October 14
Today is
World Standards Day, honoring the experts who develop voluntary standards within standards development organizations, such as ISO.
Events
1066 –
Norman Conquest:
Battle of Hastings: In England on Senlac Hill, seven miles from Hastings, the Norman forces of
William the Conqueror defeat the English army and kill King
Harold II of England.
1322 –
Robert the Bruce of Scotland defeats King
Edward II of England at Byland, forcing Edward to accept Scotland's independence.
1656 – Massachusetts enacts the first punitive legislation against the
Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). The marriage of church-and-state in
Puritanism makes them regard the Quakers as spiritually apostate and politically subversive.
1812 – Work on London's
Regent's Canal starts.
1880 – Mexican soldiers kill
Victorio, one of the greatest Apache military strategists.
1884 – The American inventor,
George Eastman, receives a U.S. Government patent on his new paper-strip
photographic film.
1888 –
Louis Le Prince films first motion picture:
Roundhay Garden Scene.
1908 – The Chicago Cubs defeat the Detroit Tigers, 2–0, clinching the World Series. The Cubs haven't won another one yet.
1912 – While campaigning in Milwaukee, the former President of the United States,
Theodore Roosevelt, is shot and mildly wounded by
John Schrank, a mentally-disturbed saloon keeper. With the fresh wound in his chest, and the bullet still within it, Mr. Roosevelt still carries out his scheduled public speech. He also carried that bullet, for the rest of his life.
1913 –
Senghenydd colliery disaster, the United Kingdom's worst coal mining accident claims the lives of 439 miners.
1926 – The children's book
Winnie-the-Pooh, by
A. A. Milne, is first published.
1938 – The first flight of the
Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighter plane.
1940 –
Balham underground station disaster in London, England, sixty-six people in the station were killed during the Nazi Luftwaffe air raids on Great Britain.
1943 – World War II: The American
Eighth Air Force loses 60 of 291
B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bombers in aerial combat during the
second mass-daylight air raid on the Schweinfurt ball bearing factories in western Nazi Germany.
1944 – Linked to
a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler,
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel is forced to commit suicide.
1947 – Captain
Chuck Yeager (

) of the United States Air Force flies a
Bell X-1 rocket-powered experimental aircraft, the
Glamorous Glennis, faster than the speed of sound at Mach 1.06 (700 miles per hour (1,100 km/h; 610 kn) over the high desert of Southern California and becomes the first pilot and the first airplane to do so in level flight.
1958 – The District of Columbia's Bar Association votes to accept African-Americans as member attorneys.
1962 – The
Cuban Missile Crisis begins: A U.S. Air Force
U-2 reconnaissance plane and its pilot flies over the island of Cuba and takes photographs of
Soviet SS-4 Sandal missiles being installed and erected in Cuba.
1964 –
Leonid Brezhnev becomes the
General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and thereby, along with his allies, such as Alexei Kosygin, the leader of the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
1968 –
Jim Hines of the United States of America becomes the first man ever to break the so-called "ten-second barrier" in the 100-meter sprint in the
Summer Olympic Games held in Mexico City with a time of 9.95 seconds.
1969 – The United Kingdom introduces the
British fifty-pence coin, which replaces, over the following years, the
British ten-shilling note, in anticipation of the
decimalization of the British currency in 1971, and the abolition of the shilling as a unit of currency anywhere in the world.
1973 – In the
Thammasat student uprising over 100,000 people protest in Thailand against the Thanom military government, 77 are killed and 857 are injured by soldiers.
1979 – The first Gay Rights March on Washington, D.C., the
National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, demands "an end to all social, economic, judicial, and legal oppression of lesbian and gay people", and draws approximately 100,000 people.
1982 – U.S. President
Ronald Reagan proclaims a
War on Drugs. Whoops.
1984 –
"Baby Fae" receives a heart transplant from a baboon.
1988 -
Def Leppard became first act in chart history to sell seven million copies of two consecutive LPs, with
Pyromania (their third studio album released in 1983) and
Hysteria, (which became the band's best-selling album to date, selling over 20 million copies worldwide, and spawning six hit singles).
1998 –
Eric Rudolph is charged with six bombings including the
1996 Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta, Georgia.
2003 – Chicago Cubs fan
Steve Bartman becomes infamously known as the scapegoat for the Cubs losing Game 6 of the
2003 National League Championship Series to the Florida Marlins.
2006 – The college football
brawl between University of Miami and Florida International University leads to suspensions of 31 players of both teams.
2012 –
Felix Baumgartner successfully jumped to Earth from a helium balloon in the stratosphere in the Red Bull Stratos project.
2014 – A
snowstorm and avalanche in the Nepalese Himalayas triggered by the remnants of
Cyclone Hudhud kills 43 people.
Continued in next post