Category: Past

On this day 90 years ago, British Egyptologist Howard Carter and his employer Lord Carnarvon became the first people in 3,000 years to enter the tomb of the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun. In the early part of the 20th Century, archaeologists had been excavating tombs in the Valley of the Kings. It was widely believed that all relevant discoveries had already been made, but Howard Carter thought differently.

Carter had been employed in 1892 at the age of 17 by the Egypt Exploration Fund in the excavation of tombs at Beni Hasan, and he worked his way up to the position of chief inspector of the Egyptian Antiquities Service by 1899. In 1907 he was employed by Lord Carnarvon to supervise his excavations, and after the first world war he started digging in the Valley of the Kings. Several years went by with no success, and Lord Carnarvon was planning to cease funding after the 1922 season.

Then, on 4 November 1922, a step was discovered leading down to a tomb. Lord Carnarvon travelled to Egypt for the unveiling, and on 26 November he and Carter entered the tomb. It turned out to be nearly intact, containing a vast array of treasures. The journalist HV Morton was present, and his description created a sensation when it was published. Carter meticulously recorded the contents of the tomb, a process that took him nearly ten years.

William Ashley Sunday, better known as Billy Sunday, was born on this day 150 years ago in Iowa. His father died five weeks later, so the family moved in with his mother’s parents. When he was ten he was sent to the Soldier’s Orphan’s Home where he was educated and became good at sports. After playing for the town baseball team before being recruited as a professional baseball player for the Chicago White Stockings. He subsequently played for the Pittsburgh Alleghenys and the Philadelphia Phillies.

One Sunday afternoon in Chicago during 1886 or 1887, Billy and some of his team stopped to listen to a gospel preaching team. He started attending the Pacific Garden Mission, and after a while he became a Christian. He gave up drinking, swearing and gambling, and started speaking in churches and at YMCAs. In 1891 he began work as assistant secretary at the Chicago YMCA, and two years later he became the full time assistant of J Wilbur Chapman, a prominent evangelist.

In 1896 Billy Sunday started his own evangelistic meetings, taking advantage of his reputation as a baseball player, and when the crowds were too large for local halls he hired canvas tents. His wife Nell became the administrator of his campaigns, and during the course of his career he preached to around 100 million people, being the most famous evangelist in the US during the early part of the 20th century.

The final chapter in Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition to the South Pole occurred on this day 100 years ago, when the bodies of Scott and his companions were found by a search party, just over a year after they had set out for the Pole. The expedition had started with three different types of transport: horses, dogs and motorised sleds. None of these worked particularly well, and it was 17 January 1912 before the final group of five men reached the South Pole, only to discover that Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had been there five weeks earlier.

On the return journey, the condition of the five explorers gradually deteriorated with exposure and hunger. Edgar Evans died on 17 February. Lawrence Oates died on 16 March. On 19 March the three survivors made their final camp as a blizzard raged outside, and over the next 11 days their supplies ran out, Scott wrote his final words, and the three men died. It was another eight months before the bodies were found.

When the news reached England, Scott was hailed as a hero, and his heroic reputation lasted for more than 50 years. However, in the past 40 years most historians have been less kind to Scott, criticising his expedition as having been poorly planned and executed in an amateurish manner. Amundsen’s expedition, by way of contrast, has been regarded as well-prepared and skilfully executed.

On this day 117 years ago, George B Selden was granted US Patent 549,160 for a “Road Engine”. Selden had begun working on a motor vehicle almost 20 years earlier, and after initial experimental success he filed his patent application in May 1879. As a patent lawyer, Selden exploited the patent system to the full, filing a series of amendments to his patent application to delay the grant of the patent for 16 years until the automobile industry started taking off.

Selden’s patent claims were extremely broad, essentially covering any motor vehicle with a liquid hydrocarbon gas engine. His own efforts at commercialising an automobile had not achieved significant commercial success, so he set about exploiting his patent by collecting a 0.75% royalty from other car manufacturers. Henry Ford and a few others had no intention of paying, so a lengthy court battle contesting the patent ensued.

At first instance Selden was successful, but Ford appealed, and in January 1911 the appeal court determined that Ford’s motor cars did not infringe because they were based on the Otto engine rather than the Brayton engine described in Selden’s patent. Thus Selden’s substantial royalty income ended, although by that time he had collected several hundreds of thousands of dollars.

On this day 48 years ago, the countries of Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged to become the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, which was shortly thereafter renamed the United Republic of Tanzania. Tanganyika had gained its independence from Britain in 1961, with Julius Nyerere as prime minister. Zanzibar had gained its independence from Britain in 1963 under the control of an Arab minority government led by the Sultan of Zanzibar.

In January 1964 a small band of African revolutionaries seized the weapons belonging to Zanzibar’s police force and overthrew the Sultan, killing many Arabs in the process. Thus ended two centuries of Arab rule in Zanzibar, during which the island had been best known for its trade in spices and slaves. Abeid Karume became Zanzibar’s new head of state, and he proceeded to negotiate the merger with Tanganyika.

Following the merger, Zanzibar became a semi-autonomous part of Tanzania. Although the union between Zanzibar and Tanganyika has survived, the marriage has been an uneasy one, largely as a result of cultural differences. Almost all of the residents of Zanzibar are Muslims, whereas a substantial majority of the inhabitants of the rest of Tanzania are Christians or animists.

Charles Martel, (Charles “the Hammer”), died on this day 1,271 years ago, at the age of 55. Born in the year 686 AD as the illegitimate son of duke Pepin II, Charles first came to prominence at the Battle of Amblève in 716, in which he used surprise to overcome a numerically superior army. In the following years he won further victories which unified the Frankish kingdoms and consolidated his power in Europe.

Strong Muslim forces from Morocco, Yemen and Syria were heading northwards into Europe, with the Umayyad conquest of Hispania occurring between 711 and 718 AD, and the Franks as their next target. Charles could see that a full-time professional army was necessary to resist this threat, and he seized church lands and property to pay his soldiers. In 732 a very large Muslim army sacked Bordeaux, and the scene was set for a battle at Tours, with the prize being Gaul and perhaps the whole of Western Europe.

Charles managed to secure the high ground at Tours before the invading forces arrived, and the Frankish infantry managed to withstand and fend off the uphill cavalry charges of the Umayyads. Charles sent out scouts to cause a diversion in the Umayyad camp, leading to some of the invaders breaking off the engagement, and soon turning into a full-scale retreat. A further invasion was successfully repulsed in 735, and much land was recaptured in the next few years.

On this day 195 years ago, Andrzej Tadeusz Bonawentura Kościuszko died at the age of 71. He never actually visited Australia, but Australia’s highest mountain, Mount Kosciuszko, was named after him by the Polish explorer Count Strzelecki, who climbed the mountain in 1840. Kościuszko was born in a village which was at the time part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but is now in Belarus. After graduating as a captain from the Polish Corps of Cadets, he took up a scholarship in Paris.

The French supported the Americans in the American Revolutionary War, and Kościuszko sailed for America in June 1776, receiving a commission as Colonel of Engineers in the Continental Army later that year. He became a strong believer in the United States Declaration of Independence, and sought out Thomas Jefferson, with whom he became a close friend. He was responsible for designing an array of defences at Saratoga, and his good judgment and attention to detail helped in the defeat of the British Army.

After serving with distinction in the war, Kościuszko was promoted to brigadier general and given American citizenship. Returning to Poland, he joined the army as a major general, but the country fell under Russian and Prussian control.  In 1794 he led the Kościuszko uprising against Imperial Russia and the Kingdom of Prussia, becoming a national hero although the uprising was unsuccessful.

On this day 30 years ago, the Polish communist government banned all trade unions including Solidarność, known to the English-speaking world as Solidarity. During the 1970s the government had raised food prices, leading to protests and government crackdowns on dissent. An electrician named Lech Wałęsa became a trade union activist and, after several run-ins with the government, was one of the negotiators who persuaded the government to allow formation of an independent trade union, Solidarity, in August 1980.

The new union grew rapidly and was registered in November 1980. It became a broad anti-Soviet social movement with strong support from the Catholic Church, using non-violent civil resistance. By the time of the first national congress, at which Lech Wałęsa was elected president of the organisation,  the union had around 10 million members, being about one third of all working-age people in Poland.

Martial law was declared in December 1981, and the government tried to destroy Solidarity through repression, banning, and imprisonment of the organisation’s leaders, but eventually the government was forced to negotiate with the union, leading to partially free elections in 1989, after which Solidarity led a coalition government. Lech Wałęsa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 and was president of Poland from 1990 to 1995.

On this day 104 years ago, The Ford Motor Company first offered for sale its Model T motor car, at a price of $850. Henry Ford, who had started as an engineer with the Edison Illuminating Company, had started experimenting with self-propelled vehicles in the 1890s. In 1899 he had formed the unsuccessful Detroit Automobile Company, which dissolved just over a year later. After some success with a racing car which he had built, he formed the Henry Ford Company (which subsequently became the Cadillac Company) in 1901, then left it in 1902.

In 1903 the Ford Motor Company was formed, with the aim of creating inexpensive motor vehicles. The company became well known after a newly designed racing car set a world land speed record of 147 km/h. At the same time, Ford set to work on building cars that would be simple to drive and easy to repair, starting with the Model A, then the Model N, then the Model S. Finally, breakthrough success was achieved with the Model T.

Originally the Model T was hand-crafted in the same way as other makes of cars. To drive costs down and improve quality, Ford created a mass production system, which enabled large numbers of cars to be produced in a short time period. This enabled prices to decrease gradually from $850 in 1909 to $260 in the 1920s, while bringing in large revenue. By 1914, Ford was able to pay his employees double the going rates, resulting in high employee retention and high productivity.

On this day 160 years ago, more than 50 years before the first flight of the Wright brothers, Henri Giffard undertook a flight of around 25km from  Paris to Trappes using his steam-engine-powered airship. In September 1783 the Montgolfier brothers had demonstrated the feasibility of travelling by balloon, by sending a sheep, a duck and a rooster for a three-kilometre eight-minute trip in a basket suspended below a balloon.

Just two months later, the first free flight with human passengers occurred using a hot air balloon, and a few days later a manned hydrogen balloon went for a 36 kilometre flight lasting over two hours. In 1785 the first balloon flight across the English Channel was made by Jean-Pierre Blanchard, and over the course of the next half century travel by balloon became very popular.

However, balloons are subject to the vagaries of the wind, and it was desirable that some way of steering could be found if air travel was to become useful. Thus Henri Giffard experimented with the use of a steam engine until he had created a navigable airship, being an elongated hydrogen-filled balloon that could be steered and directed. The steam engine drove a propeller, and steering was by way of a rudder.