August 8th is
Dalek Day *
Frozen Custard Day
Happiness Happens Day
International Cat Day *
National Dollar Day *
Sneak Some Zucchini on Your Neighbor’s Porch Day
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MORE! Tycho Brahe, Janis Joplin and Nicholas Holtham, click
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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS
Antigua & Barbuda, British Virgin Islands, St. Kitts & Nevis:
Carnival Tuesday/August Festival
Kenya – General Election Holiday
Nepal – Kathmandu: Gai Jatra
(Cow procession and festival)
Tanzania – Wakulima ya Nane Nane
(Peasants’ day)
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On This Day in HISTORY
870 – King Louis the German and his half-brother Charles the Bald partition the Middle Frankish Kingdom into east and west divisions in the Treaty of Meersen
1576 – Cornerstone laid for Tycho Brahe’s Uraniborg observatory on the island of Hven
1709 – Bartolomeu de Gusmão shows the lifting power of hot air at the court of King John V of Portugal to get support for his airship project
1786 – National Dollar Day *- A Second Continental Congress resolution establishes U.S. currency as the dollar, with dimes, cents and mills as fractions of it
1794 – Joseph Whidbey’s expedition searches for the Northwest Passage in Alaska
1814 – Esther Hobart Morris born, abolitionist; first female U.S. Justice of the Peace, in Wyoming, appointed to replace the previous justice after he resigned in protest over Wyoming extending suffrage to women
1844 – Brigham Young is chosen as the new leader of the Mormons
1863 – Florence Merriam Bailey, American ornithologist and nature writer, organized Audubon Society chapters, co-author with husband of Handbook of Birds of the Western United States and The Birds of New Mexico
1876 – Thomas Edison patents his mimeograph
1884 – Sara Teasdale born, lyric poet, Pulitzer Prize for Love Songs; also published Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems and Helen of Troy and Other Poems
1885 – More than 1.5 million people come to funeral of Ulysses S. Grant in NYC
1896 – Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings born, author, Pulitzer Prize for novel The Yearling
1899 – A.T. Marshall patents the refrigerator
1908 – Wilbur Wright makes his first public flight at a Le Mans, France racecourse
1910 – U.S Army Lt. Benjamin Foulois installs a safety belt and tricycle landing gear on a Wright Flyer in San Antonio TX; the Flyer originally had a brake skid instead of wheels
1911 – The millionth application is filed at the U.S. Patent Office, by Francis Holton for a tubeless vehicle tire
1922 – Gertrude Himmelfarb born, American traditionalist historian, noted for works on Victorian England
1925 – 200,000 Ku Klux Klan members stage its first national march in Washington DC
1927 – Maia Wojciechowska born in Poland, American children and young adult fiction author, Newbery Award for Shadow of a Bull
1929– The German airship Graf Zeppelin begins a round-the-world flight
1929 – Larisa Bogoraz born, Soviet linguist, author and dissident, organizes a protest in Red Square of the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia; exiled for four years of exile in Siberia; co-author of Memory, contributor to the underground Chronicle of Current Events (1968-1983), run by dissidents for free speech and civil rights
1930 – Terry Nation, creator of the villainous Daleks on Doctor Who, is born, To honor him; his birthday is celebrated by Doctor Who fans as Daleks Day *
1933 – Serena Wilson born, American student of Ruth St. Denis, pioneer in legitimizing belly dance in the U.S.; television host of The Serena Show; choreographer and teacher
1939 – The U.S. boycotts the Venice Film Festival because of Italy’s fascist regime
1942 – Quit India Movement launched against British rule after Gandhi’s call for swaraj: complete independence for India
1945 – The London Charter is signed by France, the U.K., Soviet Union and U.S., establishing the laws and procedures for the Nuremberg Trials
1945 – U.S. President Truman signs the United Nations Charter
1946 – First flight of the Convair B-36, world’s first mass-produced aircraft designed to carry nuclear weapons – also first bomber with intercontinental range
B-29 on left, Convair B-36 on right
1948 – Margaret Urban Walker born, American philosopher, ethicist and author; Moral Contexts, Naturalized bioethics: toward responsible knowing and practice
1953 – Soviet Premier Georgy Malenkov announces the USSR has a hydrogen bomb, which is tested four days later on August 12 at Semipalatinsk
1954 – Nicholas Holtham born, British, Church of England Bishop of Salisbury; first C of E bishop to publically support same-sex marriage; chair of Ministry Committee for Ministry with and among Deaf and Disabled People
1963 – The Great Train Robbery in England – 15 robbers steal £2.6 million
1969 – At London zebra crossing, photographer Iain Macmillan shoots the Beatles Abbey Road album cover photo
1969 – Executive order 11478, issued by President Nixon, requires each federal department and agency to establish and maintain an affirmative action program of equal employment opportunity for civilian employees and applicants
1969 – The International Fund for Animal Welfare is founded in Canada – it now has projects in over 40 countries; IFAW is the sponsor of International Cat Day *
1970 – Janis Joplin buys a headstone for blues singer Bessie Smith’s grave, two months before her own funeral
1974 – President Nixon announces his resignation from office on national TV broadcast
1983 – Metallica releases their first single, “Whiplash”
1988 – Russian troops begin pulling out of Afghanistan after nine fruitless years of war
1991 – Warsaw Poland’s radio mast, once the world’s tallest man-made object, collapses
2000 – Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley raised after 136 year in the ocean floor
2008 – The Summer Games of the XXIX Olympiad open in Beijing China
2014 – The World Health Organization (WHO) declares the West African Ebola outbreak a Public Health Emergency of International Concern
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Nicole Plyler Fisk
Gene Howington
FFS Guest Blogger
Joy of Fishes
Chuck Stanley
shortfinals
Terry Welshans
ann li-summers
wordcloud9
Flowers For Socrates 
The B-36 was started in 1941 as a way of delivering nuclear bombs to Germany from the United States. It had a bomb load of almost 90,000lb and was the first bomber designed for the hydrogen bomb. The Mark-17 hydrogen bomb was 25 ft long, 5 ft in diameter, and weighed 42,000 lb. This was four times heavier than the Mark-1 and Mark-3 nuclear bomb carried in the B-29. The Mark-1 (little boy) was 120 inches long, 28 inches diameter, and weighed 9,700lb and the Mark-3 (fat man) was 128 inches long, 60 inches diameter, and weighed 10,300lb. Although capable of flying at very high altitude, the B-36 was extraordinarily slow until four jet engines were added to complement the eight 4,360 cubic inch twenty-eight cylinder piston engines. Each of those piston engines had fifty-six spark plugs, for a total of two hundred twenty-four spark plugs per aircraft.
Hi Terry –
224 spark plugs – down-time for maintenance must have been substantial!
I also love that you get three landmarks in flight on the same day – Wilbur Wright going internationally public; then 21 years later, the Graf Zeppelin, which was only in service 9 years (and scrapped for fighter plane parts in 1940); then finally, the B-36, just 38 years after Wright flew at Le Mans. A lot of history in a such a short time.
My grandmother was born in 1895 and was a child when the Wright brothers flew. She watched the Apollo moon landing in 1969.
My three Great Aunts too – one of them ran for and won the office of County Recorder in Wyoming when it was the only state where women had the vote, and another one worked for the railroad as a “typewriter” (originally the name of the operator) – they charged her a rental fee to use the machine they provided, deducted from her weekly paycheck! All three of them lived into their 90s.
Aircraft spark plugs are special, too. Today, one plug costs about $35.00, about 10 times what an automotive plug costs. It has to do with scale of production. Automotive spark plugs are made in the millions with high production lines with a continuous flow of materials while aircraft spark plugs are made by the thousand in small batches. Aircraft were made in batches of a few hundred at a time while jeeps and trucks were full high-production assembly lines.
$7,840 just to change the spark plugs – ouch!
Government has lots of money. It took a crew many hours to do the job, and it was needed every few flight hours. The carburetor for the piston engine on this aircraft has an opening of about 100 square inches. The whole aircraft is huge!