Today in History: August 8

1814: Esther Hobart Morris is born at Tioga County, New York. In 1870 she’ll become Justice of the Peace of South Pass, Wyoming — the first woman to hold a judicial office in America.

1876: Thomas Edison receives a patent for a copying machine. Albert Blake Dick later licenses the patent and names the thing “mimeograph.”

1908: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Joseph Goldberg (Northwestern Law 1930) is born at Chicago, Illinois.

1911: The number of members of the U.S. House of Representatives is set by statute at 435.

1929: Sponsored by Hearst Newspapers, the airship Graf Zeppelin leaves Lakehurst, New Jersey, on the the beginning of the first aerial voyage around the world. It will return 21 days later after clocking nearly 50,000 miles.

1945: The United States becomes the third nation to ratify the United Nations Charter.

1945: Days after the U.S. drops atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviet Union finally gets around to declaring war on Japan.

1963: A team of 15 conspirators robs the Royal Mail of £2.6 million in what comes to be known as the Great Train Robbery. Thirteen are captured by Scotland Yard.

2000: The Confederate submarine C.S.S. Hunley, one of the few ships to have drowned three separate crews by sinking three times, is raised from Charleston Harbor after more than 130 years.