Hedy Lamarr, and her husband, the composer George Antheil, received a patent for a frequency-hopping communications system in 1942. It used a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam. The idea was not implemented by the US until 1962, when it was used by military ships during the blockade of Cuba.
There are 88 counties in Ohio. The largest in population are Franklin (the greater Columbus area), Cuyahoga (Cleveland) and Hamilton (Cincinnati). Due to the relatively sparse population in the heavily-Republican rural counties, it is possible for a Democratic candidate to carry as few as 15 to 20 counties and still win an election.
155 pages for this thread so far - wow!
Franklin Pierce was the only President that came from New Hampshire.
Pierce went to Bowdoin University with Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, hero of Gettysburg, took a leave of absence from the Bowdoin faculty to command the 20th Maine volunteer infantry. He later returned as president of the college.
On the 2nd day at Gettysburg Chamberlain ordered and led an inspirational
charge just at the moment the 20th was about be overrun. That action could
possibly have saved the day for the Union army, since it would have been
in danger of being outflanked had the 20th collpased.
Later Chamberlain, by then a general, was present at Appomattox in witness
of Lee’s surrender.
The Civil War began in the front yard of grocer William McLean, whose house in Manassas, Virginia was the scene of some of the first fighting at the Battle of Manassas. After the experience, McLean sold his farm and moved to Appomattox Court House in Virginia. Lee surrendered to Grant in the parlor of McLean’s house.
McLean Stevenson’s beloved MASH* character, Lt. Col. Henry Blake, was said to have been lost when the transport plane in which he was riding on his way home was shot down by a North Korean fighter.
Quarks come in six “flavors”: up, down, top, bottom, charm and strange.
Quark was the name of a short lived 1977 sci-fi sitcom about intergalactic garbage men starring Richard Benjamin and created by Buck Henry.
Physicist Murray Gell-Mann thought of the pronunciation of “quork” for the particle, but did not have a particular spelling in mind until he came across the line “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. Although Joyce clearly meant for “quark” to rhyme with “Mark”, Gell-Mann realized that Joyce often used drinking-related terms as (at least partial) inspirations for coined words, and thus Gell-Mann theorized that “quark” might be argued to be a combination of “quack” and “quart”. He therefore felt confident pronouncing the word to rhyme with “fork”.
Sir Humprhy Davy used the spellings aluminum and aluminium alternately and interchangably for the chemical element that has atomic number 13, though aluminium has become the accepted spelling in the UK and aluminum in the US. Both are considered acceptable spellings.
Aluminum bats were first used in NCAA baseball beginning in 1974.
Watergate drove President Nixon from office in 1974.
Ronald DeFeo, Jr., murdered his parents and four younger siblings in November 1974. The Long Island house in which the murders occurred was sold to the Lutz family at under market price and was the setting of the discredited “non-fiction” book The Amityville Horror and the series of movies the book inspired.
The Long Island Railroad was built in 1834 to provide trail service between New York and Boston (via a ferry at Greenport, NY, the terminus of the main line), since it was believed that it would be impossible to build a direct route through Connecticut. The track was built as quickly as possible, which meant they avoided populated areas. When the New Haven Railroad was built in Connecticut, the LIRR lost its main reason for existence, and, since it was built where no one lived, had too few passengers to make it profitable. It did manage to survive and is still in operation.
The “Boston-Austin” alliance of the 1960 Democratic presidential ticket, with Sens. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, was unsuccessfully repeated in 1988, with Gov. Michael S. Dukakis and Sen. Lloyd Bentsen.
Lloyd Bentsen was responsible for one of the most memorable moments of the 1988 Presidential campaign during his televised debate with Republican vice presidential nominee Dan Quayle. Quayle stated that he had as much political experience as John F. Kennedy had when he ran for the presidency. Bentsen retorted, “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.”
Dan Quayle developed the habit of having a dental checkup and teeth cleaning on Election Days.
There is no provision in the Constitution of the United States for having a “national election day” for any purpose, including selecting members of the Electoral College to elect a President.