Born on this day

Tuesday, March 24, 1874. :   American escapologist Harry Houdini is born.

Harry Houdini was born Erik Weisz on 24 March 1874 in Budapest, Hungary. When his family moved to the United States in 1878, their family name was changed to Weiss, and Erik became Ehrich. In 1891, Ehrich became a professional magician, and began calling himself Harry Houdini as a tribute to the French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin. His initial focus was on card tricks, but he began experimenting with escape acts which he then perfected through the years. Houdini could free himself from handcuffs, chains, ropes and straitjackets, often while hanging from a rope or suspended in water, sometimes in plain sight of the audience. In 1913, he introduced perhaps his most famous act, the Chinese Water Torture Cell, in which he was suspended upside-down in a locked glass and steel cabinet full to overflowing with water.

Houdini was noted for exposing spiritualists and their fake ‘supernatural’ phenomena, and once offered a $10,000 reward to anyone who could produce such a phenomenon which Houdini could not reproduce by natural means. Houdini died of peritonitis from a ruptured appendix on 31 October 1926.

Australian History

Saturday, March 24, 1827. :   Work begins on Busby’s Bore to pipe water to meet the needs of the growing colony in New South Wales.

John Busby, born 24 March 1765, was a mining engineer who emigrated to New South Wales in 1824 to take up the position of Government Mineral Surveyor. He designed and created Sydney’s first regular water supply in a project that became known as “Busby’s Bore” or “Lachlan Tunnel”. Although Sydney had been well supplied by Tank Stream for several decades, by the 1820s, the stream was so polluted from the colonists using it for their sewerage that a new water supply was required. Governor Lachlan Macquarie, a man with a vision for improving the city’s infrastructure, commissioned Busby for this task.

The project involved tunnelling 3.6 km through largely sandstone rock from the Lachlan Swamp in what is now Centennial Park to a reservoir in Hyde Park. Construction started on Busby’s birthday, on 24 March 1827, and took ten years to complete, being built by convicts who did not make a particularly motivated workforce. As the tunnelling was done entirely by hand, the rock strata also caused some difficulties.

Busby’s Bore supplemented Sydney’s original supply of drinking water from Tank Stream for around sixty years before it was decommissioned after the water was found to be too contaminated. Near the location where the original Busby’s Bore entered the city is Busby’s Bore Fountain, which was opened by the Lord Mayor in 1962, and which tells the story of Sydney’s early water supply. In 1988, Busby’s Bore Commemorative Cairn was also unveiled. In May 2006, it was decided that Busby’s Bore would be reopened as part of a project to irrigate the Botanic Gardens, The Domain and Hyde Park with wastewater.

World History

Friday, March 24, 1882. :   German scientist Robert Koch announces the discovery of the bacillus responsible for tuberculosis.

Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch, born 11 December 1843, was a German physician. He became famous for the discovery of the anthrax bacillus in 1877, the cholera bacillus in 1883 and the tuberculosis bacillus, the discovery of which was announced on 24 March 1882. Tuberculosis was the cause of one in seven deaths in the mid-19th century, so the discovery of the bacillus was a vital step in bacteriological research. Three weeks later, on April 10, he published an article entitled The Etiology of Tuberculosis. Two years later, Koch published a second paper in which he expounded “Koch’s postulates” – or criteria which must be fulfilled in order to establish a causal relationship between a parasite and a disease – which have since become basic to studies of all infectious diseases.

World History

Tuesday, March 24, 1942. :   Japanese aircraft bomb Port Moresby.

In late 1941, the Japanese began their conquest of the Pacific region, hoping to take control from the Indian/Burmese border, south through Malaya, across the islands of Indonesia to New Guinea, northwest to the Gilbert Islands and north to the Kuril Islands off the Japanese coast. Singapore and the Malay Peninsula, which had been defended by British Empire Forces, fell in a 70 day campaign that began in December 1941. In January 1942, Japanese forces landed in Rabaul. From here, the first of over 100 Japanese bombings of the Australian mainland began in February, and on 8 March, the Japanese invaded the New Guinean mainland, capturing Lae and Salamaua.

On 24 March 1942, Japanese aircraft bombed Port Moresby, New Guinea, hoping to occupy the city as a base from which to debilitate shipping to Australia’s east. This was the second attack on the town, with the first having occurred around six weeks earlier. The intention was that, by capturing New Guinea, Australia would be cut off from Allied assistance. 18 heavy bombers and three fighters dropped some 20 tons of bombs on Port Moresby’s military hospital and the town itself. Surprisingly, there were no casualties.

World History

Friday, March 24, 1989. :   The Exxon Valdez oil tanker runs aground, creating an oil slick disaster in Alaska.

On 23 March 1989, the oil tanker Exxon Valdez departed from the Valdez oil terminal in Valdez, Alaska, heading south through Prince William Sound, with a full cargo of oil. At 12:04 am on 24 March 1989, the tanker hit Bligh Reef, splitting its side open and releasing up to 115,000 m³ of crude oil, though media reports put the figure much lower. The spillage affected 1,900 km of coastline; loss of wildlife estimates were 250,000 seabirds, nearly 3,000 sea otters, 300 harbour seals, 250 bald eagles, up to 22 killer whales and billions of salmon and herring eggs.

Numerous difficulties were encountered with the clean-up. Equipment was not readily available, or not up to the massive task. In the aftermath of the environmental disaster, US Congress passed the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, including a clause banning the Exxon Valdez from Alaskan waters. On 29 January 1990, the trial of captain Joseph Hazelwood began in Anchorage, Alaska, and on 27 February 1990, Exxon and its shipping company were indicted on five criminal counts. Exxon spent around 2 billion dollars cleaning up the spill with 11,000 workers, and a further $1 billion to settle civil and criminal charges related to the case. A lawsuit brought by fishermen, property owners, businesses and communities who claimed they were harmed by the spill was still in progress as of 2002.