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Today In History – November 21 – Part 1
This is Ray Mossholder with Today in History – November 21……
On this day in 1430, The Burgundians sold Joan of Arc to the English.
On November 21, 1877, the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison announces his invention of the phonograph, a way to record and play back sound.
Edison stumbled on one of his great inventions–the phonograph–while working on a way to record telephone communication at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. His work led him to experiment with a stylus on a tinfoil cylinder, which, to his surprise, played back the short song he had recorded, “MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB”. Public demonstrations of the phonograph made the Yankee inventor world famous, and he was dubbed the “Wizard of Menlo Park.”
Edison set aside this invention in 1878 to work on the incandescent light bulb, and other inventors moved forward to improve on the phonograph. In 1887, Edison resumed work on the device, using the wax-cylinder technique developed by Charles Tainter. Although initially used as a dictating machine, the phonograph proved to be a popular tool for entertainment, and in 1906 Edison unveiled a series of musical and theatrical selections to the public through his National Phonograph Company. Continuing to improve on models and cylinders over the years, the Edison Disc Phonograph debuted in 1912 with the aim of competing in the popular record market. Edison’s discs offered superior sound quality but were not compatible with other popular disc players.
During the 1920s, the early record business suffered with the growth of radio, and in 1929 recording production at Edison ceased forever. Edison, who acquired an astounding 1,093 patents in his 84 years, died in 1931.
On November 21, 1899, President McKinley tells five visiting clergymen he had not wanted the Philippines, but since they had come into the care of the United States, he had gone down on his knees and prayed Almighty God for guidance what to do with them. The answer he believed was “that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.”
On November 21, 1916,The Britannic, sister ship to the Titanic, sank in the Aegean Sea, killing 30 people. More than 1,000 others were rescued.
In the wake of the Titanic disaster on April 14, 1912, the White Star Line made several modifications in the construction of its already-planned sister ship. First, the name was changed from Gigantic to Britannic (probably because it seemed more humble) and the design of the hull was altered to make it less vulnerable to icebergs. In addition, it was mandated that there be enough lifeboats on board to accommodate all passengers, which had not been the case with the Titanic.
The nearly 50,000-ton luxury vessel, the largest in the world, was launched in 1914, but was requisitioned soon afterward by the British government to serve as a hospital ship during World War I. In this capacity, Captain Charlie Bartlett led the Britannic on five successful voyages bringing wounded British troops back to England from various ports around the world.
On November 21, the Britannic was on its way to pick up more wounded soldiers near the Gulf of Athens, when at 8:12 a.m., a violent explosion rocked the ship. Captain Bartlett ordered the closure of the watertight doors and sent out a distress signal. However, the blast had already managed to flood six whole compartments—even more extensive damage than that which had sunk the Titanic. Still, the Britannic had been prepared for such a disaster and would have stayed afloat except for two critical matters.
First, Captain Bartlett decided to try to run the Britannic aground on the nearby island of Kea. This might have been successful, but, earlier, the ship’s nursing staff had opened the portholes to air out the sick wards. Water poured in through the portholes as the Britannic headed toward Kea. Second, the disaster was compounded when some of the crew attempted to launch lifeboats without orders. Since the ship was still moving as fast as it could, the boats were sucked into the propellers, killing those on board.
Less than 30 minutes later, Bartlett realized that the ship was going to sink and ordered it abandoned. The lifeboats were launched and even though theBritannic sank at 9:07, less than an hour after the explosion, nearly 1,100 people managed to make it off the ship. In fact, most of the 30 people who died were in the prematurely launched lifeboats. In 1976, famed ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau found the Britannic lying on its side 400 feet below the surface of the Aegean. The cause of the explosion remains unknown, but many believe that the Britannic hit a mine.
November 21, 1783, French physician Jean-François Pilatre de Rozier and François Laurent, the marquis d’ Arlandes, make the first untethered hot-air balloon flight, flying 5.5 miles over Paris in about 25 minutes. Their cloth balloon was crafted by French papermaking brothers Jacques-Étienne and Joseph-Michel Montgolfier, inventors of the world’s first successful hot-air balloons.
For time immemorial, humanity has dreamed of flight. Greek mythology tells of Daedalus, who made wings of wax, and Leonardo da Vinci drew designs of flying machines and envisioned the concept of a helicopter in the 15th century. It was not until the 1780s, however, that human flight became a reality.
The first successful flying device may not have been a Montgolfier balloon but an “ornithopter”–a glider-like aircraft with flapping wings. According to a hazy record, the German architect Karl Friedrich Meerwein succeeded in lifting off the ground in an ornithopter in 1781. Whatever the veracity of this record, Meerwein’s flying machine never became a viable means of flight, and it was the Montgolfier brothers who first took men into the sky.
Joseph and Étienne Montgolfier ran a prosperous paper business in the town of Vidalon in southern France. Their success allowed them to finance their interest in scientific experimentation. In 1782, they discovered that combustible materials burned under a lightweight paper or fabric bag would cause the bag to rise into the air. From this phenomenon, they deduced that smoke causes balloons to rise. Actually, it is hot air that causes balloons to rise, but their error did not interfere with their subsequent achievements.
On June 4, 1783, the brothers gave the first public demonstration of their discovery, in Annonay. An unmanned balloon heated by burning straw and wool rose 3,000 feet into the air before settling to the ground nearly two miles away. In their test of a hot-air balloon, the Montgolfiers were preceded by Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão, a Brazilian priest who launched a small hot-air balloon in the palace of the king of Portugal in 1709. The Montgolfiers were unaware of Lourenço’s work, however, and quickly surpassed it.
On September 19, the Montgolfiers sent a sheep, a rooster, and a duck aloft in one of their balloons in a prelude to the first manned flight. The balloon, painted azure blue and decorated with golden fleurs-de-lis, lifted up from the courtyard of the palace of Versailles in the presence of King Louis XVI. The barnyard animals stayed afloat for eight minutes and landed safely two miles away. On October 15, Jean-François Pilátre de Rozier made a tethered test flight of a Montgolfier balloon, briefly rising into the air before returning to earth.
The first untethered hot-air balloon flight occurred before a large, expectant crowd in Paris on November 21. Pilátre and d’Arlandes, an aristocrat, rose up from the grounds of royal Cháteau La Muette in the Bois de Boulogne and flew approximately five miles. Humanity had at last conquered the sky.
The Montgolfier brothers were honored by the French Acadámie des Sciences for their achievement. They later published books on aeronautics and pursued important work in other scientific fields.
On November 21, 1931, the University of Southern California surprises Notre Dame with a last-minute game-winning field goal at the new Notre Dame Stadium in South Bend. The victory won USC the national championship and was, according to that year’s Trojan yearbook, “the biggest upset since Mrs. O’Leary’s cow knocked over that lantern.”
The Irish, then nicknamed the Ramblers, hadn’t lost a game since 1928, when they lost to the Trojans–that year’s national champs–midway through the season. Thanks to their 26-game winning streak, Notre Dame had easily captured the last two national championships, and everyone expected another undefeated season. In particular, no one anticipated that the Ramblers would lose at home, on a field that the team had just dedicated to their late coach Knute Rockne.
The home team had a characteristically commanding start: They scored after a 55-yard run in the first half, and again in just four plays at the beginning of the second. But then they just fell apart. A Notre Dame interference penalty early in the fourth quarter put the ball at their 16-yard line, and USC quarterback Gaius Shaver smashed through the defensive line to score. (The Ramblers had managed to block the extra point, at least, so the score was 6-14.) Then Shaver scored again–and this time, placekicker Johnny Baker didn’t miss. USC had come within a single point of tying the game.
“What happened after that,” Time magazine said in its account of the game, “was so rapid, so out of keeping with what usually happens in Notre Dame games that 52,000 spectators who saw it found it hard to believe.” With a little more than a minute left to play, Shaver completed two remarkable passes–one for 50 yards and one for 23. There was still plenty of time to push forward for a touchdown, which is what the Ramblers expected the Trojans to do. But they didn’t. Instead, Baker dropped back to the 23 and made up for the earlier missed point by kicking a perfect field goal. The score was 16 to 14; Southern Cal had won the game and the championship.
On the evening of November 21, 1934, a young and gangly would-be dancer took to the stage of Harlem’s Apollo Theater to participate in a harrowing tradition known as Amateur Night. Finding herself onstage as a result of pure chance after her name was drawn out of a hat, the aspiring dancer spontaneously decided to turn singer instead—a change of heart that would prove momentous not only for herself personally, but also for the future course of American popular music. The performer in question was a teenaged Ella Fitzgerald, whose decision to sing rather than dance on this day in 1934 set her on a course toward becoming a musical legend. It also led her to victory at Amateur Night at the Apollo, a weekly event that was then just a little more than a year old but still thrives today.
Born in 1917 in New York City and orphaned at the age of 15, Ella Fitzgerald was a high-school dropout and a ward of New York State when she made her way to the Apollo that autumn night in 1934 with two of her girlfriends. “It was a bet,” she later recalled. “We just put our names in….We never thought we’d get the call.” But Ella did get the call, and as it happened, she came to the stage immediately after a talented and popular local dance duo. Afraid that she couldn’t measure up to the dancing talents of the preceding act, Ella was petrified. “I looked and I saw all those people, and I said, ‘Oh my gosh, what am I going to do out here?"” she told National Public Radio decades later. “Everybody started laughing and said, ‘What is she gonna do?’ And I couldn’t think of nothing else, so I tried to sing ‘The Object of My Affection."”
By her own admission, Fitzgerald was blatantly imitating the singer who popularized that song, Connie Boswell of the Boswell Sisters, and the first few notes were a disaster. Rushing onstage to protect her from the jeers of the notoriously tough Apollo Theater crowd, however, was the famous Amateur Night master of ceremonies, Ralph Cooper, who helped Ella gather her wits and try again. On her second attempt, she brought down the house.
Within the year, Ella Fitzgerald had been discovered by Chick Webb, to whose band she was legally paroled by the State of New York while still shy of her 18th birthday. It was with Webb’s band that she scored her career-making hit, “A-Tisket A-Tasket” in 1938, but it was as a solo performer that she would become a jazz legend in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a revolutionary innovator in vocal jazz.
Albert Speer and Adolf Hitler
On this day in 1941, Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler’s chief architect and minister for armaments and war production, asks for 30,000 Soviet prisoners of war to use as slave laborers to begin a massive Berlin building program.
Speer was born March 19, 1905, in Mannheim, Germany. At the age of 22, he received his architectural license, having studied at three German technical schools. He became an ardent Nazi after hearing Hitler orate at a rally in late 1930, and joined the party in January 1931. Hitler, always impressed by academic credentials and any kind of artistic or technical talent, made Speer his personal architect. Among the projects with which the Fuhrer entrusted Speer was the design of the parade grounds for the Nuremberg Party Congress in 1934, which Leni Riefienstahl made famous in her famous propaganda film Triumph of the Will.
As minister of armaments and munitions, Speer’s job description expanded to include not only armament production and transportation, but also the direction of raw material use and finally the conscription of slave labor, culled from concentration camps, for war material production. These slave laborers would come in handy for Hitler’s “new” Berlin. Speer wanted to begin construction even as the war waged. Despite the drain on resources Hitler agreed. Speer beguiled the Fuhrer with models of a Great Hall for the Chancellery and a grand office for Goering.
But as the war turned against Nazi Germany, the rebuilding plans were scrapped. When the war was over, Hitler was dead, and Speer was tried as a war criminal at Nuremberg, the site of his grand parade, and sentenced to 20 years in Spandau prison in Berlin.
This poster was posted in classrooms and believed throughout my high school years. However, the words written under the supposed humanoids were totally missing. – Ray
On November 21, 1954, Newspaper headlines around the world announced that the scientific community had exposed the Piltdown Man as a hoax, to the immense satisfaction of those Christians who had already rejected the theory of evolution.
Litany of the Immaculate Conception
A historic announcement from the Catholic Church was made on this day in 1964 during the third session of Vatican II. John Paul the 2nd approved a “Decree on Ecumenism,” that declares both Catholics and Protestants to blame for past divisions and calls for dialogue, not derision, in the future.
On November 21, 1986, National Security Council staff member Oliver North and his secretary, Fawn Hall, begin shredding documents that would have exposed their participation in a range of illegal activities regarding the sale of arms to Iran and the diversion of the proceeds to a rebel Nicaraguan group. On November 25, North was fired but Hall continued to sneak documents to him by stuffing them in her skirt and boots. The Iran-Contra scandal, as it came to be known, became an embarrassment and a sticky legal problem for the Reagan administration.
Only six years earlier, Iran had become an enemy of the United States after taking hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. At the time, Ronald Reagan had repeatedly insisted that the United States would never deal with terrorists. When the revelation surfaced that his top officials at the National Security Council had begun selling arms to Iran, it was a public relations disaster.
During the televised Iran-Contra hearings, the public learned that the money received for the arms was sent to support the Contras in Nicaragua, despite Congress’ Boland Amendment, which expressly prohibited U.S. assistance to the Contras. Though the communist Sandinistas had been legitimately elected in Nicaragua, the Reagan administration sought to oust them by supporting the Contras, an anti-Communist group.
During the Iran-Contra hearings, North claimed that the entire Reagan administration had known about the illegal plan. After admitting that he had lied to Congress, he was convicted of shredding documents, obstruction of justice, and illegally receiving a security fence for his own residence. He received a light sentence of a fine, probation, and community service.
A year later in July 1990, an appellate court voted 2-1 to overturn his conviction based on the possibility that some of the evidence may have come from testimony that Congress had immunized in their own hearings on the matter. President Reagan and Vice President George Bush maintained that they had no knowledge of the scheme.
Chemical warfare in Syria
And the headline story at this hour….November 21, 2015……
BAGHDAD – According to Iraqi and U.S. intelligence officials Isis is aggressively pursuing development of chemical weapons, setting up a branch dedicated to research and experiments with the help of scientists from Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the region.
Their quest raises an alarming scenario for the West, given the determination to strike major cities that the group showed with its bloody attack last week in Paris. Still, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls on Thursday warned that Islamic extremists might at some point use chemical or biological weapons.
Valls told the lower house of Parliament, “Terrorism hit France not because of what it is doing in Iraq and Syria … It’s what terrorists do. We know that there could also be a risk of chemical or biological weapons,” he added, though he did not talk of a specific threat.
Iraqi officials expressed concern concerning the large safe haven the extremists control has since overrunning parts of Iraq and Syria last year.
“They now have complete freedom to select locations for their labs and production sites and have a wide range of experts, both civilians and military, to aid them,” a senior Iraqi intelligence official told The Associated Press.
So far, the only overt sign of the group’s chemical weapons program has been the apparent use of mustard gas against Iraqi Kurdish fighters and in Syria. In mortars that hit Kurdish forces in northern Iraq earlier this year, preliminary tests by the U.S. showed traces of the chemical agent sulfur mustard.
Iraqi authorities clearly fear the use could be expanded. Over the summer, Iraq’s military distributed gas masks to troops deployed west and north of Baghdad, one general told the AP. A senior officer in Salahuddin province, north of Baghdad, said 25 percent of the troops deployed there were equipped with masks.
Hakim al-Zamili, the head of the Iraqi parliament’s security and defense committee said “More recently, Russia gave 1,000 protective suits against chemical attacks to Iraqi military. He said Isis has set up a branch tasked with pursuing chemical weapons. He wouldn’t give details of the program.
But al-Zamili, citing intelligence reports he has access to, told the AP that the group has managed to attract chemical experts from abroad as well as Iraqi experts, including ones who once worked for Saddam Hussein’s now-dissolved Military Industrialization Authority. The foreigners include experts from Chechnya and southeast Asia.
Isis recently moved its research labs, experts and materials from Iraq to “secured locations” inside Syria, al-Zamili added — apparently out of concern for an eventual assault on Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, captured by IS in the summer of 2014.al-Zamil continued “Daesh (the Arab acronym for Isis) is working very seriously to reach production of chemical weapons, particularly nerve gas,”, That would threaten not just Iraq but the whole world.”
Still, U.S. intelligence officials say they don’t believe Isis has the technological capability to produce nerve gas or biological agents, and that the militants were more likely to harm themselves trying to make them. A European official privy to intelligence on the extremist group’s programs agreed, saying so far even Isis production of mustard gas was in small quantities and of low quality.
The United States and its allies accused the military of Syrian President Bashar Assad of using chemical weapons in its nearly 5-year war with rebels, including a 2013 attack in a rebel-held Damascus suburb that killed hundreds. The Syrian government denies using any such weapons, but after that attack it struck a deal to give up its chemical weapons stockpiles. Still, it has been accused of continuing to use chlorine gas, a claim it denies.
Retired Lt. Gen. Richard Zahner, who was the top American military intelligence officer in Iraq in 2005 and 2006 and went on to lead the National Security Agency’s electronic spying arm, noted that al-Qaida tried for two decades to develop chemical weapons and didn’t succeed, proving the technical and scientific difficulties.However, he said, U.S. intelligence agencies have consistently underestimated the Islamic State group, which has shown itself to be more capable and innovative than al-Qaida and has greater financial resources. They are absolutely not a JV team!
“Even a few competent scientists and engineers, given the right motivation and a few material resources, can produce hazardous industrial and weapons-specific chemicals in limited quantities,” Zahner said.
Developing chemical weapons has been an ambition of the group — and various other jihadi movements — for years. There are also concerns about militants trying to obtain radioactive materials. An AP investigation published last month uncovered that authorities in the Eastern European nation of Moldova, working with the FBI have interrupted four attempts in the past five years by gangs with suspected Russian connections that sought to sell radioactive material to Middle Eastern extremists.
A senior deputy of the group’s leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi wrote in a 2013 report to al-Baghdadi of “significant progress” toward producing chemical weapons. In it, the deputy, Sameer al-Khalifawy, wrote that chemical weapons would ensure “swift victory” and “terrorize our enemies.” But, he added, what was needed was “to secure a safe environment to carry out experiments.”
In May 2013, Iraqi security forces, acting on a tip from the Americans, raided a chemical weapons research lab in Baghdad’s Sunni-majority district of al-Doura. Security forces arrested two militants running the lab, one held a master’s degree in chemistry, and the other had a bachelor’s degree in physics and worked at Saddam’s Military Industrialization Authority before it was disbanded in 2003.
Iraqi officials complained of lack of cooperation from neighboring Syria. They cited the case of a veteran Iraqi jihadist and weapons expert, Ziad Tareq Ahmed, who fled to Syria after Iraqi security agents raided his Baghdad home in 2010 and arrested members of his cell. The agents found large amounts of material that could be used for making mustard gas.
Security officials said Ahmed has worked with several Islamic militant groups without formally joining any. He was arrested by the Syrians last year. The Syrian government allowed Iraqi officals to interrogate him in prison but refused to hand him over. Then last month, they released him.
“This is a very grave development,” said one of the officials, who heads one of Iraq’s top counterterrorism agencies. “His release adds significantly to our concerns.”
Be sure to go to Part 2 for the rest of the stories for November 21
Today In History – November 21 – Part 1
Today In History - November 21 - Part 1