MAY 1 — 1960 U2 Spy Plane Incident; ELECTIONS: 1872 Liberal Republican party meet in Cincinnati; 2013 Bionic ear is 3D printed; 1931 Hoover dedicates Empire State Building; 2016 Ironheart becomes Stan Lee’s last character
MAY 1
1960- At the time really bad day for U.S. politics.
…The Russians shot down an American U2 plane out of the sky. What was the American plane doing there? The same thing we use satellites for to this day: to spy on other countries. Other countries do it, and have been for a long time.
So there’s two sides to this one. For one thing, flying over another country uninvited is considered an automatic act of war. However, Russians had spies here in the U.S., in the same way America had been flying the U2 in Soviet Space for four years. Furthermore, in 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower proposed an “open skies” plan, in which each country would be permitted to make overflights of the other to conduct mutual aerial inspections of nuclear facilities and launchpads.
However Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev refused the proposal, continuing the established Soviet policy of rejecting international inspections in any form. Well America knew the Russians were building a nuclear bomb of their own, and we had a plane that could go up to 70,000 feet.
The Russians won’t ever be able to even know it’s there, let alone shoot it down. Right?
Besides, even if they found out, the pilot could just take a suicide pill and destroy so he won’t have to risk uncovering the operation. Right?
That way, in case something did happen, we could just say it was a weather plane that veered off course. The Russians can’t prove otherwise, right?
That pilot’s name would be Francis Gary Powers and not only did he not destroy the camera equipment, he didn’t take his suicide pill. Nope. And Nikita just couldn’t wait to show off what he found and display Powers in front of the international community. Eisenhower still refused to apologize, and at the Paris summit meeting later, Khrushchev let Eisenhower have it and angrily stormed out of the meeting.
1872 Liberal Republicans meet in Cincinnati.
The Liberal Republicans were opposed to President Ulysses Grant and the Radical Republicans enforcement of Reconstruction in the south after the Civil War. Grant had meanwhile unanimously won the nomination for the Republican Party, while the Democrats knew they didn’t stand a chance against Grant.
Grant had a problem with his vice-president, Schuyler Colfax, who was infamously known for taking bribes, such as the Union Pacific Railroad scandal in which he received discounted shares. I go into much more detail about that on my December 7th AP. Anyway, Colfax was out, and the Republicans chose Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson.
The Liberal Republicans chose New York publisher and former House Representative Horace Greeley and Missouri Governor Benjamin Brown for president and vice.
The Labor Reform Party was a new party that was established in 1870 in and had their first convention in St. Louis in 1872, but lacked leadership and nominated David Davis, an Illinois Supreme Court chosen by President Lincoln, who said thanks but no thanks and withdrew his name. The Labor Reform party then chose New York attorney Charlee’s O’Conner and he flat out declined. The party nominated these two men anyways.
Meanwhile the Democrats had nothing for this election. Reconstruction was tough for the South, and they needed somebody – anybody – to oppose President Grant. So they chose team of Greeley and Brown, the same two men chosen by the Liberal Republicans. Finally on November 29, it went down. Ding, ding. The 1872 election would be one of American history’s more lopsided victories.
Grant won so winningly even Virginia, North Carolina, Mississippi and Alabama voted for him. 186 electoral, 3.6M popular. From Indiana, Thomas A. Hendricks, who would one day be Grover Cleveland’s Vice President, came in 2nd for the Democrats, followed by brown and Charles Jenkins.
Not only would David Davis and Horace Greeley came dead last, which is probably good because they weren’t running in the first place, but Greeley actually died before the electoral votes came in.
The next four years would belong to Mr. Sam Grant.
2013 The Bionic ear is 3D printed.
Nanotechnology science teams at Princeton and John Hopkins Universities teamed up to create an alternative to the prosthetic ear, and this actually outperforms a regular human ear.
Right there in New Jersey!
Using hydrogel, as a new type of prosthetic used in bio printing, cartilaginous tissue can be made to pick up radio frequencies and across a frequency range of up to 5GHt. And no, I don’t know what radio station that would be in Princeton. Originally, the mission of the experiment was to come up with a way to combine electronics and tissue to create a full-fledged bodily organ. But this completely raised the bar for the new science of bio printing!
Famous last words: what’ll they come up with next?
Ha-ha.
1844-The Great Pacificator is nominated as presidential candidate by the Whig party.
This would be one of three presidential elections Henry Clay lost. Clay was born in 1777 in Hanover County, Virginia. When he was three years old he watched the British ransack his house. Those naughty British. So when the War of 1812 hit, he fully advocated to go to war as a War Hawk. He served under President John Quincy Adams , he was a proponent of Alexander Hamilton’s American System, which contained a tariff to protect and promote American industry, a national bank to foster commerce, and federal subsidies for roads, canals, etc, which is another way of saying he was for a strong national bank.
He rejected Texas annexation due to the slave issue, wanted to admit California as a free state and at o ne point talked South Carolina from seceding from the Union. He was instrumental in brokering terms for the Missouri Compromise with his pals John Calhoun and Daniel Webster. In his personal life, Clay loved gambling, drinking, and horses.
He died of tuberculosis in 1852 and is buried in Lexington, Kentucky. Send flower.
2:05
1893 – Chicago World’s Columbian Expo opens up, this year with a new American invention, the moving sidewalk.
Alfred Speer got the patent in 1871 and put his invention right on the 3500 foot pier so folks riding the ferry didn’t have to walk to the entrance of the Fairgrounds. They could just stand. Just like we do on moving sidewalks we see in airports today. The ride was 5 cents and carried passengers across going about 2 miles per hour, or the passenger could get on a second parallel platform which ran 4 miles per hour and had benches, according to an 1890 issue of Scientific American Mag. Not sure how the benches did not wrap around the conveyor belt system because the issue doesn’t get into that.
This is it! This is the future of urban transportation and it has arrived now in the year 18931! Next thing you know, we’ll have these moving walkways that can take us from Cleveland to Cincinnati! They’ll be able to zip commuters to work all over New York City! Not so fast. Max Schmidt, who worked with Speer on the design, came up with plans for the Brooklyn Bridge, plus systems in Atlanta, Boston, L.A., Detroit, and Washington D.C. The plans didn’t call for the fact that passengers won’t go on this thing if it’s raining or snowing. Plus the maintenance isn’t worth the headache, and the public transportation currently in place was already way more efficient.
1931-President Hoover dedicates the Empire State Building.
Breathtaking, isn’t it. Yeh, that building that King Kong climbed up holding that broad, remember?
The Empire State building came in just in time during the depression. Americans needed to see that thousands of workers were building this thing story after story as fast as they could. When it was done, it proudly symbolized America’s ingenuity as it was the tallest building in the world. Hoover turned on the lights from the oval office. Actually he hit a button and someone else inside the Empire state building turned on the lights when he got the cue. Today, it’s the second largest building in New York behind the One World Trade Center. But the largest building is in Dubai folks, so we have work to do to catch up to Saudi Arabia.
2016 Ironheart becomes Stan the Man’s last Marvel character. I think. I might be off on this one, nerds, so please let me know otherwise. I’ve heard his last actual character was Stripperella in 2011 but you get the idea. Excelsior with a point was all over his best ones: the 21st century’s answer to Walt Disney’s 20th century’s Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Snow White: The Hulk, Spider-Man and the Punisher. But whether Stan the Man’s other 343 characters, Iron Man, the X-Men, or Nick Fury, had a different angle on the superhero. Stan had started with his first characters the Destroyer and Captain America in the middle of WWII, and later on in the 60s while comic book rival DC was coming up with more pretty boy heroes Green Lantern and the Flash, Stan instead blurred the lines with heroes that screwed up and villains that fought for an honorable cause, completely antithesis to the Disney model of pure good hero versus bad vain. Stan’s to p tiers deserve a ton of credit as well, Chris Clairmont, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and the Marvel empire may have collapsed upon itself in some ways during the latter years of Stan’s life, but the characters that he takes credit for, all 343 of them, has Stan the Man written all over it. ‘Nuff said.
1920-Babe Ruth’s first home run as a Yankee and the 50th of his career. Babe Ruth of course helped the Yankees win 4 World Series and 7 AL championships.