January 19

Howard Hughes certainly had the money to finance a seemingly unending search for new firsts to accomplish, so that wasn’t a problem for him. I wonder however just where he found the time to set so many world records. On the 19th in 1937, he flew from Los Angeles to New York City in 7 hours, 28 minutes, 25 seconds setting a new world record for a transcontinental flight.

January 18

Everyone knows that the South Pole cannot be reached easily. Even today, with the benefit of helicopters, airplanes, and sophisticated land vehicles the Pole can only be approached with great difficulty. Imagine what it must have been like to get to it as the 20th Century was dawning. British explorer Robert Falcon Scott, competing against Roald Amundsen in a ‘Race to the Pole,’ arrived at the South Pole on the 18th in 1912. Scott had spent a year in Antarctica preparing for his assault on the Pole. He really should have checked his email more often, because Amundsen had gotten there on the preceding December 14. Coming in second rather takes the fun out of it, and the fact that everyone in the party, including Scott, died, probably put a damper on the celebration.

January 17

On the 17th in 1950, a group formed by Anthony ’Fats’ Pino, consisting of Pino, Joseph "Specs" O'Keefe, Joseph "Big Joe" McGinnis, Stanley "Gus" Gusciora, Vincent Costa, Michael Vincent Geagan, Thomas Francis Richardson, Adolph "Jazz" Maffie and Henry Baker. strolled into the Brinks building in Boston, Massachusetts and walked out a short time later with $1,218,211.19 in cash, and over $1.5-million in checks, money orders and other securities. At the time, it was the largest robbery in the entire history of the United States.
Don’t you just love the nicknames that gangsters acquire? I think though that Mr. Pino probably bristled just a bit when he was saddled with Fats as his nickname.
O'Keefe and Gusciora had peviously entered the Brinks depot and picked the outside lock. Once inside they removed the cylinders from five locks, one at a time, so a locksmith could make duplicate keys for them. Once this was done Pino recruited six other men, including Pino's brother-in-law Vincent Costa, Michael Vincent Geagan, Thomas Francis Richardson, Adolph "Jazz" Maffie and Henry Baker.
Everyone involved in the robbery was caught but only $58,000 of the stolen money was recovered.

January 16

On the 16th in 1909, the British Imperial Antarctic Expedition headed by Ernest Shackleton, commonly called the Nimrod expedition[ii] reached the magnetic South Pole. With Shackelton were George Buckley, Frank Wild, Eric Marshall, Jameson Adams, Raymond Edward Priestley and Edgeworth David. Shackleton’s group would not at this time reach the South Pole. He did however take some solace in being the first men to reach further south than anyone else at the time. Shackleton was able to take it as well as he did because he felt that it was “better a live donkey than a dead lion".
As a result of this expedition, on December 14, 1909 Shackleton would be knighted.
The adventure was called the Nimrod expedition after the ship, the Nimrod, which had carried them to Antarctica.
It certainly seems that if someone gets it into their head to write something nothing will stop them. In a hut that they built near the magnetic South Pole, Shackleton’s group wrote, typeset and printed on a small hand press the 120-page book Aurora Australis, the first book published in Antarctica.
In 1901 Wild was a member of Robert Falcon Scott’s crew as a seaman on the ”Discovery”, along with Ernest Shackleton who was then a Lieutenant.
[v] In 1892, David was appointed head of the geology section of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science in Hobart, Australia.

January 15

In 1716, Sir Hans Sloane was created a baronet, making him the first British medical practitioner to receive a hereditary title. Sloane was in the habit of collecting things. He collected so many things that it would not be too far off base to label him a pack rat. Granted, he was a pack rat with a great deal of money and apparently, considering the number of books and manuscripts he managed to collect, one with a great deal of time on his hands. When Sloane died on the January 11, 1753, he bequeathed most of his stuff, amassed over a long career, the manuscripts, pictures, coins and more than 40,000 books that were gathering dust in the attic, to what would become the British Museum, which opened on the 15th in 1759. There was one condition attached to the gift, his estate would have to be paid £20,000, which was far less than the value of the collections. Sloane’s family didn’t seek more money because they were just glad to get all that junk out of the attic. This is a bit like some poets today who are pleased when a university asks to be the repository for their papers because that means that the poet and his wife can finally clean out the attic.
Sloane has been credited with inventing chocolate milk. The building that houses the British Museum was not the first choice. The site where Buckingham Palace is was the first pick, but it was considered too costly and in a less than desirable location. The Museum’s current home was the residence of Ralph Montagu, 1st Duke of Montagu. By the 18th century however that neighborhood had declined so Montagu’s son, the 2nd Duke of Montagu, bailed out and moved to Whitehall.

King George II gave his formal approval of the Act of Parliament which established the British Museum on June 7, 1753. It took less than six years from the green light to the opening of the museum and related libraries.

January 14

Have you had the opportunity to read Metzengerstein: A Tale In Imitation of the German? Do you have any idea what it even is or what its plot is? If so, you are at least a couple of steps ahead of me because until I stumbled across it I had never even heard of it. It is a short story published on the 14th in 1832, in the magazine Saturday Courier and it has the distinction of being the first short story published by author Edgar Allen Poe. Poe had submitted it as his entry in a writing contest. He didn’t win but the story was published with no credit to Poe several months after the contest ran. It would go on to be published again in the Southern Literary Messenger in January 1836, in which Poe is given credit for it.

January 13

On the night of the 13th in 1840, the side-wheeled steamer Lexington, the fastest vessel operating on the run from Manhattan to Boston, caught fire and burned to the waterline two miles off Eaton’s Neck on the north shore of Long Island resulting in the loss of all but four of the 143 passengers and crew. The survivors were Chester Hilliard, the only passenger to survive, the ship’s fireman Benjamin Cox, Stephen Manchester, the ship's pilot, Charles Smith, one of the ship's firemen, and David Crowley, the second mate.