"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."
January 19 Georges Claude patents the neon discharge tube for use in advertising.
WWI: German Zeppelins bomb the coastal towns of Great Yarmouth and King's Lynn in England for the first time, killing more than 20.
January 25 First United States coast-to-coast long-distance telephone call, facilitated by a newly invented vacuum tube amplifier, ceremonially inaugurated by Alexander Graham Bell in New York City and his former assistant Thomas A. Watson, in San Francisco, California.
January 31 – WWI: Germany's first large-scale use of poison gas as a weapon occurs when 18,000 artillery shells containing liquid bromidetear gas are fired on the Imperial Russian Army on the Rawka River west of Warsaw during the Battle of Bolimov; however, freezing temperatures prevent it being effective.
February – While working as a cook at New York's Sloane Hospital for Women under an assumed name, "Typhoid Mary" (an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever) infects 25 people, and is placed in quarantine for life on March 27.
March 19 – Pluto is photographed for the first time but is not classified as a planet.
May 6 – Baseball player Babe Ruth hits his first career home run (off Jack Warhop), for the Boston Red Sox.
Lassen Peak, one of the Cascade Volcanoes in California, erupts, sending an ash plume 30,000 feet in the air and devastating the nearby area with pyroclastic flows and lahars. It is the last volcano to erupt in the contiguous United States until the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens.
September 6 – The prototype military tank is first tested by the British Army.
September 7 – Former cartoonist John B. Gruelle is given a patent for his Raggedy Ann doll.
October 13 – Boston Red Sox beat Philadelphia Phillies, 4 games to 1 in the 12th World Series of North American Major League Baseball.
November 24 – William J. Simmons revives the Civil War era Ku Klux Klan at Stone Mountain, Georgia.
November 25 – Einstein's theory of general relativity is formulated.
December 25 – WWI: British and German forces declare an unofficial Christmas truce, get out of the trenches and have a free-for-all kick-around football game in no man's land.
Closing sentiment from 1915's Birth of a Nation by D.W. Griffith
Full film follows....
The Birth of a Nation (1915) with Lillian Gish : Complete film. 3 hours and 13 minutes in HD
Posted by gerardvanderleun at December 31, 2014 6:51 PM
All this from the year of your mother's birth, or close enough. She sure has seen a lot, uh? what a treasure it must be to walk through those memories with her.
I hope you have your recorder running. My mother died at ninety-four and I regret now that I didn't capture more of her stories.
Not earth-shaking ones, just the everyday stuff and how great events would affect her and the folks with her.
"We were in the garden on our friends' farm, weeding, when I split the seam of my pants. I walked up to the farmhouse and they were all gathered 'round the radio listening how the Japs had bombed Pearl Harbor." Simple things.
The world was a restless place then. As it is now. What is to be done about it? Raise a glass to the New Year. And carry on. Life is what's happening when you had other plans.
Happy New Year to all!
Posted by: Jimmy J. at January 1, 2015 12:16 AMYep. Onwards.
Posted by: vanderleun at January 1, 2015 4:21 AMGerard,
Thanks for a delightful delve into 1915 with your digital scissors and paste pot. Think of the labor required back in 1915, if one were to have tried a similar "tour" of 1815. Even if they had access, say, to the Library of Congress or the New York Public Library, they would have had a difficult time duplicating what you have done from, I trust, the relative comfort of your chair. Think, merely, of the logistics of reproduction. Happy New Year, and thanks for continuing to provide so many delights for the mind... and the soul.
Appropriate closing slide.
D.W. Griffith was a Freemason.
You would have to remind us long-suffering Phillies fans that The Team had to wait 65 years after 1915 to cart home its first World Series trophy (s'all right-- the Cubbies have been waiting over a century for their next one).
And thank you for having a sense of humor as well as a gift for poetry and a deep awareness of the things that abide. God's blessings on your new year.
Posted by: PA Cat at January 1, 2015 6:23 AMIt would seem that this Griffith chap had quite deep sympathies for the Klan. A point of view I have never seen portrayed with anywhere near this level of bias. Quite disturbing.
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Posted by: fifa 15 coins at January 3, 2015 2:12 PMI will be looking into the book "The Clansman" by Thomas Dixon to see what it is he had to say. The film based on it, according to credits.
Posted by: janmil at January 3, 2015 8:47 PM
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