Today in History: June 20

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

U.S. Patent Number 1647 was granted on this date in 1840 to Samuel Morse for his “Improvement in the mode of communicating information by signals by the application of electro-magnetism.” It was for the signals, the “dots and dashes”—the “Morse Code,” as it was referred to later—that was used in communicating via the telegraph.

The idea of the telegraph, as well as the idea that such a communications invention was needed, was pervasive on both sides of the Atlantic: no one inventor can truly be credited with the invention. Several inventors, Morse included, worked independently of each other in designing and constructing the machines and laying out longer and longer lengths of wire to test them.
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A Father’s Day Memory

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Some memories are of the photograph of an event and no longer of the incident itself, but some feel to the rememberer like they are a photo, with the details so clear and so accessible. This is one memory … it feels like I could count the rocks in the creek bed if I would just take the time.

Today is Father’s Day. It is a difficult day for my girlfriend, as her father died in February 2016, a sad fact that brought us together in our house-that-is-becoming-a-home.

My father will be 82 in August 2017. That sentence, while I know it to be factually accurate, has the effect of making me feel like a child lost in the mall. Where am I? Where have I been? If August 15, 1935, is known for anything, it is not known for the birth of my dad but for it being the date that the comedian Will Rogers and famous aviator Wiley Post died when Post crashed their airplane north of the Arctic Circle near Point Barrow, Alaska. (The plane was not de-iced because no one yet knew that that would be necessary. Barrow and Post may have been the first celebrities to have perished in a plane crash.)
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Today in History: Juneteenth

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a Proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and free laborer.”—a proclamation read by Major General Gordon Granger at Galveston, Texas, June 19, 1865

 
Today is Juneteenth, the celebration of the abolition of slavery in the United States, first celebrated in Texas on this date in 1865. It is officially recognized as a holiday till this day in most but not all of the United States.
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