Born on this day
Sunday, February 12, 1809. : Charles Darwin, the man who split the scientific community in two with his theory of evolution, is born.
British naturalist Charles Robert Darwin was born on 12 February 1809 in Shrewsbury, England. Darwin’s claim to fame is his publication of “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”. The book put forth Darwin’s theory of evolutionary selection, which expounded that survival or extinction of populations of organisms is determined by the process of natural selection, achieved through that population’s ability to adapt to its environment. Ultimately, by following Darwin’s theory of evolution to its conclusion, the book suggested that man evolved from apes. “The Origin of Species” was first published in November 1859.
It is worth noting that Darwin’s theory of evolution was not original. Although Darwin is given the credit for the theory of evolution, he developed the theory out of the writings of his grandfather Erasmus. Large sections from Erasmus’s major work, ‘Zoonomia or the Laws of Organic Life’ are repeated in Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’. There is evidence to suggest that many of the other ideas Charles proposed, such as the concept of modern biological evolution, including natural selection, were borrowed from ideas that had already been published by other scientists. Charles De Secondat Montesquieu (1689–1755), Benoit de Maillet (1656–1738), Pierre-Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759), Denis Diderot (1713–1784) and George Louis Buffon are just some whose ideas are believed by historians to have been plagiarised by Darwin, without due credit.
Australian History
Saturday, February 12, 1814. : Government House, Sydney, issues an official announcement of the new discoveries west of the Blue Mountains.
Since the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, the colony of New South Wales had been virtually imprisoned by the impassable Blue Mountains that lay to the west. George Caley, Francis Barrallier and George Evans were just three of the explorers who had tried – and failed – to penetrate beyond the steep cliffs and ravines that characterised the mountain range. Their journeys had followed the rivers, but all were stopped when the explorers met either sheer cliff faces or mazes of impassable gorges.
Blaxland, Lawson and Wentworth were pastoralists with their own holdings and a view to expand their land and stock. Like many other free settlers, they were affected by the limitations of land in New South Wales, hemmed in as the colony was by the mountains. They sought rich grasslands inland beyond the Blue Mountains. Setting off on 11 May 1813, they followed the ridges, unlike previous expeditions. The men faced difficult terrain, and had to use machetes to hack their way through the thick scrub, but they finally reached Mount York, at the western end of the Blue Mountains. From here, they sighted rich grasslands on the other side of the mountain barrier. Blaxland wrote in his journal that they “discovered what [they] had supposed to be sandy barren land below the mountain was forest land, covered with good grass”. The men explored the forest and grassland for several more days, and culminated their exploration with their ascent of a high hill they named Mount Blaxland. A week later, they returned to the colony.
Six months later, in November 1813, Governor Lachlan Macquarie commissioned Surveyor George W Evans to lead an expedition to investigate the prospects of settling west of the mountains. The expedition, which lasted seven weeks and allowed Evans to thoroughly explore the region, returned a very favourable report. On 12 February 1814, the Governor released an order from Government House announcing the discovery of rich grasslands to the west. The announcement celebrated the fertile pasturelands, well-watered by numerous streams. The order also detailed the land grants awarded to Evans, the two free men who accompanied him, and the original explorers, Lawson, Blaxland and Wentworth.
Australian History
Wednesday, February 12, 1851. : The first payable gold is discovered in Australia.
Gold was discovered in Australia as early as the 1820s, but discoveries were kept secret, for fear of sparking off unrest among the convicts. The discoveries were usually made by farmers who did not want to subject their sheep and cattle runs to a sudden influx of prospectors and lawlessness that would inevitably follow. However, as more people left the Australian colonies to join the gold rush in California, it became apparent that the outward tide of manpower would need to be stemmed. The government began to seek experts who could locate gold in Australian countrysides.
Gold was first officially discovered in Australia on 12 February 1851, not far from Bathurst, New South Wales. Edward Hammond Hargraves had carefully studied the geology of the area and, convinced that it was similar to that of the California goldfields, from where he had just returned, went prospecting. He enlisted the assistance of John Lister, a man who had already found gold in the region. Of particular note was the use of the cradle, or rocker, a technology which Hargraves had brought back from California. This device allowed prospectors to search a greater volume of soil at any given time.
Lister, accompanied by William Tom and his brother James, found four ounces of gold using the cradle. They led Hargraves to the location at Summerhill Creek, at a site which Hargraves named “Ophir” after the Biblical city of gold. After reporting his discovery, he was appointed a ‘Commissioner of Land’, receiving a reward of £10,000 plus a life pension. The New South Wales government made the official announcement of the discovery of gold in May 1851. Lister and the Tom brothers, however, were not given any credit or reward for their part in the discovery.
World History
Saturday, February 12, 1977. : The largest lobster on record is caught: it weighs nearly 20.2kg and is around a metre long.
A lobster is an edible marine crustacean which has stalked eyes, long antennae, and five pairs of legs, the first pair of which is modified into large pincers. The average adult lobster weighs between 800 grams and 1.4 kilograms. Lobsters grow throughout their lives, however, and are long-lived, so particularly large specimens have been caught.
The largest lobster on record to date was caught on 12 February 1977 in Nova Scotia, Canada, and weighed 20.14 kg, making it the world’s heaviest known crustacean. Its length was estimated to be between 90cm and 120cm. It was estimated to have possibly been one hundred years old.
World History
Friday, February 12, 1993. : The world is shocked when two ten-year-old boys abduct and murder toddler James Bulger in England.
Three-year-old James Bulger was on a shopping trip with his mother on 12 February 1993. That same day, two ten-year-old boys, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, had decided to skip school and spend the day in Bootle Strand Shopping Centre. James’s mother was being served in a butcher’s shop when the two older boys took James from where he waited outside, and led him away. During the next couple of hours they tortured the boy in an horrific manner, finally weighing him down across a railway track, where he was eventually hit by a goods train.
When James’s body was found two days later, events surrounding his death were reconstructed, and at least 38 people reported having seen the two boys walking with him, alternating between hurting and distracting him. Some of the witnesses challenged their treatment of James, but were powerless to act when the boys claimed they were looking after their younger brother. Venables and Thompson were arrested within days. Their trial was conducted in the same format as an adult trial, with the accused sitting in the dock away from their parents and with the judge and court officials dressed in full legal regalia. They were found guilty and were sentenced to imprisonment at a young offenders institution until such time as they were deemed to no longer be a threat to the public.
On 22 June 2001, the British authorities announced that Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, both then 18, would be released. They were given new homes and identities to protect them from a public that was still horrified at what two children had been capable of doing.
World History
Monday, February 12, 2001. : The first ever descent of a spacecraft onto an asteroid occurs.
The Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous – Shoemaker (NEAR Shoemaker), renamed after its launch in honor of planetary scientist Eugene M Shoemaker, was an unmanned spacecraft designed to study the near-Earth asteroid Eros from close orbit over a period of a year. Launched on February 17 1996, it was the first spacecraft to go into orbit around an asteroid.
Software problems prevented the spacecraft from completing the first of four scheduled rendezvous burns, which would allow its approach and eventual descent to the asteroid. The remainder of the mission was completed successfully, and the NEAR-Shoemaker achieved touchdown on Eros’s surface on 12 February 2001 at 3:01pm EST. Much data was collected before the spacecraft was shut down upon completion of its mission. At 7pm EST on 28 February 2001 the last data signals were received from NEAR-Shoemaker before it was shut down.
World History
Tuesday, February 12, 2002. : The war crimes trial of former Yugoslav president, Slobodan Miloševic, begins.
Slobodan Miloševic, born 20 August 1941, was the President of Serbia and of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia during a time of growing nationalism. Communist governments throughout eastern Europe had collapsed in the early 1990s, and many smaller countries which had been incorporated into Yugoslavia were demanding their autonomy. Whilst Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and Slovenia embraced their independence, Serbia and Montenegro chose to stay on in the federation.
As a fiercely nationalistic Serb, Miloševic’s aggressive attacks on ethnic Albanians in the province of Kosovo, during which over half of the province’s Albanian population fled and several thousand people died. A NATO campaign of air strikes (Operation Allied Force) eventually forced Miloševic to back down.
In June 2001, Miloševic was handed over to the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal and taken to The Hague to be tried for war crimes allegedly committed during his rule. On 30 August 2001, Miloševic was told he would be charged with genocide, the most serious of all war crimes. Later, the original charges of war crimes in Kosovo were upgraded by adding charges of genocide in Bosnia and war crimes in Croatia. His trial began at The Hague on 12 February 2002, with Miloševic defending himself while refusing to recognise the legality of the court’s jurisdiction.
Miloševic was found dead in his cell on 11 March 2006 in the UN war crimes tribunal’s detention centre in The Hague.