MARCH 7 -1999 RIP Director Extraordinaire Stanley Kubrick; INVENTION/PATENTS: 1985 R.I.P. William Farris (papermilk carton), 1854 Charles Miller (sewing machine buttonholes), 1876 Bell patents telephone; 1850 Daniel Webster endorses Compromise of 1850; 1985 a-ha becomes first Norwegian band to top U.S. pop charts
MARCH 7
1885 – Kansas cattle quarantine.
After the Civil War, Texas had so many cattle Ronald McDonald was slobbering at the mouth. The northern states were lacking a necessary amount of cows, so there was a new market for the South. Texans would use the Chisholm Trail that led from San Antonio to Abilene, where cattle could be driven from there to cities like Dodge, Caldwell, Ellsworth, Hays and Newton. However two problems came with the cattle, one was tick fever and the other was hood-and-mouth disease and it was spreading to valuable Kansas farm cattle.
By 1871 Wild Bill Hicock was hired as town Marshall in Abilene to try and restore order, and the cattle headed west towards other Kansas towns. And with the cows came the rowdiness of cowboys. Some of the more popular stories of the Old West actually happened in conjunction with this cattle exodus.
Kansas had become an agricultural state by then and is townsfolk grew impatient with cowboy lawlessness. By 1885 the Kansas legislature enacted a strict quarantine which closed all of Kansas to Texan cattle for all but the winter months of December, January and February, when the cold killed most of the diseases. Barbed wire fences began to drape sections of the states and the open range wasn’t so wide open anymore.
INVENTIONS/PATENTS:
1985 – R.I.P. Victor Farris from New Jersey, he supposedly invented the paper milk carton, although that claim is disputed and there is no patent for his name. 1854 – Charles Miller patents 1st US sewing machine to stitch buttonholes.
1876 Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone and Elisha Gray cries foul.
Now, there have been other claims to the invention of the telephone or parts of the telephone, or designs of the telephone specifically the use of liquid transmitters. You see, Bell’s patent beat Elisha Gray’s patent by two hours. According to Wikipedia,
The courts decided priority in favor of Bell and the telephone company he founded. In addition to being constructed differently from the transmitter described and pictured in Gray’s caveat, Bell’s working liquid transmitter of March 10, 1876 operated in a way that is in fact described in Bell’s original patent application, but not in Gray’s caveat.
Gray supporters cite the fact that Bell’s first successful experiment in transmitting clear speech over a wire was on March 10, 1876 using the same water transmitter design described in Gray’s caveat but not described in Bell’s patent.[18] A book by Edward Evenson called The Telephone Patent Conspiracy of 1876, concludes that it was Bell’s lawyers, not Bell, who misappropriated Gray’s water transmitter (variable resistance) invention.
1850 – Daniel Webster endorsed the Compromise of 1850.
Considered by the Senate Committee to be one of America’s all time top senators, he was responsible for the Webster-Ashbury treaty which established the border between the US and Canada. Webster tried three times to run for president and failed. He was a conservative spokesman for modernization, banking and industry but not the common man that was represented in the Jacksonian Democracy. Along with fellow Whigs John Calhoun and Henry Clay, Webster wanted the union to be preserved, and thus endorsed the Compromise of 1850 which of course id not stop the South from seceding later on.
1985, A-Ha went to No.1 on the US singles chart with ‘Take On Me’, making them the first Norwegian group to score a US No.1. The video for the song featured the band in a pencil-sketch animation method called rotoscoping, combined with live action which won six awards and was nominated for two others at the 1986 MTV Video Music Awards.