OCTOBER 5 — 1829 Happy Birthday Chester A. Arthur; 2011 R.I.P. Steve Jobs; 1957 Soviets Launch Sputnik Pt. 2
OCTOBER 5
1829 – Happy Birthday #21, Chester A. Arthur.
…The son of a Baptist preacher, Arthur was born in Fairfield, Vermont, in 189. He was graduated from Union College in 1848, taught school, was admitted to the bar, and practiced law in New York City. In 1859, Chet Arthur married Ellen Herndon, just call her Nell, and they had two children that survived to adulthood. When the Civil War broke out, Chet served as Quartermaster General of the State of New York, making sure food and supplies were available for the Union troops.
President Grant in 1871 appointed him Collector of the Port of New York, where Arthur marshaled the thousand Customs House employees on behalf of Roscoe Conkling’s Stalwart Republican machine. Arthur was a believer in the spoils system, which gave government jobs to supporters, friends and relatives, when it was coming under attack from reformers. As collector of the Custom House, he overstaffed it with Conkling supporters. In 1878 President Rutherford Hays banished Arthur from the position in an attempt to reform the Custom House. Ellen unfortunately died of pneumonia around this time and later on while in the White House, Chet would lay flowers at her portrait every day.
James “Boat Man Jim” Garfield was nominated for the 1880 election, and Garfield chose Arthur as his running mate for Vice President. As Vice President, Arthur maintained his loyalty to his old boss Cokling and his corrupt ways. But then. Four months after James Garfield was sworn in as president, he was shot and two months later succumbed to his wounds. Now remember, Garfield was shot by Charles Guitaeu, who was a disgruntled government worker wannabe. When Guiteau shot Garfield, he shouted: I’m a Stalwart of the Stalwarts! Arthur is president now! So during the months that Garfield was slowly dying, Arthur had to maintain a low profile, rather than risk suspicions of being a part of the assassination. Creepy.
Elegant Arthur took Garfield’s place as president at 2:15 in the morning of September 20, 1881, and changed his political structure. He distanced himself from Conkling and his supporters, then signed the Pendleton Service Act, which established job opportunities for Civil Service Members and other Government positions based on merit and not political gains, in this way, this bipartisan Civil Membership would enforce the laws of the Act by stopping corruption in the form of evaluating federal employees through testing.
Elegant Arthur also tried to lower tariffs on annual revenue surplus, which didn’t bode well in Congress, much like trying to veto the first general Federal Immigration Law, namely the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, also overridden by Congress. Now, as much as a corruption terminator he was politically, he was still Elegant Arthur, and needed the White House to look as such. So he took it upon himself to sell older White House memorabilia, such as Abraham Lincoln’s pants, hats from James Quincy Adams, and whatever else he could find. Good thing he cashed in all those valuables, because that way, he could pay for none other than Louis Comfort Tiffany, master of the Art Nouveau and Aesthetic movements, to redecorate the White House.
Arthur kept to himself the fact that he was suffering from a fatal kidney disease and ran for president anyway, but was not denominated and died in 1886. Publisher Alexander K. McClure recalled “No man ever entered the Presidency so profoundly and widely distrusted, and no one ever retired more generally respected.”
1804 – Happy birthday Robert Parker Parrott. He was an American soldier and inventor of military ordinance. Yeah, the Parrott rifle gun!
2011 Steve jobs passes away, ending an era for Apple Inc.
Steve Jobs, born in San Francisco February 24 1955, was adapted to Paul and Clara Jobs, and a very young Steve worked with Paul putting together electronics in the garage. Who would’ve seen that one coming, right? He was too smart for high school and dropped out of Reed College in Portland to begin working with Atari as a video game designer in 1974. From there, young Steve headed to India for a spiritual journey along with some magic mushrooms. Good times. Steve came back home and went to work on creating Apple Computers with Steve Wozniak, financing by selling Steve’s VW bus.
Steve was of course, a great American visionary: to make a product everyone can use smaller, cheaper, intuitive and accessible to everyday consumers. The original Apple 1 cost $666.66, and now it’s worth around $750,000. It had a GUI or graphical user interface, or buttons you can click on a screen. If you need to wait for a command to execute, you would see the pointy arrow turn into a clock. Unfortunately for Apple, IBM was also using the GUI on their PCs, and if you had to wait for a command to execute on a PC, your pointy mouse turned into an hourglass. Real original, IBM. Yet the PC dominated the market for the next decade to come.
Steve quietly got pushed out of his executive positions as CEO of Apple, and got into another computer field: animation. In 1986, George Lucas sold Steve, for $50 Mill, the computer graphics division of Lucas films this would lead to Pixar, which produced the first fully computer animated films like Toy Story and Finding Nemo. Apple, meanwhile, was hurting without Steve on Board, and was on the verge of declaring bankruptcy. Steve came up with another computer hardware and software enterprise called next, which would be swallowed up by Apple. Steve got his chair on the board back, and much like the 1970s, Steve drove Apple back to compete with IBM. He paid himself $1 a year.
Think Different, would be his motto. Not just with products and consumers, but the employees as well. In the late 1990s, not just with the Mac, but now with the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and meanwhile Microsoft were still trying to fix BSOD, or Blue Screen of Death issues. By 2007 shares were worth $199.99. ITunes became the world’s second biggest retailer next to Walmart! We are using UNIX now folks, no more C++. But Steve had a little cancer that was taking over his pancreas. He’d had it since 2003 already. Initially relying on ancient eastern eye of newt, tongue of toad and blood of bats, he agreed to have his pancreas removed. But by 2009, he would need a liver transplant as well.
His health continued to decline, and in August 2011, he resigned from Apple. And Tim Cook would replace him as CEO. On this day in 2011, Steve Jobs died. Apple of course would move on to make great inventions long after his departure. From the Apple TV, Apple Watch, Electric Vehicles and Apple Energy and beyond.
1986 – The Iran-Contra scandal starts to unravel.
…It started in 1985, when President Ronald Regan’s administration supplied weapons to Iran in order to secure the release of American hostages held in Lebanon by Hezbollah terrorists loyal to Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s leader. The US took millions of dollars from the sale of weapons and funneled them and guns to the Contra guerillas in Nicaragua. The contras were opponents of Nicaragua’s Sandinista Junta of National Reconstruction, whose family had been in power for 43 years. The scandal rocked the Reagan administration; 11 members of the President’s administration eventually were convicted of a variety of charges.
1957 – Soviets launch Sputnik Part II.
Here are the headlines: Cleveland Plain Dealer: Satellite Fired By Russia; Circling Around US 15 Times a Day
Now as ham radio geeks had heard mysterious bleeps the entire day before, the headlines told Americans what that noise was. ; NY Daily News: Track Red Baby Moon By Radio. Yesterday I discussed the lead up to this Soviet moon, and now a little panic and a lot of serious concern took over Americans immediately. If the Russians could send this little guy to circle around the whole planet, what’s to stop them from carrying one with a payload of a small nuclear bomb over any U.S. city they wish?
Chicago Daily Tribune: Reds Fire ‘Moon’ Into Sky. Yeah, this Moon gave the space race to the Russians, while the Americans were not even paying attention. Ham radio geeks started wondering if the bleeps they kept hearing was some kind of a Russian code for send a fireball over Washington D.C.
NYT: Soviet Fires Earth Satellite into Space; It Is Circling the Globe at 18,000 M.P.H.; Sphere Tracked in 4 Crossings over U.S. The Russians drew first blood in the space race, now the move belonged to President Dwight Eisenhower. The brilliant move was: nothing to see here, folks, just move along with your day. I paraphrase, of course. Eisenhower did nothing, and in retaliation, on November 3rd, the Soviets launched Sputnik 2, almost as a slap in the face to the American president, which carried a payload named Laika. Laika was a dog. The President, in response, on December 6, launched an American satellite which fizzled off the Launchpad quicker than the ratings of my podcast. Ike was harshly criticized for dragging his feet in the space race, but his calmness turned out to be his biggest weapon. As a result, Eisenhower saw the creation of the National Aeronautics and Space Agency, a.k.a. NASA and allowed funding for countless space exploration projects.
At the time, Ike was the bad president that was losing the space race to the Russians, but as history would eventually tell, he would emerge victorious in March 1958 with the successful launching of the Explorer. For today, the news would take its toll on American faith in the president. Ike would eventually respond, “Anyone who would spend $40 billion in a race to the moon for national prestige is nuts.”