1560 – Fort Coligny on Villegagnon Island in Rio de Janeiro is attacked and destroyed during the Portuguese campaign against France Antarctique. France Antarctique was a French colony south of the Equator, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which existed between 1555 and 1567, and had control over the coast from Rio de Janeiro to Cabo Frio. Founded as a haven for the Huguenots, the colony was ultimately destroyed by the Portuguese in 1567.
1753 - The first official St Patrick's Day.
1756 - St Patrick's Day was first celebrated in NYC at Crown & Thistle Tavern.
1762 - The first St Patrick's Day parade took place in NYC.
1780 – George Washington grants the Continental Army a holiday "as an act of solidarity with the Irish in their fight for independence".
1845 - Bristol man, Henry Jones, patents self-raising flour.
1845 - Stephen Perry of the rubber manufacturing company Messers Perry and Co, Rubber Co Manuf London patented the fist rubber bands made of vulcanized rubber. Perry invented the rubber band to hold papers or envelopes together.
1868 - Postage stamp canceling machine patent issued.
1884 - John Joseph Montgomery makes the first glider flight, Otay, CA.
1898 - Engineer John Philip Holland achieves successful test runs of the first modern submarine off Staten Island, NYC (for 1 hour 40 minutes).
1950 – Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley announce the creation of element 98, which they name "Californium".
1958 – The United States launches the Vanguard 1 satellite.
1966 – Off the coast of Spain in the Mediterranean, the DSV Alvin submarine finds a missing American hydrogen bomb.
2013 – The largest meteorite (since NASA started observing the moon in 2005) hits the moon.
Today's birthday crew:
1804 – Jim Bridger, American explorer was among the foremost mountain men, trappers, scouts and guides who explored and trapped the Western United States during the decades of 1820-1850, as well as mediating between native tribes and encroaching whites. Bridger had a strong constitution that allowed him to survive the extreme conditions he encountered walking the Rocky Mountains from what would become southern Colorado to the Canadian border. He had conversational knowledge of French, Spanish, and several native languages. He would come to know many of the major figures of the early west, including Brigham Young, Kit Carson, George Armstrong Custer, John Fremont, Joseph Meek, and John Sutter.
1849 – Charles F. Brush, American inventor, co-invented the Arc lamp. He had a great interest in science, particularly with Humphry Davy's experiments with the arc light. He tinkered with and built simple electrical devices such as a static electricity machine at age 12, experimenting in a workshop on his parents farm. In 1876 he secured the backing of the Wetting Supply Company in Cleveland to design his "dynamo" (an electrical generator) for powering arc lights. Brush remarked on his motivation for improving the generator in his US Patent 189,997: "The best forms of magneto-electric apparatus at present before the public are unnecessarily bulky, heavy, and expensive, and are more or less wasteful of mechanical power." After comparing it to the Gramme dynamo and other European entrants, the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia judged Brush's dynamo superior due to its simpler design and maintainability after completing tests in 1878. Brush produced additional patents refining the design of his arc lights in the coming years and sold systems to several cities for public lighting, and even equipped Philadelphia's Wanamaker's Grand Depot with a system. His lights were easier to maintain, had automatic functions and burned twice as long as Yablochkov candles. His generators were reliable and automatically increased voltage with greater load while keeping current constant. By 1881, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Montreal, Buffalo, San Francisco, Cleveland and other cities had Brush arc light systems, producing public light well into the 20th century.
1880 – Lawrence Oates, English army officer and Antarctic explorer.
1901 – Alfred Newman, American composer (Captain from Castile, Airport).
1938 – Zola Taylor, American singer (The Platters).
1941 – Paul Kantner, American musician (Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship, and KBC Band).
1948 – William Gibson, American-Canadian speculative fiction novelist who has been called the "noir prophet" of the cyberpunk subgenre. Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982) and later popularized the concept in his debut novel, Neuromancer (1984). In envisaging cyberspace, Gibson created an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. He is also credited with predicting the rise of reality television and with establishing the conceptual foundations for the rapid growth of virtual environments such as video games and the World Wide Web.
1978 – Jason M. Burns, American comic book writer and assistant publisher at Viper Comics. He is best known for creating the comic book titles The Expendable One and A Dummy’s Guide to Danger.
Happy birthday guys!