Today in History – March 3rd

1634 – First tavern in Boston opens (Samuel Cole)
1791 – First US internal revenue act (taxing distilled spirits & carriages)
1803 – First impeachment trial of a federal judge, John Pickering, begins.
1843 – Congress appropriates $30,000 “to test the practicability of establishing a system of electro-magnetic telegraphs”

1853 – Transcontinental railroad survey is authorized by Congress
1855 – US Congress approves $30,000 to test camels for military use
1863 – Abraham Lincoln approves charter for National Academy of Sciences
1887 – Anne Sullivan begins teaching 6 year old blind-deaf Helen Keller
1904 – Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany becomes the first person to make a sound recording of a political document, using Thomas Edison’s cylinder
1910 – Rockefeller Foundation: John D. Rockefeller Jr. announces his retirement from managing his businesses so that he can be devoted full time to being a philanthropist
1989 – Robert McFarlane gets $20,000 fine, 2 years probation for Iran-Contra
1992 – President Bush apologizes for raising taxes after pledging not to
2013 – A 2 year old US girl becomes the first child born with HIV to be cured
Birthdays
1747 – Kasamir Pulaski, US general (Revolutionary War)
1831 – George M Pullman, inventor (railway sleeping car)
1838 – George William Hill, US astronomer (calculated Moon’s orbit)
1847 – Alexander Graham Bell, Edinburgh Scotland, inventor (telephone)
1918 – Arnold Newman, photographer
1936 – Jim Clark, Formula 1 racer (1963 champ)
Deaths
1703 – Robert Hooke, scientific genius, dies in London aged 67

The Englishman Robert Hooke was a brilliant scientist, architect, and natural philosopher, best known for his law of elasticity. Hooke’s law “Ut tensio, sic vis” meaning “As the extension, so the force”, culminated, for practical purposes, in his development of the balance spring or hairspring, which for the first time enabled a portable timepiece – a watch – to keep time with reasonable accuracy. A bitter dispute between Hooke and Christiaan Huygens on this invention was to continue for centuries after the death of both; but a note dated 23 June 1670 in the Hooke Folio, describing a demonstration of a balance-controlled watch before the Royal Society, has been held to favour Hooke’s claim. It is interesting from a twentieth-century vantage point that Hooke first announced his law of elasticity as an anagram. This was a method sometimes used by scientists, such as Hooke, Huygens, Galileo, and others, to establish priority for a discovery without revealing details.
1959 – Lou Costello, comedian/actor (Abbott & Costello), dies at 52
1996 – Meyer Schapiro, art historian, dies at 91