Today in history—January 9
1788: Connecticut becomes the fifth state to ratify the constitution. The state’s general assembly will later pick “The Constitution State” as its official motto, in place of the more familiar, “The Little Rectangular State Next to New York.”
1793: Jean Pierre Blanchard makes the first successful balloon flight in the United States, flying 15 miles from Philadelphia to Woodbury, New Jersey. The event today is commemorated by a single-family residential real estate development in Woodbury called “Blanchard’s Landing.”
1816: Sir Humphrey Davy’s new safety lantern is used for the first time in a coal mine.
1839: The French Academy of Sciences is informed of the development of a marvelous new photographic process, the daguerreotype.
1878: The father of behavioral psychology, John Broadus Watson, is born in Greenville, South Carolina. Forced to leave a faculty post at Johns Hopkins after having an affair with a student, he will join the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, selling Yuban Coffee.
1895: American entrepreneur Aaron Lufkin Dennison dies at Birmingham, England. Dennison was the first man to make watches with interchangeable parts, and his American Waltham Watch Co. will go on to make 40 million timepieces over the next hundred years. As a sideline, he started making his own boxes. His box company today is known as Avery Dennison Corp.
1958: Willis Rodney Whitney dies in Schenectady, New York. Then an associate professor at MIT, he was hired by General Electric to do part-time chemical research in 1900, and later founded GE’s research lab, the first basic industrial research lab in the world.
1969: The Anglo-French Concorde aircraft makes its first test flight at Bristol, England.
1979: Architect Pier Luigi Nervi, the man responsible for introducing to the world those warm, inviting, giant reinforced concrete public buildings we all love, dies at Rome. (Left: SCOPE Cultural Center, Norfolk, Va.)
1984: Actress Clara Peller makes television history in a Wendy’s television ad when she demands, “Where’s the beef?”
1986: Eastman Kodak exits the instant camera business after it loses a patent infringement lawsuit.
1998: Walter E. Diemer, senior vice president of the Fleer Co., dies at Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In 1928, working as an accountant for Fleer, he accidentally invents a new kind of chewing gum. This “bubble gum”—colored pink because that’s the only color he has on hand—sells out immediately, and Diemer is soon training the Fleer sales force in how to blow bubbles to demonstrate the product.
1998: Communitarians are dismayed as two international teams of scientists announce that they have discovered that the galaxies are moving farther apart at increasing speeds.