August 31
1803: Capt. Meriwether Lewis and 2nd Lt. William Clark left Pittsburgh, Pa., headed for St. Louis, Mo., where they would make preparations for the Corps of Discovery Expedition, their epic exploration of the American West.
1888: Jack the Ripper’s first confirmed victim, Mary Ann Nichols, was murdered in London.
1897: Thomas Edison received a patent for his Kinetoscope, the first movie projector.
1997: Diana, Princess of Wales, was killed in a car wreck in Paris, along with her companion, Dodi Fayed, and driver Henri Paul.
2006: Edvard Munch’s iconic painting, The Scream, was recovered in a raid by Norwegian police. (It had been stolen on Aug. 22, 2004.)
2012: Apple loses its patent dispute with Samsung in Tokyo, Japan.
September 1
1897: The Boston subway opened and became the first underground rapid transit system in North America.
1952: The Old Man and the Sea, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Ernest Hemingway that earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, was first published by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
1979: The American space probe Pioneer 11 became the first spacecraft to visit Saturn, passing at a distance of 13,000 miles.
1985: A joint American-French expedition located the wreckage of RMS Titanic.
2019: Co-founder and CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey has his Twitter account hacked.
2019: Exhibition on Christian Dior sets new attendance record of almost 595,000 in seven months on closing at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
September 2
1666: The Great Fire of London destroyed 90 percent of the city.
1859: A super solar flare affected electrical telegraph service worldwide.
1963: CBS Evening News became America’s first half-hour weeknight news broadcast, when the show was expanded from 15 to 30 minutes.
2013: The new eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge opened to traffic, becoming the widest bridge in the world.
2015: Earth’s trees number just over 3 trillion according to study in “Nature” by Thomas Crowther of Yale University.
2018: Major fire at the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro destroys most of its 20 million artifacts.
September 3
301: Marinus of Arbe founded San Marino (officially the Most Serene Republic of San Marino), one of the smallest nations in the world, and the world’s oldest republic still in existence, in modern-day Italy.
1777: The flag of the United States was flown in battle for the first time, during the Battle of Cooch’s Bridge, near Philadelphia.
1953: A downpour of frogs fell on Leicester, Mass. The live creatures covered many streets and roof tops.
1967: Road and highway traffic in Sweden switched overnight from driving on the left to driving on the right.
September 4
1882: Thomas Edison flipped the switch to the first commercial electrical power plant in history, lighting one square mile of lower Manhattan. This is considered by many as the first day of the electrical age.
1888: George Eastman registered the trademark Kodak and received a patent for his camera that used roll film.
1998: Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two students at Stanford University.
2014: 19th District Court Judge James Wheelis set the highest bail ever recorded in Lincoln County, Montana, when he set a bail of $10,000,000 (ten million dollars) for Larry Mathew Hanson, 45, after Hanson repeatedly violated a restraining order.
2018: 400-year old sunken Portuguese spice trade ship discovered near port of Cascais, Portugal.
2019: YouTube fined $170 million for illegally collecting data on children’s viewing habits by US Federal Trade Commission.
September 5
2019: New theory the Loss Ness monster may be a giant eel after DNA study reveals no plesiosaur or sturgeon DNA found.
2019: Erramatti Mangamma becomes the world’s oldest living mother giving birth to twins aged 74 in Hyderabad, India.
September 6
1803: British scientist John Dalton created the system of atomic symbols that represent the atoms of different elements.
1916: The first self-service grocery store, Piggly Wiggly, was opened by Clarence Saunders in Memphis, Tenn.
(McCandless’ story was told in the book and movie, Into the Wild.)
2012: 29th MTV Video Music Awards: Rihanna f/ Calvin Harris, Nicki Minaj & Chris Brown win.
2018: World Surf League announces from 2019 there would be equal prize money for men and women across elite tour events; first US-based global sports league with gender pay parity.
ON THIS DAY… AUGUST 31 – SEPTEMBER 6
August 31- NATIONAL TRAIL MIX DAY
What are you waiting for? Grab a handful and let’s celebrate!
September 1- PINK CADILLAC DAY
This day honors the iconic pink car that became a cultural landmark of the 1950s.
September 2- WORLD COCONUT DAY
You can’t make a pina colada or a decent Thai curry without it, its water makes a great recovery drink, and its fibrous husk, when burned, repels mosquitos.
September 3- NATIONAL HUMMINGBIRD DAY
Hummingbirds share the raising of the chicks and males live a lot shorter because they use so much energy in defending their nests.
September 4- NATIONAL
WILDLIFE DAY
Today is an opportunity for everyone to step back, take a deep breath and think about all that surrounds us.
September 5- LABOR DAY
Summer’s final fling has arrived.
September 6 -NATIONAL READ A BOOK DAY
This day encourages us to silence the noise and turn the pages for a while.