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| On this date in: | |
| 1783 | Gen. George Washington issued his farewell address to the Army near Princeton, N.J. |
| 1795 | James K. Polk, the 11th president of the United States, was born in Mecklenburg County, N.C. |
| 1865 | Warren G. Harding, the 29th president of the United States, was born near Corsica, Ohio. |
| 1889 | North Dakota and South Dakota became the 39th and 40th states. |
| 1917 | British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour expressed support for a national home for the Jews of Palestine in what became known as the Balfour Declaration. |
| 1947 | Howard Hughes piloted his huge wooden airplane, the Spruce Goose, on its only flight, which lasted about a minute over Long Beach Harbor in California. |
| 1948 | President Harry S. Truman narrowly won re-election over Republican challenger Thomas E. Dewey. |
| 1959 | Charles Van Doren admitted to a House subcommittee that he had the questions and answers in advance of his appearances on the TV game show "Twenty-One." |
| 1963 | South Vietnamese President Ngo Dihn Diem was assassinated in a military coup. |
| 1983 | President Ronald Reagan signed a bill establishing a federal holiday on the third Monday of January in honor of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. |
| 2004 | President George W. Bush was elected to a second term as Republicans strengthened their grip on Congress. |
| 2006 | The Rev. Ted Haggard resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals after a man said they had had sexual trysts together. |
Article of the day
Spruce Goose flies
The Hughes Flying Boat--the largest aircraft ever built--is piloted by designer Howard Hughes on its first and only flight. Built with laminated birch and spruce, the massive wooden aircraft had a wingspan longer than a football field and was designed to carry more than 700 men to battle.
Howard Hughes was a successful Hollywood movie producer when he founded the Hughes Aircraft Company in 1932. He personally tested cutting-edge aircraft of his own design and in 1937 broke the transcontinental flight-time record. In 1938, he flew around the world in a record three days, 19 hours, and 14 minutes.
Following the U.S. entrance into World War II in 1941, the U.S. government commissioned the Hughes Aircraft Company to build a large flying boat capable of carrying men and materials over long distances. The concept for what would become the "Spruce Goose" was originally conceived by the industrialist Henry Kaiser, but Kaiser dropped out of the project early, leaving Hughes and his small team to make the H-4 a reality. Because of wartime restrictions on steel, Hughes decided to build his aircraft out of wood laminated with plastic and covered with fabric. Although it was constructed mainly of birch, the use of spruce (along with its white-gray color) would later earn the aircraft the nickname Spruce Goose. It had a wingspan of 320 feet and was powered by eight giant propeller engines.
Development of the Spruce Goose cost a phenomenal $23 million and took so long that the war had ended by the time of its completion in 1946. The aircraft had many detractors, and Congress demanded that Hughes prove the plane airworthy. On November 2, 1947, Hughes obliged, taking the H-4 prototype out into Long Beach Harbor, CA for an unannounced flight test. Thousands of onlookers had come to watch the aircraft taxi on the water and were surprised when Hughes lifted his wooden behemoth 70 feet above the water and flew for a mile before landing.
Despite its successful maiden flight, the Spruce Goose never went into production, primarily because critics alleged that its wooden framework was insufficient to support its weight during long flights. Nevertheless, Howard Hughes, who became increasingly eccentric and withdrawn after 1950, refused to neglect what he saw as his greatest achievement in the aviation field. From 1947 until his death in 1976, he kept the Spruce Goose prototype ready for flight in an enormous, climate-controlled hangar at a cost of $1 million per year. Today, the Spruce Goose is housed at the Evergreen Aviation Museum in McMinnville, Oregon.
Source: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?action=VideoArticle&id=7069
Today Birthdays
| Nelly turns 34 years old today. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 AP Photo/Peter Kramer Rapper Nelly turns 34 years old today.
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