On This Day in History

[Schmidt Meister]

August 26th In Music

1972 - Looking Glass' "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)" hits No. 1, where it will stay for one week.

Birthdays:

1941 - Chris Curtis. Drums, The Searchers, 1964 US No. 3 single 'Love Potion Number Nine'. Born in Oldham, Lancashire, England. Died on 2.28.2005 at the age of 63.

[Schmidt Meister]

On August 27, 1883, the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded history occurs on Krakatoa (also called Krakatau), a small, uninhabited volcanic island located west of Sumatra in Indonesia. Heard 3,000 miles away, the explosions threw five cubic miles of earth 50 miles into the air, created 120-foot tsunamis and killed 36,000 people.
Krakatoa exhibited its first stirrings in more than 200 years on May 20, 1883. A German warship passing by reported a seven-mile high cloud of ash and dust over Krakatoa. For the next two months, similar explosions would be witnessed by commercial liners and natives on nearby Java and Sumatra. With little to no idea of the impending catastrophe, the local inhabitants greeted the volcanic activity with festive excitement.
On August 26 and August 27, excitement turned to horror as Krakatoa literally blew itself apart, setting off a chain of natural disasters that would be felt around the world for years to come. An enormous blast on the afternoon of August 26 destroyed the northern two-thirds of the island; as it plunged into the Sunda Strait, between the Java Sea and Indian Ocean, the gushing mountain generated a series of pyroclastic flows (fast-moving fluid bodies of molten gas, ash and rock) and monstrous tsunamis that swept over nearby coastlines. Four more eruptions beginning at 5:30 a.m. the following day proved cataclysmic. The explosions could be heard as far as 3,000 miles away, and ash was propelled to a height of 50 miles. Fine dust from the explosion drifted around the earth, causing spectacular sunsets and forming an atmospheric veil that lowered temperatures worldwide by several degrees.
Of the estimated 36,000 deaths resulting from the eruption, at least 31,000 were caused by the tsunamis created when much of the island fell into the water. The greatest of these waves measured 120 feet high, and washed over nearby islands, stripping away vegetation and carrying people out to sea. Another 4,500 people were scorched to death from the pyroclastic flows that rolled over the sea, stretching as far as 40 miles, according to some sources.
In addition to Krakatoa, which is still active, Indonesia has another 130 active volcanoes, the most of any country in the world.

[Schmidt Meister]

August 27th In Music

1955 - Fats Domino's "Ain't That A Shame" hits No. 10 in the US, becoming the first R&B song to hit the Top 10 on the Pop chart.

2018 - Weird Al Yankovic receives a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Birthdays:

1942 - Daryl Dragon. American musician and songwriter, from husband-and-wife duo The Captain and Tennille. They scored numerous hits on the US singles charts, the most enduring of which included ‘Love Will Keep Us Together’, ‘Do That to Me One More Time’, and ‘Muskrat Love’. Dragon also worked on The Beach Boys' 1972 release Carl and the Passions – ‘So Tough’. Born in Los Angeles, CA. Dragon died on 1.2.2019 aged 76.

1942 - Chip Douglas. American songwriter, musician  from American rock group,  The Turtles who had the US 1967 No. 1 single 'Happy Together' and the 1967 hit 'She'd Rather Be with Me'. He was the producer of some of the The Monkees biggest hits, including 'Daydream Believer' and 'Pleasant Valley Sunday'.

[Schmidt Meister]

On August 28, 1869, convinced they will have a better chance surviving the desert than the raging rapids that lay ahead, three men leave John Wesley Powell’s expedition through the Grand Canyon and scale the cliffs to the plateau above.
Though it turned out the men had made a serious mistake, they can hardly be faulted for believing that Powell’s plan to float the brutal rapids was suicidal. Powell, a one-armed Civil War veteran and self-trained naturalist, had embarked on his daring descent of the mighty Colorado River three months earlier. Accompanied by 11 men in four wooden boats, he led the expedition through the Grand Canyon and over punishing rapids that many would hesitate to run even with modern rafts.
The worst was yet to come. Near the lower end of the canyon, the party heard the roar of giant rapids. Moving to shore, they explored on foot and saw, in the words of one man, “the worst rapids yet.” Powell agreed, writing that, “The billows are huge and I fear our boats could not ride them…There is discontent in the camp tonight and I fear some of the party will take to the mountains but hope not.”
The next day, three of Powell’s men did leave. Convinced that the rapids were impassable, they decided to take their chances crossing the harsh desert lands above the canyon rims. On this day in 1869, Seneca Howland, O.G. Howland, and William H. Dunn said goodbye to Powell and the other men and began the long climb up out of the Grand Canyon. The remaining members of the party steeled themselves, climbed into boats, and pushed off into the wild rapids.
Amazingly, all of them survived and the expedition emerged from the canyon the next day. When he reached the nearest settlement, Powell learned that the three men who left had been less fortunate, they allegedly encountered a war party of Shivwit Indians and were killed. Ironically, the three murders were initially seen as more newsworthy than Powell’s feat and the expedition gained valuable publicity. When Powell embarked on his second trip through the Grand Canyon in 1871, the publicity from the first trip had insured that the second voyage was far better financed than the first.

[Schmidt Meister]

On August 28, 1941, more than 23,000 Hungarian Jews are murdered by the Gestapo in occupied Ukraine.
The German invasion of the Soviet Union had advanced to the point of mass air raids on Moscow and the occupation of parts of Ukraine. On August 26, Hitler displayed the joys of conquest by inviting Benito Mussolini to Brest-Litovsk, where the Germans had destroyed the city’s citadel. The grand irony is that Ukrainians had originally viewed the Germans as liberators from their Soviet oppressors and an ally in the struggle for independence. But as early as July, the Germans were arresting Ukrainians agitating and organizing for a provisional state government with an eye toward autonomy and throwing them into concentration camps. The Germans also began carving the nation up, dispensing parts to Poland (already occupied by Germany) and Romania.
But true horrors were reserved for Jews in the territory. Tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews had been expelled from that country and migrated to Ukraine. The German authorities tried sending them back, but Hungary would not take them. SS General Franz Jaeckeln vowed to deal with the influx of refugees by the “complete liquidation of those Jews by September 1.” He worked even faster than promised. On August 28, he marched more than 23,000 Hungarian Jews to bomb craters at Kamenets Podolsk, ordered them to undress, and riddled them with machine-gun fire. Those who didn’t die from the spray of bullets were buried alive under the weight of corpses that piled atop them.
All told, more than 600,000 Jews had been murdered in Ukraine by war’s end.

[Schmidt Meister]

August 28th In Music

1965 - The Beach Boys 'California Girls' was at No. 3 on the US singles chart.

1972 - Alice Cooper was at No. 1 on the UK singles chart with 'School's Out'.

1993 - Billy Joel started a three-week run at No. 1 on the US album chart with 'River Of Dreams.'

Birthdays:

1937 - Joe Osborn. American bass guitar player known for his work as a session musician in Los Angeles and Nashville during the 1960s through the 1980s. As a member of The Wrecking Crew his playing can be heard on records by The Mamas & the Papas, The Carpenters, The Association and The 5th Dimension. Osborn can be heard on Simon & Garfunkel's 'Bridge Over Trouble Water' and the 5th Dimension's version of ‘Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In’. He died on December 14, 2018 aged 81.

1948 - Danny Seraphine. American musician  known as the original drummer and founding member of the rock band Chicago, a tenure which lasted from February 1967 to May 1990. The band formed in 1967 in Chicago, Illinois as The Chicago Transit Authority before shortening the name in 1970. Chicago have had five consecutive No. 1 albums on the Billboard chart and 20 top-ten singles on the Billboard Hot 100. Born in Chicago, Illinois.

[Schmidt Meister]

On August 29, 1949, at a remote test site at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan, the USSR successfully detonates its first atomic bomb, code name “First Lightning.” In order to measure the effects of the blast, the Soviet scientists constructed buildings, bridges, and other civilian structures in the vicinity of the bomb. They also placed animals in cages nearby so that they could test the effects of nuclear radiation on human-like mammals. The atomic explosion, which at 20 kilotons was roughly equal to “Trinity,” the first U.S. atomic explosion, destroyed those structures and incinerated the animals.
On September 3, a U.S. spy plane flying off the coast of Siberia picked up the first evidence of radioactivity from the explosion. Later that month, President Harry S. Truman announced to the American people that the Soviets too had the bomb. Three months later, Klaus Fuchs, a German-born physicist who had helped the United States build its first atomic bombs, was arrested for passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets. While stationed at U.S. atomic development headquarters during World War II, Fuchs had given the Soviets precise information about the U.S. atomic program, including a blueprint of the “Fat Man” atomic bomb later dropped on Japan, and everything the Los Alamos scientists knew about the hypothesized hydrogen bomb. The revelations of Fuchs’ espionage, coupled with the loss of U.S. atomic supremacy, led President Truman to order development of the hydrogen bomb, a weapon theorized to be hundreds of times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan.
On November 1, 1952, the United States successfully detonated “Mike,” the world’s first hydrogen bomb, on the Elugelab Atoll in the Pacific Marshall Islands. The 10.4-megaton thermonuclear device instantly vaporized an entire island and left behind a crater more than a mile wide. Three years later, on November 22, 1955, the Soviet Union detonated its first hydrogen bomb on the same principle of radiation implosion. Both superpowers were now in possession of the so-called “superbomb,” and the world lived under the threat of thermonuclear war for the first time in history.

[Schmidt Meister]

On August 29, 1876, Charles Franklin Kettering, the American engineer and longtime director of research for General Motors Corp. (GM), is born in Loudonville, Ohio. Of the 140 patents Kettering obtained over the course of his lifetime, perhaps the most notable was his electric self-starter for the automobile, patented in 1915.
Early in his career, Kettering worked at the National Cash Register Company in Dayton, Ohio, where he helped develop the first cash register to be equipped with an electric motor that opened the register drawer. With Edward A. Deeds, he formed Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (DELCO), a business dedicated to designing equipment for automobiles. Kettering’s key-operated electric self-starting ignition system, introduced on Cadillac vehicles in 1912 and patented three years later, made automobiles far easier and safer to operate than they had been previously, when the ignition process had been powered by iron hand cranks. By the 1920s, electric self-starters would come standard on nearly every new automobile.
United Motors Corporation (which later became General Motors) purchased DELCO in 1916, installing Kettering as vice president and director of research at GM from 1920 to 1947. During his tenure at GM, Kettering was instrumental in the development of improved engines, quick-drying automobile paints and finishes, “anti-knock” fuels (designed to reduce the damaging process of engine knocking, which occurs when gasoline ignites too early in an internal combustion engine) and variable-speed transmissions, among other innovations.
Kettering’s passion for invention spread far beyond the automotive industry: He helped develop the refrigerant Freon, used in refrigerators and air conditioners, and took an active role in the medical industry, inventing a treatment for venereal disease, an incubator for premature infants and artificial fever therapy. Highly devoted to education, he helped found the Flint Institute of Technology in 1919 and the General Motors Institute (now Kettering University) in 1926. In 1945, he and longtime General Motors head Alfred P. Sloan established the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in New York City.

[Schmidt Meister]

On August 29, 1533, Atahuallpa, the 13th and last emperor of the Incas, dies by strangulation at the hands of Francisco Pizarro’s Spanish conquistadors. The execution of Atahuallpa, the last free reigning emperor, marked the end of 300 years of Inca civilization.
High in the Andes Mountains of Peru, the Inca built a dazzling empire that governed a population of 12 million people. Although they had no writing system, they had an elaborate government, great public works, and a brilliant agricultural system. In the five years before the Spanish arrival, a devastating war of succession gripped the empire. In 1532, Atahuallpa’s army defeated the forces of his half-brother Huascar in a battle near Cuzco. Atahuallpa was consolidating his rule when Pizarro and his 180 soldiers appeared.
Francisco Pizarro was the son of a Spanish gentleman and worked as a swine-herder in his youth. He became a soldier and in 1502 went to Hispaniola with the new Spanish governor of the New World colony. Pizarro served under Spanish conquistador Alonso de Ojeda during his expedition to Colombia in 1510 and was with Vasco Nunez de Balboa when he discovered the Pacific Ocean in 1513. Hearing legends of the great wealth of an Indian civilization in South America, Pizarro formed an alliance with fellow conquistador Diego de Almagro in 1524 and sailed down the west coast of South America from Panama. The first expedition only penetrated as far as present-day Ecuador, but a second reached farther, to present-day Peru. There they heard firsthand accounts of the Inca empire and obtained Inca artifacts. The Spanish christened the new land Peru, probably after the Vire River.
Returning to Panama, Pizarro planned an expedition of conquest, but the Spanish governor refused to back the scheme. In 1528, Pizarro sailed back to Spain to ask the support of Emperor Charles V. Hernan Cortes had recently brought the emperor great wealth through his conquest of the Aztec Empire, and Charles approved Pizarro’s plan. He also promised that Pizarro, not Almagro, would receive the majority of the expedition’s profits. In 1530, Pizarro returned to Panama.
In 1531, he sailed down to Peru, landing at Tumbes. He led his army up the Andes Mountains and on November 15, 1532, reached the Inca town of Cajamarca, where Atahuallpa was enjoying the hot springs in preparation for his march on Cuzco, the capital of his brother’s kingdom. Pizarro invited Atahuallpa to attend a feast in his honor, and the emperor accepted. Having just won one of the largest battles in Inca history, and with an army of 30,000 men at his disposal, Atahuallpa thought he had nothing to fear from the bearded white stranger and his 180 men. Pizarro, however, planned an ambush, setting up his artillery at the square of Cajamarca.
On November 16, Atahuallpa arrived at the meeting place with an escort of several thousand men, all apparently unarmed. Pizarro sent out a priest to exhort the emperor to accept the sovereignty of Christianity and Emperor Charles V., and Atahuallpa refused, flinging a Bible handed to him to the ground in disgust. Pizarro immediately ordered an attack. Buckling under an assault by the terrifying Spanish artillery, guns, and cavalry (all of which were alien to the Incas), thousands of Incas were slaughtered, and the emperor was captured.
Atahuallpa offered to fill a room with treasure as ransom for his release, and Pizarro accepted. Eventually, some 24 tons of gold and silver were brought to the Spanish from throughout the Inca empire. Although Atahuallpa had provided the richest ransom in the history of the world, Pizarro treacherously put him on trial for plotting to overthrow the Spanish, for having his half-brother Huascar murdered, and for several other lesser charges. A Spanish tribunal convicted Atahuallpa and sentenced him to die. On August 29, 1533, the emperor was tied to a stake and offered the choice of being burned alive or strangled by garrote if he converted to Christianity. In the hope of preserving his body for mummification, Atahuallpa chose the latter, and an iron collar was tightened around his neck until he died.
With Spanish reinforcements that had arrived at Cajamarca earlier that year, Pizarro then marched on Cuzco, and the Inca capital fell without a struggle in November 1533. Huascar’s brother Manco Capac was installed as a puppet emperor, and the city of Quito was subdued. Pizarro established himself as Spanish governor of Inca territory and offered Diego Almagro the conquest of Chile as appeasement for claiming the riches of the Inca civilization for himself. In 1535, Pizarro established the city of Lima on the coast to facilitate communication with Panama. The next year, Manco Capac escaped from Spanish supervision and led an unsuccessful uprising that was quickly crushed. That marked the end of Inca resistance to Spanish rule.
Diego Almagro returned from Chile embittered by the poverty of that country and demanded his share of the spoils of the former Inca empire. Civil war soon broke out over the dispute, and Almagro seized Cuzco in 1538. Pizarro sent his half brother, Hernando, to reclaim the city, and Almagro was defeated and put to death. On June 26, 1541, allies of Diego el Monzo, Almagro’s son, penetrated Pizarro’s palace in Lima and assassinated the conquistador while he was eating dinner. Diego el Monzo proclaimed himself governor of Peru, but an agent of the Spanish crown refused to recognize him, and in 1542 Diego was captured and executed. Conflict and intrigue among the conquistadors of Peru persisted until Spanish Viceroy Andres Hurtado de Mendoza established order in the late 1550s.

[Schmidt Meister]

August 29th In Music

1964 - Roy Orbison releases "(Oh) Pretty Woman." It went on to reach No. 1 four weeks later.

1966 - The Youngbloods record "Get Together."

1987 - Los Lobos started a three week run at No. 1 on the US singles chart with 'La Bamba'. Taken from the film about the life of Ritchie Valens.

1999 - Lou Bega went to No. 1 on the UK singles chart with 'Mambo No 5', originally recorded and composed by Perez Prado in 1949.

Birthdays:

1943 - Dick Halligan. Keyboards, flute, from jazz-rock American music group Blood Sweat & Tears. They scored the 1969 US No. 2 single 'Spinning Wheel', and the 1969 US No. 12 single 'You've Made Me So Very Happy'. They had a US No. 1 with their second album Blood, Sweat & Tears in 1968. Born in Troy, New York.

1945 - Chris Copping. From Procol Harum, who had the 1967 US No. 5 single 'A Whiter Shade Of Pale', (one of the few singles to have sold over 10 million copies) and scored the hits 'Homburg', 'Conquistador’. Born in Middleton, Lancashire, England.

1953 - Rick Downey. From American hard rock band Blue Oyster Cult who scored the 1976 US No. 12 single '(Don't Fear) The Reaper'. Blue Oyster Cult have sold over 24 million records worldwide.

1975 - Kyle Cook. Guitarist, Matchbox Twenty who rose to international fame with their debut album, Yourself or Someone Like You (1996), which was certified 12× Platinum in the United States and multi-platinum in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Born in Frankfort, Indiana.

[Eric]

August 29th is Judgement Day.

 

[Eric]

I was born on Judgement Day.

[Schmidt Meister]

4 minutes ago, Eric said:

I was born on Judgement Day.

Well, here's cheers to you. Hoping you have an awesome birthday, my friend.

 

[Schmidt Meister]

8 minutes ago, Eric said:

I was born on Judgement Day.

 

[Eric]

22 minutes ago, Schmidt Meister said:

 

Thanks, man. You are the first person to wish me Happy Birthday.

[tous]

Happy birthday, amigo.

In addition to the cake, here are a celebratory heffalump and a congratulatory wriggly bear  

[Eric]

5 minutes ago, tous said:

Happy birthday, amigo.

In addition to the cake, here are a celebratory heffalump and a congratulatory wriggly bear  

Thank you. I'm not sure how I feel about being 55. I never obeyed 55mph speed limits, but my body seems intent on enforcing 55yo age limits, as my current hernia repair recovery illustrates. 55mph is too damn slow and my 55th year arrived too damned fast.

[tous]

The means that we have concocted to measure time are totally arbitrary, mostly based on the movement of astronomical objects.

That made sense for primitive man, but there is nothing in the natural world that states that one must measure their life based on how often the Moon appears to be full or the duration of one summer to the next -- which are arbitrary measures.

Ask a dog what time it is and they will just look at you funny.

As I used to instruct students when I taught English composition at a community college in answer  to the inevitable question when assigned an essay, How long does it got to be?

After wincing at the poor grammar, I replied, start at the beginning.  When you get to the end, stop.

Such is life, no?

Begin at birth, end at death, have fun in between.

[Schmidt Meister]

On August 30, 1963, John F. Kennedy becomes the first U.S. president to have a direct phone line to the Kremlin in Moscow. The “hotline” was designed to facilitate communication between the president and Soviet premier.
The establishment of the hotline to the Kremlin came in the wake of the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, in which the U.S. and U.S.S.R had come dangerously close to all-out nuclear war. Kennedy’s administration had discovered that the Soviets had planted missiles capable of launching nuclear warheads into the U.S. on the island of Cuba. The highly tense diplomatic exchange that followed was plagued by delays caused by slow and tedious communication systems. Encrypted messages had to be relayed by telegraph or radioed between the Kremlin and the Pentagon. Although Kennedy and Khrushchev were able to resolve the crisis peacefully and had both signed a nuclear test-ban treaty on August 5, 1963, fears of future “misunderstandings” led to the installation of an improved communications system.
On August 30, the White House issued a statement that the new hotline would “help reduce the risk of war occurring by accident or miscalculation.” Instead of relying on telegrammed letters that had to travel overseas, the new technology was a momentous step toward the very near future when American and Soviet leaders could simply pick up the phone and be instantly connected 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It was agreed that the line would be used only in emergencies, not for more routine governmental exchanges.
An article in The New York Times described how the new system would work: Kennedy would relay a message to the Pentagon via phone, which would be immediately typed into a teletype machine by operators at the Pentagon, encrypted and fed into a transmitter. The message could reach the Kremlin within minutes, as opposed to hours. Although a far cry from the instantaneous communication made possible by today’s cell phones and email, the technology implemented in 1963 was considered revolutionary and much more reliable and less prone to interception than a regular trans-Atlantic phone call, which had to be bounced between several countries before it reached the Kremlin.
In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson became the first U.S. president to use the new system during the Six Day War in the Middle East when he notified then-Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin that he was considering sending Air Force planes into the Mediterranean.

[Schmidt Meister]

On August 30, 1918, after speaking at a factory in Moscow, Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin is shot twice by Fanya Kaplan, a member of the Social Revolutionary party. Lenin was seriously wounded but survived the attack. The assassination attempt set off a wave of reprisals by the Bolsheviks against the Social Revolutionaries and other political opponents. Thousands were executed as Russia fell deeper into civil war.
Born Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov in 1870, Lenin was drawn to the revolutionary cause after his brother was executed in 1887 for plotting to assassinate Czar Alexander III. He studied law and took up practice in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), where he associated with revolutionary Marxist circles. In 1895, he helped organize Marxist groups in the capital into the “Union for the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class,” which attempted to enlist workers to the Marxist cause. In December 1895, Lenin and the other leaders of the Union were arrested. Lenin was jailed for a year and then exiled to Siberia for a term of three years.
After the end of his exile, in 1900, Lenin went to Western Europe, where he continued his revolutionary activity. It was during this time that he adopted the pseudonym Lenin. In 1902, he published a pamphlet titled What Is to Be Done? which argued that only a disciplined party of professional revolutionaries could bring socialism to Russia. In 1903, he met with other Russian Marxists in London and established the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP). However, from the start there was a split between Lenin’s Bolsheviks (Majoritarians), who advocated militarism, and the Mensheviks (Minoritarians), who advocated a democratic movement toward socialism. These two groups increasingly opposed each other within the framework of the RSDWP, and Lenin made the split official at a 1912 conference of the Bolshevik Party.
After the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of 1905, Lenin returned to Russia. The revolution, which consisted mainly of strikes throughout the Russian empire, came to an end when Nicholas II promised reforms, including the adoption of a Russian constitution and the establishment of an elected legislature. However, once order was restored, the czar nullified most of these reforms, and in 1907 Lenin was again forced into exile.
Lenin opposed World War I, which began in 1914, as an imperialistic conflict and called on proletariat soldiers to turn their guns on the capitalist leaders who sent them down into the murderous trenches. For Russia, World War I was an unprecedented disaster: Russian casualties were greater than those sustained by any nation in any previous war. Meanwhile, the economy was hopelessly disrupted by the costly war effort, and in March 1917 riots and strikes broke out in Petrograd over the scarcity of food. Demoralized army troops joined the strikers, and on March 15 Nicholas II was forced to abdicate, ending centuries of czarist rule. In the aftermath of the February Revolution (known as such because of Russia’s use of the Julian calendar), power was shared between the ineffectual Provincial Government and the soviets, or “councils,” of soldiers’ and workers’ committees.
After the outbreak of the February Revolution, German authorities allowed Lenin and his lieutenants to cross Germany en route from Switzerland to Sweden in a sealed railway car. Berlin hoped (correctly) that the return of the anti-war Socialists to Russia would undermine the Russian war effort, which was continuing under the Provincial Government. Lenin called for the overthrow of the Provincial Government by the soviets, and he was condemned as a “German agent” by the government’s leaders. In July, he was forced to flee to Finland, but his call for “peace, land, and bread” met with increasing popular support, and the Bolsheviks won a majority in the Petrograd soviet. In October, Lenin secretly returned to Petrograd, and on November 7 the Bolshevik-led Red Guards deposed the Provisional Government and proclaimed soviet rule.
Lenin became the virtual dictator of the world’s first Marxist state. His government made peace with Germany, nationalized industry, and distributed land but beginning in 1918, had to fight a devastating civil war against czarist forces. In 1920, the czarists were defeated, and in 1922 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was established. Upon Lenin’s death in early 1924, his body was embalmed and placed in a mausoleum near the Moscow Kremlin. Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honor. After a struggle of succession, fellow revolutionary Joseph Stalin succeeded Lenin as leader of the Soviet Union.

[Schmidt Meister]

August 30th In Music

1969 - Santana release their self-titled debut album, with standout tracks "Evil Ways" and "Soul Sacrifice."

1986 - Steve Winwood went to No. 1 on the US singles chart with, 'Higher Love'.

Birthdays:

1935 - John “Papa” Phillips. From American folk rock vocal group The Mamas & the Papas who had the 1965 hit 'California Dreamin'', the 1966 US No. 1 single 'Monday Monday' and the 1967 hit 'Dedicated to the One I Love'. Born in Parris Island, South Carolina. Phillips died on 3.18.2001 aged 65.

1954 - Ronald Beitle. Drummer, Wild Cherry, 1976 US No. 1 single 'Play That Funky Music'.

[Schmidt Meister]

On August 31, 1897, Thomas Edison receives a patent for his movie camera, the Kinetograph. Edison had developed the camera and its viewer in the early 1890s and staged several demonstrations.
The camera was based on photographic principles discovered by still-photograph pioneers Joseph Nicephone Niepce and Louis Daguerre of France. In 1877, inventor Edward Muybridge developed a primitive form of motion pictures when Leland Stanford, governor of California, invited him to develop photo studies of animals in motion. Muybridge developed an ingenious system for photographing sequential motion, setting up 24 cameras attached to trip wires stretched across a racetrack. As the horse tripped each wire, the shutters snapped. The resulting series of photos could be projected as something resembling a motion picture. This breakthrough in the early 1870s inspired another student of animal motion, Etienne Jules Marey of France, to develop in 1882 a rotating camera rather like a rifle, where different pictures were taken in a rapid sequence by a rotating cartridge.
Unlike these earlier cameras, Edison’s Kinetoscope and Kinetograph used celluloid film, invented by George Eastman in 1889. In February 1893, Edison built a small movie studio that could be rotated to capture the best available sunlight. He showed the first demonstration of his films, featuring three of his workers pretending to be blacksmiths, in May 1893.
The invention inspired French inventors Louis and August Lumiere to develop a movie camera and projector, the Cinematographe, that allowed a large audience to view a film. Several other cameras and projectors were also developed in the late 1800s.
In 1898, Edison sued American Mutoscope and Biograph Pictures, claiming that the studio had infringed on his patent for the Kinetograph. He had entrusted the development of the machine to his assistant, W.L.K. Dickson, who left Edison’s company in 1895 and helped found Biograph. However, in 1902, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that although Thomas Edison had patented the Kinetograph, he only owned rights to the sprocket system that moved perforated film through the camera, not the entire concept of the movie camera.
In 1909, Edison and Biograph joined forces with other filmmakers to create the Motion Pictures Patents Company, an organization devoted to protecting patents and keeping other players from entering the film industry. In 1917, the Supreme Court dissolved the trust, and the Edison Company left the film industry the same year.
Thomas Edison filed 1,093 successful U.S. patent applications and 500-600 unsuccessful or abandoned applications. http://edison.rutgers.edu/patents.htm (Some of the most significant inventions of Thomas Edison: Automatic Telegraph, Carbon Telephone Transmitter, Longer Lasting Light Bulb, Phonograph, Movie Camera and Viewer and the Alkaline Storage Battery)

[Schmidt Meister]

August 31st In Music

1963 - The girl trio, Angels, started a three week run at No. 1 on the US singles chart with ‘My Boyfriend’s Back’.

1963 - The Ronettes first entered the US singles chart with 'Be My Baby' the girl group's only top 10 hit.

Birthdays:

1939 - Jerry Allison. Drummer from American rock and roll band The Crickets, who had the 1957 US No. 1 single 'That'll Be The Day'. Born in Hillsboro, Texas.

1945 - Bob Welch. Guitarist for Fleetwood Mac. Born in Los Angeles, California.

1948 - Rudolf Schenker. German guitarist from Scorpions, who he formed in 1965 when he was 17 years old. Their 1990 power ballad 'Wind Of Change' topped the European charts and was a No. 4 hit in the US. The Scorpions hold the record for the best-selling single by a German artist and band. Born in Hildesheim, Lower Saxony, Germany.

1957 - Gina Schock. Drummer from all-female American rock band The Go-Go's, who had the 1982 US No. 2 single, 'We Got The Beat', and the 1982 UK hit single 'Our Lips Are Sealed'. Their 1981 debut album, Beauty and the Beat, is considered one of the "cornerstone albums of US new wave music". Born in Baltimore, Maryland.

[Schmidt Meister]

On September 1, 1775, Richard Penn and Arthur Lee, representing the Continental Congress, present the so-called Olive Branch Petition to the Earl of Dartmouth. Britain’s King George III, however, refused to receive the petition, which, written by John Dickinson, appealed directly to the king and expressed hope for reconciliation between the colonies and Great Britain.
Dickinson, who hoped desperately to avoid a final break with Britain, phrased colonial opposition to British policy this way: “Your Majesty’s Ministers, persevering in their measures, and proceeding to open hostilities for enforcing them, have compelled us to arm in our own defence [sic], and have engaged us in a controversy so peculiarly abhorrent to the affections of your still faithful Colonists, that when we consider whom we must oppose in this contest, and if it continues, what may be the consequences, our own particular misfortunes are accounted by us only as parts of our distress.”
By phrasing their discontent this way, Congress attempted to notify the king that American colonists were unhappy with ministerial policy, not his own. They then concluded their plea with a final statement of fidelity to the crown: “That your Majesty may enjoy long and prosperous reign, and that your descendants may govern your Dominions with honour to themselves and happiness to their subjects, is our sincere prayer.”

[Schmidt Meister]

On September 1, 1939, at 4:45 a.m., some 1.5 million German troops invade Poland all along its 1,750-mile border with German-controlled territory. Simultaneously, the German Luftwaffe bombed Polish airfields, and German warships and U-boats attacked Polish naval forces in the Baltic Sea. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler claimed the massive invasion was a defensive action, but Britain and France were not convinced. On September 3, they declared war on Germany, initiating World War II.
To Hitler, the conquest of Poland would bring Lebensraum, or “living space,” for the German people. According to his plan, the “racially superior” Germans would colonize the territory and the native Slavs would be enslaved. German expansion had begun in 1938 with the annexation of Austria and then continued with the occupation of the Sudetenland and then all of Czechoslovakia in 1939. Both had been accomplished without igniting hostilities with the major powers, and Hitler hoped that his invasion of Poland would likewise be tolerated.
To neutralize the possibility that the USSR would come to Poland’s aid, Germany signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union on August 23, 1939. In a secret clause of the agreement, the ideological enemies agreed to divide Poland between them. Hitler gave orders for the Poland invasion to begin on August 26, but on August 25 he delayed the attack when he learned that Britain had signed a new treaty with Poland, promising military support should it be attacked. To forestall a British intervention, Hitler turned to propaganda and misinformation, alleging persecution of German-speakers in eastern Poland. Fearing imminent attack, Poland began to call up its troops, but Britain and France persuaded Poland to postpone general mobilization until August 31 in a last ditch effort to dissuade Germany from war.
Shortly after noon on August 31, Hitler ordered hostilities against Poland to begin at 4:45 a.m. the next morning. At 8 p.m. on August 31, Nazi S.S. troops wearing Polish uniforms staged a phony invasion of Germany, damaging several minor installations on the German side of the border. They also left behind a handful of dead concentration camp prisoners in Polish uniforms to serve as further evidence of the supposed Polish invasion, which Nazi propagandists publicized as an unforgivable act of aggression.
At 4:45 a.m. on September 1, the invasion began. Nazi diplomats and propagandists scrambled to head off hostilities with the Western powers, but on September 2 Britain and France demanded that Germany withdraw by September 3 or face war. At 11 p.m. on September 3, the British ultimatum expired, and 15 minutes later British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain went on national radio to solemnly announce that Britain was at war with Germany. Australia, New Zealand, and India followed suit shortly thereafter. At 5:00 p.m., France declared war on Germany.
In Poland, German forces advanced at a dizzying rate. Employing a military strategy known as the blitzkrieg, or “lightning war,” armored divisions smashed through enemy lines and isolated segments of the enemy, which were encircled and captured by motorized German infantry while the panzer tanks rushed forward to repeat the pattern. Meanwhile, the sophisticated German air force, the Luftwaffe, destroyed Polish air capability, provided air support for the blitzkrieg, and indiscriminately bombed Polish cities in an effort to further terrorize the enemy.
The Polish army was able to mobilize one million men but was hopelessly outmatched in every respect. Rather than take a strong defensive position, troops were rushed to the front to confront the Germans and were systematically captured or annihilated. By September 8, German forces had reached the outskirts of Warsaw, having advanced 140 miles in the first week of the invasion.
The Polish armed forces hoped to hold out long enough so that an offensive could be mounted against Germany in the west, but on September 17 Soviet forces invaded from the east and all hope was lost. The next day, Poland’s government and military leaders fled the country. On September 28, the Warsaw garrison finally surrendered to a relentless German siege. That day, Germany and the USSR concluded an agreement outlining their zones of occupation. For the fourth time in its history, Poland was partitioned by its more powerful neighbors.
Despite their declaration of war against Germany, Britain and France did little militarily to aid Poland. Britain bombed German warships on September 4, but Chamberlain resisted bombing Germany itself. Though Germans kept only 23 divisions in the west during their campaign in Poland, France did not launch a full-scale attack even though it had mobilized over four times that number. There were modest assaults by France on its border with Germany but these actions ceased with the defeat of Poland. During the subsequent seven months, some observers accused Britain and France of waging a “phony war,” because, with the exception of a few dramatic British-German clashes at sea, no major military action was taken. However, hostilities escalated exponentially in 1940 with Germany’s April invasion of Norway and May invasion of the Low Countries and France.
In June 1941, Hitler attacked the USSR, breaking his nonaggression with the Soviet Union, and Germany seized all of Poland. During the German occupation, nearly three million Polish Jews were killed in the Nazi death camps. The Nazis also severely persecuted the Slavic majority, deporting and executing Poles in an attempt to destroy the intelligentsia and Polish culture. A large Polish resistance movement effectively fought against the occupation with the assistance of the Polish government-in-exile. Many exiled Poles also fought for the Allied cause. The Soviets completed the liberation of Poland in 1945 and established a communist government in the nation.