DECEMBER 12th

On this date in:
1745	John Jay, American statesman and the first chief justice of the Supreme Court, was born in New York City.
1787	Pennsylvania became the second state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
1870	Joseph H. Rainey of South Carolina took his seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the first black congressman.
1897	"The Katzenjammer Kids," the pioneering comic strip by Rudolph Dirks, debuted in the New York Journal.
1914	The New York Stock Exchange re-opened for the first time since July 30. The market had shut down when World War I broke out.
1915	Singer Frank Sinatra was born in Hoboken, N.J.
1917	Father Edward Flanagan founded Boys Town outside Omaha, Neb.
1925	The first motel - the "Motel Inn" - opened, in San Luis Obispo, Calif.
1946	A United Nations committee voted to accept a six-block tract of Manhattan real estate offered as a gift by John D. Rockefeller Jr. to be the site of U.N. headquarters.
1947	The United Mine Workers union withdrew from the American Federation of Labor.
1975	Sara Jane Moore pleaded guilty to trying to kill President Gerald R. Ford.
1998	Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles died in Tallahassee at age 68.
1998	The House Judiciary Committee approved a fourth and final article of impeachment against President Bill Clinton and submitted the case to the full House.
1999	"Catch-22" author Joseph Heller died at age 76.
2000	A divided U.S. Supreme Court halted the presidential recount in Florida, effectively making Republican George W. Bush the winner.
2000	The Marine Corps grounded all eight of its high-tech V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft following a fiery crash in North Carolina that killed four Marines.
2003	Keiko, the killer whale made famous by the "Free Willy" movies, died in a Norwegian fjord.
2007	Ike Turner, the rock pioneer and ex-husband of Tina Turner, died at age 76.

Article of the day

Da Vinci notebook sells for over $5 million

On this day in 1980, American oil tycoon Armand Hammer pays $5,126,000 at auction for a notebook containing writings by the legendary artist Leonardo da Vinci.

The manuscript, written around 1508, was one of some 30 similar books da Vinci produced during his lifetime on a variety of subjects. It contained 72 loose pages featuring some 300 notes and detailed drawings, all relating to the common theme of water and how it moved. Experts have said that da Vinci drew on it to paint the background of his masterwork, the Mona Lisa. The text, written in brown ink and chalk, read from right to left, an example of da Vinci's favored mirror-writing technique. The painter Giuseppi Ghezzi discovered the notebook in 1690 in a chest of papers belonging to Guglielmo della Porto, a 16th-century Milanese sculptor who had studied Leonardo's work. In 1717, Thomas Coke, the first earl of Leicester, bought the manuscript and installed it among his impressive collection of art at his family estate in England.

More than two centuries later, the notebook--by now known as the Leicester Codex--showed up on the auction block at Christie's in London when the current Lord Coke was forced to sell it to cover inheritance taxes on the estate and art collection. In the days before the sale, art experts and the press speculated that the notebook would go for $7 to $20 million. In fact, the bidding started at $1.4 million and lasted less than two minutes, as Hammer and at least two or three other bidders competed to raise the price $100,000 at a time. The $5.12 million price tag was the highest ever paid for a manuscript at that time; a copy of the legendary Gutenberg Bible had gone for only $2 million in 1978. "I’m very happy with the price. I expected to pay more," Hammer said later. "There is no work of art in the world I wanted more than this." Lord Coke, on the other hand, was only "reasonably happy" with the sale; he claimed the proceeds would not be sufficient to cover the taxes he owed.

Hammer, the president of Occidental Petroleum Corporation, renamed his prize the Hammer Codex and added it to his valuable collection of art. When Hammer died in 1990, he left the notebook and other works to the Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Several years later, the museum offered the manuscript for sale, claiming it was forced to take this action to cover legal costs incurred when the niece and sole heir of Hammer's late wife, Frances, sued the estate claiming Hammer had cheated Frances out of her rightful share of his fortune. On November 11, 1994, the Hammer Codex was sold to an anonymous bidder--soon identified as Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft--at a New York auction for a new record high price of $30.8 million. Gates restored the title of Leicester Codex and has since loaned the manuscript to a number of museums for public display.

Today Birthdays

Jennifer Connelly turns 38 years old today.

AP Photo/Denis Poroy Actress Jennifer Connelly turns 38 years old today.

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