- 224th Day of 2013 /141 Remaining
- 41 Days Until The First Day of Autumn
- Sunrise:6:23
- Sunset:8:05
- 13 Hours 42 Minutes of Daylight
- Moon Rise:12:11pm
- Moon Set:11:10pm
- Moon’s Phase:32 %
- The Next Full Moon
- August 20 @ 6:45 pm
- Full Sturgeon Moon
- Full Red Moon
- Full Green Corn Moon
- Full Grain Moon
The fishing tribes are given credit for the naming of this Moon, since sturgeon, a large fish of the Great Lakes and other major bodies of water, were most readily caught during this month. A few tribes knew it as the Full Red Moon because, as the Moon rises, it appears reddish through any sultry haze. It was also called the Green Corn Moon or Grain Moon.
- Tides
- High:2:55am/3:22pm
- Low:8:42am/9:56pm
- Rainfall (measured July 1 – June 30)
- Normal To Date:0.00
- This Year:0.04
- Last Year:0.02
- Annual Seasonal Average:23.80
- Holidays
- Vinyl Record Day
- Kool-Aid Days
- National Toasted Almond Bar Day
- UN International Youth Day
- Arequipa Week-Peru
- Queen’s Birthday-Thailand
- Annual Pilgrimage-Montserrat
- On This Day In …
- 1851 --- Isaac Singer of New York City patented the double-treadle sewing machine on this day. Although a sewing machine had already been patented, Singer’s sewing machine was revolutionary, having a double treadle. With patent in hand, Isaac set up shop in
Boston, Massachusetts and began to manufacture his invention. Even after huge settlements paid to Elias Howe, another sewing machine patent holder, Singer, through business innovations like installment buying, after-sale servicing and trade-in allowances, had the marketplace all sewn up.
- 1865 --- Joseph Lister became the first doctor to use disinfectant during surgery. Hmm. Joseph Lister. That name rings a bell. Yep. Same Joseph Lister as the one whose name is on those bottles of Listerine mouthwash.
- 1877 --- Thomas A. Edison finished figuring out his first phonograph. Edison handed the model of his invention to John Kreusi with instructions on how to build it. Kreusi, a confident man, bet the
inventor $2 and said that there was no way that the machine would ever work. He lost the bet.
- 1879 --- The first National Archery Association tournament took place in Chicago, IL.
- 1898 --- The Spanish-American War was ended with the signing of the peace protocol. The U.S. acquired Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Hawaii was also annexed.
- 1915 --- "Of Human Bondage", by William Somerset Maugham, was first published.
- 1937 --- Comedian Red Skelton got his first taste of network radio as he appeared on the Rudy Vallee Show on NBC.
- 1953 --- The Soviet Union secretly tested its first hydrogen bomb.
- 1960 --- The first balloon satellite, Echo 1, was launched by the United States from Cape Canaveral, Fla.
- 1960 --- The Silver Beetles recruited drummer Pete Best.
- 1961 --- In an effort to stem the tide of refugees attempting to leave East Berlin, the communist government of East Germany begins
building the Berlin Wall to divide East and West Berlin. Construction of the wall caused a short-term crisis in U.S.-Soviet bloc relations, and the wall itself came to symbolize the Cold War.
- 1964 --- For the 10th time in his major-league baseball career, Mickey Mantle hit home runs from both the left and ride sides of the plate in the same game -- setting a new baseball record.
- 1966 --- John Lennon apologized at a news conference in Chicago for
saying "the Beatles are more popular than Jesus."
- 1969 --- The Boston Celtics were sold for $6 million. At the time it was the highest price paid for a pro basketball team.
- 1973 --- Jack Nicklaus won his 14th major golf title. The win broke the record that had been held by Bobby Jones for 50 years.
- 1977 --- The space shuttle Enterprise passed its first solo flight test.
- 1981 --- IBM (International Business Machines) introduced the Model 5150 PC (personal computer). The IBM PC ran on the Intel
8088 microprocessor at 4.77 mHz with one or two 160K floppy disk drives. It had 16 kilobytes of memory, expandable to 256k, five 8-bit ISA slots, a 65-watt power supply, no built-in clock, no built-in serial or parallel ports, and no built-in video capability -- it was available with an optional color monitor. MS-DOS 1.0/1.1 was issued with the PC (IBM later released its own operating system: PC-DOS). Prices started at $1,565. The IBM PC was a smashing success and IBM quickly became the #1 microcomputer company, with Apple dropping to #2.
- 1984 --- Luis Aparicio and Don Drysdale, who began their playing careers on the same day (in 1956), were inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. Also inducted were Pee Wee Reese, Harmon Killebrew and Rick Ferrell.
- 1988 --- The Last Temptation of Christ, the controversial film directed by Martin Scorsese, opened despite demonstrations and protestations by religious groups.
- 1990 --- Fossil hunter Susan Hendrickson discovers three huge bones jutting out of a cliff near Faith, South Dakota. They turn out to be part of the largest-ever Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton ever discovered, a 65 million-year-old specimen dubbed Sue, after its discoverer.
- 1992 --- The United States, Mexico and Canada agreed to form a free-trade zone that would remove most barriers to trade and investment and create the world’s largest trading bloc: The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
- 1994 --- Major league baseball players went on strike rather than allow team owners to limit their salaries. The strike lasted for 232 days. As a result, the World Series was wiped out for the first time in 90 years.
- 1998 --- Swiss banks agreed to pay $1.25 billion to settle lawsuits filed by Holocaust survivors and their heirs. The banks had kept millions of dollars deposited by Holocaust victims and their relatives before and during World War II.
- 2000 --- A Russian nuclear submarine sinks to the bottom of the Barents Sea on this day in 2000; all 118 crew members are later found dead. The exact cause of the disaster remains unknown. The Kursk left port on August 10 to take part in war games with the Russian military. Russian ships, planes and submarines met up in the Barents Sea, which is above the Arctic Circle, to practice military maneuvers. On August 12, the Kursk was scheduled to fire a practice torpedo; at 11:29 a.m., before doing so, two explosions spaced shortly apart occurred in the front hull of the submarine and it plunged toward the bottom of the sea. The Kursk was 500 feet long and weighed 24,000 tons. It had two nuclear reactors and could reach speeds of 28 knots. It was the largest attack submarine in the world, approximately three times the size of the largest subs in the United States Navy. With the fate of the 118 Russian soldiers onboard the Kursk unknown, several nations offered to contribute to the rescue effort, but the Russian government refused any assistance. When divers finally reached the Kursk a week later, they found no signs of life. Under a great deal of pressure, Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to raise the submarine from the sea bottom for an investigation, although no ship or object that size had ever before been recovered from the ocean floor. Furthermore, given that the Barents Sea is frozen for most of the year, the operation had only a small window in which to work. Using $100 million, the best available technology and an international team of experts, the
Kursk was raised on September 26, 2001, about a year after the accident. Unfortunately, however, the team was forced to cut off the front hull from the rest of the sub in order to bring it to the surface, leaving the best evidence of what caused the explosions at the bottom of the sea.
- Birthdays
- Erwin Schrodinger
- Suzanne Vega
- Cecil B. De Mille
- John Cadbury
- James Buchanan ('Diamond Jim') Brady
- Casey Affleck
- George Hamilton
- Mark Knopfler
- Kid Creole
- Pat Metheny
- Sir Mix-A-Lot
- Lillie Devereux Blake
- Mary Roberts Reinhardt
- Christy Mathewson
- Vincent Bendix
- George Bellows
- Oscar Homolka
- Cantinflas
- Jane Wyatt
- John Derek