(edited from Wikipedia)
"
The first five-year plan of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was a list of economic goals, created by Communist Party General Secretary Joseph Stalin, based on his policy of socialism in one country. The plan was implemented in 1928, [starting on October 1], and took effect until 1932.

The Soviet Union entered a series of five-year plans which began in 1928 under the rule of Joseph Stalin. Stalin launched what would later be referred to as a "revolution from above" to improve the Soviet Union's domestic policy. The policies were centered around rapid industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture. Stalin desired to remove and replace any policies created under the New Economic Policy. Some scholars have argued that the programme of mass industrialization advocated by Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition was co-opted to serve as the basis of Stalin's first five year plan.

The plan, overall, was to transition the Soviet Union from a weak, poorly controlled, agriculture state, into an industrial powerhouse. While the vision was grand, its planning was ineffective and unrealistic given the short amount of time given to meet the desired goals.

Collective farming and peasants' resistance

In 1929, Stalin edited the plan to include the creation of "kolkhoz" collective farming systems that stretched over thousands of acres of land and had hundreds of thousands of peasants working on them. The creation of collective farms essentially destroyed the kulaks as a class (dekulakization). Another consequence of this is that peasants resisted by killing their farm animals rather than turning them over to the State when their farms were collectivized. The resistance to Stalin's collectivization policies led to the famine in Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan as well as areas of the Northern Caucasus.

Rapid growth of heavy industry

The central aspect of the first Soviet five-year plan was the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union from October 1928 to December 1932, which was thought to be the most crucial time for Russian industrialization. Lenin himself before the time of his death, knew the importance of building a transitional state to communism and was quoted saying "Modern industry is the key to this transformation, the time has come to construct our fatherland anew with the hands of machines". Rapid growth was facilitated starting in 1928 and continued to accelerate because of the building of heavy industry, which in turn raised living standards for peasants escaping the countryside. The Bolsheviks' need for rapid industrialization was once again out of the fear of impending war from the West. If war were to break out between the Soviet Union and the West, the Soviets would be fighting against some of the most industrialized nations in the world.

Prisoner labor

To meet the goals of the first five-year plan the Soviet Union began using the labor of its growing prisoner population. Initially the Soviet leaders sought to decrease the number of prisoners in the Soviet Union so that those resources could be rerouted to the five-year plan. This legislation led to many dangerous prisoners being released from prison into labor camps.

The people of the Soviet Union began being sentenced to forced labor, even when they committed small offenses, or committed no crime at all. Many of the prisoners used for labor were peasants who had resisted indoctrination. This was an attempt by the Soviet Union to acquire free labor for the rapid industrialization; however, it led to the incarceration of many innocent people in the Soviet Union. Eventually Western nations, such as the United States, began to boycott goods produced by this form of labor.

Successes of the first five-year plan

Although many of the goals set by the plan were not fully met, there were several economic sectors that still saw large increases in their output. Areas like capital goods increased 158%, consumer goods increased by 87%, and total industrial output increased by 118%. In addition, despite the difficulties that agriculture underwent throughout the plan, the Soviets recruited more than 70,000 volunteers from the cities to help collectivize and work on farms in the rural areas.

The largest success of the first five-year plan, however, was the Soviet Union beginning its journey to become an economic and industrial superpower. Stalin declared the plan a success at the beginning of 1933, noting the creation of several heavy industries where none had existed.

The first five-year plan also began to prepare the Soviet Union to win in the Second World War. Without the initial five-year plan, and the ones that followed, the Soviet Union would not have been prepared for the German invasion in 1941. Due to the rapid industrialization of the plan, as well as the strategic construction of arms manufacturers in areas less vulnerable to future warfare, the Soviet Union was partially able to build the weapons it needed to defeat the Germans in 1945.

Failures of the first five-year plan

The first plan saw unrealistic quotas set for industrialization that, in reality, would not be met for decades to come. The great push for industrialization caused quotas to consistently be looked at and adjusted.

Secondly, many western historians point to collectivization as a cause of the large-scale famine in the Soviet Union between 1932 and 1933 in which 3.3 to 7.5 million died. These famines were among the worst in history and created scars which would mark the Soviet Union for many years to come and incense a deep hatred of Russians by Ukrainians, Tatars, and many other ethnic groups.

Aside from the three to four million people dying because of starvation or even freezing to death because of waiting in line for rations, people were not wanting or unable to have children which assisted in the decrease of the population. Hitler claimed the supposed disregard of human life by Russians toward non-Russians as one of his reasons to conduct Operation Barbarossa and gain initial victories over the Russians.
"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_five-year_plan

---------------------------------------------------------

On This Day: First nuclear submarine commissioned, a rapid technology breakthrough - Sep. 30, 1954
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364783

On This Day: Ravine in Ukraine site of horrific mass killings - Sep. 29, 1941
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364708

On This Day: Fleming discovers penicillin in mold; drug several years away - Sep. 28, 1928
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364630

On This Day: Champollion announces that he has deciphered the Rosetta Stone - Sep. 27, 1822
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364526

On This Day: Machine Gun Kelly caught on the same day Dillinger gang escapes prison - Sep. 26, 1933
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364394

(edited from article)
"
The USS Nautilus is One of the Most Important Submarines of All Time

In an era where technological progress was rapid, Nautilus was a stunning achievement. Just nine years after the atomic bomb test at Alamogordo, New Mexico, Nautilus was underway and using nuclear power. Not only that, but the submarine proved that nuclear propulsion was safe and efficient, paving the way for an all-nuclear U.S. Navy submarine fleet. During its career it had made 2,507 dives and traveled 513,550 miles without incident. A trailblazer, Nautilus’s success ensured that the U.S. submarine fleet would maintain technological superiority over its Soviet Navy for the remainder of the Cold War.

In 1948, the U.S. Navy established a Nuclear Power Branch, kicking off a revolution in ship propulsion. The department, headed by legendary naval officer Adm. Hyman Rickover, would oversee the construction of a unique ship, the first to take advantage of the benefits of nuclear propulsion. That ship was the nuclear submarine USS Nautilus. Nautilus was formally commissioned into service on September 30, 1954. Its reactor was started up on December 30, and on January 17, 1955, it finally left the pier.

The U.S. Navy, used to traveling long distances to fight its battles, was an early fan of nuclear propulsion. Nuclear power promised to eliminate the need for massive quantities of ship fuel, reducing the logistical demands of a fleet at sea. As Norman Polmar and K. J. Moore explained in their book Cold War Submarines, nuclear-powered submarines would have a virtually unlimited range, be faster above and below the surface of the ocean, generate more power per volume than diesel engines, and operate more easily than diesel engines.

In 1958, the United States government pushed to have a nuclear-powered submarine reach the North Pole, both as a response to the Sputnik satellite launch and to prove that Polaris-missile-armed submarines could operate above the Arctic Circle. On July 23, 1958, Nautilus became the first ship to reach the North Pole—above or below the ice. Nautilus traveled from Hawaii to Greenland, perhaps the most unusual voyage undertaken thus far by any ship.
"
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/uss-nautilus-one-most-important-submarines-all-time-196948

(edited from Wikipedia)
"
Because her nuclear propulsion allowed her to remain submerged far longer than diesel-electric submarines, she broke many records in her first years of operation and traveled to locations previously beyond the limits of submarines. In operation, she revealed a number of limitations in her design and construction. This information was used to improve subsequent submarines.

Nautilus was decommissioned in 1980 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1982. The submarine has been preserved as a museum ship at the Submarine Force Library and Museum in Groton, Connecticut, where the vessel receives around 250,000 visitors per year.

Operation Sunshine – under the North Pole

In response to the nuclear ICBM threat posed by Sputnik, President Eisenhower ordered the U.S. Navy to attempt a submarine transit of the North Pole to gain credibility for the soon-to-come SLBM weapons system. On 25 April 1958, Nautilus was underway again for the West Coast, now commanded by Commander William R. Anderson, USN. Stopping at San Diego, San Francisco, and Seattle, she began her history-making polar transit, "Operation Sunshine", as she departed the latter port on 9 June. On 19 June, she entered the Chukchi Sea, but was turned back by deep drift ice in those shallow waters. On 28 June, she arrived at Pearl Harbor to await better ice conditions.

By 23 July, her wait was over, and she set a course northward. She submerged in the Barrow Sea Valley on 1 August and on 3 August, at 2315 hrs. EDT she became the first watercraft to reach the geographic North Pole. The ability to navigate at extreme latitudes without surfacing was enabled by the technology of the North American Aviation N6A-1 Inertial Navigation System, a naval modification of the N6A used in the Navaho cruise missile; it had been installed on Nautilus and Skate after initial sea trials on USS Compass Island in 1957. From the North Pole, she continued and after 96 hours and 1,590 nmi (2,940 km; 1,830 mi) under the ice, surfaced northeast of Greenland, having completed the first successful submerged voyage around the North Pole. The technical details of this mission were planned by scientists from the Naval Electronics Laboratory including Dr. Waldo Lyon who accompanied Nautilus as chief scientist and ice pilot.

Navigation beneath the arctic ice sheet was difficult. Above 85°N both magnetic compasses and normal gyrocompasses become inaccurate. A special gyrocompass built by Sperry Rand was installed shortly before the journey. There was a risk that the submarine would become disoriented beneath the ice and that the crew would have to play "longitude roulette". Commander Anderson had considered using torpedoes to blow a hole in the ice if the submarine needed to surface.

The most difficult part of the journey was in the Bering Strait. The ice extended as much as 60 ft (18 m) below sea level. During the initial attempt to go through the Bering Strait, there was insufficient room between the ice and the sea bottom. During the second, successful attempt to pass through the Bering passage, the submarine passed through a known channel close to Alaska (this was not the first choice, as the submarine wanted to avoid detection).

The trip beneath the ice cap was an important boost for America as the Soviets had recently launched Sputnik, but had no nuclear submarine of their own. During the address announcing the journey, the president mentioned that one day nuclear cargo submarines might use that route for trade.

As Nautilus proceeded south from Greenland, a helicopter airlifted Commander Anderson to connect with transport to Washington, D.C. At a White House ceremony on 8 August, President Eisenhower presented him with the Legion of Merit and announced that the crew had earned a Presidential Unit Citation.

[Cuban missile crisis]

Nautilus operated in the Atlantic, conducting evaluation tests for ASW improvements, participating in NATO exercises, and during October 1962, in the naval quarantine of Cuba.
"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nautilus_(SSN-571)

---------------------------------------------------------

On This Day: Ravine in Ukraine site of horrific mass killings - Sep. 29, 1941
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364708

On This Day: Fleming discovers penicillin in mold; drug several years away - Sep. 28, 1928
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364630

On This Day: Champollion announces that he has deciphered the Rosetta Stone - Sep. 27, 1822
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364526

On This Day: Machine Gun Kelly caught on the same day Dillinger gang escapes prison - Sep. 26, 1933
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364394

On This Day: On-board ammo sinks battleship; over 300 souls lost - Sep. 25, 1911
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364296

(edited from Wikipedia)
"
Babi Yar is a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and a site of massacres carried out by Nazi Germany's forces during its campaign against the Soviet Union in World War II. The first and best documented of the massacres took place on 29–30 September 1941, killing some 33,771 Jews. Other victims of massacres at the site included Soviet prisoners of war, communists and Romani people. It is estimated that a total of between 100,000 and 150,000 people were murdered at Babi Yar during the German occupation.

Sonderkommando 4a and the 45th Battalion of the German Order Police conducted the shootings. Servicemen of the 303rd Battalion of the German Order Police at this time guarded the outer perimeter of the execution site.

The massacre was the largest mass-murder by the Nazi regime during the campaign against the Soviet Union, and it has been called "the largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust" to that particular date. It is only surpassed overall by the later October 1941 Odessa massacre of more than 50,000 Jews (committed by German and Romanian troops), and by Aktion Erntefest of November 1943 in occupied Poland with 42,000–43,000 victims.

Massacres of September 1941

On 26 September 1941, the following order was posted:
"
All Yids of the city of Kiev and its vicinity must appear on Monday, 29 September, by 8 o'clock in the morning at the corner of Mel'nikova and Dokterivskaya streets (near the Viis'kove cemetery). Bring documents, money and valuables, and also warm clothing, linen, etc. Any Yids who do not follow this order and are found elsewhere will be shot. Any civilians who enter the dwellings left by Yids and appropriate the things in them will be shot.
"
— Order posted in Kyiv in Russian, Ukrainian, and German on or around 26 September 1941

The commander of the Einsatzkommando reported two days later:
"
The difficulties resulting from such a large scale action—in particular concerning the seizure—were overcome in Kiev by requesting the Jewish population through wall posters to move. Although only a participation of approximately 5,000 to 6,000 Jews had been expected at first, more than 30,000 Jews arrived who, until the very moment of their execution, still believed in their resettlement, thanks to an extremely clever organization.
"

According to the testimony of a truck driver named Hofer, victims were ordered to undress and were beaten if they resisted:
"
I watched what happened when the Jews—men, women and children—arrived. The Ukrainians led them past a number of different places where one after the other they had to give up their luggage, then their coats, shoes and over-garments and also underwear. They also had to leave their valuables in a designated place. There was a special pile for each article of clothing. It all happened very quickly and anyone who hesitated was kicked or pushed by the Ukrainians to keep them moving.
"

The crowd was large enough that most of the victims could not have known what was happening until it was too late; by the time they heard the machine gun fire, there was no chance to escape. All were driven down a corridor of soldiers, in groups of ten, and then shot. A truck driver described the scene.
"
Once undressed, they were led into the ravine which was about 150 metres long and 30 metres wide and a good 15 metres deep ... When they reached the bottom of the ravine they were seized by members of the Schutzpolizei and made to lie down on top of Jews who had already been shot ... The corpses were literally in layers. A police marksman came along and shot each Jew in the neck with a submachine gun ... I saw these marksmen stand on layers of corpses and shoot one after the other ... The marksman would walk across the bodies of the executed Jews to the next Jew, who had meanwhile lain down, and shoot him.
"

In the evening, the Germans undermined the wall of the ravine and buried the people under the thick layers of earth. According to the Einsatzgruppe's Operational Situation Report, 33,771 Jews from Kyiv and its suburbs were systematically shot dead by machine-gun fire at Babi Yar on 29 and 30 September 1941. The money, valuables, underwear, and clothing of the murdered were turned over to the local ethnic Germans and to the Nazi administration of the city. Wounded victims were buried alive in the ravine along with the rest of the bodies.

Further massacres

In the months that followed, thousands more were seized and taken to Babi Yar where they were shot. It is estimated that more than 100,000 residents of Kyiv of all ethnic groups, mostly civilians, were murdered by the Nazis there during World War II. A concentration camp was also built in the area.

Mass executions at Babi Yar continued until the Nazis evacuated the city of Kyiv. On 10 January 1942 about 100 captured Soviet sailors were executed there after being forced to disinter and cremate the bodies of previous victims. In addition, Babi Yar became a place of execution of residents of five Gypsy camps. Patients of the Ivan Pavlov Psychiatric Hospital were gassed and then dumped into the ravine. Thousands of other Ukrainians were murdered at Babi Yar. Ukrainian poet and activist Olena Teliha and her husband, and renowned bandurist Mykhailo Teliha, were murdered there on 21 February 1942. Also murdered in 1941 were Ukrainian activist writer Ivan Rohach, his sister, and his staff.

[Outside discovery]

Upon the Soviet liberation of Kyiv in 1943, Soviet officials led Western journalists to the site of the massacres and allowed them to interview survivors. Among the journalists were Bill Lawrence of The New York Times and Bill Downs of CBS. Downs described in a report to Newsweek what he had been told by one of the survivors, Efim Vilkis:
"
However, even more incredible was the actions taken by the Nazis between August 19 and September 28 last. Vilkis said that in the middle of August the SS mobilized a party of 100 Russian war prisoners, who were taken to the ravines. On August 19 these men were ordered to disinter all the bodies in the ravine. The Germans meanwhile took a party to a nearby Jewish cemetery whence marble headstones were brought to Babii Yar [sic] to form the foundation of a huge funeral pyre. Atop the stones were piled a layer of wood and then a layer of bodies, and so on until the pyre was as high as a two-story house. Vilkis said that approximately 1,500 bodies were burned in each operation of the furnace and each funeral pyre took two nights and one day to burn completely. The cremation went on for 40 days, and then the prisoners, who by this time included 341 men, were ordered to build another furnace. Since this was the last furnace and there were no more bodies, the prisoners [realized] it was for them. They made a break but only a dozen out of more than 200 survived the bullets of the Nazi machine guns.
"

Number of people who were murdered

Estimates of the total number of people who were murdered at Babi Yar during the Nazi occupation vary. At the Nuremberg trials in 1946, Soviet prosecutor Lev Smirnov claimed that approximately 100,000 corpses were lying in Babi Yar; he made this estimate using documents which were published by the Extraordinary State Commission which the Soviets set up in order to investigate Nazi crimes after the liberation of Kyiv in 1943.

In a recently published letter to the Israeli journalist, writer, and translator Shlomo Even-Shoshan which was dated 17 May 1965, Anatoly Kuznetsov commented on the Babi Yar atrocity:

In the two years that followed, Ukrainians, Russians, Gypsies and people of all nationalities were murdered in Babi Yar. The belief that Babi Yar is an exclusively Jewish grave is wrong... It is an international grave. Nobody will ever determine how many and what nationalities are buried there, because 90% of the corpses were burned, their ashes were scattered in ravines and fields.

Concealment of the crimes

Before the Nazis retreated from Kyiv ahead of the Soviet offensive of 1944, they were ordered by Wilhelm Koppe to conceal their atrocities in the East. Paul Blobel, who had been in control of the mass murders in Babi Yar two years earlier, supervised the Sonderaktion 1005 in eliminating its traces. The Aktion was carried out earlier in all extermination camps. The bodies were exhumed, burned and the ashes scattered over farmland in the vicinity. Several hundred prisoners of war from the Syrets concentration camp were forced to build funeral pyres out of Jewish gravestones and exhume the bodies for cremation.

Trials

In the aftermath of the war, several SS commanders who had planned and supervised the massacre were arrested and put on trial. Paul Blobel, the overall commander of the SS unit responsible for the massacre, was sentenced to death by the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials in the Einsatzgruppen Trial. He was hanged on 7 June 1951 at Landsberg Prison. Otto Rasch was also indicted in the Einsatzgruppen Trial but his case was discontinued for health reasons, and he died in prison in 1948. Friedrich Jeckeln was convicted of war crimes by a Soviet military tribunal in the Riga Trial, sentenced to death, and hanged on 3 February 1946. Kurt Eberhard was arrested by US authorities but committed suicide while in custody in 1947.

In January 1946, 15 former members of the German police (including Paul Scheer) were tried in Kyiv over their roles in the massacre and other atrocities. Twelve of them were sentenced to death. Two additional perpetrators were given prison sentences at the Nuremberg Trials.

The vast majority of the perpetrators were never tried for their roles in the massacre.
"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babi_Yar

---------------------------------------------------------

On This Day: Fleming discovers penicillin in mold; drug several years away - Sep. 28, 1928
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364630

On This Day: Champollion announces that he has deciphered the Rosetta Stone - Sep. 27, 1822
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364526

On This Day: Machine Gun Kelly caught on the same day Dillinger gang escapes prison - Sep. 26, 1933
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364394

On This Day: On-board ammo sinks battleship; over 300 souls lost - Sep. 25, 1911
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364296

On This Day: President Washington signs up for more law and order - Sep. 24, 1789
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364203

(edited from Wikipedia)
"
Sir Alexander Fleming (1881-1955) was a Scottish physician and microbiologist, best known for discovering the world's first broadly effective antibiotic substance, which he named penicillin. His discovery in 1928 is described as the "single greatest victory ever achieved over disease". For this discovery, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain.

One sometimes finds what one is not looking for. When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn't plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world's first antibiotic, or bacteria killer. But I suppose that was exactly what I did.

— Alexander Fleming

History of penicillin

The history of penicillin follows observations and discoveries of evidence of antibiotic activity of the mould Penicillium that led to the development of penicillins that became the first widely used antibiotics. Following the production of a relatively pure compound in 1942, penicillin was the first naturally-derived antibiotic.

Ancient societies used moulds to treat infections, and in the following centuries many people observed the inhibition of bacterial growth by moulds. While working at St Mary's Hospital in London in 1928, Scottish physician Alexander Fleming was the first to experimentally determine that a Penicillium mould secretes an antibacterial substance, which he named "penicillin". The mould was found to be a variant of Penicillium notatum (now called Penicillium rubens), a contaminant of a bacterial culture in his laboratory. The work on penicillin at St Mary's ended in 1929.

In 1939, a team of scientists at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology at the University of Oxford, led by Howard Florey that included Edward Abraham, Ernst Chain, Mary Ethel Florey, Norman Heatley and Margaret Jennings, began researching penicillin. They developed a method for cultivating the mould and extracting, purifying and storing penicillin from it, together with an assay for measuring its purity. They carried out experiments with animals to determine penicillin's safety and effectiveness before conducting clinical trials and field tests. They derived its chemical structure and determined how it works.

The private sector and the United States Department of Agriculture located and produced new strains and developed mass production techniques. During the Second World War penicillin became an important part of the Allied war effort, saving thousands of lives. Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery and development of penicillin.

After the end of the war in 1945, penicillin became widely available. Dorothy Hodgkin determined its chemical structure, for which she received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964. This led to the development of semisynthetic penicillins that were more potent and effective against a wider range of bacteria. The drug was synthesised in 1957, but cultivation of mould [mainly in canteloupe] remains the primary means of production.

It was discovered that adding penicillin to animal feed increased weight gain, improved feed-conversion efficiency, promoted more uniform growth and facilitated disease control. Agriculture became a major user of penicillin. Shortly after their discovery of penicillin, the Oxford team reported penicillin resistance in many bacteria. Research that aims to circumvent and understand the mechanisms of antibiotic resistance continues today.

Discovery of penicillin

In August [1928], Fleming spent the summer break with his family at his country home [in] Suffolk. Before leaving his laboratory, he inoculated several culture plates with S. aureus. He kept the plates aside on one corner of the table away from direct sunlight. He arrived at his laboratory on 3 September, where [his assistant] Pryce was waiting to greet him. As he and Pryce examined the culture plates, they found one with an open lid and the culture contaminated with a blue-green mould. In the contaminated plate the bacteria around the mould did not grow, while those farther away grew normally, meaning that the mould killed the bacteria.

Fleming resumed his vacation and returned in September. According to his notes on 30 October, he collected the original mould and grew it in culture plates. After four days he found that the plates developed large colonies of the mould. He repeated the experiment with the same bacteria-killing results.

He concluded that the mould was releasing a substance that was inhibiting bacterial growth, and he produced culture broth of the mould and subsequently concentrated the antibacterial component. After testing against different bacteria, he found that the mould could kill only specific, Gram-positive bacteria. For example, staphylococcus, streptococcus, and diphtheria bacillus were easily killed; but there was no effect on typhoid bacterium and a bacterium once thought to cause influenza. He prepared a large-culture method from which he could obtain large amounts of the mould juice. He called this juice "penicillin", explaining the reason as "to avoid the repetition of the rather cumbersome phrase 'Mould broth filtrate'.

For the effect on the cultures of staphylococci that Fleming observed, the mould had to be growing before the bacteria began to grow, because penicillin is only effective on bacteria when they are reproducing. Fortuitously, the temperature in the laboratory during that August was optimum first for the growth of the mould, below 20 °C (68 °F), and later in the month for the bacteria, when it reached 25 °C (77 °F). Had Fleming not left the cultures on his laboratory bench and put them in an incubator, the phenomenon would not have occurred.
"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Fleming
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_penicillin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_penicillin

---------------------------------------------------------

On This Day: Champollion announces that he has deciphered the Rosetta Stone - Sep. 27, 1822
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364526

On This Day: Machine Gun Kelly caught on the same day Dillinger gang escapes prison - Sep. 26, 1933
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364394

On This Day: On-board ammo sinks battleship; over 300 souls lost - Sep. 25, 1911
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364296

On This Day: President Washington signs up for more law and order - Sep. 24, 1789
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364203

On This Day: Neptune found using math!, but is there a Planet Nine?? - Sep. 23, 1846
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364133

(edited from Wikipedia)
"
Lettre à M. Dacier is a letter sent in 1822 by the Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion to Bon-Joseph Dacier, secretary of the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. It is the founding text upon which Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs were first systematically deciphered by Champollion, largely on the basis of the multilingual Rosetta Stone.

On 14 September 1822, while visiting his brother Jacques-Joseph, a great supporter of his ideas, Champollion made a crucial breakthrough in understanding the phonetic nature of hieroglyphs and proclaimed, "Je tiens l'affaire! " ("I've got it!" ) and then fainted from his excitement.

On 27 September 1822, he exhibited at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres a draft containing eight pages of text to a packed room. The final version was published in late October 1822 by Firmin-Didot in a booklet of 44 pages with four illustrated plates.

French text of the Letter

"It is a complex system, writing figurative, symbolic, and phonetic all at once, in the same text, the same phrase, I would almost say in the same word."

Jean-François Champollion, Lettre à M. Dacier relative à l'alphabet des hiéroglyphes phonétiques (Paris, 1822) – at French Wikisource

Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts

The writing systems used in ancient Egypt were deciphered in the early nineteenth century through the work of several European scholars, especially Jean-François Champollion and Thomas Young. Ancient Egyptian forms of writing, which included the hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic scripts, ceased to be understood in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, as the Coptic alphabet was increasingly used in their place.

Later generations' knowledge of the older scripts was based on the work of Greek and Roman authors whose understanding was faulty. It was thus widely believed that Egyptian scripts were exclusively ideographic, representing ideas rather than sounds, and even that hieroglyphs were an esoteric, mystical script rather than a means of recording a spoken language. Some attempts at decipherment by Islamic and European scholars in the Middle Ages and early modern times acknowledged the script might have a phonetic component, but perception of hieroglyphs as purely ideographic hampered efforts to understand them as late as the eighteenth century.

The Rosetta Stone, discovered in 1799 by members of Napoleon Bonaparte's campaign in Egypt, bore a parallel text in hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek. It was hoped that the Egyptian text could be deciphered through its Greek translation, especially in combination with the evidence from the Coptic language, the last stage of the Egyptian language. Doing so proved difficult, despite halting progress made by Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy and Johan David Åkerblad. Young, building on their work, observed that demotic characters were derived from hieroglyphs and identified several of the phonetic signs in demotic. He also identified the meaning of many hieroglyphs, including phonetic glyphs in a cartouche containing the name of an Egyptian king of foreign origin, Ptolemy V. He was convinced, however, that phonetic hieroglyphs were used only in writing non-Egyptian words.

In the early 1820s Champollion compared Ptolemy's cartouche with others and realised the hieroglyphic script was a mixture of phonetic and ideographic elements. His claims were initially met with scepticism and with accusations that he had taken ideas from Young without giving credit, but they gradually gained acceptance. Champollion went on to roughly identify the meanings of most phonetic hieroglyphs and establish much of the grammar and vocabulary of ancient Egyptian. Young, meanwhile, largely deciphered demotic using the Rosetta Stone in combination with other Greek and demotic parallel texts.

Decipherment efforts languished after Young's death in 1829 and Champollion's in 1832, but in 1837 Karl Richard Lepsius pointed out that many hieroglyphs represented combinations of two or three sounds rather than one, thus correcting one of the most fundamental faults in Champollion's work. Other scholars, such as Emmanuel de Rougé, refined the understanding of Egyptian enough that by the 1850s it was possible to fully translate ancient Egyptian texts. Combined with the decipherment of cuneiform at approximately the same time, their work opened up the once-inaccessible texts from the earliest stages of human history.

Rosetta Stone

When French forces under Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in 1798, Bonaparte brought with him a corps of scientists and scholars, generally known as the savants, to study the land and its ancient monuments. In July 1799, when French soldiers were rebuilding a Mamluk fort near the town of Rosetta that they had dubbed Fort Julien, Lieutenant Pierre-François Bouchard noticed that one of the stones from a demolished wall in the fort was covered with writing.

It was an ancient Egyptian stela, divided into three registers of text, with its lower right corner and most of its upper register broken off. The stone was inscribed with three scripts: hieroglyphs in the top register, Greek at the bottom and an unidentified script in the middle.

The text was a decree issued in 197 BC by Ptolemy V, granting favours to Egypt's priesthoods. The text ended by calling for copies of the decree to be inscribed "in sacred, and native, and Greek characters" and set up in Egypt's major temples. Upon reading this passage in the Greek inscription the French realised the stone was a parallel text, which could allow the Egyptian text to be deciphered based on its Greek translation. The savants eagerly sought other fragments of the stela as well as other texts in Greek and Egyptian. No further pieces of the stone were ever found, and the only other bilingual texts the savants discovered were largely illegible and useless for decipherment.

The savants did make some progress with the stone itself. They guessed at the positions of proper names in the middle register, based on the position of those names in the Greek text, and managed to identify the p and t in the name of Ptolemy, but they made no further progress.

The first copies of the stone's inscriptions were sent to France in 1800. In 1801 the French army in Egypt was besieged by British and Ottoman forces and surrendered in the Capitulation of Alexandria. By its terms, the Rosetta Stone passed to the British. Upon the stone's arrival in Britain, the Society of Antiquaries of London made engravings of its text and sent them to academic institutions across Europe.

Reports from Napoleon's expedition spurred a mania for ancient Egypt in Europe. Egypt was chaotic in the wake of the French and British withdrawal, but after Muhammad Ali took control of the country in 1805, European collectors descended on Egypt and carried away numerous antiquities, while artists copied others. No one knew these artefacts' historical context, but they contributed to the corpus of texts that scholars could compare when trying to decipher the writing systems.

De Sacy, Åkerblad and Young

Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy, a prominent French linguist, was among the first to work on the stone. He realised that there were far more than 25 signs in demotic and that the demotic inscription was probably not a close translation of the Greek one, thus making the task more difficult. After publishing his results in 1802 he ceased working on the stone.

In the same year de Sacy gave a copy of the stone's inscriptions to a former student of his, Johan David Åkerblad. Åkerblad had greater success, analysing the same sign-groups as de Sacy but identifying more signs correctly. In his letters to de Sacy Åkerblad proposed an alphabet of 29 demotic signs, half of which were later proven correct, and based on his knowledge of Coptic identified several demotic words within the text. De Sacy was sceptical of his results, and Åkerblad too gave up. Despite attempts by other scholars, little further progress was made until more than a decade later, when Thomas Young entered the field.

Young noticed the similarities between hieroglyphic and demotic signs and concluded that the hieroglyphic signs had evolved into the demotic ones. Adopting some of the phonetic values proposed by Åkerblad, Young matched the eight hieroglyphs to their demotic equivalents and proposed that some signs represented several phonetic values while others stood for just one. He then attempted to apply the results to a cartouche of Berenice, the name of a Ptolemaic queen, with less success, although he did identify a pair of hieroglyphs that marked the ending of a feminine name. The result was a set of thirteen phonetic values for hieroglyphic and demotic signs. Six were correct, three partly correct, and four wrong.

As the Egyptologist Francis Llewellyn Griffith put it in 1922, Young's results were "mixed up with many false conclusions, but the method pursued was infallibly leading to definite decipherment."

Champollion's breakthroughs

Jean-François Champollion had developed a fascination with ancient Egypt in adolescence, between about 1803 and 1805, and he had studied Near Eastern languages, including Coptic, under de Sacy and others.

Champollion was initially dismissive of Young's work, having seen only excerpts from Young's list of hieroglyphic and demotic words. After moving to Paris from Grenoble in mid-1821 he would have been better able to obtain a full copy, but it is not known whether he did so. It was about this time that he turned his attention to identifying phonetic sounds within cartouches.

A crucial clue came from the Philae Obelisk, an obelisk bearing both a Greek and an Egyptian inscription. William John Bankes, an English antiquities collector, shipped the obelisk from Egypt to England and copied its inscriptions. These inscriptions were not a single bilingual text like that of the Rosetta Stone, as Bankes assumed, but both inscriptions contained the names "Ptolemy" and "Cleopatra".

Champollion broke down the hieroglyphs in Ptolemy's name differently from Young and found that three of his conjectured phonetic signs—p, l and o—fitted into Cleopatra's cartouche. A fourth, e, was represented by a single hieroglyph in Cleopatra's cartouche and a doubled version of the same glyph in Ptolemy's cartouche. A fifth sound, t, seemed to be written with different signs in each cartouche, but Champollion decided these signs must be homophones, different signs spelling the same sound. He proceeded to test these letters in other cartouches, identify the names of many Greek and Roman rulers of Egypt and extrapolate the values of still more letters.

Champollion announced his proposed readings of the Greco-Roman cartouches in his Lettre à M. Dacier, which he completed on 22 September 1822. He read it to the Académie on 27 September, with Young among the audience. This letter is often regarded as the founding document of Egyptology, although it represented only a modest advance over Young's work. Yet it ended by suggesting, without elaboration, that phonetic signs might have been used in writing proper names from a very early point in Egyptian history. How Champollion reached this conclusion is mostly not recorded in contemporary sources.

According to Hermine Hartleben, who wrote the most extensive biography of Champollion in 1906, the breakthrough came on 14 September 1822, a few days before the Lettre was written, when Champollion was examining Huyot's copies. One cartouche from Abu Simbel contained four hieroglyphic signs. Champollion guessed, or drew on the same guess found in Young's Britannica article, that the circular first sign represented the sun.

Champollion turned to the title of Ptolemy found in the longer cartouches in the Rosetta Stone. Champollion knew the Coptic words that would translate the Greek text and could tell that phonetic hieroglyphs such as p and t would fit these words. From there he could guess the phonetic meanings of several more signs. By Hartleben's account, upon making these discoveries Champollion raced to his brother's office at the Académie des Inscriptions, flung down a collection of copied inscriptions, cried "Je tiens mon affaire!" ("I've done it!" ) and collapsed in a days-long faint.

Champollion made a second breakthrough. Phonetic signs were thus not limited to cartouches. To test his suspicions, Champollion compared hieroglyphic texts that seemed to contain the same content and noted discrepancies in spelling, which indicated the presence of homophones. He compared the resulting list of homophones with the table of phonetic signs from his work on the cartouches and found they matched.

Champollion announced these discoveries to the Académie des Inscriptions in April 1823. From there he progressed rapidly in identifying new signs and words. He concluded the phonetic signs made up a consonantal alphabet in which vowels were only sometimes written.

A summary of his findings, published in 1824, stated "Hieroglyphic writing is a complex system, a script all at once figurative, symbolic and phonetic, in one and the same text, in one and the same sentence, and, I might even venture, one and the same word." The Précis identified hundreds of hieroglyphic words, described differences between hieroglyphs and other scripts, analysed proper names and the uses of cartouches and described some of the language's grammar. Champollion was moving from deciphering a script to translating the underlying language.
"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lettre_%C3%A0_M._Dacier
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decipherment_of_ancient_Egyptian_scripts

---------------------------------------------------------

On This Day: Machine Gun Kelly caught on the same day Dillinger gang escapes prison - Sep. 26, 1933
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364394

On This Day: On-board ammo sinks battleship; over 300 souls lost - Sep. 25, 1911
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364296

On This Day: President Washington signs up for more law and order - Sep. 24, 1789
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364203

On This Day: Neptune found using math!, but is there a Planet Nine?? - Sep. 23, 1846
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364133

On This Day: S.J. Moore joins this long list of presidential assassination plotters - Sep. 22, 1975
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364070

(edited from Wikipedia)
"
Machine Gun Kelly

George Kelly Barnes (1900–1954), better known by his pseudonym "Machine Gun Kelly", was an American gangster from Memphis, Tennessee, active during the Prohibition era. His nickname came from his favorite weapon, a Thompson submachine gun. He is best known for the kidnapping of oil tycoon and businessman Charles F. Urschel in July 1933, from which he and his gang collected a $200,000 ransom. Urschel had collected and left considerable evidence that assisted the subsequent FBI investigation, which eventually led to Kelly's arrest in Memphis on September 26, 1933. His crimes also included bootlegging and armed robbery.

Career

During the Prohibition era of the 1920s and 1930s, Kelly worked as a bootlegger for himself as well as a colleague. After a short time, and several run-ins with the local Memphis police, he decided to leave town and head west with his girlfriend. He was arrested in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1928, for smuggling liquor onto a Native American Reservation, and sentenced to three years at Leavenworth Penitentiary, Kansas, beginning February 11, 1928.

Shortly thereafter, Kelly married Kathryn Thorne, an experienced criminal who purchased Kelly's first machine gun and insisted—despite his lack of interest in weapons—that he perform target practice in the countryside. She also went to great lengths to familiarize his name within underground crime circles.

[Kiidnappings]

According to Persons in Hiding, a 1938 book by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Kelly worked with Kathryn and Eddie Doll in the kidnapping of a wealthy manufacturer [, Arthur Woolverton,] in South Bend, Indiana, for a $50,000 ransom. His kidnapping was reported widely at the time and proved to be historic, characterized by contemporary reporting as a turning point in America’s growing kidnapping scourge. The New York Daily News called his abduction "spectacular", asserted that "for brazen audacity (it) has no parallel", and suggested that such crimes "represent a challenge to organized society".

Kelly's last criminal activity was another history-making abduction – the July 1933 kidnapping of wealthy Oklahoma City resident Charles F. Urschel and his friend Walter R. Jarrett. The Kellys demanded a ransom of $200,000 ($4.5 million today), and held Urschel at the farm of Kathryn's mother and step-father. Urschel, having been blindfolded, made note of evidence of his experience, including remembering background sounds, counting footsteps and leaving fingerprints on surfaces in reach. This proved invaluable for the FBI in its investigation, as agents concluded that Urschel had been held in Paradise, Texas, based on sounds that Urschel remembered hearing while he was being held hostage.

An investigation conducted in Memphis disclosed that the Kellys were living at the residence of J. C. Tichenor. Special agents from Birmingham, Alabama, were immediately dispatched to Memphis, where, in the early morning hours of September 26, 1933, a raid was conducted. George and Kathryn Kelly were taken into custody by FBI agents and Memphis police.

The arrest of the Kellys was overshadowed by the escape of ten inmates, including all of the members of the future Dillinger gang, from the penitentiary in Michigan City, Indiana, that same night.

[Historic trial]

The trial was held on October 12, 1933; George and Kathryn Kelly were convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment.

The kidnapping of Urschel and the two trials that resulted were historic in several ways. They were:

the first federal criminal trials in the United States in which film cameras were allowed;
the first kidnapping trials after the passage of the Lindbergh Law, which made kidnapping a federal crime;
the first major case solved by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI; and
the first prosecution in which defendants were transported by airplane.
"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Gun_Kelly_(gangster)

(edited from article)
"
[Dillinger gang]

John Dillinger was sent to the Indiana State Prison for robbing a grocery store. While he served his sentence, he befriended several seasoned bank robbers, including Harry Pierpont, Homer Van Meter, and Walter Dietrich. They taught him all that they knew about robbing banks including the methods used by the notorious Herman Lamm. They planned future bank heists together when they got out of prison. Knowing Dillinger would likely get out before any of the others, the group began to put together a plan to break out of prison. It would require Dillinger's help from the outside.

On September 26, 1933, Pierpont, Hamilton, Van Meter and six other convicts who were all armed escaped from the prison to a hideout Dillinger had arranged in Hamilton, Ohio.

They were supposed to rendezvous with Dillinger but found out that he was in jail in Lima, Ohio after being arrested for robbing a bank. Wanting to get their friend out of jail, Pierpont, Russell Clark, Charles Makley, and Harry Copeland went to the county jail in Lima. They managed to break Dillinger out of jail, but Pierpont killed the county sheriff, Jess Sarber, in the process.

Dillinger and what was now being called the Dillinger gang relocated to Chicago where they went on a crime spree robbing two police arsenals of three Thompson submachine guns, Winchester rifles and ammunition. They robbed several banks across the Midwest.
"

https://www.thoughtco.com/notorious-bank-robbers-in-history-4126399

---------------------------------------------------------

On This Day: On-board ammo sinks battleship; over 300 souls lost - Sep. 25, 1911
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364296

On This Day: President Washington signs up for more law and order - Sep. 24, 1789
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364203

On This Day: Neptune found using math!, but is there a Planet Nine?? - Sep. 23, 1846
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364133

On This Day: S.J. Moore joins this long list of presidential assassination plots - Sep. 22, 1975
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364070

On This Day: Defense of Marriage Act signed into law, later Biden signs its repeal - Sep. 21, 1996
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016363991

Source: The Hill

09/25/23 6:19 PM ET

Ukraine’s infantry made it past the main layer of defenses in the front line weeks ago, but armored vehicles have now rolled past anti-tank obstacles known as “dragon’s teeth” and are advancing near the town of Verbove in a critical step for Kyiv’s operation.

Armored vehicles, including American-made Strykers, breached the main layer of the infamous “Surovikin line” of defenses, named for the Russian Gen. Sergei Surovikin, which is made up of trenches, mines and anti-tank obstacles.

The Institute for the Study of War first assessed last week that armored vehicles likely penetrated the main layer, though it wasn’t immediately clear if the positions would hold.

Ukrainian commanders have also confirmed to media outlets that the armored vehicles blasted through the main line after troops cleared the way.


Read more: https://thehill.com/newsletters/defense-national-security/4222555-ukraine-busts-through-russias-main-defensive-line/

(edited from Wikipedia)
"
Liberté was a pre-dreadnought battleship built for the French Navy in the mid-1900s. She was the lead ship of the Liberté class, which included three other vessels. Liberté carried a main battery of four 12 in. guns, but mounted ten 7.6 in. guns for her secondary armament in place of the 6.5 in. guns of the earlier vessels. Like many late pre-dreadnought designs, Liberté was completed after the revolutionary British battleship HMS Dreadnought had entered service, rendering her obsolescent.

On entering service, Liberté was assigned to the 2nd Division of the Mediterranean Squadron, based in Toulon. She immediately began the normal peacetime training routine of squadron and fleet maneuvers and cruises to various ports in the Mediterranean. She also participated in several naval reviews for a number of French and foreign dignitaries.

Liberté's active career was cut short on 25 September 1911 when a fire broke out in one of the ship's propellant magazines and led to a detonation of the charges stored there, destroying the ship in a tremendous explosion that killed 286 of her crew. The blast also damaged several other vessels and killed crewmen on six neighboring ships.

An investigation revealed that the standard French propellant, Poudre B, was prone to decomposition that rendered it very unstable; it had likely been the culprit in several other ammunition fires in other ships. The wreck remained in Toulon until 1925, when her destroyed hull was refloated, towed into a drydock, and broken up.

Loss

At 05:31 on the morning of 25 September, crewmen in other battleships reported seeing smoke coming from Liberté, originating from her forward starboard casemate. Shortly thereafter, the forward superstructure erupted in flames, but it quickly appeared to observers that the ship's crew was getting the fire under control.

At 05:53 a tremendous explosion aboard Liberté rocked the harbor. The ship was badly damaged by the blast, with both central 194 mm turrets thrown overboard, the deck amidships collapsed, and the forward 55 m (180 ft) of the ship completely destroyed. The forward 305 mm turret was blasted apart, and only one of the guns was recovered, having been hurled into the muddy bottom of the harbor.

The explosion threw a 37-metric-ton chunk of armor plate from the ship into the battleship République moored some 690 ft away, which caused significant damage. Splinters from the exploding ship sank a steam pinnace and killed fifteen men aboard the armored cruiser Marseillaise, nine aboard the battleship Saint Louis, six aboard the armored cruiser Léon Gambetta, four aboard the battleship Suffren, and three aboard Démocratie. Liberté's surviving crew immediately fled the ship; 286 were killed in the explosion and 188 were wounded. Fortunately, 143 of the crew, including the ship's commander, had been on leave in Toulon at the time and thus avoided the accident.

The navy convened a commission to investigate the incident on 25 September. They considered the possibility of sabotage, but ruled it out. The investigation determined that the accident was likely caused by excessive heat in the magazines and deemed that the standard procedures for ammunition monitoring were not sufficient.

The French Navy had earlier suffered a series of fatal accidents in Toulon, beginning with an explosion aboard a torpedo boat in February 1907 in which nine men were killed. The following month, the battleship Iéna blew up, killing 107 men. An explosion aboard a gunnery training ship killed six in August 1908, and an explosion on a cruiser killed thirteen in September 1910. Six more men were killed aboard the cruiser Gloire just two weeks before Liberté exploded, on 10 September 1911. The culprit was unstable Poudre B, a nitrocellulose-based propellant that was also responsible for the destruction of Iéna, and possibly the other explosions as well.

Following the disaster, the navy established new rules, requiring that propellant charges older than four years be discarded. The Navy Minister also rescinded an order instructing gun crews to return propellant charges that had misfired to the magazines; going forward, charges that had been placed in the guns would either have to be fired or discarded.

The wreck of the ship remained in Toulon for several years, though work on clearing or marking navigational hazards began immediately. World War I, which lasted from 1914 to 1918, significantly delayed work on refloating the remnants of the hull. On 4 September 1920, the old cruiser Latouche-Tréville was fitted with four and later six compressed air pumps and brought alongside to serve as a barracks for the workers and a floating workshop. A pair of submarines and several smaller craft were also used to aid in the recovery effort. On 21 February 1925, Liberté's hull was pumped with compressed air and refloated, before being towed into a drydock in Toulon, where she was broken up.
"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_battleship_Libert%C3%A9

"
HMS Dreadnought

HMS Dreadnought was a Royal Navy battleship the design of which revolutionised naval power. The ship's entry into service in 1906 represented such an advance in naval technology that her name came to be associated with an entire generation of battleships, the dreadnoughts, as well as the class of ships named after her. Likewise, the generation of ships she made obsolete became known as pre-dreadnoughts. Admiral Sir John "Jacky" Fisher, First Sea Lord of the Board of Admiralty, is credited as the father of Dreadnought. Shortly after he assumed office in 1904, he ordered design studies for a battleship armed solely with 12 in (305 mm) guns and a speed of 21 knots (39 km/h; 24 mph). He convened a Committee on Designs to evaluate the alternative designs and to assist in the detailed design work.

Dreadnought was the first battleship of her era to have a uniform main battery, rather than having a few large guns complemented by a heavy secondary armament of smaller guns. She was also the first capital ship to be powered by steam turbines, making her the fastest battleship in the world at the time of her completion. Her launch helped spark a naval arms race as navies around the world, particularly the Imperial German Navy, rushed to match it in the build-up to the First World War.
"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Dreadnought_(1906)

---------------------------------------------------------

On This Day: President Washington signs up for more law and order - Sep. 24, 1789
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364203

On This Day: Neptune found using math!, but is there a Planet Nine?? - Sep. 23, 1846
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364133

On This Day: S.J. Moore joins this long list of presidential assassination plots - Sep. 22, 1975
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364070

On This Day: Defense of Marriage Act signed into law, later Biden signs its repeal - Sep. 21, 1996
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016363991

On This Day: Lenape tribe land in PA swindled; no relief from 21st century courts - Sep. 20, 1737
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016363877

(edited from Wikipedia)
"
The Judiciary Act of 1789 was a United States federal statute enacted during the first session of the First United States Congress. It established the federal judiciary of the United States.

U.S. President George Washington signed the Act into law on September 24, 1789.

Article III, Section 1 of the Constitution prescribed that the "judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and such inferior Courts" as Congress saw fit to establish. It made no provision for the composition or procedures of any of the courts, leaving this to Congress to decide.

The existence of a separate federal judiciary had been controversial during the debates over the ratification of the Constitution. Anti-Federalists had denounced the judicial power as a potential instrument of national tyranny. Indeed, of the ten amendments that eventually became the Bill of Rights, five (the fourth through the eighth) dealt primarily with judicial proceedings. Even after ratification, some opponents of a strong judiciary urged that the federal court system be limited to a Supreme Court and perhaps local admiralty judges. Congress, however, decided to establish a system of federal trial courts with broader jurisdiction, thereby creating an arm for enforcement of national laws within each state.

Legislative history

Senator Richard Henry Lee (AA-Virginia) reported the judiciary bill out of committee on June 12, 1789; Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, who would go on to serve as the third Chief Justice of the United States, was its chief author. The bill passed the Senate 14–6 on July 17, 1789, and the House of Representatives then debated the bill in July and August 1789. The House passed an amended bill 37–16 on September 17, 1789. The Senate struck four of the House amendments and approved the remaining provisions on September 19, 1789. The House passed the Senate's final version of the bill on September 21, 1789. U.S. President George Washington signed the Act into law on September 24, 1789.

Provisions of the Act

The Act set the number of Supreme Court justices at six: one Chief Justice and five Associate Justices. The Supreme Court was given exclusive original jurisdiction over all civil actions between states, or between a state and the United States, as well as over all suits and proceedings brought against ambassadors and other diplomatic personnel; and original, but not exclusive, jurisdiction over all other cases in which a state was a party and any cases brought by an ambassador.

The Court was given appellate jurisdiction over decisions of the federal circuit courts as well as decisions by state courts holding invalid any statute or treaty of the United States; or holding valid any state law or practice that was challenged as being inconsistent with the federal constitution, treaties, or laws; or rejecting any claim made by a party under a provision of the federal constitution, treaties, or laws.

The Act also created 13 judicial districts within the 11 states that had then ratified the Constitution (North Carolina and Rhode Island were added as judicial districts in 1790, and other states as they were admitted to the Union). Each state comprised one district, except for Virginia and Massachusetts, each of which comprised two. Massachusetts was divided into the District of Maine (which was then part of Massachusetts) and the District of Massachusetts (which covered modern-day Massachusetts). Virginia was divided into the District of Kentucky (which was then part of Virginia) and the District of Virginia (which covered modern-day West Virginia and Virginia).

This Act established a circuit court and district court in each judicial district (except in Maine and Kentucky, where the district courts exercised much of the jurisdiction of the circuit courts). The circuit courts, which comprised a district judge and (initially) two Supreme Court justices "riding circuit," had original jurisdiction over serious crimes and civil cases of at least $500 involving diversity jurisdiction or the United States as plaintiff in common law and equity.

The circuit courts also had appellate jurisdiction over the district courts. The single-judge district courts had jurisdiction primarily over admiralty cases, petty crimes, and suits by the United States for at least $100. Notably, at this time, Congress did not grant original federal question jurisdiction to the federal courts, which is why diversity has been described as the "original" and "ancient" jurisdiction of the federal courts.

Congress authorized all people to either represent themselves or to be represented by another person. The Act did not prohibit paying a representative to appear in court.

Congress authorized persons who were sued by citizens of another state, in the courts of the plaintiff's home state, to remove the lawsuit to the federal circuit court. According to Edward A. Purcell Jr., removal was the "most significant innovation" of the Act. The Constitution says nothing about removal jurisdiction, which "was a powerful device to assert the primacy of the national judicial power over that of the states."

The Act created the Office of Attorney General, whose primary responsibility was to represent the United States before the Supreme Court. The Act also created a United States Attorney and a United States Marshal for each judicial district.

The Judiciary Act of 1789 included the Alien Tort Statute, now codified as 28 U.S.C. § 1350, which provides jurisdiction in the district courts over lawsuits by aliens for torts in violation of the law of nations or treaties of the United States.
"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judiciary_Act_of_1789

---------------------------------------------------------

On This Day: Neptune found using math!, but is there a Planet Nine?? - Sep. 23, 1846
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364133

On This Day: S.J. Moore joins this long list of presidential assassination plots - Sep. 22, 1975
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364070

On This Day: Defense of Marriage Act signed into law, later Biden signs its repeal - Sep. 21, 1996
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016363991

On This Day: Lenape tribe land in PA swindled; no relief from 21st century courts - Sep. 20, 1737
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016363877

On This Day: Jamestown burned, followed later by harsher slavery and race laws - September 19, 1676
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016363789

(edited from Wikipedia)
"
The planet Neptune was mathematically predicted before it was directly observed. With a prediction by Urbain Le Verrier, telescopic observations confirming the existence of a major planet were made on the night of September 23–24, 1846, at the Berlin Observatory, by astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle (assisted by Heinrich Louis d'Arrest), working from Le Verrier's calculations. It was a sensational moment of 19th-century science, and dramatic confirmation of Newtonian gravitational theory. In François Arago's apt phrase, Le Verrier had discovered a planet "with the point of his pen".

In retrospect, after it was discovered, it turned out it had been observed many times before but not recognized, and there were others who made various calculations about its location which did not lead to its observation. By 1846, the planet Uranus had completed nearly one full orbit since its discovery by William Herschel in 1781, and astronomers had detected a series of irregularities in its path that could not be entirely explained by Newton's law of universal gravitation. These irregularities could, however, be resolved if the gravity of a farther, unknown planet were disturbing its path around the Sun. In 1845, astronomers Urbain Le Verrier in Paris and John Couch Adams in Cambridge separately began calculations to determine the nature and position of such a planet. Le Verrier's success also led to a tense international dispute over priority.

The conventional wisdom that Neptune's discovery should be "credited to both Adams and Le Verrier" has recently been challenged putting in doubt the accounts of Airy, Challis and Adams in 1846. A later Scientific American article by Sheehan, Kollerstrom and Waff claimed more boldly "The Brits Stole Neptune" and concluded "The achievement was Le Verrier's alone."

The discovery of Neptune led to the discovery of its moon, Triton, by William Lassell just seventeen days later.

Even before Neptune's discovery, some speculated that one planet alone was not enough to explain the discrepancy in Uranus' orbit. [It was postulated] that another planet, of roughly 12 Earth masses, must exist beyond Neptune.

As of 2022, no large planet has been found beyond Neptune that would explain any alleged discrepancy, despite the discovery of trans-Neptunian objects (most notably, Pluto). While the astronomical community widely agrees that "Planet X", as originally envisioned, does not exist, the concept of an as-yet-unobserved planet has been revived by a number of astronomers to explain other anomalies observed in the outer Solar System.
"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_Neptune

(edited from article)
"

Searching for Planet Nine

03.11.22 Science Update

The Solar System has eight planets. In 2006, astronomers reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet, the same class as contains Eris, Sedna, Quaoar, Ceres and perhaps many more solar system small bodies. These are defined approximately as bodies that orbit the Sun but that are not massive enough (unlike regular planets) to gravitationally dominate their environments by clearing away material. Astronomers wonder, though, whether there might not really be a ninth planet previously undiscovered but lurking in the outer reaches of the solar system, perhaps in the giant Oort cloud of objects that begins hundreds of astronomical units (au) from the Sun and extends outward.

The notion that there may be a ninth massive planet in the outer solar system has taken on new appeal with recent data that show that the orbital parameters of some small bodies beyond Neptune (their inclinations, perihelions, and retrograde motions) seem to behave as though they had been influenced by the gravity of a massive object in the outer solar system.

Although these data suffer from observational biases and statistical uncertainties, they have triggered renewed interest in the idea of the presence of another planet. This speculative "Planet 9," according to estimates, would be about 5-10 Earth-masses in size and orbit about 400-800 au from the Sun. A planet at this distance would be extremely difficult to spot in normal optical sky searches because of its faintness, even to telescopes like PanSTARRS and LSST.

The study has been advanced by a team of researchers led by Sigurd Naess of the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Oslo, as a part of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT) collaboration led by Principal Investigator, Professor Suzanne Staggs of Princeton University. Their search found many tentative candidate sources (about 3500 of them) but none could be confirmed, and there were no statistically significant detections. The results cover only about 10-20% of the possibilities, but other sensitive millimeter facilities are coming online and should be able to complete this search for Planet 9 as hypothesized.
"
https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/searching-planet-nine

---------------------------------------------------------

On This Day: S.J. Moore joins this long list of presidential assassination plots - Sep. 22, 1975
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016364070

On This Day: Defense of Marriage Act signed into law, later Biden signs its repeal - Sep. 21, 1996
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016363991

On This Day: Lenape tribe land in PA swindled; no relief from 21st century courts - Sep. 20, 1737
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016363877

On This Day: Jamestown burned, followed later by harsher slavery and race laws - September 19, 1676
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016363789

On This Day: Sep. 18 death prophecy comes true. Seer's life spared. - in the year 96
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016363670