1886
On this date in 1886, President Grover Cleveland dedicated the Statue of Liberty as a gift from the people of France on what is now known as Liberty Island in New York Harbor. The 151-foot statue, designated as a national monument in 1924 and restored for its centennial in 1986, serves as a universal symbol of freedom and democracy.
Congress authorized the placement of the venture in 1877. William Tecumseh Sherman, a Civil War hero, chose the site in keeping with the wishes of the sculptor, Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, who consulted Gustave Eiffel, the designer of the Eiffel Tower, to deal with the complex structural issues.
An agreement stipulated that Americans were to fund the 154-foot granite pedestal and foundation while the French would take responsibility for the statue itself. However, money problems on both sides of the Atlantic delayed the project. In France, a lottery helped raise funds, while in the United States, the money came from theatrical benefits, art shows, auctions and prize fights.
The statue, made of copper sheeting hung on an iron framework, depicts a robed woman holding a torch. The flame of the torch is coated in gold leaf. Its classical appearance is derived from Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom from slavery, oppression and tyranny. Seven spikes on the crown evoke the Seven Seas and the seven continents. Lady Liberty’s torch signifies enlightenment. She holds a tablet that represents knowledge and notes the date of the Declaration of Independence: July 4, 1776.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
i do not like that this was the russians, but you have to admire a crew willing to put themselves at risk for their country, even if it's not my country.
On October 30, 1961, a little more than 16 years after humanity entered the age of nuclear warfare, the Soviet Union demonstrated the frightening capabilities of their nuclear arsenal by detonating an almost inconceivably powerful hydrogen bomb.
The “Tsar Bomba,” “The King of Bombs,” or “Big Ivan” as the Soviets nicknamed it at the time, produced the most powerful artificial explosion in history and greatly enhanced the anxiety that accompanied the Cold War.
While “Little Boy,” the bomb dropped over Hiroshima and the first nuclear device ever detonated, had a yield equivalent to 15 kilotons of TNT and was capable of disintegrating an entire city, the Tsar Bomba had a yield of a whopping 50 megatons and was virtually capable of destroying an entire small country.
The bomb was dropped over Severny, an island in the desolate Russian archipelago of Novaya Zemla. A blinding fireball with a diameter of 5 miles lit the sky and produced a mushroom cloud that rose high up into the Earth’s atmosphere, all the way to a staggering altitude of approximately 100 miles.
However, since the detonation occurred in a remote and sparsely populated area, no humans were killed or seriously injured during the test. Still, the bomb’s behemoth blast wave, which traveled all the way around the Earth three times, caused minor material damage in towns that were located as far as 550 miles from ground zero.
Several weeks before the Tsar was sent on its way to Novaya Zemlya, high-ranking Soviet military officials had hand-picked the bomb delivery crew that was to carry out the possibly futile task of unloading the device from an altitude of 6.5 miles above the ground.
A pilot named Andrei E. Durnovtsev was selected as the squadron leader; he was to fly a customized Tupolev Tu-95 “Bear” airplane armed with the bomb. Another pilot, an unnamed major of the Soviet Air Force, was tasked with flying the second plane, a smaller Tupolev Tu-16, to observe and film the test.
Although the bomb was fitted with a parachute that was designed to slow down its descent towards the detonation altitude and give the pilots enough time to get clear of the destruction zone, everyone involved in the operation was aware that the bomb delivery crew had only a 50 percent chance of surviving the mission.
Such a powerful nuclear device had never been constructed before; no one was able to accurately predict the potentially frightening effects of the explosion.
Both planes were painted in anti-flash white, a special military paint designed to protect the integrity of the aircraft and the health of the crew by reflecting the thermal radiation produced by a nuclear explosion, and the crew was equipped with black-out visors that were designed to protect their eyes from the blinding brightness of the unprecedented flash. When the planes took off, the men were aware that their fate was in the hands of chance.
When Major Durnovtsev reached the agreed coordinates, a Soviet general on the ground remotely released the 27-ton bomb which immediately deployed its parachute and started descending towards the altitude at which it was set to detonate.
Durnovtsev, who was aware of the fact that the pilots had only about two and a half minutes to move to the distance of at least 30 miles away from ground zero, channeled all of his concentration and hope into bringing his crew to safety.
When the bomb detonated, the smaller and faster plane had already reached the distance of at least 5o miles, but Durnovtsev in his Tu-95 had managed to get only about 28 miles from the center of the explosion.
The Tsar’s shock wave, which traveled faster than the speed of sound, reached the plane and caused it to fall rapidly for almost a mile. Three of the crewmen reportedly lost consciousness, but Major Durnovtsev somehow remained in control.
He managed to set the plane back on course and safely land at a mainland Air Force base some 300 miles away. Since not many people would have been able to repeat his daring escape, he was immediately promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel and named a Hero of the Soviet Union.
My Granddaddy Larry lost three houses in West Palm Beach to the market crash and depression. He moved the family back to NW Florida, so not all bad.
1929 October 29 - Black Tuesday hits Wall Street as investors trade 16,410,030 shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. Billions of dollars were lost, wiping out thousands of investors, and stock tickers ran hours behind because the machinery could not handle the tremendous volume of trading. In the aftermath of Black Tuesday, America and the rest of the industrialized world spiraled downward into the Great Depression.
During the 1920s, the U.S. stock market underwent rapid expansion, reaching its peak in August 1929, a period of wild speculation. By then, production had already declined and unemployment had risen, leaving stocks in great excess of their real value. Among the other causes of the eventual market collapse were low wages, the proliferation of debt, a weak agriculture, and an excess of large bank loans that could not be liquidated.
Stock prices began to decline in September and early October 1929, and on October 18 the fall began. Panic set in, and on October 24—Black Thursday—a record 12,894,650 shares were traded. Investment companies and leading bankers attempted to stabilize the market by buying up great blocks of stock, producing a moderate rally on Friday. On Monday, however, the storm broke anew, and the market went into free fall. Black Monday was followed by Black Tuesday, in which stock prices collapsed completely.
After October 29, 1929, stock prices had nowhere to go but up, so there was considerable recovery during succeeding weeks. Overall, however, prices continued to drop as the United States slumped into the Great Depression, and by 1932 stocks were worth only about 20 percent of their value in the summer of 1929. The stock market crash of 1929 was not the sole cause of the Great Depression, but it did act to accelerate the global economic collapse of which it was also a symptom. By 1933, nearly half of America’s banks had failed, and unemployment was approaching 15 million people, or 30 percent of the workforce. It would take World War II, and the massive level of armaments production taken on by the United States, to finally bring the country out of the Depression after a decade of suffering.