True, but outside of the protection of Earth's atmosphere is a totally different place, quite treacherous. Don't have to go far to get into some really bad stuff!
On January 7, 1558, French troops under Francis, Duke of Guise, capture the port city of Calais from the English. Calais was the last French soil held by the English as a result of victories in the Hundred Years War, having been captured in 1347. Calais flourished under English rule but still was heavily influenced by the French as part of the Diocese of Theoruanne. When the English abolished the Diocese, King Henry II recalled Fancis from the south of France, where he had been organizing an army to attack Italian assets, and ordered him to launch a secret winter strike on Calais. The attack began on January 1 and by the 7th, Governor Lord Wentworth surrendered. The loss had a profound impact on Queen Mary, who from her deathbed a few months later, said,"When I am dead and cut open, they will find Philip (her King Consort) and Calais inscribed on my heart." On January 7, 1608, fire nearly totally destroys Jamestown, England's first settlement on continental North America. Only a handful of houses survived. The only written record of the fire comes from the colony's governor, Captain James Smith, who wrote in his journal, "I begin to think that it is safer for me to dwell in the wild Indian country than in this stockade, where fools accidentally discharge their muskets and others burn down their homes at night." The fire launched Jamestown into what is known as its "Starving Time," as the region was in the midst of an extreme drought and various delays prevented a meaningful resupply of the colony until 1610. During this time, Pocahontas, princess of the neighboring Powhatan tribe, was instrumental in supplying the colonists with food and clothing. (copy of a 1608 map shows the location of Jamestown) On January 7, 1904, Marconi International Marine Communication Co. instructs its members to use the code "CQD" to signal a ship in distress. The Morse code "CQ" was already in use by land and marine radiomen as the start of any general call; "CQ" meant "to anyone listening." The "D" was added for "distress." The code was already in use but not standard practice; sometimes a simple transmission of the word "help" did the trick. The first successful use of "CQD" actually came in December of 1903, when the American steamer Kroonland lost a propeller in the English Channel and received help from an English ship. "CQD" was only used 9 times before the International Radiotelegraphic Convention adopted the easier to recognize "SOS" in 1906. Titanic radio operator Jack Phillips tried CQD first, switching to SOS as that disaster unfolded. (undated photo of an early shipboard wireless room)
On January 14, 1954, the Nash-Kelvinator Corp. and Hudson Motorcar Corp. merge to form American Motors. It was, at the time, the largest corporate merger in US history. Under CEO George Romney (father of US Senator Mitt), AMC early on employed a "dinosaur fighter" strategy; while the Big 3 of Ford, GM and Chrysler built ever-larger cars, AMC grabbed the market for midsize and, especially, compact cars (below: AMC's famed 1957 Nash Metropolitan). The strategy kept AMC relevant for a couple of decades, but the gas crisis of the 70's forced the Big 3 into AMC's realm. Renault Inc. purchased a significant portion of AMC in the late 70's and in 1987, Chrysler bought and merged the company out of existence. (below right: the '75 AMC Pacer) On January 14, 1973, Aloha From Hawaii is broadcast live via satellite to audiences in Asia and throughout Oceania (Australia and other island nations in the southwest Pacific), and delay broadcast the same day to Europe. To avoid a scheduling conflict with Super Bowl VII the same night, the Elvis Presley concert was held for broadcast in the US until April. Even without the same night viewership of Elvis' home nation, Aloha From Hawaii was and remains the most watched live broadcast by a solo performer in television history, with viewership somewhere between 150-200 million (original estimates put the viewership at about 1.5 billion, more than the actual combined population of the nations that accepted the broadcast). About 37% of people watching TV in Japan that night were tuned in to Aloha; the viewing percentage was above 70 in South Korea and nearly 92% in the Philippines. The April rebroadcast drew a 57 share in the U.S. and was NBC's highest viewed show that year. Elvis performed 22 songs wearing a variation of his Las Vegas-residency white jumpsuit, this one with an embroidered bald eagle across the back (Elvis wanted something "patriotic" for the show, and this was one of the few times he requested a special costume from wardrobe designer Bill Belew). Once the audience cleared the building, Elvis returned to the stage and recorded additional material for the U.S. broadcast.
On January 15, 1943, The Pentagon, headquarters for the U.S. Department of Defense in Arlington, VA, is formally dedicated. Before the Pentagon, offices for what was then called the War Department were spread throughout Washington DC in several buildings, including some "temporary" buildings thrown up during WWI. When a new building on C Street built in the 30's proved too small to consolidate the Department under one roof (that building is now home of the State Department), Congress approved construction of The Pentagon. Washington zoning laws prohibited a building taller than 4 floors, meaning the new building needed a sprawling footprint. At 29 acres, it to this day has the largest footprint of any building in the world, and its 6.5 million square feet of office space made it the world's largest office building until surpassed by the Diamond Exchange Center in India in 2023. About 26,000 military and civilians work in The Pentagon. On January 15, 1865, the Confederacy's last major seaport is cut off when Fort Fisher falls to Union troops. Essentially two earthworks - one 1,800 feet long protecting the mouth of the Cape Fear River, the other (below) about a mile long facing the Atlantic - Fort Fisher safeguarded sea access to the port of Wilmington, NC with about 50 cannon and a garrison of 2,400. An assault on Christmas Eve, 1864 failed, but on January 12th, Union ships commenced 3 days of cannon fire on the fort, and an amphibious landing by about 2,000 troops on the15th took the fort after six hours of fierce fighting. The loss of Fort Fisher severed the last supply lines to Lee's forces fighting a defensive campaign to the north. On January 15, 1892, James Naismith, physical education coach at the YMCA International Training Center in Springfield, Mass, publishes Basket Ball, the rules of the game he had spent the previous months developing. Naismith was tasked by the school's head of PE to come up with an indoor activity to keep the "perpetually short tempered" students occupied during the winter. The overriding requirement Naismith faced was that the game not be too rough. In addition to the rule that the ball could only be advanced by being passed rather than run with or kicked, the safety rule dictated Basket Ball's most fundamental difference from other sports; the goals were placed high over the player's heads. Naismith originally conceived boxes as the goals; when he asked a custodian for the boxes he was given two peach baskets instead. In an interview years later, Naismith confided the first game of basket ball was exactly not what he was asked to deliver: he blew a whistle to start play and the players proceded to beat the hell out of each other. Eventually he got it figured out; baskeball ranks fifth in the list of the world's most played team sports (behind soccer, cricket, field hockey and volleyball).
On January 16, 1883, President Chester Arthur signs the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act into law. Prior to 1883, many desirable government jobs were filled through patronage, the practice of elected officials giving jobs to their supporters as a gratuity. The Pendleton Act (below: Sen. George Pendleton, D-Ohio) outlawed the so-called "Spoils System" and created the U.S. Civil Service Commission, which established an exam system to ensure that civil service hires were made through merit rather than patronage. The Commission was replaced by several boards through the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, and in 1981, Luevano v Campbell abolished the exam system on the grounds that it was racially discriminatory. On January 17, 1547, Ivan IV is crowned Tsar (a Slavic derivation of the latin "caesar") of Russia, aka Tsar of Moscovy. For the previous 264 years, Moscovy (Moscow) had been a principality of the Mongol Empire, but its influence in Russia had waned in the last 100 years, and by the time Ivan succeeded his father Vasily III, the "Golden Horde" had been defeated. The Tsardom of Russia would expand rapidly over the next 174 years, until Peter the Great established the Russian Empire in 1721. On January 16, 1969, the Soviet spacecraft Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 complete the first docking of crewed spacecraft in outer space. Soyuz 4 launched from the Baikonur Launch Center on Jan. 14 with Vladimir Shatalov as the lone crew member. Soyuz 5 launched 23 hours later with Aleksei Yeliseyev, Yevgeny Khrunov and Boris Volinov aboard. The two craft met up in orbit over the Soviet Union on the morning of the 16th and spent 4 and a half hours docked, during which Yeliseyev and Khrunov transferred to Soyuz 4. Because the two orbiters had been built with only rudimentary docking facilities and no connecting tunnel (the Soyuz program objectives were hastily rewritten after Soyuz 2 and 3 failed their planned in-flight docking the previous October), the crew transfer was accomplished via spacewalk, the only time in history a ship-to-ship personnel transfer has been performed via EVA. Issues with Yeliseyev's tether lines during the transfer prevented filming of the EVA in progress (photo shows a model of the docked ships). Both ships then returned to the USSR with their reconfigured crews over the next 48 hours. Two months later, the US would complete its first successful crewed docking and personnel transfer with the command and lunar modules of Apollo 9. On January 16, 1996, Jamaican authorities open fire on Hemisphere Dancer, an Air Force surplus amphibious plane owned by pop music star Jimmy Buffett. The plane was taxiing ashore in the waters off Negril, and police believed it to be smuggling marijuana. Buffett was aboard, as was U2 singer Bono, Bono's wife and children, U2 bassist Adam Clayton, and Island Records founder Chris Blackwell. No one was hurt and police apologized for the incident, though Bono (who would say he felt like they flew into a James Bond movie) cancelled the rest of his Jamaican vacation and returned to the States. Buffett would say the group was only coming to the island for some of its famous Jamaican chicken and had no marijuana aboard, a "fact" he would be coy about in the lyrics of "Jamaica Mistaica," the song he later wrote about the incident. (Hemisphere Dancer, now on display at Buffett's Orlando, FL restaurant).
On January 17, 1920 - exactly one year after the 18th Amendment was officially ratified by the states - National Prohibition begins in the United States. Prohibition was defined by the Volstead Act, passed by Congress 3 months earlier, which officially prohibited the sale of alcohol, defined what constituted an alcoholic beverage, and spelled out the penalties for violation of the law. What it didn't do was legislate any kind of enforcement of anti-liquor laws, and a nation-wide cottage industry devoted to quenching America's thirst for alcohol soon rose. By early 1933, President Roosevelt would sign the Cullen-Harrison Act into law, permitting the sale and consumption of beer and other low alcohol-content beverages. Before the end of the year, passage of the 21st Amendment would repeal 18A. (photo: deputies in Orange County, CA, dump vats of alcohol into the sewers, 1932) On January 17, 1917, the U.S. purchases the Danish West Indies from Denmark for $25 million. The islands consist of St. Thomas, St. Croix, St. John and 50 other minor islands in the Lesser Antilles. In 1954, the Danish West Indies would be officially renamed the Virgin Islands of the United States (Christopher Columbus is believed to be the first European to have seen the islands and to have called them the Virgin Islands). An unincorporated territory of the U.S., the Virgin Islands have one delegate in the U.S. House of Representatives (currently Stacey Plaskett-D) who can debate but not vote. Residents born on the islands are U.S. citizens, though they cannot vote in Presidential elections. (Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, capital city of the USVI) On January 17, 1980, an audience in New Brunswick, Canada, hears Rush perform "Natural Science" live for the first time. The last track on the Permanent Waves album (released 3 days prior), "Natural Science" was also the last song written and recorded for the album. As was common for the band, Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee wrote the music while Neil Peart wrote the lyrics, but Peart disgarded his first attempt at what would be one of Rush's famed epic-length songs, in this case a sci-fi track based on the "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" tale from the Arthurian legends. He then composed "Natural Science" after enduring 3 days of writer's block; some of the music written for "Sir Gawain" was incorporated into the final track. Echo was a common effect throughout the piece, and was created naturally, by sticking an amp through a window and bouncing portions of the original recording off the mountains where Le Studio (in Quebec) was located. In a fan Q&A not long after the band's final tour, Alex said "Natural Science" was his favorite Rush composition to play live.
On January 20, 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John Garner Nance are sworn in for their second terms as President and VP, the first time the inauguration is held on 1/20. The date was moved as one of a number of changes related to presidential elections by the 20th Amendment. The overriding factor in moving the inauguration was to shorten the "lame duck" period between the election in early November and the inauguration, which had previously been in early March. On January 20, 1909, General Motors acquires a share of the Oakland Motor Car Company. William Durant, a prominent dealer in horse drawn carriages, purchased Buick Motors in 1904, then created GM as a holding company to manage Buick in 1908. He added Olds Motor Works that November, and added Oakland to the group two months later. GM continued expanding over the following decades, including Chevrolet and Cadillac, both of which severely hurt Oakland's sales. In 1926, Oakland acquired, and later merged with Pontiac Motors. Pontiac became one of the 5 major pillars of the General Motors family until it disolved in 2010.
On January 23, 1960, the USS Trieste descends and successfully surfaces from the deepest part of the oceans known to man - Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench of the Pacific Ocean. The Trieste is a bathyscaphe, a self-propelled submersible designed for extreme depths. All submarines take on seawater to help them descend, but a conventional submarine then expels the water to surface. The extreme pressure at maximum depth won't allow that, so a bathyscaphe carries solid ballast that can be released to allow it to surface. The first bathyscaphe was designed and built by Auguste Piccard in 1946; his son Jacques co-piloted the Trieste on its historic dive along with Don Walsh. The Trieste's depth finder recorded the dive at 37,800 feet, but later improvements to the equipment showed the dive in fact reached bottom at 35,798 feet. (The Trieste on the surface moments before diving into the Trench, and aloft in 1958.) On January 23, 1986, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducts its inaugural class: Elvis Presley, James Brown, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Sam Cooke, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis. The Hall of Fame Foundation was founded in 1983 by Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun. A search committee chose Cleveland, OH as home to the Hall for a variety of contributions to the foundation of rock and roll, including being home to WJW radio, which is credited with launching the career of DJ Alan Freed (who coined the phrase "rock and roll"; Freed was a non-performer inductee of the inaugural class). On January 23, 1978, Terry Kath, singer/guitarist and co-founder of the rock/jazz fusion band Chicago, kills himself with a gunshot to the head. He was 8 days shy of his 32nd birthday. Kath admittedly had drug problems and regularly carried a gun, but bandmates insist he was not suicidal. His death happened at the home of one of the band's roadies, who said Kath played a couple of rounds of "Russian Roulette" with one of his guns (which was unloaded) before picking up a second gun and removing the clip before putting it to his head, not realizing there was a round chambered. Many rock historians consider Kath one of the most underrated guitar players of the genre; co-founder Walt Parazaider claims Jimi Hendrix once told him, "Your guitar player is better than me." (Chicago performs Kath's "25 or 6 to 4" in 1970)
