Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, we all know that. At least the courts ruled that his patent filing was first. In addition to the legal wrangling, there is a valid historical question of who was first, Bell or Elisha Gray. The controversy was largely buried because the Bell System bought out Gray's company, thereby representing both sides. Perhaps it will come up again now that Lucent Technologies, the current name for Gray's enterprise, is a separate entity. There is no dispute that Western Electric under it's various names has been the largest manufacturer of telephone equipment in the world.
"Put your John Hancock on it" has become an expression for signing your name based on the flourish with which the president of the Continental Congress signed a sheet of parchment on this day in 1776. England's parliament took the government of India back from the East India Company, Adolf Hitler took the government of Germany by acting swiftly and probably destroying other instructions from President Hindenburg, a very significant letter to a US president was dispatched, and a future US president got his boat sideways in front of a Japanese cruiser and demonstrated his swimming skills.
There really was a Lady Godiva, she really did ride naked through the market as a tax protest, and it worked. I'm not sure why the date is set to 2 August, the actual event was probably in late May. Her campaign style has not often been repeated, in fact a young lady protesting Poland's value added tax was arrested for public lewdness at Krakow on 6 July this year, and Poland is still collecting the VAT. Today's quotes address the naked truth, but we have no photos.
1776 - John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, and about fifty other delegates signed the Declaration of Independence. There are 56 signatures on the document, but at least five were not present and signed later, and two delegates never did.
1858 - British Parliament passed the Government of India Act of 1858, ending a century of government by the East India Company and establishing the authority of the British Crown to be represented by a governor general who also held the title of viceroy.
1934 - German Reich President Paul von Hindenburg died at age 87. The Nazis immediately issued a law combining the offices of President and Chancellor, making Hitler president as well as chancellor. The army was required to swear personal loyalty to Hitler.
1939 - Albert Einstein sent a letter to US president Franklin Roosevelt outlining the possibility of creating an atomic bomb, indicating the importance of foreign uranium sources, and reporting that Germany had stopped the sale of Czech uranium which suggested that Germany was already working to create a bomb. The letter had little effect, US efforts to create a fission bomb started in December of 1941.
1943 - A group of 15 US PT-boats, 80-foot wooden-hulled torpedo boats, intercepted Japanese convoys south of Kolombangra Island in the Solomon Islands. PT-109, commanded by Lieutenant JG John F. Kennedy, was rammed and sunk by the Japanese cruiser Amagiri, killing two and badly injuring others.
Lady Godiva Day, Coventry, England - Commemorates the famous naked ride through Coventry's market by Lady Godiva in the summer of 1057. Frustrated when her attempts to increase appreciation for the arts were resisted by the struggling townspeople, Godiva asked her husband Leofric to reduce their taxes. He said no many times, finally agreeing on condition she rode through the market exhibiting her body as an example of beauty as the ancient Greeks might. She agreed, and none of Leofric's taxes were levied that year. She rode with her hair in two braids, the prudish addition of masses of cascading hair and the fate of Peeping Tom were added to the story six centuries later.
1835 - Elisha Gray, US inventor - Born at Barnesville, Ohio to a family of Quaker farmers, left school at the death of his father, apprenticed as a carpenter, finished prep school, interest in chemistry took him to Oberlin College at age 21, where he became interested in electricity. Filed for over 70 patents, mostly related to the telegraph and telephone, beginning with a successful telegraph relay in 1867. Bought out Enos Barton's first partner in a small burglar and fire alarm company to form Gray and Barton in 1869 to manufacture telegraph equipment, Western Union Telegraph Company took a one-third interest in Gray and Barton in 1872, changing its name to Western Electric Manufacturing Company. On 14 February 1876 he filed a "caveat" for the first telephone, a legal document that committed him to completing a patent application within three months and established his precedence for the invention. It didn't help, Alexander Graham Bell filed a patent application with similar claims less tan two hours before Gray's caveat. Bell won all the court challenges, despite the fact that his first working telephone included elements that were absent from his patent but included in Gray's caveat. Two years later Gray left Western Electric and in 1880 he was named professor of dynamic electricity at Oberlin College. He died at Newtonville, Massachusetts on 21 January 1901.
Hope is nature's veil for hiding truth's nakedness.
- Alfred Bernhard Nobel
Men in earnest have no time to waste in patching fig leaves for the naked
truth.
- Hubert H. Humphrey
Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness
of the self, in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little
like the robes of the desert, through which one's nakedness can always
be felt, and, sometimes, discerned.
- James Arthur Baldwin
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
- Mark Twain
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