Good morning, Whitewater
You’re in luck. You’ve more than a municipal meeting today — you’ve a task force to which to look forward. It sounds so decisive, serious, and urgent, doesn’t it? Perhaps not so much — it’s Whitewater’s Urban Forestry Task Force. The meeting’s today at 4:30 p.m., and the agenda is available online.
The History Channel recalls that today is the anniversary of the first drunk driving arrest:
On this day in 1897, a 25-year-old London taxi driver named George Smith becomes the first person ever arrested for drunk driving after slamming his cab into a building. Smith later pled guilty and was fined 25 shillings.
In the United States, the first laws against operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of alcohol went into effect in New York in 1910. In 1936, Dr. Rolla Harger, a professor of biochemistry and toxicology, patented the Drunkometer, a balloon-like device into which people would breathe to determine whether they were inebriated. In 1953, Robert Borkenstein, a former Indiana state police captain and university professor who had collaborated with Harger on the Drunkometer, invented the Breathalyzer.
Easier-to-use and more accurate than the Drunkometer, the Breathalyzer was the first practical device and scientific test available to police officers to establish whether someone had too much to drink. A person would blow into the Breathalyzer and it would gauge the proportion of alcohol vapors in the exhaled breath, which reflected the level of alcohol in the blood….
Despite the stiff penalties and public awareness campaigns, drunk driving remains a serious problem in the United States. In 2005, 16,885 people died in alcohol-related crashes and almost 1.4 million people were arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
Here’s today’s almanac:
| Almanac | ||
|---|---|---|
| Thursday, September 10, 2009 | Sunrise | Sunset |
| Official Time | 06:28 AM | 07:14 PM |
| Civil Twilight | 06:00 AM | 07:42 PM |
| Tomorrow | 06:30 AM | 07:12 PM |
| Tomorrow will be: | 4 minutes shorter | |
| Amount of sunlight: | 12h 46 m | |
| Amount of daylight: | 13h 42 m | |
| Moon phase: | Waning Gibbous | |