January 26

Space research and travel, by their very nature; require extreme care and attention to detail. While the expression a miss is as good as a mile might be appropriate in other fields, in the case of early attempts to study earth’s moon it would be better stated as a miss is as good as 22,000 miles. That is the distance by which the Ranger 3, launched on the 26th in 1962 as part of NASA’s Ranger program, missed its target – the moon.

January 25

It is common knowledge that Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell were blessed both with far more than their fair share of intelligence and ambition. On the 25th in 1881, the two men would stand on common ground, when they formed the Oriental Telephone Company, which was the first telephone company.

January 24

Alfred Hitchcock released his first film, The Pleasure Garden, in England on the 24th in 1927. Alfred Hitchcock went on to an extraordinary career as a director. Most of his movies were designed to frighten people, The Birds and Vertigo being handy examples. When I consider the fact that Hitchcock exhibited such highly polished skill in his work, it is difficult me to imagine fear in any form lurking in his mnemonic circuits. As it turns out, however, Hitchcock had at least two fears, both of them bordering on phobia. He was terrified of policemen, which is why he never learned to drive a car – if he didn’t drive, he could never be stopped by a policeman, ticketed or subjected to who knows how many other indignities. Reasonable? Of course, most people have concerns about encountering the police. The other one, however, just baffles me and I simply can’t understand his dislike for eggs, which was extreme. Excuse me, what was that? Did I hear you ask how extreme? Consider this quote from Hitchcock: “I’m frightened of eggs, worse than frightened, they revolt me. That white round thing without any holes … have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid? Blood is jolly, red. But egg yolk is yellow, revolting. I’ve never tasted it.”

January 23

Elizabeth Blackwell was born on February 3, 1821. As a young woman, she submitted an application to the medical school at Geneva College, in Geneva, New York, a school not known for accepting women to its programs. For some reason the registrar and faculty asked the student body to vote on Blackwell’s application. The students, believing the application to be a joke, voted to allow her admission to the school. As it turned out, the joke was on the students because on the 23rd in 1849, Blackwell received her medical degree, becoming the first woman licensed to practice in the United States.

January 22

The television show Western Premier of Commercial Television, hosted by Bob Hope, was broadcast from an unused garage on the Paramount Studios lot in Hollywood, California. When the show aired, on the 22nd in 1947, it was Bob Hope who ushered in the television era because it was the first commercial broadcast of a television show.

January 21

The novel ‘The Power of Sympathy’, by William Hill Brown, was published on the 21st in 1789, in Boston, Massachusetts. It is widely considered the first novel published in the United States.

January 20

Joseph Marie Eugène Sue was born on the 20th in 1804. He was a writer who achieved some measure of success, if by success you mean that he was able to get mediocre books consistently published. Some believe that a real sign of success is when somebody begins to plagiarize your work. One book that he wrote was Les Mystères du peuple, an illustrated book on the Seven Deadly Sins. Another writer, Maurice Joly, plagiarized much of the work and worked it into an anti-Napoleon III diatribe titled, Dialogues in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. After this, the trail gets a bit muddy. Hermann Goedsche in turn plagiarized the work plagiarized by Joly. This book, which plagiarized a plagiarized book, became the basis for The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, unfortunately a long-lived anti-Semitic fraud.