On This Day...

Quite simple really,Historical events on this day

1964, Sandie Shaw had her first UK No.1 single with the Burt Bacharach song '(There's) Always Some Thing There To Remind Me'.
1964, The Who, then known as The High Numbers, receive a letter from EMI Records, asking them for original material after their recent audition for the company.

1966, The Supremes became the first female group to have a No.1 album on the US char whith 'The Supremes a Go Go', knocking The Beatles 'Revolver', from the top of the charts. 
1966, The Beach Boys ‘Good Vibrations’ made its debut on the US singles chart. Written by Brian Wilson and Mike Love, the track was recorded over 6 weeks in four different Los Angeles studios, at a cost of over $16,000. The recording engineer would later say that the last take sounded exactly like the first, six months earlier. The record would reach No.1 on the US charts in December 1966. 

1969, American singer Tommy Edwards died after suffering a brain aneurysm in Henrico County, Virginia, at the age of 47. Had the 1958 US & UK No.1 single 'It's All In The Game'.
1969, Paul McCartney publicly denied rumors that he was dead. The most recent of many "clues" of this Death Hoax was the fact that he was the only barefoot Beatle on the newly released 'Abby Road' LP cover. The story was actually started as a prank by Fred La Bour, a sports and arts writer for the student paper, The Michigan Daily at the University of Michigan.
1969, Led Zeppelin II was released on Atlantic Records in the UK. The Jimmy Page-produced album which was recorded over six months between four European and three American tours, peaked at No.1 in both the UK and US, going on to sell over 12 million copies in the US alone, (and spending 138 weeks on the UK chart). The album is now recognised by writers and music critics as one of the greatest and most influential rock albums ever recorded.

1986, Jane Dornacker was killed in a helicopter crash during a live traffic report for WNBC radio in New York. Listeners heard the terrified voice of Dornacker screaming "Hit the water, hit the water’ as the helicopter from which she and pilot Bill Pate were reporting, fell from the sky and crashed into the Hudson River. Dornacker had been a member of The Tubes and Leila And The Snakes.

1988, Phil Collins started a two week run at No.1 on the US singles chart with 'Groovy Kind Of Love', his 6th US No.1. 
1988, U2 scored their fourth UK No.1 album with the double set and film soundtrack 'Rattle And Hum', featuring their first UK No.1 single 'Desire'. 

1989, English folk singer, songwriter, poet, and record producer Ewan MacColl died aged 74. He wrote 'Dirty Old Town' and 'The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face', (became a No.1 hit for Roberta Flack in 1972). Acts including Planxty, The Dubliners, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash recorded his songs. He was the father of singer, songwriter Kirsty MacColl.

1990, Pearl Jam played their first ever concert when they appeared at the Off Ramp in Seattle. 

1993, Oasis signed a six-album deal with Creation Records for a £40,000 advance. 1996, It was announced that, "The Beatles were now bigger than The Beatles". The statement was based on sales so far this year, having sold 6,000,000 albums from their back catalog and a combined total of 13,000,000 copies of ‘The Beatles Anthology 1’ and ‘The Beatles Anthology 2’. With the release of ‘The Beatles Anthology 3’ a week away, it was anticipated that total Beatles album sales for 1996 would exceed 20 million. A poll showed 41 percent of sales were to teenagers who were not born when The Beatles officially called it quits in 1970. 

1999, it was reported that Sinead O'Connor was attempting to buy the church where she was ordained into the Catholic sisterhood. The church was on the market for £70,000. 

2000, George Michael paid £1.45m for the Steinway piano on which John Lennon wrote 'Imagine.' George said, "I know that when my fingers touch the keys of that Steinway, I will feel truly blessed. And parting with my money has never been much of a problem, just ask my accountant." The singer outbid Robbie Williams and The Oasis brothers.
 2000, Pearl Jam appeared at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, California, celebrating the tenth anniversary of their first live performance as a band.

2003, Elliot Smith, US singer songwriter, committed suicide aged 34. One time member of Stranger Than Fiction, solo 1997 album 'Either/Or'.

2005, Waterloo by Abba was voted the best song in the history of the Eurovision Song Contest. Viewers in 31 countries across Europe voted during a special show in Copenhagen to celebrate the annual event's 50th birthday. 

2008, A homeless man claimed a £2,000 reward by returning a waxwork head of ex-Beatle Sir Paul McCartney which had been left on a train. Anthony Silva found the item in a bin at Reading station after auctioneer Joby Carter left it under a seat at Maidenhead station. The homeless man thought it was a Halloween mask and had been using it as a pillow before realising what it was. The wax model sold the following week for £5,500 at auction.

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Frenchman C Hopffer patents the fire extinguisher ...

19 October 1722. The first automatic fire extinguisher of which there
is any record was patented in England by French C. Hopffer, a celebrated
chemist. Before 1722, if a fire broke out at a business, it would be a case
of fetching a good old-fashioned bucket of water.

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It consisted of a cask of fire-extinguishing liquid containing a pewter
chamber of gunpowder. This was connected with a system of fuses
which were ignited, exploding the gunpowder and scattering the solution.

First drunk driving arrest ...

On this day in 1897, a 25-year-old London taxi driver named George Smith becomes the first person ever
arrested for drunk driving after slamming his cab into a building.

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Smith later pled guilty and was fined 25 shillings.

Vesuvius erupts ...

At noon on August 24, 79 A.D., this pleasure and prosperity came to an end when the peak of Mount Vesuvius exploded,
propelling a 10-mile mushroom cloud of ash and pumice into the stratosphere. For the next 12 hours, volcanic ash
and a hail of pumice stones up to 3 inches in diameter showered Pompeii, forcing the city’s occupants to flee in terror.
Some 2,000 people stayed in Pompeii, holed up in cellars or stone structures, hoping to wait out the eruption.

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The remains of 2,000 men, women, and children were found at Pompeii. After perishing from asphyxiation, their bodies
were covered with ash that hardened and preserved the outline of their bodies.

Today, Mount Vesuvius is the only active volcano on the European mainland. Its last eruption was in 1944 and its last
major eruption was in 1631. Another eruption is expected in the near future, would could be devastating for the 700,000 people who live in the “death zones” around Vesuvius.

Gold first discovered in Klondike, found at Bonanza Creek, Alaska by George Carmack ...

While salmon fishing near the Klondike River in Canada’s Yukon Territory on this day in 1896,
George Carmack reportedly spots nuggets of gold in a creek bed. His lucky discovery
sparks the last great gold rush in the American West.

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“Klondike Fever” reached its height in the United States in mid-July 1897 when two
steamships arrived from the Yukon in San Francisco and Seattle, bringing a total of
more than two tons of gold. Thousands of eager young men bought elaborate “Yukon outfits”
(kits assembled by clever marketers containing food, clothing, tools and other necessary
equipment) and set out on their way north. Few of these would find what they were
looking for, as most of the land in the region had already been claimed. One of the
unsuccessful gold-seekers was 21-year-old Jack London, whose short stories based on
his Klondike experience became his first book, The Son of the Wolf (1900).

Rudolf Diesel of Germany obtains patent #608,845 for his internal combustion engine, later known as the diesel engine.

In 1894, he filed for a patent for his new invention, dubbed the diesel engine.
Diesel was almost killed by his engine when it exploded. Diesel spent
two more years making improvements and in 1896 demonstrated another
model with the theoretical efficiency of 75 percent, in contrast to the ten
percent efficiency of the steam engine.

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On this day in 1898, Rudolf Diesel was granted patent #608,845 for an
"internal combustion engine." The diesel engines of today are refined
and improved versions of Rudolf Diesel's original concept.

Joseph Priestley, English theologian, chemist and author discovers oxygen by isolating it in its gaseous state ...

On August 1, 1774, he conducted his most famous experiment. Using a 12-inch-wide glass "burning lens,"
he focused sunlight on a lump of reddish mercuric oxide in an inverted glass container placed in a pool of mercury.

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The gas emitted, he found, was "five or six times as good as common air." In succeeding tests, it caused
a flame to burn intensely and kept a mouse alive about four times as long as a similar quantity of air.

Viking 1 lands on Mars ...

On the seventh anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, the Viking 1 lander, an unmanned U.S. planetary
probe, becomes the first spacecraft to successfully land on the surface of Mars.

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Viking 1 was launched on August 20, 1975, and arrived at Mars on June 19, 1976. The first month of its orbit
was devoted to imaging the surface to find appropriate landing sites. On July 20, 1976, the Viking 1 lander
separated from the orbiter, touched down on the Chryse Planitia region of Mars, and sent back the first
close-up photographs of the rust-colored Martian surface.

Rosetta Stone found ...

On this day in 1799, during Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign, a French soldier discovers a black basalt
slab inscribed with ancient writing near the town of Rosetta, about 35 miles north of Alexandria. The irregularly
shaped stone contained fragments of passages written in three different scripts: Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics
and Egyptian demotic.

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The ancient Greek on the Rosetta Stone told archaeologists that it was inscribed by priests honoring the king of Egypt,
Ptolemy V, in the second century B.C. More startlingly, the Greek passage announced that the three scripts were all of
identical meaning. The artifact thus held the key to solving the riddle of hieroglyphics, a written language that had been “dead” for nearly 2,000 years.

A revolutionary new technology is christened “MP3″.

14 July 1995: Representatives of the Recording Industry Association of America
(RIAA) were not in attendance at the 1995 christening of the infant technology that
would shake their business model to its core just a few years later. Known formally
as “MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3,” the technology in question was an efficient new format
for the encoding of high-quality digital audio using a highly efficient data-compression
algorithm. In other words, it was a way to make CD-quality music files small enough
to be stored in bulk on the average computer and transferred manageably across the Internet.

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Released to the pubic one week earlier, the brand-new MP3 format was
given its name and its familiar “.mp3″ file extension on this day in 1995.

1st-ever football (soccer) World Cup competition begins in Uruguay ...

On July 13, 1930, France defeats Mexico 4-1 and the United States defeats Belgium 3-0 in the first-ever
World Cup football matches, played simultaneously in host city Montevideo, Uruguay.

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The World Cup has since become the world’s most watched sporting event.

Bikini introduced ...

On July 5, 1946, French designer Louis Reard unveils a daring two-piece
swimsuit at the Piscine Molitor, a popular swimming pool in Paris.

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Parisian showgirl Micheline Bernardini modeled the new fashion, which
Reard dubbed “bikini,” inspired by a news-making U.S. atomic test that took
place off the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean earlier that week.

Today, nine years ago.

R.I.P., Michael. God bless

John Wayne dies ...

On this day in 1979, John Wayne, an iconic American film actor famous for starring in countless
westerns, dies at age 72 after battling cancer for more than a decade.

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During four decades of acting, Wayne, with his trademark drawl and good looks, appeared in over 250 films.
He was married three times and had seven children.

It's purely elementary as Holmes said to his assistant Dr. Watson on his deductive powers of reasoning, Schnaps7 lol.