The earth turns on its axis, making day and night. We know that, and since the third century BC various astronomers have reached that conclusion, but it was only in 1851 that it was demonstrated experimentally by a talented self-taught physicist at Paris. Léon Foucault found that a pendulum, which swings straight back and forth, appeared to change its angle relative to the room in which it was swinging over a long enough period of time. Since there was no force deflecting the pendulum, it must be the room turning rather than the pendulum. He was invited to demonstrate it in the Pantheon at the 1851 Worlds Fair, and he did it up right. The pendulum was suspended from the ceiling in the church, 67 meters (220 feet) above the floor. The weight on the pendulum was a cannon ball. A stylus below the ball marked its path on sand spread below, and made a full circle every 40 hours. (At the poles the rotation would take exactly one day, at the equator it would never move at all.) I remember his name from grindingtelescope mirrors as a teenager, the process for testing the progress of a perfect parabolic curve is known as the Foucault knife-edge test and involves a pinhole light, a razor blade, and a dark room. It has been refined since 1858 when he developed it, but not replaced. With test equipment costing almost nothing, flaws less than a millionth of an inch in the curve of a mirror can be exposed. His name is pronounced FOO KO. The Umberto Eco novel Foucault's Pendulum, which I and countless others bought and never could get through, has absolutely nothing to do with him.
Today marks a famous race, perhaps the last time a horse beat a locomotive over any distance. This time it was outrun when a boiler leak limited speed, a month before the same locomotive lost a race when it broke down just short of the finish line. We also have the first issue of the New York Times, the first Jewish chaplain in the US Army, and the collapse of Jay Cooke's bank that played a large part in the history of rail in the US.
The head of the United Nations died in the wreck of a light plane attempting to negotiate peace in Africa, and Chile has a peaceful transition to independence - but it only lasts for about four years before a long series of government transitions there that were anything but peaceful.
1830 - The first steam locomotive built in the US, the Baltimore & Ohio's "Tom Thumb," lost a nine-mile race to a horse running on a parallel track at Ellicotts Mills, Maryland.
1851 - The first issue of The New York Times hits the street, priced at two cents. Henry Jarvis Raymond, an experienced journalist and editor, started the "grey lady" after raising a hundred thousand dollars, Horace Greeley's Tribune had been started ten years before with only a thousand dollars.
1862 - The first Jewish chaplain, Rabbi Jacob Frankel of Philadelphia's Roden Shalom Congregation, was commissioned by President Lincoln. Until July of that year regulations required that only ordained Christians could serve as chaplains.
1873 - The banking house Jay Cooke and Company, overextended in financing the Northern Pacific Railroad, closed. This precipitated the Panic of 1873, starting an extended recession in the US. By year end 5,000 other businesses had failed.
1895 - Daniel David Palmer performed the first 'chiropractic adjustment,' to a misaligned vertebrae in the neck of Harvey Lillard at Davenport, Iowa. It is claimed that the treatment cured Harvey's deafness. This was the advent of modern chiropractic medicine, Palmer founded the Palmer Chiropractic College in Davenport later the same year.
1961 - Secretary General of the United Nations Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjold, on peace mission to Katanga in the Congo (Zaire until 1997, now Democratic Republic of the Congo), died in a plane crash.
Independence Day, Chile - Commemorates the revolutionary government's replacement of the Spanish colonial government on this day in 1810, and the final independence in 1818. Home rule was achieved quietly in 1810 because the Spanish had their hands full at home with Napoleon, but the Viceroy of Peru conquered Chile in 1814 and Chilean patriots had to overthrow him in a summer campaign from November 1817 to February 1818.
1819
- Jean Bernard Léon Foucault, French physicist - Born at Paris
to a publisher, he was educated at home and showed great mechanical talent
and ingenuity as a child. Passed the examination for bachelor of arts,
studied medicine but developed a strong aversion to the sight of blood.
Worked in a lab preparing samples for microscopy, studied math to support
growing interest in physics, became scientific editor of the "Journal
des Débats" in 1845. That April took the first photograph of the sun on
a daguerreotype plate working with Louis Fizeau. With Regnault demonstrated
the nature of binocular vision in humans. In 1848 to 1850, working with
Fizeau, he measured the speed of light in air within 1% of the currently
accepted value, using a notched spinning mirror to fold a beam of light
back and forth through a 12-foot tube. Then filled the tube with water
and found that light traveled more slowly, overturning the "corpuscular"
theory of light advanced by Newton. He invented a regulator for the feed
of the Davy electric arc lamp making electric lighting (but not home lighting)
practical. Used a pendulum to demonstrate the rotation of the earth, building
one for the 1851 World's Fair in the Pantheon at Paris, using 200 feet
of piano wire and a 65 pound cannon ball. Invented and named the gyroscope
in 1852. From 1855 he was physicist at the Paris Observatory, where he
developed a test for optical mirrors for telescopes in 1858 as well as
a process for silvering them when perfectly shaped. He suffered a paralyzing
stroke soon after he had fully equipped his lab at the Observatory, and
died at Paris on 11 February 1868.
Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception
of bad news, which obeys its own set of laws.
- Douglas Adams
No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No stream or gas drives
anything until it is confined. No Niagara is ever turned into light and
power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused,
dedicated, disciplined.
- Harry Emerson Fosdick
Accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a lady, but a newspaper
can always print a retraction.
- Adlai E. Stevenson
There are few things in this world which it is worth while to get angry
about; and they are just the things anger will not improve.
- Henry Jarvis Raymond, first
publisher of the New York Times
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