Today’s Motto: ‘It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog’

This is Your Day-TODAY: Take a Determined Step Forward and Make History!

On this day, Sep.09……

1753 – The first steam engine imported into the American colonies landed at New York City.

1843 – A U.S. patent was issued for a hand-cranked ice-cream freezer invented by Nancy M. Johnson.

1892 – The New York City health department established the first diagnostic public heath laboratory in the U.S. as its Division of Pathology, Bacteriology and Disinfection.( It was spurred by the scare of Asiatic cholera at the time).

1934 – The first rocket fired in America to break the sound barrier was launched by the American Rocket Society from Marine Park, Staten Island, New York. The rocket reached a top speed of 700 mph, a maximum height of 400-ft, 1,600-ft horizontal range and ended in New York Bay.

1945 – The first “bug” in a computer programme was discovered by Grace Hopper: a moth was removed with tweezers from a relay and taped into the log. (A Harvard technical team looked at Panel F of Mark II calculator and found something unusual. It was a moth, which they promptly removed and taped in the log book. U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper added the caption “First actual case of bug being found,” and that’s the first time anyone used the word bug to describe a computer glitch. Naturally, the term debugging followed. Story is unconfirmed.

While the core facts of the story are true but that’s not how this meaning of the word bug appeared in the dictionary. Inventors and engineers had been talking about bugs for more than a century before the moth in this 9 Sep 1945 incident. Even Thomas Edison used the word. Here’s an extract of a letter he wrote in 1878 to Theodore Puskas, as cited in The Yale Book of Quotations (2006): “‘Bugs’ — as such little faults and difficulties are called — show themselves and months of intense watching, study and labor are requisite before commercial success or failure is certainly reached”).

1949 – Hindi was accepted as the national language of India.

1963 – The first ever live birth in captivity of a giant panda in the world took place at Beijing Zoo, China.

1997 – Designated court decides to frame charges against 49 persons, including Shiv Sena Supremo Bal Thackeray, BJP president L. K. Advani and former U.P. Chief Minister Kalyan Singh, in cases relating to Babri Masjid demolition in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992.

1999 – Mahesh Bhupathi and Ai Sugiyama won the mixed doubles title in the U.S. Open.

2000 – The hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica stretched over a populated city for the first time, after ballooning to a new record size.

For two days, Sept. 9-10, the hole extended over the southern Chile city of Punta Arenas, exposing residents to very high levels of ultra violet radiation. Too much UV radiation can cause skin cancer and destroy tiny plants at the beginning of the food chain. Previously, the hole had only opened over Antarctica and the surrounding ocean. Data from the U.S. space agency NASA showed the hole covered 11.4 million square miles – an area more than three times the size of the United States.

2014 – Apple announced the Apple Watch, the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus; the phones would be larger than previous models and have an improved camera.

2015 – Queen Elizabeth II becomes Great Britain’s longest-reigning monarch at 63 years and seven months, beating the previous record set by her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria.

2017 – Egyptian archaeologists announce the discovery of a 3,500-year-old tomb of a goldsmith and his family in Draa Abul-Naga, Egypt.

2019 – Scientist reveal evidence of humans earliest milk consumption, 6,000 years ago from the dental plaque of teeth of prehistoric farmers from Britain.
Born….

1850 – Bhartendu Harishchandra, poet/dramatist/father of modern Hindi (pic credit- WikiBio).

1890 – Colonel Harland Sanders, American founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

1909 – Leela Chitnis, veteran Marathi, Hindi actor.

1967 – Akshay Kumar, Bollywood actor.

1974 – Capt. Vikram Batra, officer of the Indian Army, posthumously awarded the Param Vir Chakra, India’s highest and prestigious award for valour, for his actions during the 1999 Kargil War.

RIP….

2012 – Verghese Kurien, known as the Father of the White Revolution in India. He was a social entrepreneur whose “billion-litre idea”, Operation Flood – the world’s largest agricultural dairy development programme, made India the world’s largest milk producer, surpassing the United States of America by 1998. By 2010-11 India produced 17 percent of global output. It doubled milk available per person within 30 years, and which made dairy farming India’s largest self-sustaining industry.

You may have known….

A new fitness ‘Napercise’ consists of nothing but sleeping for 45 minutes.

{Compiled by Lt. Gen. (R) Raj Kadyan}