Today in History: August 14

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister and their staffs met for a secret conference on board the USS Augusta in Placentia Bay in Newfoundland the first week of August 1941. The result of the meeting was a policy statement signed by the two leaders called the “Joint Declaration by the President and the Prime Minister,” but by the end of August it was being referred to in the press as the “Atlantic Charter.” It was published seventy-five years ago today.

The nations that eventually signed it—the Allied nations of World War II—used it as a basis for creating the United Nations.
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Today in History: August 13

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The first episode of South Park aired on Comedy Central on this date in 1997. It remains the only episode created entirely with paper cut-outs.

Despite its high ratings (a 1.3 at 10:00 p.m. on a basic cable channel that was less than 10 years old in 1997 was quite a solid performance and amounted to almost one million television sets tuned in), the episode did not win its creators a long-term contract for the show. Within a month, however, the program had doubled its viewership, by the end of the season it had quintupled its viewer numbers, and a hit was born.
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Edison Obsessed

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Sixteen months of embarrassingly public false starts and failed attempts led to the rarest of things from Thomas Edison: silence. He was going to allow his results to speak for themselves for once. When he and his invention were ready on December 31, 1879, Thomas Edison invited the public to his lab in Menlo Park, New Jersey, to witness electric lights being turned on and off for the first time.

In September 1878, Edison had convinced himself that he was so close to an electric light that he announced it to the press. “I have it now! When the brilliancy and cheapness of the lights are made known to the public, illumination by carburated hydrogen gas will be discarded,” he told the New York Sun. Gas lamps inside and outside the house, with their many inherent dangers, were about to be a thing of the past.
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