Good morning, Whitewater.

Friday in town will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-one. Sunrise is 5:51 AM and sunset 8:09 PM, for 14h 17m 29s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 7.1% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1914, the world gets its first electric traffic signal:

The world’s first electric traffic signal is put into place on the corner of Euclid Avenue and East 105th Street in Cleveland, Ohio, on this day in 1914.

In the earliest days of the automobile, navigating America’s roads was a chaotic experience, with pedestrians, bicycles, horses and streetcars all competing with motor vehicles for right of way. The problem was alleviated somewhat with the gradual disappearance of horse-drawn carriages, but even before World War I it had become clear that a system of regulations was necessary to keep traffic moving and reduce the number of accidents on the roads. As Christopher Finch writes in his “Highways to Heaven: The AUTO Biography of America” (1992), the first traffic island was put into use in San Francisco, California in 1907; left-hand drive became standard in American cars in 1908; the first center painted dividing line appeared in 1911, in Michigan; and the first “No Left Turn” sign would debut in Buffalo, New York, in 1916.

Various competing claims exist as to who was responsible for the world’s first traffic signal. A device installed in London in 1868 featured two semaphore arms that extended horizontally to signal “stop” and at a 45-degree angle to signal “caution.” In 1912, a Salt Lake City, Utah, police officer named Lester Wire mounted a handmade wooden box with colored red and green lights on a pole, with the wires attached to overhead trolley and light wires. Most prominently, the inventor Garrett Morgan has been given credit for having invented the traffic signal based on his T-shaped design, patented in 1923 and later reportedly sold to General Electric.

Despite Morgan’s greater visibility, the system installed in Cleveland on August 5, 1914, is widely regarded as the first electric traffic signal. Based on a design by James Hoge, who received U.S. patent 1,251,666 for his “Municipal Traffic Control System” in 1918, it consisted of four pairs of red and green lights that served as stop-go indicators, each mounted on a corner post. Wired to a manually operated switch inside a control booth, the system was configured so that conflicting signals were impossible. According to an article in The Motorist, published by the Cleveland Automobile Club in August 1914: “This system is, perhaps, destined to revolutionize the handling of traffic in congested city streets and should be seriously considered by traffic committees for general adoption.”

Here’s the Friday puzzle from JigZone:

Good morning, Whitewater.

Thursday in town will be mostly sunny and warm, with a high of eighty-nine.  Sunrise is 5:50 AM and sunset 8:10 PM, for 14h 19m 49s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing crescent with 2.8% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission is scheduled to meet at 6 PM, and the Fire Department is scheduled to hold a business meeting at 6:30 PM.

If you think ramen noodles are boring, think again —

On this day in 1862, the residents of Port Washington riot against the draft:

On this date the War Department issued General Order No.99, requesting by draft 300,000 troops to reinforce the Union armies in the Civil War. This action reinforced public sentiment against the draft and prompted the citizens in Port Washington, Ozaukee County to riot in protest.

JigZone uses chess pieces for its Thursday puzzle:

Good morning, Whitewater.

Midweek in town will bring a one-third chance of thunderstorms and a high of eighty-six.  Sunrise is 5:49 AM and sunset 8:11 PM, for 14h 22m 08s of daytime.  The moon is new today, with .4% of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1923, John Calvin Coolidge becomes president:

John Calvin Coolidge Jr.… July 4, 1872 – January 5, 1933) was the 30th President of the United States (1923–29). A Republican lawyer from Vermont, Coolidge worked his way up the ladder of Massachusetts state politics, eventually becoming governor of that state. His response to the Boston Police Strike of 1919 thrust him into the national spotlight and gave him a reputation as a man of decisive action. Soon after, he was elected as the 29th vice president in 1920 and succeeded to the presidency upon the sudden death of Warren G. Harding in 1923. Elected in his own right in 1924, he gained a reputation as a small-government conservative, and also as a man who said very little, although having a rather dry sense of humor.

Coolidge restored public confidence in the White House after the scandals of his predecessor’s administration, and left office with considerable popularity.^[1] As a Coolidge biographer wrote, “He embodied the spirit and hopes of the middle class, could interpret their longings and express their opinions. That he did represent the genius of the average is the most convincing proof of his strength.”^[2] Coolidge’s retirement was relatively short, as he died at the age of 60 in January 1933, less than two months before his direct successor, Herbert Hoover, left office.

Not perfect – to be sure  – but good (in more than one sense), at a time when (as now) good was & would be more than enough.

Here is the Wednesday puzzle from JigZone:

Good morning, Whitewater.

Tuesday in town will be partly cloudy with a high of eighty-five. Sunrise is 5:48 AM and sunset 8:13 PM, for 14h 24m 26s of daytime. We’ve a new moon today, with just .2% of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Alcohol Licensing Committee meets at 6:15 PM this evening, and Common Council at 6:30 PM.

On Saturday, August 1, 1981, at 12:01 a.m. Eastern Time, MTV launched with the words “Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll,”spoken by John Lack, and played over footage of the first Space Shuttle launch countdown of Columbia, which took place earlier that year, and of the launch of Apollo 11. Those words were immediately followed by the original MTV theme song, a crunching rock tune composed by Jonathan Elias and John Petersen, playing over photos of the Apollo 11 moon landing, with the flag featuring MTV’s logo changing various colors, textures, and designs. MTV producers Alan Goodman and Fred Seibert used this public domain footage as a concept.^[13] Seibert said they had originally planned to use Neil Armstrong‘s “One small step” quote, but lawyers said Armstrong owns his name and likeness, and Armstrong had refused, so the quote was replaced with a beeping sound.^[14] The shuttle launch identification ran at the top of every hour in various forms from MTV’s first day until it was pulled in early 1986, in the wake of the Challenger disaster.^[15]

The first music video shown on MTV was The Buggles‘ “Video Killed the Radio Star” originally only available to homes in New Jersey.^[16] This was followed by the video for Pat Benatar‘s “You Better Run“. Sporadically, the screen would go black when an employee at MTV inserted a tape into a VCR.^[17] MTV’s lower third graphics that appear near the beginning and end of music videos would eventually use the recognizable Kabel typeface for about 25 years, but these graphics differed on MTV’s first day of broadcast; they were set in a different typeface and included record label information such as the year and label name.

On this day in 1832, the Black Hawk War ends:

On this date the defeat of Black Hawk and his followers at the Battle of Bad Axe, ended the Black Hawk War. Black Hawk led the American troops northward while the rest of the Indians constructed rafts and canoes to facilitate an escape over the Mississippi river. The plan was successful initially but eventually General Atkinson realized the ruse.

In the battle, women, children and the elderly hid behind rocks and logs and American soldiers often could not or did not differentiate between warriors and the women and children. Atkinson sent Wabasha and his Sioux warriors, enemies of the Sauk, after the approximately 150 members of the British Band that made it to the Western bank of the Mississippi. The Sauk, “escaped the best they could, and dispersed“, but only 22 women and children were spared.

Black Hawk escaped, but the Battle of Bad Axe marked the end of the war. [Source: Along the Black Hawk Trail by William F. Stark, p.142-153]

Here’s a JigZone puzzle for Tuesday:

Good morning, Whitewater.

A new month in town begins with mostly sunny skies and a high of eighty-four. Sunrise is 5:47 AM and sunset 8:14 PM, for 14h 26m 42s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 2.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

In August 1774, Joseph Priestly makes a discovery:

….he isolated an “air” that appeared to be completely new, but he did not have an opportunity to pursue the matter because he was about to tour Europe with Shelburne. While in Paris, however, Priestley managed to replicate the experiment for others, including French chemist Antoine Lavoisier. After returning to Britain in January 1775, he continued his experiments and discovered “vitriolic acid air” (sulphur dioxide, SO₂).

In March he wrote to several people regarding the new “air” that he had discovered in August. One of these letters was read aloud to the Royal Society, and a paper outlining the discovery, titled “An Account of further Discoveries in Air”, was published in the Society’s journal Philosophical Transactions.^[101] Priestley called the new substance “dephlogisticated air”, which he made in the famous experiment by focusing the sun’s rays on a sample of mercuric oxide. He first tested it on mice, who surprised him by surviving quite a while entrapped with the air, and then on himself, writing that it was “five or six times better than common air for the purpose of respiration, inflammation, and, I believe, every other use of common atmospherical air”.^[102]He had discovered oxygen gas (O₂).

Priestley assembled his oxygen paper and several others into a second volume of Experiments and Observations on Air, published in 1776. He did not emphasise his discovery of “dephlogisticated air” (leaving it to Part III of the volume) but instead argued in the preface how important such discoveries were to rational religion. His paper narrated the discovery chronologically, relating the long delays between experiments and his initial puzzlements; thus, it is difficult to determine when exactly Priestley “discovered” oxygen.^[103] Such dating is significant as both Lavoisier and Swedish pharmacist Carl Wilhelm Scheele have strong claims to the discovery of oxygen as well, Scheele having been the first to isolate the gas (although he published after Priestley) and Lavoisier having been the first to describe it as purified “air itself entire without alteration” (that is, the first to explain oxygen without phlogiston theory).^[104]

On this day in 1832, a warship blocks Black Hawk’s retreat:

On this date the armed steamboat the Warrior reached the British Band on the Mississippi where they hoped to cross the river and escape the American troops. After being guided by a Sioux Indian, the ship which held an artillery piece, dropped anchor, making the Sauk escape virtually impossible. Black Hawk attempted to surrender to the Warrior, waving a white cloth, but the crew either did not understand or did not accept the message. The ship and its men opened fire, killing a number of unprepared Indians. [Source: Along the Black Hawk Trail by William F. Stark, p. 140-141]

JigZone begins the week with a colorful puzzle: