On This Day

Every date has a story. American history, wars, disasters, inventions and legends, posted on the day it happened.

[On This Day @HailHistory]

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[On This Day @HailHistory]

@business Franz Kafka's first real job was at Assicurazioni Generali. He started Nov 1, 1907, hated the 8am-to-6pm shifts that left no time to write, and quit on July 15, 1908. Two weeks later he joined a workers' accident insurance office, assessing claims for lost fingers and limbs.

[On This Day @HailHistory]

@newscientist The dinosaur-killing crater was found by oil hunters. In 1978 Pemex geophysicists Glen Penfield and Antonio Camargo spotted a 180 km "bullseye" under the Yucatán. Separately, Luis and Walter Alvarez found iridium up to 160x normal in clay at Gubbio, Italy. That's them.

[On This Day @HailHistory]

@business The amber light was a Detroit cop's idea. In 1920 police signal chief William Potts built the first four-way, three-color traffic light, and by 1921 15 Detroit towers ran it. The very first signal, London 1868, was gas-lit and exploded on Jan 2, 1869.

[On This Day @HailHistory]

@Reuters Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on Sept 15, 2008, with over $600 billion in assets, still the biggest in U.S. history. The Dow fell just over 500 points.

Next day, Barclays' Bob Diamond told Lehman staff they'd been bought, then played "God Save the Queen" on the intercom.

[On This Day @HailHistory]

@WSJ This museum is still missing 13 works. On March 18, 1990, two men posing as police took them, including Rembrandt's only seascape, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee.

They even pulled a large Rembrandt self-portrait off the wall, then left it behind. A $10M reward still stands.

[On This Day @HailHistory]

@MarketWatch Nvidia was sketched out at a Denny's on Berryessa Road in East San Jose in late 1992 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, then launched with $40,000 in the bank. In 1999 its GeForce 256 became the first chip it sold as a "GPU."

[On This Day @HailHistory]

@business @chriswelch Apple's first fold lands 30 years after the flip that made folding cool: Motorola's StarTAC, launched Jan 3, 1996 for $1,000 (~$2,010 today).

At 3.1 oz it was the smallest, lightest cell phone yet. Ads came with a cardboard cut-out, and its look echoed Star Trek's Communicator.

[On This Day @HailHistory]

@TechCrunch Humans first made fusion work in 1952, as a bomb.

Ivy Mike, Nov 1, 1952, Enewetak: a 20-ft device nicknamed "Sausage" yielded 10.4 megatons and wiped the island of Elugelab off the map.

74 years later, the hard part is taming it into steady power.

[On This Day @HailHistory]

@business Barclays gave the world its first cash machine: June 27, 1967, at its Enfield branch in north London. Actor Reg Varney launched it.

Inventor John Shepherd-Barron of De La Rue said the idea struck him that there must be a way to get your own money anywhere in the world.

[On This Day @HailHistory]

@CNBC The first internet worm to make headlines hit thousands of computers in 1988. Its author, Cornell grad student Robert Tappan Morris, later co-founded Y Combinator.

His code copied itself too fast and earned the first felony conviction under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

[On This Day @HailHistory]

@Rainmaker1973 The first battery was a hand-stacked tower of metal discs.

In 1800, Alessandro Volta piled copper and zinc discs with brine-soaked cloth between them and wrote to London's Royal Society. By 1808, Humphry Davy had used piles to isolate sodium, potassium and calcium.

[On This Day @HailHistory]

@Rainmaker1973 Chris Martin spent a month memorizing "The Scientist" backward so Coldplay's video could run in reverse.

The trick is 130 years old. The Lumière brothers filmed a factory wall being knocked down in 1896, then sometimes projected it in reverse so the wall rose back up.

[On This Day @HailHistory]

@Rainmaker1973 The cow behind the first vaccine still hangs in a London library.

On 14 May 1796, Edward Jenner took cowpox pus from milkmaid Sarah Nelmes, who caught it from a cow named Blossom, and put it into 8-year-old James Phipps. Smallpox never took. Blossom's hide is at St George's.

[On This Day @HailHistory]

@CNBC American Express started in 1850 in Buffalo as a freight-forwarding company, co-founded by Henry Wells and William Fargo, the same two men who launched Wells Fargo in 1852.

This 1865 Amex share is signed by both. Its first paper charge card didn't come until 1958.

[On This Day @HailHistory]

@wonderofscience Galileo saw Saturn's rings in 1610 and had no idea what they were. He wrote that Saturn was "composed of three" bodies and called the rings its "ears."

In 1612 they vanished edge-on. He asked: "Has Saturn swallowed his children?" Huygens finally called them a disk in 1655.

[On This Day @HailHistory]

@Rainmaker1973 Every ear of corn you've ever eaten started as teosinte, a wild Mexican grass whose "ear" held just 5 to 10 seeds, each sealed in a fruitcase hard enough to survive a grazing animal's gut.

Farmers in southern Mexico began reshaping it into maize about 9,000 years ago.

[On This Day @HailHistory]

@CNBC Today's AT&T is technically Southwestern Bell.

The government broke up Ma Bell on Jan 1, 1984 into 7 "Baby Bells." In 2005 one of them, SBC, bought its old parent for $16B+, renamed itself AT&T Inc. and took the "T" ticker on Dec 1.

[On This Day @HailHistory]

@Rainmaker1973 Seattle's Edith Macefield turned down a reported $1 million in 2006 rather than sell her 1900 farmhouse. A five-story building went up around it, and she died there in 2008. Many link it to Disney's "Up", but Up's production began in 2004.

[On This Day @HailHistory]

@NFL Tonight's stadium was formally dedicated as Soldier Field at the 1926 Army-Navy Game, with 100,000+ fans packed in.

It decided the national title: undefeated Navy vs. an Army team whose only loss came against Notre Dame. It ended 21-21, and Navy was awarded the championship.