September 16

Edward Whymper, a British climber and explorer died on the 16th in 1911, of natural causes. On the 14th of July in 1865, he led an expedition to the top of the Matterhorn becoming the first of many to reach the Matterhorn’s summit. Sadly, on the descent, four members of his party fell to their deaths. Whymper’s response to this tragedy was extreme sadness, a sadness that led him to introspection about mountain climbing. He suggested that everyone be very aware that in mountain climbing “there [are] joys too great to be described in words, and there have been griefs upon which I have not dared to dwell; and with these in mind I say: Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are nought without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end.”

September 15

There is absolutely nothing about Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, O. J. Simpson, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Senator Larry Craig, Global Warming, destruction of the rain forests or the proposed deforestation of the Pacific Northwest anywhere in this entry.

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway was the first inter-city railway. It operated, oddly enough, between the cities of Liverpool and Manchester in England. After making it over several engineering hurdles, not the least of which was figuring a way to get a very large, very heavy train across a bog without having the locomotive and rail cars sinking into it, work progressed surprisingly quickly. After clearing all the other obstacles, service commenced on September 15, 1830. At one point on the inaugural run, the train came to an unexpected stop. William Huskisson, a Member of Parliament for Liverpool, seized this as an opportunity to schmooze with his fellow passenger the Duke of Wellington, who also happened to be England’s Prime Minister. Huskisson spoke to the Prime Minister from the roadbed next to Wellington’s carriage. Apparently, the conversation must have been riveting for the two men because neither of them noticed that another train was approaching on a parallel track. Huskisson was struck by the approaching train and seriously injured. He was loaded on to the train that had just hit him and rushed to a hospital but died later that day. That must have put a bit of a damper on the party celebrating the railway’s opening. There are unconfirmed reports that Huskisson’s last words were “No problem, he’s got plenty of room to get by.”

September 14

Joseph Kittinger[i] is a man whose career is peppered with more than his fair share of firsts, a number of them involving balloons[ii]. As an officer in the United States air force, he was assigned to the Aerospace Medical Research Laboratories at the Wright-Patterson air force base in Dayton, Ohio. On August 16, 1960, as part of his assignment, he was required to make a parachute jump from the gondola of a balloon that had risen to an altitude of 102,800 feet. His free fall took longer than four and a half minutes during which he reached a speed of 714 miles per hour. On September 14, 1989, he began what would become the first solo transatlantic crossing in a balloon. He reached Europe on the 18th.
[i] Today Kittinger is, I kid you not, Vice President of Flight Operations for Rosie O'Grady's Flying Circus.
[ii] On December 13 and 14 in 1960, Kittinger and William C. White, participants in the Air Force’s Project Stargazer, rode a balloon to a height of 82,000 feet and remained there for eighteen hours making a series of observations

September 13

In the first century of the current era, Romans conquered what is now Great Britain. Shortly after the middle of that century, they built a series of fortifications in the middle of what is now Scotland. This was the Gask Ridge Wall. It has been said that ‘good fences make good neighbors’ and the Roman’s were apparently quick to take that maxim to it’s logical extreme changing it to ’good walls make good neighbors’ On the 13th in 122, construction of Roman emperor Hadrian’s Wall began in England. The wall is entirely in England, approximately nine miles from Scotland in the west, and 68 miles in the east. Roughly 40 years later during Emperor Antoninus Pius’ reign, Quintus Lolius Urbicus governor of Great Britain, began construction of yet another wall crossing that green and pleasant land, the Antonine Wall, this time it was built entirely in Scotland.

September 12

Henry Hudson[i] must really have been something else. He has had a river, a bay, a car named after him, and there are probably other things that I am unaware of. I do know that he had to have been a halfway decent sailor and explorer because he was able to get large, influential companies from two countries to give him more than adequate funding for his epic voyages. He managed to secure this funding in spite of the fact that he never really did what he had been hired to do. He was repeatedly given the task of finding the elusive northern passage from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. It seems obvious that his performance evaluations tap-danced around the bit about “Have you done what we hired you to do?” On the 12th in 1609, Hudson was doing what most explorers do: exploring. He had entered what is now called the Hudson River and decided that he needed a break from all that not finding stuff that he was doing. He pulled his ship, the Half Moon, over to the side of the river and landed on what we now call Manhattan Island. I am sure that it is merely a coincidence that the 12th is also his birthday. Heck, you can’t blame a guy for calling work and taking the day off on his birthday can you?
[i] In June of 1611, Hudson, his son and several crew members were set adrift by mutineers. He was never seen again.

September 11

British scientist, physicist and mathematician Sir James Hopwood Jeans was born on the 11th in 1877. His resume reads remarkably like fellow Briton Stephen Hawking’s does, which means that I understand maybe every other word of what he wrote, if that much. He is good for a quote however, which is proven by the following: “The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter...we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter." Jeans also noted that "Life exists in the universe only because the carbon atom possesses certain exceptional properties."

September 10

History records that Simon Bolivar became president of Peru on the 10th in 1823. What it is generally relegated to the footnotes, which is a bit like throwing something into the attic where it is rarely seen every again, Bolivar was also president of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, and Bolivia. Also tossed into the footnote bin is that Bolivar founded Lodge No. 2 of the Peruvian Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry.

Not that I’m paranoid or anything like that but other Freemasons are the following United States presidents: James Buchanan, Gerald Ford, James Garfield, Warren Harding, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, James Monroe, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Harry S. Truman, and George Washington