April 11, 2006
The Birthdate Thing
This is the current variant of the "let's all answer the same question" meme, upon which I happened at Ith's. Go to Wikipedia and look up your birth day (excluding the year). List three events, two births and one death, including the year. Seeing as how I happen to have a cool birthday, here I go:
December 17th
Events:
1903 - The Wright Brothers make the first powered heavier-than-air flight in the Wright Flyer at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
1935 - First flight of the Douglas DC-3 airplane.
2003 - SpaceShipOne flight 11P, piloted by Brian Binnie, makes the first privately-funded manned supersonic flight. My recollection is that their original hope was to make an actual space shot on this date, but lost some time due to development difficulties. It was still a worthy centennial observation. I'd like to think that the date was also chosen deliberately for the Douglas flight.
Births:
1873 - Ford Madox Ford, British writer (d. 1939)
1903 - Erskine Caldwell, American author (d. 1987)
1942 - Paul Butterfield, American harmonica player (d. 1987)
Death:
1967 - Harold Holt, Australian Prime Minister, believed drowned, (b. 1908)
Posted by triticale at April 11, 2006 07:59 PM | TrackBack