Pandemic - It Happened ToDay

Pandemic

March 11, 1918 - First cases of Spanish influenza confirmed.

The disease was first observed at Fort Riley, Kansas on March 4th and confirmed a week later both there and in another case in Queens, New York, on March 11, 1918. An even more virulent strain of the virus would appear in August of 1918 simultaneously in Brest France, Freetown Sierra Leone, and in Boston MA.

Allied soldiers in World War I would refer to the sickness as the Spanish Flu as the virus spread across Europe during the fall of 1918 and into Spain where the uncensored Spanish press wrote freely and dramatically about the devastation from influenza.

The Spanish Flu Pandemic would spread throughout the world in three waves from 1918 into 1920 and touching even the Arctic and remote islands. Infection rates ran as high as 50% in some areas, and global mortality ran upwards of 100 million people. It is estimated that the Spanish Flu killed twice as many people as did the Black Plague of the 14th century.

Current concerns about "Avian Flu" and a new world-wide pandemic are related to the severity of the 1918 Spanish Flu. Research points to the 1918 virus having originated in birds and a mutation of the virus that jumped to humans without first traveling and mutating further through other species. Typically influenza outbreaks have a mortality rate of 0.1% or less for those infected. The Spanish Flu was not a typical outbreak in many respects. Besides the unusually high infection and mortality rates, this strain of influenza targeted young generally healthy adults (20-40 years old) who typically would survive influenza, instead of the usually weaker immune systems of young children and senior citizens.

In the U.S., entire Alaskan villages were obliterated by the Spanish Flu viruses, 500,000 to 700,000 died across the nation while 25-30% of the country was infected by the pandemic. Britain would report a quarter million deaths, and France almost a half million. More than 7 million, or about 3% of the population at that time of India would die of influenza. Pacific Island nations such as Fiji and Samoa would lose up a quarter of their people to the pandemic.

It is estimated that during the past 25 years AIDS has claimed 25 million lives, about the same number as died during the first six months of the Spanish Flu pandemic.

Quote for ToDay:
"No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating." - Harold Rosenberg

Dead Asleep - It Happened ToDay

Dead Asleep

March 10, 1948 - Czechoslovakian Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk Found Dead

Dressed only in his pajamas, Jan Masaryk was found dead in the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry below his bathroom window. Masaryk's death on this day in 1948 remains a great mystery for many historians.

The Communist government "officially" announced that the Czechoslovakian Foreign Minister had committed suicide, though many believed, and many still do believe, that the non-Communist minister was actually murdered.

Soviet Bloc intelligence officier Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, who defected to the United States in 1978, claimed that Jan Masaryk was on a list of ten international leaders the Kremlin killed or tried to kill during that era.

Jan Masasryk was a formidable foe and impediment to the post war expansion of the USSR's Communist empire in eastern and central Europe. The Soviet Union fought to impose a Communist government on the smaller country of Czechoslovakia, while Masaryk insisted that it should remain a democracy.

Quote for ToDay:
"A husband is what is left of the lover after the nerve has been extracted." - Helen Rowland

Hundred Years of Solitude - It Happened ToDay

Hundred Years of Solitude

March 6, 1928 - Gabriel García Márquez Born On This Day

Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez was born on this day in 1928 in the small Columbian town of Aracataca, which would be his inspiration for the mythical "Macondo" the central village in Márquez's masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude.

As a child, García Márquez's grandmother told him fantastical tales that would set the stage for his trademark literary style of magical realism. He began his writing career as a reporter and foreign correspondent for El Universal in Cartagena. García Márquez would publish Leaf Storm and Other Stories, his first collection of short stories in 1955.

García Márquez moved to Mexico City during the 1960's and in 1967 published his crowning opus - One Hundred Years of Solitude. Because of his unique style of writing, García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982 for his body of work. In 1985 he would publish El Amor en los Tiempos del Cólera, based on his parent's courtship, which was made into the Golden Globe nominated film and better known by its English title - Love in the Time of Cholera.

Quote for ToDay:
"Self-reliance is the only road to true freedom, and being one's own person is its ultimate reward." - Patricia Sampson

Circle The Wagons! - It Happened ToDay

Circle The Wagons!

March 5, 1875 - Reward Offered for Invention of a Motorized Wagon

Though the automobile industry did not emerge until the turn of the twentieth century, legislators and inventors alike had dreamed of a self-propelled motorized alternative to the horse-drawn carriages and wagons of the day, and without the constraints of rails.

On this day in 1875, the state of Wisconsin announced a $10,000 reward to any inventor who could produce a motorized wagon.

During the next twenty years several inventors created a variety of "vehicles" which were propelled by many different engine types, both internal and external combustion types, and generally incorporated a tricycle or three-wheeled design. Notable among this period of early attempts were the Duryea Brothers and Elwood Haynes of the US, and German inventors Benz, Daimler, and Diesel. However, none of these early forms of the "automobile" were capable of replacing a full-sized wagon, at best they were novelties that transported two or three people short distances around town.

In 1895, sixteen years after originally filling his first patent for his improvements to the mammoth-sized Brayton internal combustion engine and its use in a 4 wheeled car, George Selden won recognition and the reward for the first "motorized wagon". Selden's 1879 patent application included a "smaller and lighter" version of Brayton's two-stroke kerosene stationary engine - Selden's engine was a single cylinder engine that only weighed 400 lbs.!

Selden's patent would monopolize the attachment of an internal combustion engine to a carriage or wagon for the next two decades, during which he would reap huge royalties from American automobile manufacturers. However it would be Henry Ford who was ultimately successful in replacing draft animals with automobiles by revolutionizing manufacturing and the assembly line, and by breaking Selden's patent hold on the industry.

Quote for ToDay:
"Self-reliance is the only road to true freedom, and being one's own person is its ultimate reward." - Patricia Sampson

Testing...1...2...3...testing! - It Happened ToDay

Testing...1...2...3...testing!

March 4, 1877 - Emile Berliner invents the microphone.

Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, and Thomas Edison first invented sound recording and then playback on the phonograph which then sparked the music recording industry; but neither of Bell's or Edison's inventions would have progressed much past being novelties in their workshops and laboratories and into everyday life without a means to capture sound.

On this day in 1877, Emile Berliner, a young mostly self-taught German immigrant to America, would present an improvement to Bell's telephone transmitter, effectively the first microphone. Bell would purchase the rights to the new microphone and recruit Berliner to work at his Boston laboratory for the next six years. Berliner then returned to Washington D.C. and continued experimenting with sound and recording.

Berliner's improvements on the telephone transmitter followed on the heels of improvements Edison had made to Bell's invention a year earlier. It was while working on Bell's telephone that Edison was inspired to capture and reproduce sound through recording and playback, which ultimately became the phonograph in 1877. Ten years later in 1887, Berliner would patent a new type of phonograph called the Gramophone. The Gramophone would utilize a spinning flat disk for the recording instead of the cylinder used by Edison's phonograph. Despite the superior fidelity of Edison's cylindrical recordings, Berliner's disks would become the preferred recording medium due to simpler manufacturing and ease of storage.

Berliner would continue to make improvements to the microphone and the Gramophone. He would found first the Berliner Gramophone Company and then with one of his chief engineers Eldridge Johnson they would start the Victor Talking Machine Company, notable for its " his Master's voice" logo with Nipper listening to a Gramophone. In 1929 the Victor Talking Machine Company would be purchased by the Radio Corporation of America - RCA.

Quote for ToDay:
"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth." - Niels Bohr