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By History.com Editors

After nine days and four minutes in the sky, the experimental aircraft Voyager lands at Edwards Air Force Base in California, completing the first nonstop flight around the globe on one load of fuel. Piloted by Americans Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager, Voyager was made mostly of plastic and stiffened paper and carried more than three times its weight in fuel when it took off from Edwards Air Force Base on December 14. By the time it returned, after flying 25,012 miles around the planet, it had just five gallons of fuel left in its remaining operational fuel tank.

Voyager was built by Burt Rutan of the Rutan Aircraft Company without government support and with minimal corporate sponsorship. Dick Rutan, Burt’s brother and a decorated Vietnam War pilot, joined the project early on, as did Dick’s friend Jeanna Yeager (no relation to aviator Chuck Yeager). Voyager‘s extremely light yet strong body was made of layers of carbon-fiber tape and paper impregnated with epoxy resin. Its wingspan was 111 feet, and it had its horizontal stabilizer wing on the plane’s nose rather than its rear–a trademark of many of Rutan’s aircraft designs. Essentially a flying fuel tank, every possible area was used for fuel storage and much modern aircraft technology was foregone in the effort to reduce weight.

When Voyager took off from Edwards Air Force at 8:02 a.m. PST on December 14, its wings were so heavy with fuel that their tips scraped along the ground and caused minor damage. The plane made it into the air, however, and headed west. On the second day, Voyager ran into severe turbulence caused by two tropical storms in the Pacific. Dick Rutan had been concerned about flying the aircraft at more than a 15-degree angle, but he soon found the plane could fly on its side at 90 degrees, which occurred when the wind tossed it back and forth.

Rutan and Yeager shared the controls, but Rutan, a more experienced pilot, did most of the flying owing to the long periods of turbulence encountered at various points in the journey. With weak stomachs, they ate only a fraction of the food brought along, and each lost about 10 pounds.

On December 23, when Voyager was flying north along the Baja California coast and just 450 miles short of its goal, the engine it was using went out, and the aircraft …read more

Source: HISTORY

By History.com Editors

On this day in 1943, future President Ronald Reagan, an Army Air Corps first lieutenant during World War II, is on an active-duty assignment with the Army’s First Motion Picture Unit.

Technically, Reagan was a unit public relations officer, however Warner Brothers Studios and the American Army Air Corps had tapped him the previous year to star in a motion picture called Air Force. To allow filming to go forward, Reagan was transferred from his cavalry unit to the Air Corps’ motion-picture unit in early January 1943.

Housed in the old Hal Roach studios, the First Motion Picture Unit (FMPU)–its acronym was pronounced fum-poo–produced military training, morale and propaganda films to aid the war effort. FMPU released Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series and a documentary of the bomber Memphis Belle, the crew of which completed a standard-setting 35 bombing missions in Europe. The films were screened on domestic training grounds and in troop camps overseas as well as in U.S. movie theaters.

Air Force, which was later renamed Beyond the Line of Duty, conveyed the true story of the heroic feats of aviator Shorty Wheliss and his crew and featured narration by Lt. Ronald Reagan. The documentary, intended to promote investment in war bonds, won an Academy Award in 1943 for best short subject. Reagan went on to narrate or star in three more shorts for FMPU including For God and Country,Cadet Classification, and the The Rear Gunner. Reagan also appeared as Johnny Jones in the 1943 full-length musical film This is the Army.

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Source: HISTORY

By History.com Editors

On this day in 1851, a fire sweeps through the Library of Congress and destroys two-thirds of Thomas Jefferson’s personal literary collection.

Jefferson, who died in 1826, had offered to sell his personal library to Congress after the Congressional library, along with the rest of the Capitol and the White House, was burned by the British in 1814, during the War of 1812. His collection of 6,487 volumes of books and newspapers fetched $23,950 and, in addition to providing an invaluable archive to the nation, the fee helped pay off some of Jefferson’s personal debts. According to the Library of Congress, Jefferson also offered to arrange and number all the books himself. He called his collection, which contained a vast assortment of scientific works, an “interesting treasure” that he hoped would have a “national impact.”

Jefferson was a voracious reader who claimed that he could not live without books. His servants often found him sitting on the floor of his library at Monticello surrounded by as many as 20 open books and newspapers at a time. He studied a variety of subjects, including paleontology, mechanics, classical literature, natural history, agriculture, math, chemistry, philosophy and, of course, politics.

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Source: HISTORY

By History.com Editors

On this day in 1917, British Army Council Instruction Number 1069 formally establishes the British Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps (WAAC), authorizing female volunteers to serve alongside their male counterparts in France during World War I.

By 1917, large numbers of women were already working in munitions factories throughout Britain, serving the crucial function of supplying sufficient shells and other munitions for the Allied war effort. The harsh conditions in the factories were undeniable, with long hours spent working with noxious chemicals such as the explosive TNT; a total of 61 female munitions workers died of poisoning, while 81 others died in accidents at work. An explosion at a munitions factory in Silvertown, East London, when an accidental fire ignited 50 tons of TNT, killed 69 more women and severely injured 72 more.

In early 1917, a campaign began to allow women to more directly support the war effort by enlisting in the army to perform labors such as cookery, mechanical and clerical work and other miscellaneous tasks that would otherwise be done by men who could better serve their country in the trenches. By March 11, 1917, even Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander in chief, had come around to the idea, writing to the British War Office that “the principle of employing women in this country [France] is accepted and they will be made use of wherever conditions admit.”

The establishment of the WAAC in the summer of 1917 meant that, for the first time, women were to be put in uniform and sent to France to serve as clerks, telephone operators, waitresses and in other positions on the war front. Women were paid less than their male counterparts: 24 shillings per week for unskilled labor and up to twice that for more skilled labor, such as shorthand typing.

As the stated purpose behind the WAAC was to release British soldiers doing menial work in Britain and France for active service at the front, the War Office set the restriction that for every woman given a job through the WAAC, a man had to be released for frontline duties. None of the female volunteers could become officers–according to traditions in the British army–but those who rose in the ranks were given the status of “controllers” or “administrators.”

By the end of World War I, approximately 80,000 women had served in the three British women’s forces–the WAAC, the Women’s …read more

Source: HISTORY

By History.com Editors

On this day in 1977, Saturday Night Fever, a movie that ignites the disco dance craze across America, along with the movie career of its star, John Travolta, opens in theaters. Travolta earned a Best Actor Academy Award nomination for his performance as 19-year-old Tony Manero, who during the week toils in a Brooklyn, New York hardware store and on the weekend dons a white suit and becomes king of a discotheque called 2001 Odyssey.

Tony takes great care in his appearance, at one point during the film uttering the now-famous line: “Would ya just watch the hair. Ya know, I work on my hair a long time and you hit it. He hits my hair.”

Music played an essential role in Saturday Night Fever, and the film’s soundtrack, which featured a number of songs by the Bee Gees, including “Stayin’ Alive,” “Night Fever,” “How Deep is Your Love” and “Jive Talkin,” became one of the best-selling soundtracks of all time. Saturday Night Fever was one of Gene Siskel’s favorite films. The prominent film critic (who died in 1999) reportedly watched the movie at least 17 times and even purchased the now-iconic white polyester suit Travolta wore while strutting across the lighted dance floor.

Prior to Saturday Night Fever, John Travolta, who was born on February 18, 1954, in Englewood, New Jersey, appeared in the 1976 horror film Carrie, starring Sissy Spacek, and the 1976 made-for-TV movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. He was best known, however, for his role as Vinnie Barbarino, a remedial high school student who employs the catchphrase “Up your nose with a rubber hose” on the TV sitcom Welcome Back Kotter, which originally aired from 1975 to 1979.

After Saturday Night Fever propelled him to international stardom, Travolta followed up with another huge box-office hit, the 1978 big-screen adaptation of the musical Grease. In his role as 1950s-era bad boy Danny to co-star Olivia Newton-John’s good girl Sandy, Travolta charmed audiences with his singing and dancing. Grease was the highest-grossing film of 1978 as well as the highest-grossing movie musical of all time. Following Grease, Travolta helped spark another craze–this time for country music–with the 1980 box-office hit Urban Cowboy, co-starring Debra Winger.

During the 1980s, Travolta starred in a string of mediocre movies, including Staying Alive (1983), a sequel to Saturday Night Fever that was directed and co-written by Sylvester Stallone, …read more

Source: HISTORY

By History.com Editors

On this day in 2008, scientists successfully flip the switch for the first time on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) lab in Geneva, kicking off what many called history’s biggest science experiment.

Testing particle physics theories, the $8 billion LHC is the largest particle accelerator in the world, made up of superconducting magnets that allow engineers and physicists to study subatomic particles including protons, electrons, quarks and photons. The LHC can create 600 million collisions per second.

The 17-mile underground ring, located beneath the Swiss-French border, sends particle beams at the speed of light, causing them to collide and recreate debris caused by the Big Bang. At the time of its launch, some scientists and environmentalists speculated that the LHC would create a mini black hole that could end the world. These claims were refuted by CERN and physicist Stephen Hawking, who said any mini black holes would evaporate instantly.

The goal of the LHC, the largest scientific instrument on the planet, was to create and discover the Higgs boson, better known as “the God particle.” In 1964, Peter Higgs and Francois Englert came up with the theory that the particle associated with a mass-transmitting energy field was the key to how everything in the universe acquires mass.

In 2012, CERN announced the LHC experiments had allowed researchers to observe a particle consistent with the Higgs boson. On Oct. 8, 2013, Higgs and Englert were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.”

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Source: HISTORY

By History.com Editors

Considered one of the world’s greatest ballet dancers of all time, Soviet virtuoso Mikhail Baryshnikov choreographs his own Cold War-era defection from the U.S.S.R. after four years of planning.

Known as “Misha” to his admirers, Baryshnikov, then 26, finished a performance with the Leningrad-based Kirov Ballet in Toronto while on a Canadian tour, and then evaded his KGB handlers, disappearing into the crowd outside, hopping into a waiting car and hiding out until he was officially granted political asylum in Canada. Soon after, he received political asylum in the United States, where he became principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre and the New York City Ballet. He became a U.S. citizen on July 3, 1986.

Baryshnikov called the defection an artistic choice rather than a political one.

“When I was in Toronto, I finally decided that if I let the opportunity of expanding my art in the West slip by, it would haunt me always,” he told The Globe and Mail in his first post-defection interview. “What I have done is called a crime in Russia … But my life is my art and I realized it would be a greater crime to destroy that. I want to work with some of the West’s great choreographers if they think I am worthy of their creations.”

Baryshnikov told People magazine in 1985 that the defection unfolded like a thriller.

“It was arranged secretly through friends,” he said. “I was running, the getaway car was waiting a few blocks away as we were boarding on the group’s bus. KGB was watching us. It was actually funny. Fans are waiting for me outside the stage door, and I walk out and I start to run, and they start to run after me for autograph. They were laughing, I was running for my life. It was very emotional moment, I tell you.”

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Source: HISTORY