Wellesley College (named after the town, not the Duke of Wellington) was founded in 1875. It’s one of the original “Seven Sisters” women’s colleges in the Northeast. The others include Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith and Vassar.
The nickname of Mount Holyoke athletic teams is Lyons.
The world’s first funicular railway was built between Lyon and La Croix-Rousse, France in 1862.
The Internal Revenue Service came into being in 1862. Grab those ankles!
The Federal income tax lasted from 1862 until 1872, then reappeared in 1894. In 1895 the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in the case of Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co., but in 1913 the 16th Amendment was ratified to make them constitutional and there has been a federal income tax ever since (though the rates have fluctuated wildly).
The 16th Amendment was ratified by 42 of the 48* states. Three states (Connecticut. Rhode Island, and Utah) rejected the amendment without ever subsequently ratifying it, and three others (Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Florida) never took up the proposed amendment.
*Alaska and Hawaii had not been admitted to the union at that time.
Hawaii Five-O was the longest-running crime show on TV until Law & Order beat its record in 2003.
Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap is the longest running professional play in modern history, having had over 24,000 performances (and counting) in London’s West End since it opened in 1952. The US record for a long run was The Fantastiks, which ran for 42 years and over 17,000 performances off Broadway. The longest running Broadway show is The Phantom of the Opera, which is still running after over 9000 performances
Agatha Christie loosely based her 1962 Miss Marple mystery The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side on a widely-known personal tragedy which had befallen actress Gene Tierney: a kiss from a fan who was ill with highly contagious German measles resulted in the child with whom Tierney was then pregnant being born prematurely, underweight, deaf, partially blind with cataracts, and severely retarded. The child ultimately had to be institutionalized.
Gene Tierney was married to designer Oleg Cassini at the time, and during a separation from her husband had an affair with JFK.
The Cassini probe sent back firsthand evidence that Titan, one of the moons of Saturn, had gigantic lakes of ethane/methane on its surface (although their existence had been theorized earlier).
Isaac Asimov created the TV show Probe, starring former teen idol Parker Stevenson as a genius who solves scientific mysteries.
The word “robotics” was coined by Isaac Asimov, in a SF short story called “Liar!”
Asimov lived near the Manhattan apartment building featured in the 1984 movie Ghostbusters, and complained to the production crew when several streets were closed for lengthy periods during filming, interrupting his daily routine.
The tanker *SS Manhattan *, built with an icebreaker bow, was the first commercial ship to traverse the Northwest Passage, in 1969. At the time, she was both the largest commercial vessel and the largest icebreaker in the world. Officially the trip was for to evaluate the real need for the Alaska Pipeline, but it also forced Canada to confront sovereignty issues in Arctic waters, a debate still under way given the retreat of the Arctic icepack.
On the TV series Northern Exposure, Shelly Tambo (played by Cynthia Geary) was a former winner of the Miss Northwest Passage beauty pageant.
Oliver Tambo was Nelson Mandela’s law partner and longtime comrade in the African National Congress, outlawed for decades by the Apartheid regime of South Africa.
The classic American minstrel show consisted of a blackface chorus. Three characters were named: Mr. Interlocutor in the center, who acted as MC and straight man, and Mr. Bones and Mr. Tambo on the ends of of the front row, who were the comedians. Mr. Tambo was so named because he originally played a tambourine.
On “Star Trek”, Dr. Leonard McCoy was nicknamed “Bones” by Captain Kirk. This is a shortening of “sawbones”, an old term for a surgeon.
DeForest Kelley, who played Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy on Star Trek, had wanted to be a doctor himself in real life, but was thwarted by the Great Depression and went into show business instead.