AUGUST 24 – 1814 British sack White House; 1983 Pete Rose ends consecutive games played streak at 745; 1995 Windows 95 debuts
AUGUST 24
1814 – British sack the White House.
…What does Great Britain and Al Qaeda have in common? They both have American presidents to take cover. The British did it with President Madison, who fled to Maryland, and Al Qaeda did it with W. Bush, who took refuge at an Air Force Base in Nebraska.
But in this case, the British and Americans were at war, settling old scores from the Revolution, and the British got revenge on America for President Madison invading Canada. Of course the Americans declared war with the British because the British were interfering with America’s trade relationship with France as well as teaming up with the Native Americans to wage war on Americans. In perhaps the most embarrassing American military defeat, on August 24, President James Madison was meeting with his generals regarding the progress of the War of 1812, or lack thereof.
His wife Dolly Madison, who made those yummy cupcakes we still eat to this day, was at the White House when she saw the British coming. Abandoning their personal belongings, she managed to get a full sized painting of George Washington and fled. The British invaded the capitol, then the capitol building. They ate the leftover food in the White House and then destroyed it.
You can imagine how low the morale plunged in America, but in reality the Americans knew that all 7 million inhabitants were willing to die for their country and the British only had 4500 troops. Besides Andrew Jackson would destroy the British army in Louisiana in the Battle of New Orleans, and elsewhere the War would end with the British defeat in Baltimore. 198 years later the White House burning incident was mentioned between British Prime Minister David Cameron and President Obama when Obama joked that his countrymen really lit this place up
1976 – Happy divorsary Zsa Zsa Gabor and jack Ryan. Jack helped to design the Barbie Doll, Hot Wheels and Chatty Cathy. He was her sixth husband.
1889 – We lose a great American. African-American Jan Matzeliger passed away on August 24, 1889. He invented the shoe-lace making machine.
Why?
Because we’re Americans and we don’t like to do things manually when we can just invent a machine to do it for us. That’s why. In more patent news: 1869, Cornilius Swartout patents the waffle iron, Thomas Edison patented the motion picture camera, and 1991, Bernard Castro, patented the convertible couch, died on August 24, 1991. In Pete Rose news.1983 He ends streak of consecutive games played at 745, and exactly six years to the day later would be suspended from baseball for gambling.
And in dinosaur news…
1995 – Windows 95 debuts. A huge improvement over Windows 3.1. I;’d talk more about this but my computer just blue screened. No seriously, Three important things happened here, one, the MS-DOS was no longer the shell of the operating system, but rather a side application. Two, it introduced Plug n Play, or plug n pray as the IT world called it. Three, it moved to a preemptively multitasked 32-bit architecture system. It also gave us the task bar, the Start button, and effectively drove the OS/2 operating system out of business.