AUGUST 9 -Discount rates rise from 5-6% heading to Crash of 1929; Battle of Cedar Creek Mountain; 1969 Manson cult kills five in Beverly Hills; 2016 A-Rod retires from the Yankees; 1971 Swanson gets patent for 3D printed device
AUGUST 9
1929 — Discount rates are increased from 5-6%.
That’s the rate your that the Federal Reserve charges to borrow money from your bank. As a short term result, the Dow would rise 12.8% to its peak on Sep 3.
While tensions were rising in East Berlin, President Herbert Hoover was celebrating his 55th birthday with Charles Lindbergh, and Babe Ruth was hitting his 500th home run in the major leagues, all the heavy giants of Wall Street began pulling out of the stock market: John D. Rockefeller, JP Morgan, Joe Kennedy and others, exchanging their assets for cash or gold.
Paul Warburg, possibly the main creation of the Fed, foresaw its depression since March, when he predicted that the unlimited speculation that was going on would cause a depression that would affect the entire country. For today in 1929, the Dow was looking good. But soon the government would need to start selling securities, and then started issuing call loans. The downward spiral was in full progress and within a month and ten days, would collapse completely.
1862 – Battle of Cedar Creek Mountain. Union Maj. Gen. Nathaniel Banks V Confederate Maj. Gen. Stonewall Jackson. The result: confederate victory. It was the first combat of the Northern Virginia campaign.
Maj. Gen. John Pope was appointed to command the newly constituted Army of Virginia on June 26. His mission was to move his troops through central VA and relieve the pressure on Maj. Gen. George McLellan in the Shenandoah area, specifically the Blue Ridge Mountains.
This area was the Breadbasket of the Confederates, who were growing wheat to feed its troops. McLellan was recently defeated at the Battle of Malvern Hill. So Gen. Robert E. Lee responded to Pope’s movements by dispatching T.J.Stonewall Jackson with 14,000 men to Gorduonsville in July. Jackson was later reinforced by A.P. Hill’s division.
P Pope wanted the rail junction at Gordonsville, so he marched his forces south into Culpepper County towards that area.On August 9, theStonewall Brigade and Banks’s corps tangled at Cedar Mountain. At first, Banks was on the attack, and conf. Gen. Charles S. Winder had fallen, mortally wounded. But then, a Confederate counterattack led by A.P. Hill fought back and repulsed the Yankees and won the day.
This battle shifted fighting in Virginia from the Peninsula to Northern Virginia, giving Lee the upper hand. You can check out the scene at the intersection of VA State route 15 and general Winder Road, that is, if you wanted to see the bloodied wheat fields from the American civil War.
1969 – Manson cult kills five people
…in Beverly Hills. Charles Manson was born in Cincy OH, in 1934 to an unwed 16 year old alcoholic prostitute named Kathleen Maddox. Maddox couldn’t raise Charles so he wound up in the streets at a very young age, then in jail. He was released from jail in 1967, got into LSD, the song Helter Skelter by the Beatles, the Book of Revelations, Scientology, the Church of Final Judgment, and playing the guitar. He somehow gathered a group of followers, also on LSD and magic mushrooms, and convinced them there was an imminent war brewing between white and black people and that he would be the religious leader behind it. This group grew to about 100 people, mostly gullible girls whom he called The Family.
Manson’s idea was to instigate the war by killing rich white people and make it look like black people did it. Charlie’s Angels struck first on August 9, 1969 at Roman Polanski’s house in Beverly Hills. Polanski was famous for the movies Chinatown, Rosemary’s Baby and the Pianist but he was not Manson’s intended target. His target was the former occupier of the home who turned Manson down for a recording contract. Polanski wasn’t home, but his wife was, along with coffee goddess Abigail Folger. The next night The Family committed ore grisly murders.
The killing spree continued, and since Manson technically did not commit the murders he couldn’t be tried for them when he was apprehended, but was indicted for convincing his Angels to do the work for him. Instead of getting the death penalty, Charles Manson got life behind bars in a California prison, where he remains to this day. Charles Manson remains an icon of the cult movement, or whatever mumbo jumbo you want to call it.
1988 – In Canada news, NHL legend Wayne Gretsky gets traded to the LA Kings. Gretsky had won eight Hart trophies in his 9 seasons with the Edmonton Oilers. Why am I bringing up a Canadian sport on a US History show? Isn’t it obvious? Because few teams play the game better than the Los Angeles Kings.
92016 – New York Yankee A-Rod retires.
After more than two decades playing the game of baseball, Alex Rodriguez has gotten a .297 batting average, almost 700 homers, and was a three-time MVP in the American League. He also writes children’s books, two of them actually; Out of the Ballpark and Hit a Grand Slam.
He’s dated the likes of Madonna, J-Lo, Kate Hudson, Cameron Diaz, etc. His family moved to the US from the Dominican-Republic when he was four, then to Miami when he was around 10. A-Rod’s the youngest person to hit 500 home runs in an MLB career, on August 4 2007 at the age of 32 years, 8 days. He also hit the most grand slam home runs in an MLB career. No wonder the babes loved him. He’s won the Silver Slug award 10 times, and despite it all he’ll never be able to get over all the accusations of using performance-enhancing drugs the whole time.
That, along with all his otherwise impressive victories and awards, is just one thing he’ll never shake.
1971 – Wyn Kelly Swainson gets his patent for a 3D printing device.
By putting a tray into a vat of liquid plastic and directing a laser onto it, which fuses a solid line of plastic onto the tray, then dropping the tray down, the continuing the process with another layer and so on. Just a few years before that he filed a patent in Denmark called “Method of Producing a 3D Figure by Holography”.
In this system, a 3D object could be scanned using a pair of laser interferometers and its dimensions transferred to a computer. The computer takes this data and feeds it on the object’s shape to another pair of lasers; it fuses and hardens the 3D shape in the tray. Woah.
1944 – Smokey the Bear debuts, educating us “Only you can prevent forest fires.” Yeah, Smokey, except for one thing. Why does it take one careless match to start a forest fire but every time I go camping it takes me the whole damn matchbook to light a campfire? Go figure.