On November 10, 1951, the first U.S. direct-dial transcontinental telephone call was made by the mayor of Englewood, NJ, who dialed a 10-digit number on a black rotary phone in an AT&T switching station. He was flanked by nine men in business suits from AT&T and its Bell Laboratories subsidiary. Eighteen seconds later, he reached the mayor of Alameda, CA, near San Francisco. The connection speed was blisteringly fast compared with that of 1915, when early attempts at transcontinental calls from San Francisco to New York required as many as five operators nationwide, each asking “Number, please?” – taking 23 minutes to complete. Direct-dialing was made possible via the Bell System’s use of expensive automated switching systems and the North American Numbering Plan, which assigned three-digit area codes to the continent in 1947. States needing multiple area codes had codes with a middle digit of 1; the rest had a middle digit of 0. The most populous regions received codes that took the shortest time to dial on rotary phones. Today the U.S. has nearly 300 area codes.
“Billions upon billions of stars” … Astronomer, astrophysicist and cosmologist Carl Sagan was born on November 9, 1934, in Brooklyn, NY. He developed an interest in the stars at an early age. He attended the University of Chicago, earning graduate degrees in astronomy and astrophysics. Later he lectured at Harvard University but was denied tenure in 1968 and moved to Cornell University, where he became a full professor and directed its Laboratory for Planetary Studies until his death in 1996. From the start of the U.S. space program in the 1950s he was a NASA advisor, and he played important roles in major robotic spacecraft missions into the Solar System, including Pioneer 10 and 11 and both Voyager space probes (1977). Sagan became one of the world’s most famous scientists in the fall of 1980 when he developed and hosted the 13-part PBS series “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage,” which covered many subjects, ranging from the history of science to the nature of the universe. He was a key advocate for the search for extraterrestrial life and sounded an early alarm on global warming.
Author and journalist Margaret Mitchell was born on November 8, 1900, in Atlanta, Georgia. Her mother instilled in her a bitter view of the post-Civil War South, haunted by the damage of General Sherman’s “March to the Sea” through Georgia. She also listened to war veterans’ one-sided stories. Mitchell attended Smith College, then wrote for the Atlanta Journal for six years. She quit after marrying John Marsh in 1926 because of a persistent ankle injury. Partly egged-on by her husband, she began writing a Civil War novel (in secret) whose heroine, a plantation-owner’s spoiled daughter named Pansy O'Hara (later renamed Scarlett), would do anything to escape post-war poverty and loss. Mitchell used parts of the manuscript, titled Gone With the Wind, to steady a wobbly sofa. Known for her interest in “dirty” book stores, she collected erotica and relished pornography. During the 10 years in which she wrote the novel – published in 1936 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize – she was also reading sexology books. Her racially-charged views on sex are strongly reflected in the character of Rhett Butler.
Happy 70th birthday to singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, who was born Roberta Joan Anderson on November 7, 1943, at Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada. At age 8 in Saskatchewan, she contracted polio during the last major epidemic in North America (1951) prior to the Salk vaccine’s success. She recovered, took an avid interest in many types of music, learned guitar from a Pete Seeger instruction book, and in 1964 moved to Toronto, where she found folk singing gigs. She also had a daughter she gave up for adoption, not even telling her parents. Joni’s compositions were covered by Tom Rush, Buffy Sainte-Marie and especially Judy Collins ("Both Sides Now," "Chelsea Morning"). After winning a Grammy for her album “Clouds” (1969), Joni released “Ladies of the Canyon” (1970), which included the song "Woodstock." In 1971 she recorded her landmark album “Blue,” which followed successive breakups with Graham Nash and James Taylor. The New York Times has ranked “Blue” as one of 25 albums representing "turning points and pinnacles in 20th-century popular music."
On November 7, 1929, nine days after the Stock Market Crash, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) opened at its first location in rented space at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street in New York. It was the brainchild of three progressive art patrons: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, wife of multimillionaire John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and two of her friends, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan. Known as "the Ladies," they wanted to counterbalance the prevailing conservatism of traditional museums and promote modern art. Mrs. Rockefeller began amassing her own collection between 1925 and 1935, largely works on paper, focusing on living American artists. Because her husband was opposed to the museum – and modern art – he would not fund the venture, so MoMA moved into three other temporary spaces in the next 10 years. But in 1936, Rockefeller donated the land for its current site on 53rd Street. Its distinctive “International Style” building opened in 1939 (renovated in 2002-2004). Pictured: MoMA’s renowned “Reflections of Clouds on the Water-Lily Pond,” Claude Monet (c. 1920).
Conductor and composer John Philip Sousa, America’s “March King,” was born on November 6, 1854, in Washington, D.C. As a child playing the violin and studying music, it was found he had perfect pitch. At 13 he apprenticed with the U.S. Marine Band, in which his father was a trombonist. Starting in 1880 and for the next 12 years, he conducted that band and began writing marches – 136 over his lifetime. He also conducted "The President's Own" band for Presidents Hayes, Garfield, Cleveland, Arthur and Harrison. His greatest marches include "Semper Fidelis" (1888), the official march of the U.S. Marine Corps; "The Washington Post" (1889), named for the newspaper that commissioned it; "The Liberty Bell" (1893); and his greatest work, "Stars and Stripes Forever" (1896), with its piccolo obbligato, declared by Congress the National March of the United States. In 1892 he formed his own Sousa Band and developed the sousaphone (similar to the tuba). Sousa was also one of the world’s greatest trapshooters and helped found what became the Amateur Trapshooting Association.
On November 5, 1605, the Gunpowder Plot, intended to assassinate King James I by blowing up the House of Lords, was thwarted in London. The treachery was part of a revolt in Britain’s Midlands designed to install James' young daughter (granddaughter of Mary Queen of Scots) as the Catholic head of state, thereby reversing England’s break from the Church of Rome. One of the 13 members of the plot, Guy Fawkes, was apprehended while guarding 36 barrels of gunpowder placed under the House of Lords. He was later sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. The date became known as Gunpowder Treason Day, Bonfire Night and other names, on which people lit bonfires and burned effigies of hate-figures, often the pope, out of anti-Catholic sentiment. Over time masks of Fawkes became common and the annual occasion was called Guy Fawkes Day. Stylized Fawkes masks seen in the movie “V for Vendetta” (2006) are now used by post-modern anarchists, particularly the hacktivists Anonymous. The modern word “guy” is derived from references to Guy Fawkes.
The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) was established on November 4, 1952, by order of President Harry Truman. Its predecessor was the Armed Forces Security Agency (1949), which failed to centralize post-World War II intelligence functions or coordinate them with civilian agencies. Operating under the Defense Department, the NSA’s function is to manage signals intelligence, i.e., interception of communications. It monitors, collects, decodes and analyzes information for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence. It is authorized to do so via clandestine means and allegedly via use of subversive software. It conducts surveillance of specific individuals within the United States and collects and stores all phone records of all American citizens. Its 1,300 buildings are headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland, between Baltimore and Washington. The NSA is Maryland’s largest employer and largest consumer of electric power. Its large main building is sheathed in one-way dark glass that is lined with copper shielding to trap signals and prevent espionage. NSA owns the world’s single largest group of supercomputers.
Bookseller and publisher Karl Baedeker was born on November 3, 1801, in Essen, Prussia, the eldest of 10 sons of a printer and bookseller. In 1827, at age 25, he started a bookselling and publishing business in Koblenz, a hub of tourism in the Rhine region. He acquired a publishing house that sold a traveler’s handbook for Rhine journeys, which he revised as a single-source guide that included information he believed would be useful, such as tourist sights, routes, transportation, hotels, restaurants, tipping and prices. Such data distinguished his books from English travel guides published from 1836 by John Murray, which Baedeker admired and emulated. He was known for being incorruptible in his dealings, often checking the quality of establishments by making incognito visits, and used a system of stars to denote places of special interest. His red-bound Baedeker handbooks became indispensable for their clearness, accuracy, detail and reliable maps. One historian has said of Baedeker, "It is a moot point whether he invented tourism or tourism invented him."
Realist author Stephen Crane was born on November 1, 1871, in Newark, NJ, the last of 14 children of a Methodist minister and his wife. Though sickly as a child, he was precocious and taught himself to read by age 4. He spent less than two years as a college student, partly at Syracuse University, before starting a freelance writing career in New York, where he lived in the gritty, impoverished world of the Bowery in Lower Manhattan. From this emerged his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), the tale of a girl driven to prostitution. He also contracted various diseases in this period (and later as a war correspondent abroad). Crane’s fascination with stories of Civil War battles resulted in his masterwork of naturalism, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), which he called "a psychological portrayal of fear," told through the inner experiences of a young Union private whose dreams of glory disappear when he flees from battle. Crane had never been to war, but the book became a huge bestseller in the United States and Britain. He died of tuberculosis at age 28.
