OCTOBER 21 — 1876 Alexander Graham Bell’s Telephone makes headlines; 1992 Jackson Weaver dies, voice of Smokey the Bear; 1861 Battle of Blues Bluff; 2004 Sox beat Yanks, curse lifted
OCTOBER 21
1876 – Here are the headlines for 1876. While Harper’s Weekly had a political cartoon showing a black man threatened to vote for the Democratic ticket in the election of 1876, the New York Times had a different headline: Audible Speech by Telegraph. Professor A. Graham Bells Discovery Successful and Interesting Experiments Between Boston and Cambridge.
On October 9th, I explained the story of how Alexander Graham Bell, who moved to Boston from Switzerland in 1871, began teaching school for the death. His wife and mother were both deaf, so Bell had a genuine interest in voice technology. He soon met electrical designer and scientist Dr. Thomas Watson who was a tremendous asset to Bell. The article reads, “Articulate conversation then took place through the wires. The sounds, at first faint and indistinct, became suddenly quite loud and intelligible. Mr. Bell in Boston and Mr. Watson in Cambridge then took notes of what was said and heard, and the comparison of the two records is most interesting, as showing the accuracy of the electrical transmission.”
Lots of questions and controversies surround the race to the patent office between Gray and Bell. The field of advanced audio technology was a very small one at the time, so word travelled fast who was inventing what. Depending on whom you ask, Gray definitely stole ideas from Bell, and/or Bell definitely stole ideas from Gray. The difference is Bell’s patent attorneys were on his side, yet there’s no smoking gun or hard evidence on either side of anyone stealing anything. Depending on whom you ask, of course.
1921 – President Harding condemns lynching.
…On October 20, 1921, Harding became the first president to condemn lynchings of blacks in the South. Now that WWI was over, focus on racial tensions in the Deep South, mostly by white supremacists, became in an increasingly large issue. The NAACP, or National association forth advancement of colored people reported that lynching’s were going on twice a week. Harding was a progressive Republican politician who was in favor of full civil rights for African Americans and suffrage for women.
According to politico.com, In Birmingham, Alabama, Harding voiced support for anti-lynching bills pending in Congress. Legislation seeking to curb the practice was initially sponsored in 1918 by Rep. Lenidas Dyer of Missouri; Sen. Charles Curtis of Kansas sponsored a companion measure in the Senate. Any county that had a lynching would have to pay a fine of $10,000. In addition, county officials in federal courts who were not in compliance with anti-lynching laws or offered sanctuary to those guilty of lynching would also be fined. However the bill was defeated by Southern Democrats in the Senate.
In fact Congress wouldn’t enact anti-discrimination laws for another 42 years when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 2005, a resolution was passed by the Senate to officially apologize for dragging its feet on anti-lynching bills from the past. But was Harding sincere about his speech delivered on this day in 1921? Not according to historian Wyn Wade in his book “The Fiery Cross”, where he claims that a Ku Klux Klan member had seen Harding being initiated into the KKK on the White House lawn. There is no proof to back Wade’s claims, by the way.
1992 – Jackson Weaver passes away. He was the co-host of WMAL’s Washington DC morning drive program for 32 years. His final broadcast was a mere six days before his death. Weaver was also the voice of Smokey the Bear for 45 years.
1861 – Battle of Balls Bluff. Brig. General Pomeroy Stone and Colonel Edward Baker v Col. Nathan Shanks Evans. The result: a Confederate victory.
President Lincoln had sent Union Maj. Gen. George McLellan to fight the Rebels just across the Potomac River. McLellan ordered Gen. Charles Stone to send a recon mission across the Potomac to report back the positions of Evan’s troops near Leesburg. At nightfall on October 20, 1861, Capt. Chase Philbrick and his men mistook a line of trees as a line of tents. I do the same thing all the time. God gave me pretty eyes but sometimes they don’t work too well. Thankfully they work when they need to. But yeah, moonlit shadows, the dead of night, just threw them off. And they reported that he had stumbled across an unguarded Confederate camp. Stone sent Col. Edward Baker, a close friend of Abraham Lincoln’s; Lincoln actually named his second son Ed after him, to attack the camp. But Baker’s inexperienced army collided with an equally inexperience Rebel army of Mississippi infantry and an inexperienced skirmish began.
Baker only had four small boats available to transport men across the river, and this delay would prove fatal to Baker, who was killed in the afternoon. Even though the Yankees had the Rebels outgunned with rifles and artillery, their inexperience turned out to be no match against the Confederate older smootboards, since at this type of close range none of that mattered anyway. Union resistance crumbled as the Confederates captured their cannon.
The Yankees were trapped on the top of a 100-foot cliff on the Potomac, and legend has it that many may or may not have leaped to their deaths, depending on who you ask, rather than getting captured. The Union would lose 49 killed, 158 wounded, and over 700 missing or captured, while the Rebels lost 33 killed and 115 wounded.
The battle, while small in military scale, had major political implications in D.C., with angry Radical Republicans creating the Joint Committee on the Conduct of War, using Stone as a scapegoat and relieving him of command, jailed Stone for six months on charges of treason for being, shall we say, less than aggressive. And would cause political infighting, haunting the Union army for the rest of the war.
2004 Boston beats the Yankees 10-3, came back from tan impossible 309 deficits in the ALCS. They’re the first team in MLB history to do so; Johnny Damon hit 2 HRs, one a grand slam for 6 RBI.