern Mediterranean basis. The tree has been important in the religious and cultural history of the Middle East – it appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and is mentioned in numerous places in the Old Testament. It is the national symbol of the nation of Lebanon, and appears on its flag, but only small remnants of the original cedar forests in Lebanon and Cyprus remain.
When George Smith, a young self-taught Assyrologist in the British Museum, first deciphered tablet 11 of the Epic of Gilgamesh, he was amazed at its startling similarity to the Biblical account of Noah’s flood. Smith jumped and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement, and to the astonishment of those present, began to pull off his jacket, waistcoat, tie and shirt.
Smith’s discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh brought him worldwide fame; unfortunately he died of dysentery on an archaeological expedition to Aleppo in 1876, aged 36.
