After exploring the area of the Pacific Northwest that we now know as British Colombia, George Vancouver wrote in the 1700s that the channel at Seymour Narrows was “one of the vilest stretches of water in the world.” On this date in 1958, it was cleared with 1,270 metric tons of Nitramex 2H explosive, which resulted in one of the biggest non-nuclear intentional explosions in history.

More than 250 feet deep, Seymour Channel held a mountain under its waves, dubbed Ripple Rock. The mountain’s twin peaks reached to within a few feet of the surface of the waters, which created a hazard that had claimed more than 100 boats and dozens of lives. Knowing that an invisible danger lay just below was a navigation nightmare. For decades, civil engineers studied the feasibility of destroying the mountain peaks with a controlled explosion.

The explosion launched 600,000 metric tons of rock 900 feet into the air. When the day came, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation used the event to broadcast Canada’s first-ever coast-to-coast live moment (below the fold):
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President William Henry Harrison died on this date in 1841.

Harrison’s brief presidency may have yielded more trivia per capita than any other in history: He was the oldest president elected (age 68) until President Reagan, 140 years later (a record that might be broken again this year, with two leading candidates who will be older than Reagan was); he was the first to die in office; his was briefest presidency (only 32 days); he was the last President born before the country was founded in 1776; his was to this date the longest inaugural speech; he is the only grandfather of a future President; and he was the first President to be photographed while in office.

The photograph was made on March 4, 1841, his inauguration day, but has since been lost to history. What remains is a daguerreotype of the photo, seen at top.
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The first mobile phone call was made 43 years ago today. A Motorola employee named Martin Cooper stood in midtown Manhattan, near a temporary base station, and phoned Motorola’s rival Bell Labs headquarters in New Jersey.

The moment was not recorded, but the event took place at a press conference, so Cooper is reported by many sources to have said to his competitor, “This is Marty. I’m calling you from a cell phone, a real handheld portable cell phone.” He was using an early version of the company’s DynaTAC mobile phone, which became commercially available and ubiquitous in the mid 1980s. The battery inside the two-and-a-half pound “brick” (seen above, on the cover of Popular Science from July that year) gave users 20 minutes of talk time and then needed to be charged for 10 hours.
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