1860 – The first successful United States Pony Express run from Saint Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, California begins. Mail takes eleven days from Saint Louis to San Francisco. Less than a year and a half later telegraph from coast to coast makes the Pony Express obsolete.

1885 – Gottlieb Daimler is granted a German patent for his engine design, making the automobile practical.

1917 – Vladimir Lenin arrives in Russia from exile, marking the beginning of Bolshevik leadership in the Russian Revolution.

1922 – Joseph Stalin becomes the first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. People who argue with this turn up dead, if they turn up at all.

1941 – Churchill warns Stalin of German invasion. Didn’t make a difference. Stalin had secretly signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler, and he’d murdered all his experienced military leadership because of politics.

1942 – World War II: Japanese forces begin an assault on the United States and Filipino troops on the Bataan Peninsula. The American and Filipino survivors are savaged by their Japanese captors. 5,000-10,000 Filipino and 600-650 American prisoners of war died in what came to be known as the “Bataan Death March”. In 1946 Japanese Lt. General Masaharu Homma is executed in the Philippines for leading the Bataan Death March.

1948 – President Harry S. Truman signs the Marshall Plan, authorizing $5 billion in aid for 16 countries, including former enemies. $5 billion? That won’t hardly buy off a dimmocrat crony today…

1968 – Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech.

1973 – The first portable cell phone call is made in New York City, United States (driving 20MPH under the speed limit in the fast lane with traffic piling up behind…)

1974 – The Super Outbreak occurs, the biggest tornado outbreak in recorded history. The death toll is 315, with nearly 5,500 injured. This is the bunch that ravaged Xenia, Ohio and Brandenburg, Kentucky. I was at Fort Knox, close to Brandenburg. We treated victims and sheltered survivors.

1981 – The Osborne 1, the first successful portable computer, is unveiled at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. 64kB RAM (1/25000th of my MacBook Pro’s 16 GB). It used 360kB 5.25 floppies. My Macbook Pro has 512 GB solid state drive – 14,000 times the storage. The Osborne displayed a 5? monochrome monitor that could show 24 lines of 52 characters each, and I have to say “Retina” and the Osbourne cost $1,795 in 1981 dollars or $4,635 today. Man, those were the good old days!

1982 – The United Kingdom sends a naval task force to the south Atlantic to reclaim the disputed Falkland Islands from Argentina on orders from “Iron Meg”, Margaret Thatcher. Back when Brit leaders had principles.

1986 – US national debt hits $2 trillion. That WAS the WHOLE debt. Under our new overlords, that’s not even the whole budget deficit for Obama’s first two years.

1996 – A United States Air Force airplane carrying United States Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown crashes in Croatia, killing all 35 on board. He was a friend of Bill ‘n’ Hillary Clinton, perhaps not the safest thing to be… NO idea what he knew that they didn’t want him to tell…

2010 – Apple Inc. released the first generation iPad, a tablet computer. I have the big iPad Pro. Call me a fan.
Said Steve Jobs in 1983:

“Strategy is really simple. What we want to do at Apple, is we want to put an incredibly great computer in a book that you can carry around with you and learn how to use in 20 minutes … And we really want to do it with a radio link in it so you don’t have to hook up to anything and you’re in communication with all of these larger databases and other computers.”

300,000 were sold on the first day of its availability.