The Mysteries of History (April 4 Edition)
First Detective Story; Blimp Crash; NATO; MLK Assassinated; WTC; Microsoft
1841 — First Detective Story Published (by E.A. Poe)
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Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) wrote in a variety of genres, but is best known for his mystery/horror tales and poetry (especially The Raven). On this date in 1841, a tale he wrote which is considered the first detective story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, was published. Sherlock Holmes would came later (the deerstalker-headwear-wearing sleuth would debut in 1887).
Questions: Did Poe ever write any humorous stories? What were the strange circumstances surrounding his death? What elements of Poe’s first detective story find their counterpart in Arthur Conan Doyles’ Sherlock Holmes stories?
1933 — New Jersey Blimp Crash Kills 73
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Blimps, Dirigibles, and Zeppelins, oh my! A Dirigible named Akron crashed off the New Jersey shore on this date in 1933, killing 73 of the 76 aboard.
The Akron was sent up during thunderstorms that day even though dirigibles were known to be unstable in bad weather. In fact, the Akron had been involved in a fatal attempted landing the previous year in high winds: three men who were tasked with holding the ropes that would secure the dirigible to terra firma hung on even when wind gusts and the dirigible’s helium lifted the ship back up into the air. Two of them men fell from 200 feet and died in the fall. The other man held onto his rope for two hours until the crew on board was able to pull him up into the craft through a porthole. His amazing feat of endurance was probably due to a combination of natural or developed physical strength as well as adrenaline (from fear).
On the date currently under discussion (April 4, 1933), miscommunication between the ground and air crews caused the Akron to be flown directly into the thunderclouds, resulting in the craft losing 1,000 feet of altitude in just a few seconds. Mechanical damage caused the ship to be uncontrollable, and it plunged into the Atlantic Ocean. The rescue ship that was sent out also crashed, killing two of the seven aboard (making a total of 75 who died that day).
Questions: What is the difference, if any, between Blimps, Dirigibles, and Zeppelins? How often are Dirigibles or similar vehicles used in modern times, and for what? Have you seen the movie The Rocketeer?
1949 — NATO Established
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NATO came into being on this date in 1949. Its purpose was to thwart communist expansion and serve as a mutual defense alliance. The U.S.-led group was initially comprised of eleven nations: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United States.
These Countries agreed to “have each others’ backs” with the agreed-upon Three Musketeers-like credo: “An armed attack against one or more of them … shall be considered an attack against them all.”
The Soviet Union and its cronies countered with the Warsaw Pact six years later, in 1955. See this article 1991 — Warsaw Pact Disintegrates.
Questions: Why did NATO carry on after the Warsaw Pact was dissolved? How is NATO involved in Ukraine’s War of Russian Aggression? What other Countries have joined NATO since 1949? What did future President Robert Taft think of NATO when it was founded?
1968 — MLK Assassinated
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The following is what I wrote about the assassination of MLK in my book Still Casting Shadows: A Shared Mosaic of U.S. History — Volume 2: 1914-2006:
“History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.”—Martin Luther King, Jr
. . .
Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated April 4th in Birmingham, Alabama by James Earl Ray. Whether Ray was acting alone or he had accomplices is not known; at least not by anyone who’s saying. Nevertheless, the FBI had sent King a threatening letter. After FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had complained to him that he hadn’t been “taking the aggressive” with the Civil Rights leader, Assistant Director William Sullivan wrote King an anonymous letter wherein Sullivan claimed to be African-American. The letter allegedly had as its intent embarrassing King into resigning from the Southern Chris tian Leadership Conference. Others believe its actual intent was to drive King to suicide. The letter concluded: King, there is only one thing for you to do. You have just 34 days in which to do…You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation. King had planned to galvanize blacks and (poor) whites alike at a massive camp-in scheduled to take place in Washington, D.C. later in the month. Instead of the peaceful demonstration King would have wanted, though, rioting broke out in more than 125 cities around the country in reaction to King’s assassination. Forty-six more people lost their lives during these riots.
Riots broke out in Memphis and Washington, D.C. after Martin Luther King’s murder. After the Civil War, former slaves, now free, were promised forty acres and a mule to start a new, independent, life. On April 9, in King’s hometown of Atlanta, Georgia, two mules pulled a wooden farm cart carrying King’s casket as tens of thousands of aching hearts observed it pass by. Instead of forty acres and a mule, King got two mules and tens of thousands of achers.
The man who reportedly (see the “HOWEVER” section below) killed King, James Earl Ray, was an escaped convict. Ray had been on the lam from a Missouri prison for a year. He was finally located in June by Scotland Yard, and arrested at the London airport. His aim was to reach safety in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) which was at the time ruled by white supremacists.
Two years after escaping prison and one after killing King in cold blood, Ray pled guilty to avoid the death penalty (which he had been willing to give King without even the semblance of a trial or an opportunity to defend himself). He was sentenced to 99 years, serving 29 of them before he died in 1998 at the age of 70. If only Ray had shown some intestinal fortitude and held out to the age of 140 before kicking the bucket, he could have been released (in 2068).
HOWEVER, three days after pleading guilty, Ray claimed he had been set up, and was innocent of the murder of King. A likely story? There are a couple of things that make it at least worth considering: 1) Why would he leave the gun used to kill King, which had his fingerprints on it on a nearby sidewalk? He claimed he had been approached by a man named Raoul who had wanted him to get involved in an illegal gun-running operation. If true, that’s how Ray’s fingerprints could have gotten on the gun.
Also, 2) King had enemies in high (powerful) corners of the politisphere, such as FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (who thought King was a communist), the U.S. military (King had denounced the Vietnam War), and government officials who may have taken umbrage at King’s call for a UBI (Universal Basic Income).
And 3) In 1999, a Memphis jury found Ray innocent of the murder, concluding that he had been framed. The jury found a restaurant owner (who was the one who came forward with his part in the conspiracy to murder King) liable. The King family believes in Ray’s innocence, and think a Memphis police officer was the actual shooter.
Questions: Why was MLK in Memphis at the time of his death? Do you think James Earl Ray killed Martin Luther King?
1973 — WTC Opens in NYC
public domain image from wikimedia commons
On this date in 1973, New York City’s World Trade Center officially opened for business as the tallest building in the world, shoving aside its homie, the Empire State Building.
A year later, the Sears Tower (now the Willis Tower) in the windy-but-not-as-windy-as-Milwaukee city of Chicago upstaged the WTC, measuring in at 86 feet taller than the Manhattan monster.
Questions: Which invention made skyscrapers possible? Hint: the longest sensible palindrome is Sit on a Potato Pan Otis. Where is the tallest building today? If you were alive then, where were you on 9/11/2001? How did you first hear about the attack — over the radio? On TV? In school? At work? At home? Had you ever been to the WTC?
1975 — Microsoft Begins Business
public domain image from wikimedia commons
On this date 50 years ago, Microsoft was founded. Had they known how ginormous it would become, a better name might have been Megasoft.
Regardless of its moniker, the company began operations in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but relocated to Washington State in 1979, where both of the founders (Bill Gates and Paul Allen) grew up (they had previously been in Albuquerque to be close to the company for which they wrote software when they first began in business, before coming up with their own operating system).
Their first OS was MS-DOS (MicroSoft Disk Operating System), which had no GUI (Graphical User Interface). They had success with that, licensing it to other companies, such as IBM. In 1985 they came out with GUI-based Windows.
Besides its ultra-popular and lucrative Windows OS, Microsoft has produced productivity software (its Office products: Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint), a popular professional/commercial-grade database (SQL Server), web Browser (Internet Explorer), and a game system (XBox), among other things.
Shaking a stick at the amount of money Microsoft has made would be a futile endeavor; However, the U.S. Government did take them to task (and to court) over their predatory business practices, causing some changes to their MO and resulting in the transfer of some of their money into government coffers.
Questions: Which versions (if any) of Windows have you used? Which is your favorite? Have you ever used a Mac? Have you ever used Linux? Have you ever used Amiga? Why did the government get the money Microsoft paid in fines? Shouldn’t it have been distributed to the consumers?
Read about “The Secret Lives of Kids” here.
