Good morning.

Our week starts with a wintry mix of freezing drizzle, on a cloudy day with a high of thirty-two.

Whitewater’s Planning Commission meets tonight at 6 PM, and our Library Board at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1948, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration on Human Rights:

Paris, Dec, 10–A universal Declaration on Human Rights nearly three years in preparation, was adopted late tonight by the United Nations General Assembly. The vote was 48 to 0 with the Soviet bloc, Saudi Arabia and the Union of South Africa abstaining….

The declaration is the first part of a projected three-part International Bill of Rights. The United Nations now will begin drafting a convention that will be a treaty embodying in specific detail and in legally binding form the principles proclaimed in the declaration. The third part will be a protocol for implementation of the convention possibly by such measures as establishment of an International Court of Human Rights and an International Committee of Conciliation.

The Assembly accorded an ovation to Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt when Dr. Herbert V. Evatt, the Assembly’s president, after declaring the declaration adopted, paid tribute to the first chairman of the Human Rights Commission for her tireless efforts in the long process of drafting the document.

“She has raised a great name to an even greater honor,” Dr. Evatt said of the United States delegate.

In Wisconsin history on this day, Otis Redding died in a plane crash in 1967:

1967 – Otis Redding Dies
On this date a twin-engine Beechcraft carrying Otis Redding crashed into Lake Monona in Madison, killing Redding and four members of his touring band, the Bar-Kays. Otis Redding was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989. [Source: OtisRedding.com]

From Google-a-Day, a question about Poe: “In Poe’s work about a decrepit dwelling and the failing family lineage, who is it that invites the narrator to his abode to witness its disrepair firsthand?”

Good morning.

Sunday brings rain or snow to Whitewater, intermittently throughout the day, with a high of thirty-six.

On December 9, 1921, an engineer at GM made a momentous discovery about gasoline:

…a young engineer at General Motors named Thomas Midgeley Jr. discovers that when he adds a compound called tetraethyl lead (TEL) to gasoline, he eliminates the unpleasant noises (known as “knock” or “pinging”) that internal-combustion engines make when they run. Midgeley could scarcely have imagined the consequences of his discovery: For more than five decades, oil companies would saturate the gasoline they sold with lead–a deadly poison.

In 1911, a scientist named Charles Kettering, Midgeley’s boss at GM, invented an electric ignition system for internal-combustion cars that made their old-fashioned hand-cranked starters obsolete. Now, driving a gas-fueled auto was no trouble at all. Unfortunately, as more and more people bought GM cars, more and more people noticed a problem: When they heated up, their engines made an alarming racket, banging and clattering as though their metal parts were loose under the hood.

The problem, Kettering and Midgeley eventually figured out, was that ordinary gasoline was much too explosive for spark-ignited car engines: that is, what we now call its octane (a measure of its resistance to detonation) was too low. To raise the fuel’s octane level and make it less prone to detonation and knocking, Midgeley wrote later, he mixed it with almost anything he could think of, from “melted butter and camphor to ethyl acetate and aluminum chloride…[but] most of these had no more effect than spitting in the Great Lakes.”

He found a couple of additives that did work, however, and lead was just one of them. Iodine worked, but producing it was much too complicated. Ethyl alcohol also worked, and it was cheap–however, anyone with an ordinary still could make it, which meant that GM could not patent it or profit from it. Thus, from a corporate point of view, lead was the best anti-knock additive there was.

In February 1923, a Dayton filling station sold the first tankful of leaded gasoline. A few GM engineers witnessed this big moment, but Midgeley did not, because he was in bed with severe lead poisoning. He recovered; however, in April 1924, lead poisoning killed two of his unluckier colleagues, and in October, five workers at a Standard Oil lead plant died too, after what one reporter called “wrenching fits of violent insanity.” (Almost 40 of the plant’s workers suffered severe neurological symptoms like hallucinations and seizures.)

On 12.9.1844, our state saw its first daily:

 1844 – Milwaukee’s First Daily Newspaper Published
On this date Milwaukee’s first daily newspaper, The Daily Sentinel, was published. David M. Keeler served and manager and C.L. MacArthur was the editor. [Source: History of Milwaukee, Vol. II, p.49]

Google-a-Day asks why “[o]ne place has more hail than any other location in the world. What did a 1978 study suggest is likely the cause of this phenomenon? ”

Good morning.

Saturday in town will be mostly cloudy with a high of thirty-eight. We’ll have 9h 7m of sunlight, 10h 11m of daylight, and tomorrow will be one minute shorter.

On this day seventy-one years ago, America declared war against Japan, in response to that nation’s attack the previous day. Here’s the lede from the New York Times story reporting on the Congressional vote:

Washington, Dec. 8.–The United States today formally declared war on Japan. Congress, with only one dissenting vote, approved the resolution in the record time of 33 minutes after President Roosevelt denounced Japanese aggression in ringing tones. He personally delivered his message to a joint session of the Senate and House. At 4:10 P. M. he affixed his signature to the resolution.

On 12.8.1917, a prominent Wisconsin inventor passed away:

1917 – Inventor John F. Appleby Dies
On this date the inventor of the twine-binder, John F. Appleby died. Appleby was raised on a wheat farm in Wisconsin and searched for an easier way to harvest and bundle grains. His invention gathered severed spears into bundles and bound the sheaves with hempen twine. His invention, which was pulled by horses, was a great success. In 1878 William Deering, a farm machinery manufacturer secured the right to use Appleby’s patent and sold 3,000 twine harvesters in a single year. In 1882 the McCormicks (of the McCormick reapers) paid $35,000 for the privilege to manufacture Appleby’s invention. Appleby spent the rest of his life in his shop trying to create additional successful machinery. [Source: Badger Saints and Sinners by Fred L. Holmes]

If you’ve been worried that perhaps, just perhaps, America hasn’t devoted all her resources to the search for Bigfoot, rest assured that cryptozoologists are throwing a blimp into the mix.  Next, I’m sure, a few drones, but at least this is a start:

Google’s daily puzzle shoots a basketball question: “Which NBA player shares his name with a founding member of New Edition and a song on the album “Sheik Yerbouti”?” more >>

Good morning.

Whitewater’s week ends with cloudy skies, but a relatively mild forty-one degree day.

It’s the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and in the Washington Post there’s a moving story entitled, “A reporter remembers ‘the vision of death’ at Pearl Harbor.”

It’s a story about ninety-seven-year-old Betty McIntosh’s “account of the attack on Pearl Harbor [that] went unpublished until today. Now 97, she speaks to The Fold’s Brook Silva-Braga about what she remembers from that infamous day and her later work as a wartime spy.” The paper has a link to her account, itself entitled, “Hono­lulu after Pearl Harbor: A report published for the first time, 71 years later.”

A video interview accompanies Betty’s story:

1943 – USS-Wisconsin [was] Christened
On this date the USS-Wisconsin was christened by Wisconsin’s first lady Madge Goodland. The ship was re-christened by Mrs. Goodland in March, 1951 during the Korean War. The USS-Wisconsin was inactive for many years but was recommissioned in 1989. [Source: First Ladies of Wisconsin, the Governor’s Wives by Nancy G. Williams, p.181]

Google-a-Day asks about  the Olympics: “Where were the games held when a female was awarded, for the very first time, a perfect score in an Olympic gymnastic event?”

Good morning.

Whitewater will see a slight chance (about 20%) of rain this afternoon, with a high of forty-five.

The Landmarks Commission meets tonight at 6 PM.

On this day in 1884, the Washington Monument was at last completed:

…in Washington, D.C., workers place a nine-inch aluminum pyramid atop a tower of white marble, completing the construction of an impressive monument to the city’s namesake and the nation’s first president,George Washington.  As early as 1783, the infant U.S. Congress decided that a statue of George Washington, the great Revolutionary War general, should be placed near the site of the new Congressional building, wherever it might be. After then-President Washington asked him to lay out a new federal capital on the Potomac River in 1791, architect Pierre L’Enfant left a place for the statue at the western end of the sweeping National Mall (near the monument’s present location).

It wasn’t until 1832, however–33 years after Washington’s death–that anyone really did anything about the monument. That year, a private Washington National Monument Society was formed. After holding a design competition and choosing an elaborate Greek temple-like design by architect Robert Mills, the society began a fundraising drive to raise money for the statue’s construction. These efforts–including appeals to the nation’s schoolchildren–raised some $230,000, far short of the $1 million needed. Construction began anyway, on July 4, 1848, as representatives of the society laid the cornerstone of the monument: a 24,500-pound block of pure white marble.

Six years later, with funds running low, construction was halted. Around the time the Civil War began in 1861, author Mark Twain described the unfinished monument as looking like a “hollow, oversized chimney.” No further progress was made until 1876–the centennial of American independence–when President Ulysses S. Grant authorized construction to be completed.

Made of some 36,000 blocks of marble and granite stacked 555 feet in the air, the monument was the tallest structure in the world at the time of its completion in December 1884. In the six months following the dedication ceremony, over 10,000 people climbed the nearly 900 steps to the top of the Washington Monument. Today, an elevator makes the trip far easier, and more than 800,000 people visit the monument each year….

NASA offers new and truly beautiful photos of the Earth at night, as part of a recent, December 5th series.  Here’s just one of them: