Born on this day

Monday, May 17, 1909. :   Professor Julius Sumner Miller is born.

Julius Sumner Miller, the man who popularised science with children, was born on 17 May 1909. Sumner Miller studied under Albert Einstein, but was best known for his work on children’s television programs, being Disney’s “Professor Wonderful” on The Mickey Mouse Club and in Canada, the “mad professor” on The Hilarious House of Frightenstein. In Australia, Sumner Miller’s catchphrase was “Why is it so?”, and this was also the title of his show which was broadcast from 1963 to 1986. In “Why Is It So?”, he piqued children’s (and adults’) curiosity by investigating common questions by using common household equipment to conduct experiments.

One of Sumner Miller’s more popular experiments showed how air pressure could exert sufficient force on a boiled egg (with shell removed) to push it into a milk bottle which had an opening of lesser circumference than that of the egg. Unfortunately, Sumner Miller omitted information on how to then remove the egg: subsequently, milk factories all over Australia encountered the problem of having to scrap returned milk bottles with boiled eggs inside.

Sumner Miller died of leukaemia on 14 April 1987.

Australian Explorers

Thursday, May 17, 1770. :   Lieutenant James Cook discovers and names Queensland’s Glass House Mountains.

Lieutenant James Cook was not the first to discover Australia, as he was preceded by numerous Portuguese and Dutch explorers. However, he was the first to sight and map the eastern coastline. Cook’s ship, the ‘Endeavour’, departed Plymouth, England, on 26 August 1768. After completing the objective of his mission, which was to observe the transit of Venus from the vantage point of Tahiti, Cook went on to search for Terra Australis Incognita, the great continent which some believed to extend round the pole. After spending nearly a year charting the coastline of New Zealand, which had been documented by Abel Tasman in 1642, he set sail east.

On 19 April 1770, Cook’s crew first sighted land, although it was not known whether the land belonged to an island or a continent. The land was in fact the far southeastern corner of the Australian continent, and Cook went on to chart the eastern coast of what was then known as New Holland, claiming it for Great Britain under the name of New South Wales.

Cook named many points of interest along the way. On 17 May 1770, he sighted and named the Glass House Mountains, which lie in what is now Queensland’s Sunshine Coast hinterland. He named the series of volcanic plugs Glass House because they reminded him of Yorkshire’s glass furnace chimneys. On this day, he also documented Noosa Head.

Australian History

Wednesday, May 17, 1893. :   Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination sparked WWI, arrives in Australia for a tour marked by hunting parties and barbeques.

His Imperial and Royal Highness Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Este, was born 18 December 1863. He was an Archduke of Austria and from 1896 until his death, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne. The Archduke was one of the leading advocates of maintaining the peace within the Austro-Hungarian government during both the Bosnian Crisis of 1908-1909 and the Balkan Wars Crises of 1912-1913.

On 17 May 1893, the Archduke arrived in Sydney, Australia. His visit was unique in that he spent much time hunting in the New South Wales outback, near the then-remote towns of Nyngan and Narromine. In his diary, Ferdinand noted a dislike for the barbeques organised for his hunting parties, and he remarked on the “wasteful” practice of ringbarking trees for clearing. He was also astonished by, and admired, the speed and endurance of Australian horses.

Following the completion of his tour in Australia, the Archduke then went on to the United States, where his most notable observation was disgust at the Americans’ attitude to and treatment of the poor.

Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated by “The Black hand”, a secret nationalistic Serb society, at approximately 11:00am on 28 June 1914. The assassination led to war between Austria and Serbia, which escalated into World War I as other European countries allied themselves with one side or the other.

World History

Saturday, May 17, 1902. :   Archaeologist Spyridon Stais discovers the Antikythera mechanism, believed to be an early clockwork mechanism from circa 87 BC.

Spyridon Stais was a leading archaeologist working a shipwreck that had been discovered at a depth of about 40 metres off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1900. On 17 May 1902, divers retrieving statues and other items from the wreck brought up a piece of rock which had a gear wheel embedded in it. The item, which has become known as the Antikythera mechanism, is one of the oldest surviving geared mechanisms, made from bronze in a wooden frame.

Since its discovery, scientists have theorised over its purpose. The most accepted theory of its function is that it was an analogue computer designed to model the movements of heavenly objects. Recent working reconstructions of the device support this analysis. The device is all the more impressive for its use of a differential gear, which was previously believed to have only been invented in the 16th century.

World History

Monday, May 17, 1943. :   The Day of the Dam-Busters: During WW2, Britain carries out strategic bombing attacks on crucial dams in Germany’s industrial region

The Ruhr Valley in northwestern Germany was Germany’s main industrial region during the first half of the twentieth century. Bordered by the Ruhr, Rhine and Lippe Rivers, it holds three major dams, the Möhne, Sorpe and the Edersee Dams, which were key producers of hydroelectric power during World War II. The industrial area was also central to the manufacture of Germany’s war munitions.

During World War II, the dams became the target of a series of bold bombing raids by Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF). The “bouncing bomb” was invented and developed by Barnes Wallis, Assistant Chief Designer at British engineering firm Vickers. When dropped from the correct angle and height, the bomb was designed to skip over the surface of the water, thus avoiding obstacles such as torpedo nets. After executing a series of bounces, it would reach the dam wall, where its residual backward spin would cause the bomb to run down the side of the dam to its underwater base, exploding and damaging the dam wall.

Codenamed Operation Chastise, the raid was carried out over the night of 16-17 May 1943. It was a dangerous assignment as the aircraft dropping the bombs had to avoid German anti-aircraft fire while flying low enough to deploy the bombs. 53 of the 133 aircrew who participated in the attack were killed. The dam walls of the Möhne and Edersee were destroyed, while the Sorpe received minor damage. With an estimated two-thirds of the area’s water supply compromised, massive flooding inundated the Ruhr Valley. Several underground mines were flooded, numerous factories were destroyed and over a hundred damaged, along with over a thousand houses. Many roads, railways and bridges were flooded in a radius of about 80km from the breaches. Two hydro-electric powerplants were destroyed and seven others damaged, causing massive disruption to the industrial region for at least two weeks. At least 1,650 people were killed, and hundreds more were never found: over one thousand of these were foreign prisoners of war and forced-labourers, mostly from the Soviet Union prison camps.

Although later analysis indicates the operation was not the military and strategic success it was believed to be at the time, it proved to be a tremendous morale-booster for the British. An interesting, although unexpected, result was the development of improved bombing technology because of acceptance of Barnes Wallis’s ideas. His concept of “earthquake bombing”, which had been previously rejected, was now accepted. This involved dropping a large, specially designed heavy bomb at supersonic speed so it penetrated underground and exploded, with the resulting shockwaves producing the equivalent of a small earthquake. Nearby structures such as dams, railways, viaducts and other crucial infrastructure would be destroyed, especially as any concrete foundations served to magnify the effects of the bomb. Ultimately, this led to the development of the Tallboy and Grand Slam bombs, which caused catastrophic damage to German infrastructure in the latter part of the war.

World History

Thursday, May 17, 1973. :   Televised hearings begin on the Watergate affair.

The Watergate scandal was an American political scandal and constitutional crisis that led to the resignation of US President Richard Nixon. It began with a burglary at the Watergate Apartment complex. On 17 June 1972, five men were caught searching through confidential papers and bugging the office of President Nixon’s political opponents, the Democratic National Committee. One of the men, James McCord, was officially employed as Chief of Security at the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP), indicating that the burglary was linked to US President Nixon’s re-election campaign.

On 17 May 1973, the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities began televised proceedings on the escalating Watergate scandal. On 24 July 1973, it was revealed that Nixon had secretly taped all conversations in the Oval Office. With this information available, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered President Richard Nixon to surrender the tape recordings. After prevaricating for three months, Nixon finally produced the tapes.

The break-in, consequent cover-up by Nixon and his aides, and the subsequent investigation ultimately led to the resignation of the President on 9 August 1974, preventing his impeachment by the Senate. When President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon a month later, this prevented any criminal charges from being filed against the former president.