1968 saw the entire world in varying states of turmoil as the thirst for freedom gathered strength virtually everywhere. Eastern Europe was no exception. However, the Prague Spring came to a thundering close on the 20th, when Czechoslovakia was invaded by the USSR, who sent 200,000 troops, supported by 5,000 tanks into Prague. I mean really now, what choice did the Soviets have? After all, spring was technically over in June and I just do not buy the excuse that Prague never got the email about that.
On August 20, 1977, NASA sent the Voyager 2 unmanned spacecraft into space from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Voyager 2 made a grand tour of the planets in our solar system and then embarked on its most ambitious task: it is to become the first manmade object to visit another planetary system, which is very, very, very far away. As of May 5, 2006, the most recent date for which telemetry is available, Voyager was 11.84 billion miles from Earth and was traveling at a speed of 51,410 mph! I was quite surprised to find out that not only was it that far away but everything on it was still functioning and sending data back to Earth. At present, estimates are that it will take almost 40,000 years for it to get where it is going. O.K., so the next time you take a trip by car, no complaining about the traffic. I also hope whoever finds Voyager has an 8-track tape player.
King Gustav III, horrified by watching his beloved Sweden labor under the oppressive yoke of parliamentary rule, completed his coup d'etat on the 21st in 1777. He then provided his nation with a new constitution and installed himself as an enlightened despot, which is really the sort of despot one should be.
King Charles I’s was an able monarch, but his legacy to the world was certainly not the art of diplomacy. On the 22nd in 1642, while addressing parliament, Charles called the parliamentarians traitors. This did not sit well with those in Parliament and Charles bringing the issue before them the English Civil War began, thus proving the truth of Charles’s statement. Charles ended his days, on January 29, 1649 with the help of an executioner.
August 23, 1989 was the 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, with which the Soviet Union and Germany divided spheres of influence in Eastern Europe. On that day, approximately two million people held hands, forming a human chain across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to draw the world’s attention to their plight. It took a bit more time for their freedom to be restored but what the heck it killed the afternoon.
Truman Capote, literary trailblazer, social gadfly, at the end a pariah, and perhaps the most important writer of the 20th century, died on the 25th in 1984.
Capote was not my first choice for an entry for the 25th, but I like his work a great deal and decided to throw him in. It took me a while to figure out a graceful way to get to the next item, which was my first choice. All right then, let’s try this: Capote was a writer, and it seems to me that writers often write for newspapers. I will take that connection, tenuous though it may be, as an opportunity to make a graceful segue to this next tidbit (which I like a lot!).
On the 25th in 1830 the New York Sun, a widely read newspaper, published an article purportedly written by the noted astronomer Sir John Herschel. In exquisite detail the article discussed Herschel’s discoveries, made with the assistance of an ‘an immense telescope of an entirely new principle,’ about the Moon. The article described, among other things, the bison, goats, and [my favorite] bipedal tail-less beavers that were all living on the Moon. Herschel went on to describe the numerous bat-like winged humanoids residing on the moon who, for some reason, exhibited a strong propensity for building temples. One thing the editors neglected to include in the article was any indication that the entire article was a work of fiction, that Herschel knew absolutely nothing about it, and had not consented to its publication. The editors also failed to state that the article had been intended to poke fun at the rather fanciful notions then being advanced by the learned denizens of academia. People read the article and never once questioned its veracity; they actually became enraged when additional articles on the subject were not forthcoming. Thus The Great Moon Hoax, as the article came to be called, set the bar for all future pranksters.
If there will always be war, I think the governments involved should proceed with the aim of beating the time of the Anglo-Zanzibar War. The war, between the United Kingdom and Zanzibar, took place between 9:02 and 9:40 on the morning of the 27th in 1896.
In 1869, on the 31st, Mary Ward, a prominent British scientist, was traveling to a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in a steam-powered automobile that had been designed and built by two of her cousins. The vehicle was traveling at the breakneck speed of 4 mph when, as luck would have it, she fell out of the passenger compartment and was run over by the vehicle She died almost instantly and went directly in to the record books as the first person to die because of an automobile accident.
