Today in History
Today is Wednesday, Dec. 28, the 363rd day of 2016. There are three days left in the year.
Today's Highlight in History:
1800 Dec 29, Charles Goodyear (d.1860), inventor of vulcanized rubber for tires, was born.
1808 Dec 29, Andrew Johnson, the 17th president of the United States who succeeded Lincoln (1865-1869), was born in a 2-room shack in Raleigh, N.C. [Waxhaw, South Carolina]
On Dec. 28, 1846, Iowa became the 29th state to be admitted to the Union.
On this date:
In 1612, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei observed the planet Neptune, but mistook it for a star. (Neptune wasn't officially discovered until 1846 by Johann Gottfried Galle.)
In 1832, John C. Calhoun became the first vice president of the United States to resign, stepping down because of differences with President Andrew Jackson.
1845 Texas (comprised of the present State of Texas and part of New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming) was admitted as the 28th state, with the provision that the area (389, 166 square miles) should be divided into no more than five states "of convenient size." Sam Houston insisted on maintaining control of offshore waters as a condition of joining the union.
In 1856, the 28th president of the United States, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, was born in Staunton, Virginia.
1891 Dec 29, Edison patented the "transmission of signals electrically" (radio).
1862 Dec 29, The bowling ball was invented.
In 1895, the Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis, held the first public showing of their movies in Paris.
In 1917, the New York Evening Mail published "A Neglected Anniversary," a facetious essay by H.L. Mencken supposedly recounting the history of bathtubs in America.
In 1937, composer Maurice Ravel died in Paris at age 62.
In 1945, Congress officially recognized the Pledge of Allegiance.
In 1961, the Tennessee Williams play "Night of the Iguana" opened on Broadway. Former first lady Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, the second wife of President Woodrow Wilson, died in Washington at age 89.
In 1973, the book "Gulag Archipelago," Alexander Solzhenitsyn's expose of the Soviet prison system, was first published in Paris.
In 1981, Elizabeth Jordan Carr, the first American "test-tube" baby, was born in Norfolk, Virginia.
In 1989, Alexander Dubcek, the former Czechoslovak Communist leader who was deposed in a Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968, was named president of the country's parliament.
In 1991, nine people died in a crush of people trying to get into a rap celebrity basketball game at City College in New York.
1995 Dec 29, The CNN financial network was launched by Turner Enterprises.