Calendar: August 6

A Year: Day to Day Men: 6th of August

A Bed of Flowers

August 6, 1874 was the birthdate of American writer and researcher, Charles Hoy Fort.

During 1915, Charles Fort, an experienced journalist with wit and a contrarian nature, began to write two books, titled “X” and “Y”, the first dealing with the idea that beings on Mars were controlling events on Earth, and the second with the postulation of a sinister civilization in existence at the South Pole. These books caught the attention of writer Theodore Dreiser who attempted to get them published, but to no avail.

Discouraged by this failure, Charles Fort burnt the manuscripts, but was soon renewed to begin work on the book that would change the course of his life, the 1919 “The Book of the Damned”, which Dreiser helped to get published. The title referred to “damned” data that Fort collected, phenomena for which science could not account and that was thus rejected or ignored.

For more than thirty years, Charles Fort visited libraries in New York City and London, assiduously reading scientific journals, newspapers, and magazines, collecting notes on phenomena that were not explained well by the accepted theories and beliefs of the time. He marveled that seemingly unrelated bits of information were, in fact, related. The notes were kept on cards and scraps of paper in shoeboxes, in a cramped shorthand of Fort’s own invention.

From this research, Charles Fort wrote four books. These are: “The Book of the Damned” published in 1919; the 1923 “New Lands”, a theory on the Super-Sargasso Sea: “Lo!“ published in 1931 dealing with astronomy and teleportation; and the 1932 “Wild Talents” describing Fort’s new theory of psychic and mental powers.

Examples of the odd phenomena in Charles Fort’s books include many occurrences of the sort variously referred to as occult and paranormal. Reported events include: teleportation; the falling of frogs and fishes from the sky; spontaneous human combustion; ball lightning; levitation; unexplained disappearances; and giant wheels of light in the ocean, among others. His books offered many reports of out-of-place objects found in unlikely locations and out of their place in time. He was an early proponent of extraterrestrial spacecraft and the first to explain human appearances and disappearances by the hypothesis of alien abduction.

Suffering from poor health and falling eyesight in the early 1930s , Charles Fort was pleasantly surprised to find himself the subject of a cult following. The Fortean Society was initiated at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel in New York City on January 26, 1931 by some of Fort’s friends, many who were also writers. Fort rejected the official society but met informally with many members. Distrusting doctors, Fort did not seek medical assistance for his worsening health. After he collapsed on May 3rd of 1932, he was rushed to the Royal Hospital in the Bronx, dying only hours afterward, most likely from untreated leukemia. He was interred in the family plot in Albany, New York. More than 60,000 of his handwritten notes are in the New York Public Library.

Calendar: August 5

A Year: Day to Day Men: 5th of August

Searching for Socks

August 5, 1887 was the birthdate of John Reginald Owen, the English character actor.

Reginald Owen studied at Sir Herbert Tree’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and made his professional debut on stage in 1905. When he was still a young actor, he met the author Mrs. Clifford Mills. Upon hearing her idea of a children’s play to be called a Rainbow Story, Owen persuaded her to turn it into a play. This became the play “Where the Rainbow Ends” which opened on December 21st of 1911 starring Owen as Saint George. It received good reviews.

John Reginald traveled to the United States in 1920, originally working on Broadway in New York. He later moved to Hollywood and began a lengthy career in many Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer productions. Owen is perhaps best known today for his role as Ebenezer Scrooge in the 1938 film version of “A Christmas Carol” , a role he inherited from Lionel Barrymore who suffered a broken hip.

Owen was one of only five actors to play both Sherlock Holmes and his companion Dr. Watson. He first played Watson in the 1932 film “Sherlock Holmes” opposite Clive Brooks. In the 1933 film “A Study in Scarlet”, Owen played Sherlock Holmes opposite Warburton Gamble in the character of Doctor Watson. Owen also has the odd distinction of playing three classical characters of Victorian fiction- Scrooge, Holmes, and Watson- only to have those characters taken over and personified by other actors, namely Alastair Sim as Scrooge, Basil Rathbone as Holmes, and Nigel Bruce as Watson.

Owen appeared, later in his career, on the television series “Maverick” in two episodes and also guest starred in episodes of the series “One Step Beyond” and “Bewitched”. He was featured in the 1964 film “Mary Poppins” and had a small role in the 1962 film production of the Jules Verne novel “Five Weeks in a Balloon”. John Reginald Owen died from a heart attack at age 85 at his home in Boise, Idaho in 1972, after a film career totaling over one hundred films, many of which are today listed as classics- “Of Human Bondage”, “Anna Karenina”, “A Tale of Two Cities”, “The Great Ziegfeld” and “The Call of the Wild”.

Calendar: August 2

A Year: Day to Day Men: 2nd of August

Courthouse Park

The Marihuana Tax Act is enacted on August 2, 1937 in the United States.

Regulations and restrictions on the sale of cannabis sativa as a drug began as early as 1906. The head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Harry J Anslinger, argued that, in the 1930s, the FBN had noticed an increase of reports of people smoking marijuana. Anslinger had also, in 1935, received support from president Franklin D Roosevelt for adoption of the Uniform State Narcotic Act, state laws that included regulations of cannabis.

The American Medical Association opposed the act because the tax was imposed on physicians prescribing cannabis, retail pharmacists selling cannabis, and medical cannabis cultivation and manufacturing. The AMA proposed that cannabis instead be added to the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act that regulated opiates and coca products. The bill was passed over the last-minute objections of the American Medical Association.

Dr. William Creighton Woodward , the legislative counsel for the AMA, objected to the bill on the grounds that the bill had been prepared in secret without giving proper time to prepare their opposition to the bill. He doubted their claims about marijuana addiction, violence, and overdosage. He further asserted that because the word ‘Marijuana’ was largely unknown at the time, the medical profession did not realize they were losing cannabis. “Marijuana is not the correct term … Yet the burden of this bill is placed heavily on the doctors and pharmacists of this country”.

The bill was passed on the grounds of different reports^[ and hearings.^.Anslinger also referred to the International Opium Convention that from 1928 included cannabis as a drug not a medicine, and that all states had some kind of laws against improper use of cannabis. By 1951, however, new justifications had emerged, and the Boggs Act that superseded the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 was passed. In August 1954, the Internal Revenue Code of 1954 was enacted, and the Marihuana Tax Act was included in Subchapter A of Chapter 39 of the 1954 Code.

Shortly after the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act went into effect on October 1, 1937, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Denver City police arrested Moses Baca for possession and Samuel Caldwell for dealing. Baca and Caldwell’s arrest made them the first marijuana convictions under U.S. federal law for not paying the marijuana tax. Judge Foster Symes sentenced Baca to 18 months and Caldwell to four years in Leavenworth Penitentiary, a maximum-security federal prison, for violating the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act.

Calendar: July 30

A Year: Day to Day Men: 30th of July

Reading His Messages

The first Defenestration of Prague occurred on July 30, 1419.

In the early 15th century there was a fair amount of discontent internally within the Catholic Church; in particular, regular folks were angry over the relative amount of wealth held by the clergy and nobility compared with the grinding poverty of the peasant class. As a result , reforming and sometimes radical preachers arose to protest these grievances.

Jan Želivsky was a prominent Czech priest during the Hussite Reformation which was started by reformer John Huss. Želivsky preached at Church of Our Lady of the Snows in Prague. He was one of a few moderate Utraquist priests of the reformation movement at that time and strongly influential. His sermons were noted both for their eloquence and their apocalyptic descriptions.

The first defenestration of Prague began when radical Hussites wanted to free several moderate Hussites imprisoned by the magistrates. The town council had refused to exchange their Hussite prisoners. Jan Želivsky led his congregation on a protest procession through the streets of Prague to the New Town Hall on Town Square.

While they were marching, a stone was thrown at Želivský from the window of the town hall, allegedly hitting him. This enraged the mob and they stormed the town hall. Once inside the hall, the group defenestrated the judge and council members. Some thirty radical Hussites threw the judge and seven members of the Prague Town Council out of the upper stories windows of the New Town Hall, sending them to their deaths on the pikes of the Hussite Army below. The shock of the news caused the Czech king, Wenceslas IV, to die of a heart attack.

The consequences for this defenestration of Prague’s leaders were rather severe. John Huss was burned at the stake after being betrayed with a safe conduct, setting up the tension for Martin Luther a century later under similar circumstances. After that, the rest of Europe fought a “crusade” against the Hussites, who managed to fight them off for twenty years before suffering some military defeats.

The remaining Hussites agreed to a compromise solution that ended up setting up an Utraquist rite that helped portend the Protestant Reformation and led to a complex religious situation in Bohemia. The First Defenestration of Prague could be considered a qualified success, showing the powerlessness of the Luxemburg dynasty and giving the Bohemian nobility significant freedom of religion, though short of the total liberty that many of them wanted.

Calendar: July 29

A Year: Day to Day Men: 29th of July

Stripping Among the Cattails

July 29, 1954 was the publishing date for Tolkien’s “Fellowship of the Ring”.

“The Lord of the Rings” started as a sequel to J. R. R. Tolkien’s work “The Hobbit”, published in 1937. The popularity of “The Hobbit” had led George Allen & Unwin, the publishers, to request a sequel. Tolkien warned them that he wrote quite slowly, and responded with several stories he had already developed; however the publishers thought more stories about hobbits would be popular. So at the age of 45, Tolkien began writing the story that would become “The Lord of the Rings”.

Persuaded by his publishers,Tolkien started the new Hobbit series in December of 1937. After several false starts, the story of the One Ring emerged. The idea for the first chapter , which became entitled “A Long-Expected Party” arrived fully formed, although the reasons behind Bilbo’s disappearance, the significance of the Ring, and the series title “ The Lord of the Rings” did not arrive until the spring of 1938.

Originally, Tolkien planned to write a story in which Bilbo had used up all his treasure and was looking for another adventure to gain more; however, Tolkien remembered the Ring and its powers and thought that would be a better focus for the new work. As the story progressed, he also brought in elements from his “Simarillion” mythology.

Because J.R.R. Tolkien had a full-time academic position and needed to earn further money as a university examiner, his writing on the project was slow. Tolkien abandoned writing the series during most of 1943 not restarting it until April of 1944. This spate of writing became a serial for his son Christopher, who was sent chapters as they were written while he was stationed with the Royal Air Force in South Africa. Tolkien made another concerted effort in 1946, and showed the manuscript to his publishers in 1947. The story was effectively finished the next year, but Tolkien did not complete the revision of earlier parts of the work until 1949. Finished after twelve years, the original manuscript totaled 9,250 pages.

A dispute between Tolkien and his publisher George Allen and Unwin led to the book being offered to Harper Collins Publishers in 1950. After Milton Waldman, Tolkien’s contact at Collins, expressed the belief that the book urgently needing “cutting”, Tolkien demanded that they publish it in 1952, Collins did not; so Tolkien took it back to Allen and Unwin, stating that he would consider it being published in parts.

For publication, the book was divided into three volumes to minimize any potential financial loss due to the high cost of type-setting and modest anticipated sales: “The Fellowship of the Ring“(Books I and II), “The Two Towers” (Books III and IV), and “The Return of the King”(Books V and VI plus six appendices). Delays in producing appendices, maps and especially an index led to the volumes being published later than originally hoped. The first volume of the “Fellowship of the Ring” was finally published in the United Kingdom on July 29th of 1954.

Calendar: July 23

A Year: Day to Day Men: 23rd of July

Framing His Own Portrait

July 23, 1886 was the day that American Steve Brodie jumped (supposedly) off the Brooklyn Bridge and survived.

The Brooklyn Bridge, then known as the East River Bridge, had opened just three years before Steve Brodie’s claimed jump. A swimming instructor from Washington DC, Robert Emmet Odium, was killed while attempting the same stunt in May of 1885. Brodie, who was unemployed and aware of the publicity generated by Odium’s fatal jump, bragged to people in the Bowery section of New York City that he would take the jump. Wagers were made for and against; but Brodie never officially announced he would make the attempt.

The jump supposedly made by Steve Brodie on July 23, was from a height of 135 feet, the same height as a fourteen-story building. The New York Times in its coverage put the height at about 120 feet. The newspaper backed Brodie’s account of the jump, saying that Brodie had practiced by making shorter jumps from other bridges and from masts of ships. They also cited two witness descriptions by their reporters.

The New York Times account stated that Steve Bodie leaped into the East River, feet first, and emerged uninjured , except with a pain on his right side. Upon reaching shore, Steve Brodie was arrested by the police. The New York Times described Brodie as a newsboy and long-distance pedestrian who jumped from the bridge to win a two-hundred dollar bet. Another account that surfaced after the jump was a claim by Moritz Herzber, a liquor dealer, who said he offered to back a saloon for Brodie if he made the jump.

If true, Steve Bodie would have been the first person to survive a jump off the Brooklyn Bridge; however, his claim was disputed, which still lingers today. In 1930 it was reported that a retired police sergeant and friend of Bodie, Thomas K. Hastings, said that Steve Brodie had told him he didn’t make the jump and never said he did. In his book “The Great Bridge”, historian David McCullough said it was commonly believed by skeptics that a dummy was dropped from the bridge, and that Brodie merely swam out from shore and surfaced beside a passing barge.

After the stunt, Steve Brodie opened a saloon at 114 Bowery near Grand Street, which also became a museum for his bridge-jumping stunt. He became an actor capitalizing on his reputation, appearing in the vaudeville musicals “Mad Money” and “On the Bowery”. He later opened another saloon in Buffalo, New York. Brodie died in San Antonio, Texas in 1901; the cause of death described as either diabetes or tuberculosis. His fame persisted after his death, with the term “to do a Brodie”, meaning to take a chance, specifically a suicidal one, entered the language.

Calendar: July 19

A Year: Day to Day Men: 19th of July

Sailing Away

The steamship SS Great Britain is launched on July 19, 1843.

The SS Great Britain was designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, an English mechanical and civil engineer, for the Great Western Steamship Company’s transatlantic service between Bristol and New York. While other ships had been built of iron or equipped with a screw propeller, SS Great Britain was the first to combine both features in a large ocean-going ship.

The ship’s design team, led by Brunel, were initially cautious in the adaptation of their plans to iron hulled-technology. With each successive draft however, the ship grew ever larger and bolder in conception. By the fifth draft, the vessel had grown to 3,400 tons, over 1,000 tons larger than any ship then in existence. The ship was originally designed to use paddle-wheels for propulsion: however, after testing a number of different screw propellers over several months, Brunel persuaded the company directors to build completely new engines suitable for powering the new propeller.

The launching or, more accurately, the “floating out” took place on 19 of July, 1843. Conditions were generally favorable and diarists recorded that, after a dull start, the weather brightened with only a few intermittent showers. Following the launch ceremony, the builders had planned to have Great Britain towed to the Thames for her final fitting out. Unfortunately, the harbor authorities had failed to carry out the necessary modifications to their facilities in a timely manner. This dilemma was to result in another costly delay for the company. After being trapped in the harbor for more than a year, SS Great Britain was at last floated out in December 1844.

When completed in 1845, Great Britain was a revolutionary vessel—the first ship to combine an iron hull with screw propulsion, and at 322 feet in length and with a 3,400-ton displacement. She had four decks, including the spar upper deck, a crew of 120, and was fitted to accommodate a total of 360 passengers, along with 1,200 tons of cargo and 1,200 tons of coal for fuel. An innovative feature was the lack of traditional heavy bulwarks around the main deck; a light iron railing both reduced weight and allowed water shipped in heavy weather to run unimpeded back to sea.

On 26 July 1845, seven years after the Great Western Steamship Company had decided to build the ship, and five years overdue, SS Great Britain embarked on her maiden voyage, from Liverpool to New York under Captain James Hosken, with 45 passengers. The ship made the passage in 14 days and 21 hours, at an average speed of 9.25 knots, almost 1.5 knots slower than the prevailing record. She made the return trip in thirteen and a half days, again an unexceptional time. In her second season of service in 1846, Great Britain successfully completed two round trips to New York at an acceptable speed, but was then laid up for repairs.

Calendar: July 15

A Year: Day to Day Men: 15th of July

Sunflowers in Blue Vase

On July 15, 1799, French Captain Pierre-Francois Bouchard finds the Rosetta Stone.

The Rosetta Stone is a granodiorite stele, inscribed with three versions of a decree issued at Memphis, Egypt in 196 BC on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The top and middle texts are in Ancient Egyptian using the Hieroglyphic script and the Demotic script, respectively, while the bottom is in Ancient Greek. As the decree had only minor differences between the three versions, the Rosetta Stone proved to be the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of a larger stele; no additional fragments were found in later searches. Owing to its damaged state, none of the three texts is absolutely complete. This fragment of the stele is 3 feet 8 inches high at its highest point, 2 feet 6 inches wide and 11 inches thick. It weighs approximately 1,680 pounds. The front surface is polished smooth with the incised text; the sides are smooth; and the back is only roughly worked as this would not have been visible when erected.

The stone, carved in black granodiorite, similar to granite, is believed to have been originally in a temple, possibly at nearby Sais. It was moved during the medieval period, and was eventually used as building material in the construction of Fort Julien near the town of Rashid in the Nile Delta. During the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt, Pierre-Francois Bouchard discovered the stone and was immediately convinced of its importance. It was the first Ancient Egyptian bilingual text recovered in modern times; it aroused widespread interest with its potential to decipher previously untranslated hieroglyphic language.

Study of the decree was already under way when the first full translation of the Greek text appeared in 1803. It took another 20 years, however, before the transliteration of the Egyptian scripts was announced by Jean-Francois Champollion in Paris in 1822. It took longer still before scholars were able to read the Ancient Egyptian inscriptions and literature confidently.

The major advances in the decoding of the Rosetta Stone were: The recognition in 1799 that the stone offered three versions of the same text; It became known in 1802 that the demotic text used phonetic characters to spell foreign names; Thomas Young recognized in 1814 that the hieroglyphic text did so as well, and had pervasive similarities to the demotic text; Champollion saw in his 1822-1824 studies that. in addition to being used for foreign names, the phonetic characters were also used to spell native Egyptian words.

Calendar: July 13

A Year: Day to Day Men: 13th of July

Shades

July 13, 1793 marks the murder of French political theorist, scientist, and radical journalist, Jean-Paul Marat.

The first of Jean-Paul Marat’s large-scale publications detailing his experiments was “Research into the Physics of Fire”. It described 166 experiments conducted to show that fire was not, as widely held, a material element but an “igneous fluid”. The Academy of Sciences appraised his work and endorsed Marat’s methods but did not agree with its conclusions. This marked the beginning of worsening relations between Marat and many of the Academy’s members.

Jean-Paul Marat’s second biggest work was “Discoveries on Light”, focusing on an error in Newton’s light theory. Marat showed through experiments that white light was broken down into colors by diffraction, and not by refraction as Newton proposed. Once again Marat asked the Academy of Sciences to review his work. From June 1779 to January of 1780, Marat performed experiments in the presence of the Academy’s commissioners showing his conclusions. Their repost was only three paragraphs stating that while there were a lot of experiments, the commission did not believe that Marat proved his theory. Goethe described Marat’s rejection by the Academy as a glaring example of scientific despotism.

On the eve of the French Revolution , Jean=Paul Marat left his career as a doctor and scientist and took up his pen on behalf of the Third Estate, devoting himself entirely to politics. On September 12, 1789, Marat began his own newspaper, “The People’s Friend”, attacking influential groups in Paris, the Constituent Assembly, and Louis XVI’s Finance Minister, Jacques Necker. Between 1790 and 1792, Marat was often forced into hiding, sometimes in the Paris sewers. He only emerged publicly on the August 10 Insurrection, when the Palace was invaded and the royal family was forced to shelter in the Legislative Assembly.

Forced to retire from the French Convention as a result of a worsening skin disease, Marat continued to work at home, where he soaked in a medicinal bath. Marat was in his bathtub on July 13, 1793, when a young woman, named Charlotte Corday, appeared at his flat claiming to have vital information for Marat. Their interview lasted about fifteen minutes, with him writing details on an improvised desk of a board across the tub. After he finished his writing, Corday rose from her chair, drawing out a five inch knife, driving it hard into Marat.s chest. It opened the carotid artery, close to his heart; the massive bleeding was fatal within seconds. Charlotte Corday was guillotined on July 17, 1793 for the murder.

Calendar: July 9

A Year: Day to Day Men: 9th of July

Apollo on the Bed

July 9, 1858, was the birthdate of the German-American anthropologist Franz Uri Boas.

In 1887 Franz Uri Boas emigrated to the United States, where he first worked as a museum curator at the Smithsonian. In 1899 he became a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, where he remained for the rest of his career. Through his students, many of whom went on to found anthropology departments and research programs inspired by their mentor, Boas profoundly influenced the development of American anthropology.

Franz Boas was one of the most prominent opponents of the then-popular ideologies of scientific racism, the idea that race is a biological concept and that human behavior is best understood through the typology of biological characteristics. In a series of groundbreaking studies of skeletal anatomy, Boas showed that cranial shape and size was highly malleable depending on environmental factors such as health and nutrition, in contrast to the claims by racial anthropologists of the day that held head shape to be a stable racial trait.

Boas also worked to demonstrate that differences in human behavior are not primarily determined by innate biological dispositions but are largely the result of cultural differences acquired through social learning. In this way, Boas introduced culture as the primary concept for describing differences in behavior between human groups, and as the central analytical concept of anthropology.

Among Boas’s main contributions to anthropological thought was his rejection of the then-popular evolutionary approaches to the study of culture, which saw all societies progressing through a set of hierarchic technological and cultural stages, with Western European culture at the summit. Boas argued that culture developed historically through the interactions of groups of people and the diffusion of ideas; and that consequently, there was no process towards continuously “higher” cultural forms. This insight led Boas to reject the “stage”-based organization of ethnological museums, instead preferring to order items on display based on the affinity and proximity of the cultural groups in question.

Boas also introduced the ideology of cultural relativism, which holds that cultures cannot be objectively ranked as higher or lower, or better or more correct; but that all humans see the world through the lens of their own culture, and judge it according to their own culturally acquired norms. For Boas, the object of anthropology was to understand the way in which culture conditioned people to understand and interact with the world in different ways. To do this, it was necessary to gain an understanding of the language and cultural practices of the people studied.

Calendar: July 7

A Year: Day to Day Men: 7th of July

Casual Attitude

July 7, 1880 was the birthdate of the American inventor Otto Frederick Rohwedder.

Otto Rohwedder was born in Davenport, Iowa, the son of Claus and Elizabeth Rohwedder, of ethnic German descent. He attended the public schools in Davenport, eventually becoming an apprentice fo a jeweler to learn a trade. He continued his studies, graduating with a degree in optics from the Northern Illinois College of Ophthalmology and Otology in Chicago.

Otto Rohwedder became successful in his career as a jeweler, expanding his business to three locations in Saint Joseph, Missouri, where he had settled with his wife and two children. He used his experience with watches to invent new machines in his spare time. Convinced that he could develop a machine that would slice bread, Rohwedder sold his jewelry stores to fund his efforts. In 1917 a fire broke out in his factory, destroying his prototype and his blueprints. Forced to find new funding for his project, it took several more years before he could bring his machine to market.

In 1927 Otto Rohwedder successfully designed a machine that not only sliced the bread but wrapped it afterwards. He applied for patents and sold the first machine to Frank Bench of the Chillicothe Baking Company in Chillicothe, Missouri, in 1928. The first loaf of automatically sliced bread sold commercially on July 7, 1928, on Rhowedder’s forty-eighth birthday. Sales of the machine to other bakeries increased and sliced bread became available across the country.

In 1930 the Continental Baking Company of New York City introduced their “Wonder Bread” as a sliced bread. Other major companies saw the success of the marketing and followed with their own sliced products. The availability of standardized slices boosted the sales of the 1926 invention, the automatic pop-up toaster. For the first time, American bakeries in the year 1933 sold more sliced than unsliced bread loaves.

Otto Rohwedder was granted seven patents for his bread slicing and handling machines between the years 1927 to 1936. In 1933, he sold his patent rights to the Micro-Westco Company of Bettendorf, Iowa, and joined the company. He became vice-president and sales manager of the Rohwedder Bakery Machine division. His original bread-slicing machine is in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

Calendar: July 2

A Year: Day to Day Men: 2nd of July

The Magic of Buoyancy

On July 2, 1816, the French frigate Méduse struck the Bank of Arguin, a sandbar off the Atlantic shore of Mauritania.

The mission of Méduse was to ferry French officials to the port of Saint-Louis in Senegal and to formally re-establish French occupation of the colony. Viscount Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys was appointed Captain of the frigate and given command of the Méduse, even though he had hardly sailed in 20 years. On the 17th of June of 1816, a four ship convoy under the command of Chaumareys and with the appointed French Governor of Senegal, Julien Schmaltz, on board, departed for the port of Saint-Louis.

Governor Schmaltz wanted to reach Saint-Louis as fast as possible, by the most direct route, though this would take the fleet dangerously close to the shore, where there were many sandbars and reefs. Experienced crews sailed further out. Méduse was the fastest of the convoy and, disregarding his orders, Captain Chaumareys quickly lost contact with the other ships. As she closed on the coast of Africa, the course of Méduse became dangerous. Realizing the danger at last, Chaumareys ordered the ship brought up into the wind, but it was too late, and Méduse ran aground on a sandbar and stuck fast thirty-one miles from the coast.

On July 5th, a gale developed and the frigate showed signs of breaking up. The passengers and crew panicked, and Chaumareys decided to evacuate the frigate immediately, leaving no time to enact the original plan of making multiple ferry trips to shore. Instead, it was suggested that the raft they had built for ferrying the supplies could be used to carry passengers and Méduse’s longboats could tow the raft to safety. One hundred and forty-six men and one woman boarded the woefully unstable raft. The raft had few supplies and no means of steering or navigation. Much of its deck was underwater.

The towing proved impractical, however, and the boats soon abandoned the raft and its passengers in the open ocean. Without any means of navigating to shore, the situation aboard the raft rapidly turned disastrous. Dozens were washed into the sea by a storm, while others, drunk from wine, rebelled and were killed by officers. Stormy weather threatened, and only the center of the raft was secure. Dozens died either in fighting to get to the center or because they were washed overboard by the waves.

Rations dwindled rapidly; by the fourth day there were only 67 people left alive on the raft, and some resorted to cannibalism to survive. On the eighth day, the fittest decided to throw the weak and wounded overboard, leaving just 15 men remaining, all of whom survived another four days until their rescue on July 17 by the brig Argus, which accidentally encountered them.

Calendar: July 1

A Year: Day to Day Men: 1st of July

Sitting with Clasped Hands

July 1, 1535 is the starting day of the trial of Sir Thomas More.

Thomas More began his studies at Oxford University in 1492, at the age of fourteen, receiving a classical education and becoming proficient in both Latin and Greek. At his father’s insistence he left Oxford after two years to study law at New Inn, a place of initial training for barristers. More became a student in 1496 at Lincoln’s Inn, a professional association for barristers, until 1502 when he was deemed qualified as a barrister.

Thomas More lived for a year near the Carthusian Monastery, joined the monks’ spiritual exercised and contemplated joining the order. However, he decided to remain a layman, standing instead for election to a position in Parliament in 1504 and marrying Jane Colt the following year. More was elected to Parliament to represent Great Yarmouth, a coastal area in Western England, and later elected in 1510 to represent London.

Thomas More was knighted and made under-treasurer of the Exchequer in 1521, becoming increasingly influential as a personal advisor to King Henry VIII. More succeeded to the office of Lord Chancellor in 1529 when that post became vacant. He strongly supported the Catholic Church and saw the Protestant Reformation as heresy and a threat to the church, particularly the theology of Martin Luther and William Tydale.

More opposed King Henry VIII’s separation from the Catholic Church: he refused to acknowledge King Henry as the Supreme Head of the Church of England, Henry VIII established the church after Pope Paul III had excommunicated the king over his divorce from his wife Catherine of Aragon. After refusing to take the Oath of Supremacy to Henry as required, Thomas More was put on trial for treason.

More was an experienced judge and lawyer who had prepared himself for his final trial over several years. At this trial, he was determined to bring all of his experience and training to bear—to defend not only himself and his family, but also his country, his church, the English tradition of law, and the future of Christendom.

On July 1, 1535, he appeared before fifteen judges and twelve jurors. Despite the impressive numbers, however, this trial was not to be impartial. Thomas More aptly discredited all of the government’s evidence and established the credibility of his own character. The total lack of viable evidence against More proved to be totally irrelevant. The jury took only fifteen minutes to render its verdict: “Guilty.” He was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered; but the King commuted this to execution by decapitation. The execution took place on 6 July 1535.

Calendar: June 30

A Year: Day to Day Men: 30th of June

Beauty in a Form

June 30, 1908 is the date of the Tunguska Event in Siberia.

The Tunguska event was a large explosion that occurred near the Stony Tunguska River In Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia on the morning of June 30, 1908. This event is the largest impact event on Earth in recorded history. The explosion over the Easter Siberian tiaga, a very large ecoregion of forests and wildlife, flattened 770 square miles of forest, yet caused no known human casualties.

The explosion is generally attributed to the air burst of a meteoroid, It is classified as an impact event, though no impact crater has been found. The object is thought to have disintegrated at an altitude of 3 to 6 miles rather than to have hit the Earth’s surface. Studies have yielded estimates of the meteoroid’s size from 200 to 600 feet. Estimates of the energy of the downward airburst range from three to five megatons of TNT (three to five million tons). The explosion knocked down some 80 million trees over the affected area.

Natives and Russian settlers in the hills north-west of Lake Baikal observed a column of bluish light, nearly as bright as the sun, moving across the sky. About ten minutes later, there was a flash and a sound similar to artillery fire. Eyewitnesses closer to the explosion site reported the sound moved from the east to the north. The sounds were accompanied by a shock wave that knocked people off their feet and broke windows hundreds of miles away.

The explosion registered at seismic stations across Euroasia; in some places, the shock wave registered equivalent to an earthquake of 5.0 magnitude. Fluctuations in atmospheric pressure were detected in Great Britain. Over the next few days, night skies in Asia and Europe glowed. The theory for this was light passing through high-altitude ice particles that had formed at extremely low temperatures. Suspended dust particles caused a month-long decrease in atmospheric transparency, according to observers at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles County, California.

It is believed that the passage of the asteroid through the atmosphere caused pressures and temperatures to build up to a point where the asteroid abruptly disintegrated in a huge explosion. The destruction would have to have been so complete that no remnants of substantial size survived, and the material scattered into the upper atmosphere during the explosion would have caused the glowing skies.

Calendar: June 28

A Year: Day to Day Men: 28th of June

Iced Coffee

On June 28, 1911 the Nakhla meteorite falls to earth and lands in Egypt.

The Nakhla meteorite is a prototypical example of the Nakhlite type meteorite of the SNC Group of Mars meteorites. These meteorites are considered to have been ejected by the impact of another large body colliding with the Martian surface. They orbited through the solar system before penetrating the Earth’s atmosphere. This Nakhla meteorite landed in the Abu Hommos district near the village of El Nakha El Bahariya, Egypt.

Many people witnessed the descent, approaching from the north-west, with an inclination of about 30 degrees. It was trailed by a column of white smoke. Several explosions were heard before it fell to earth into an area of about three miles in diameter. About forty fragments were discovered, some buried in the ground up to a meter deep. The original weight of the meteorite was estimated at twenty-two pounds (ten kilograms); fragments weighed from 20 grams to eighteen hundred grams.

The Nakhla meteorite is especially significant because it is the first Martian meteorite to show signs of aqueous processes on Mars. The rock contains carbonates and hydrous minerals, formed by chemical reactions in water. In addition, the rock was exposed to water after it formed, which caused secondary accumulations of minerals. The carbonates contain more ¹³C than rocks formed on Earth, indicating Martian origin.

London’s natural History Museum, which holds several intact fragments of the meteorite, allowed NASA researchers to break one open in 2006, providing fresh samples, relatively free from Earth-sourced contamination. These NASA scientists found an abundance of complex carbonaceous material occupying branching structural pores and channels in the rock, resembling the effects of bacteria observed in rocks on Earth.

Side Note: One fragment of the meteorite was said to have landed on a dog, as observed by a farmer named Mohammed Ali Effendi Hakim in the village of Denshal. It supposedly vaporized the animal instantly. Since no remains of the dog were recovered and there were no other eyewitness to the dog’s demise, this story remains apocryphal. However, the story of the Nakhla dog has become something of a legend among astronomers.