Search

Charles Stark Draper was born to Arthur and Martha Draper in Windsor, Missouri. His father was a dentist and his mother was a schoolteacher. In 1917, Draper enrolled in the University of Missouri, where he planned to study medicine. In 1919, he transferred to Stanford University in California, graduating in 1922 with a bachelor’s degree in psychology. He then attended Herald’s Radio College in order to work as a ship radio operator. After finishing his training, Draper took a road trip cross-country with a friend who was attending Harvard. On their way to Boston, they drove through Cambridge. Draper was taken with the town, especially the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). That day, he enrolled in MIT’s electrochemical program.

William Mills Wrigley (RIHG-lee), Jr., was born on September 30, 1861, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His parents, William Wrigley, Sr., and Mary Ann Ladley Wrigley, had married on December 3, 1860. William, Sr., was a soap maker, and in 1870 he founded the Wrigley Manufacturing Company, which made Wrigley’s Scouring Soap. William, Jr., and a friend ran away to Manhattan at age eleven, where William worked selling newspapers. He soon returned to Philadelphia and quit school at age thirteen to work for his father. He made $1.50 a week stirring a vat of liquid soap in the factory and later became a soap salesman. As a teenager, Wrigley traveled from city to city, convincing merchants to carry Wrigley’s Scouring Soap in their stores. He married Ada Foote in 1885, and their daughter Dorothy was born in July, 1886; eight years later, the couple had a son, Philip.

At the end of the 1930’s, the U.S. Navy began preparing to fight a war in both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. The Navy continued to rely heavily on battleships and aircraft carriers, but it also began building a fleet of long-range submarines. Prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved the Navy from the coast of California to Hawaii as a show of force, hoping to deter the Japanese from attacking. In the Atlantic, American submarines fought German U-boats in an unofficial naval war. When Roosevelt declared a state of emergency on September 8, 1939, the Navy was authorized to increase its number of enlisted personnel by almost sixty thousand, to 191,000. Officers and nurses in the reserves were also called back to active duty. On June 14, 1940, Roosevelt signed a bill authorizing the expansion of the Navy’s number of combatant ships by 11 percent as a precautionary measure. As the war in Europe spread, Congress passed a second bill, signed on July 19, increasing the size of the Navy by 1,325,000 tons of combatant ships.

Mexican-born criminal and activist. Juan Nepomuceno Cortina (NEH-poh-mew-SAY-noh cohr-TEE-nah) was born May 16, 1824, in Camargo, Tamaulipas, Mexico. His parents, Estefana Goseacochea and Trinidad Cortina, both had been married before and each had two sons. In addition to Cortina, Estefana and Trinidad had two more children together, Jose Maria and Maria del Carmen. Cortina, nicknamed Cheno, was slender, with reddish-blond hair and gray eyes.

Argentine-born architect. Eduardo Fernando Catalano (ehd-WAHR-doh fehr-NAHN-doh kaht-ah-LAH-noh) was born December 19, 1917, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the youngest child of a commercial artist. Little is known about his early life in Argentina. Catalano studied architecture at Buenos Aires University. He came to the United States after winning a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania. Catalano continued his studies in architecture at Harvard University under architect Walter Gropius and architect and furniture designer Marcel Breuer; Gropius and Breuer are considered two of the pioneers of modernist architecture. Modernist architecture is characterized by simple, unembellished designs and buildings often constructed of glass, steel, and concrete.

William Henry Vanderbilt (VAN-duhr-bihlt) was born on May 8, 1821, to Cornelius and Sophia Vanderbilt. As a child, William was frail and often sickly. Because of his ill health, his father never thought much of William and regularly insulted him. Even into adulthood, Cornelius believed that William was not smart enough to run the family business and called him names like “beetlehead,” “blockhead,” and “good for nothing.” When William was a teenager, Cornelius got him a job in a New York banking house. The two men had a falling-out when William was nineteen and decided to marry Maria Louisa Kissam. Cornelius felt that his son’s decision to marry the daughter of a poor minister from Brooklyn exhibited bad judgment.

Mexican-born baseball player. Baldomero Melo Almada Quiros, better known as Mel Almada (ahl-MAH-dah), was born February 7, 1913, in Huatabampo, located in northwestern Mexico along the Gulf of California. He was one of the eight children of Baldomero Almada and Amelia Quiros Almada, wealthy upper-class landowners. Baldomero was a descendant of conquistadors and Amelia from Spanish nobility. Baldomero was appointed governor of Baja California but the previous governor, Esteban Cantu, refused to give up the position. Hoping to escape the turmoil and violence of the Mexican Revolution, the family moved to Los Angeles, California, in 1914.

Dutch physicist. Pieter Zeeman Pieter Zeeman was born May 25, 1865, in the small town of Zonnemarie in the Netherlands. Zonnemarie is in the Zeeland province on the island of Schouwen, in the southeastern part of the country. Zeeman’s parents, Catharinus Farandinus Zeeman and Wilhelmina Worst, had six children: four sons and two daughters. Catharinus was a Lutheran minister. Wilhelmina home-schooled Zeeman and his siblings through elementary school. Zeeman then attended secondary school in Zierikzee, the island’s major city. Zeeman was still in high school on November 17, 1882, when a massive geomagnetic storm disrupted telegraphs and created auroras worldwide. He observed and sketched the aurora as a pale green arch that formed in the eastern sky. Zeeman sent letters with his description and drawings to the journal Nature, and they were published in 1883. After graduating, he attended school in Delft for two years, studying classical languages and reading papers by leading scientists. While there, Zeeman met physicist H. Kamerlingh Onnes, who was a pioneer in refrigeration technology and later discovered superconductivity.

Construction of the Squalus began on October 18, 1937, in the Portsmouth Navy Yard in New Hampshire. The Squalus was commissioned on March 1, 1939, under the command of Oliver Naquin. The submarine began a series of test dives near the Isles of Shoals and made its nineteenth on the morning of May 23. The dive was routine until the vessel reached a depth of sixty feet, when the engine rooms began to flood. Twenty-six men died when the after section of the submarine flooded. The Squalus came to rest at a depth of 243 feet, with the bow at an angle of eleven degrees. The Squalus sent up a marker buoy along with signal rockets. While waiting to be rescued, the crew put on their Momsen lungs, which they used as gas masks. The lung recycled exhaled air using an oblong rubber bag containing soda lime.

After Uranus’s discovery, scientists noticed that it did not behave as expected. They concluded that the gravitational effects of a yet unknown planet caused discrepancies noted in Uranus’s orbit. In the early 1840s, British astronomer John Adams and French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier independently calculated the unknown planet’s orbit and mass. In 1846, German astronomer Johann Galle discovered Neptune within one or two degrees of its predicted location.

Denmark became a state during the tenth century and a constitutional monarchy in 1849. Its citizens often rank as the happiest in the world in global surveys, and the country is the second most peaceful in the world. Denmark is located on the Jutland Peninsula in northern Europe. It borders the Baltic and North Seas and Germany to the south. Sweden is located to the northeast. The country also includes the islands of Fyn, Sjælland, and several other smaller ones. Its position gives it control of the Danish Straits, which link the Baltic and North Seas. Denmark is a low-lying nation, prone to flooding, that is protected from the sea by a series of dikes. The elevation of the country ranges from 171 meters above sea level to 7 meters below sea level. Denmark is a pioneer in harnessing energy from wind power, combating the country’s air pollution problem. Approximately one-quarter of the population lives in the capital city of Copenhagen. Denmark joined the European Union in 1973 but did not adopt the euro as its currency. Denmark’s standard of living and per-capita gross national product are among the world’s highest. The country is also a welfare state, leading the world in income equality. Among Denmark’s top resources are limestone, chalk, natural gas, petroleum, and salt.

The crash of the USS Shenandoah is among the United States’ most dramatic aviation disasters. The airship encountered severe winds that carried it higher into the sky than it could withstand. It ultimately broke in two and crashed in southern Ohio, killing fourteen of the men on board.

On Valentine’s Day of 1929, five members of Chicago mobster George “Bugs” Moran’s gang and two others were murdered by a group of men dressed as police officers. Known as the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre, the event was thought to have been orchestrated by rival gangster Al Capone in an attempt to consolidate his power over organized crime in Chicago.

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was constructed in 1921 to honor the numerous unidentified soldiers killed in action during World War I. Located in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, the white marble tomb was designed by Lorimer Rich and sculpted by Thomas Hudson Jones.

Ground-based telescopes have a long history of advancing astronomy research. Starting in the 1960s, large ground-based telescopes,situated in advantageous locations on the Earth’s surface and having apertures larger than 250 centimeters,were used to explore and further study objects in our solar system. For example, in the 1950s, the Martian atmosphere was believed to be thin, and, based on the intensity and polarization of Martian reflected light, Martian surface pressure was determined to be only 5 to 10 percent of that on the Earth. Designers of preliminary Martian landers used this value when deciding whether a descent to the Martian surface should be affected by a balloon, glider, or downward-pointing rocket engine. Also, the presence of this much atmosphere suggested that Martian life might exist, as there would be enough air to breathe (if free oxygen were present) and enough protection from ultraviolet light and extreme temperature changes.

When Uranus was first observed (perhaps as early as 1690), many astronomers considered it to be a star rather than a planet. British astronomer William Herschel studied Uranus in 1781 when he thought he had discovered a new comet. After two years of further study, astronomers agreed that Uranus was, in fact, a planet.