This Day in History

 Mar 31, 1889:
Eiffel Tower opens



On March 31, 1889, the Eiffel Tower is dedicated in Paris in a ceremony presided over by Gustave Eiffel, the tower's designer, and attended by French Prime Minister Pierre Tirard, a handful of other dignitaries, and 200 construction workers.

In 1889, to honor of the centenary of the French Revolution, the French government planned an international exposition and announced a design competition for a monument to be built on the Champ-de-Mars in central Paris. Out of more than 100 designs submitted, the Centennial Committee chose Eiffel's plan of an open-lattice wrought-iron tower that would reach almost 1,000 feet above Paris and be the world's tallest man-made structure. Eiffel, a noted bridge builder, was a master of metal construction and designed the framework of the Statue of Liberty that had recently been erected in New York Harbor.

Eiffel's tower was greeted with skepticism from critics who argued that it would be structurally unsound, and indignation from others who thought it would be an eyesore in the heart of Paris. Unperturbed, Eiffel completed his great tower under budget in just two years. Only one worker lost his life during construction, which at the time was a remarkably low casualty number for a project of that magnitude. The light, airy structure was by all accounts a technological wonder and within a few decades came to be regarded as an architectural masterpiece.

The Eiffel Tower is 984 feet tall and consists of an iron framework supported on four masonry piers, from which rise four columns that unite to form a single vertical tower. Platforms, each with an observation deck, are at three levels. Elevators ascend the piers on a curve, and Eiffel contracted the Otis Elevator Company of the United States to design the tower's famous glass-cage elevators.

The elevators were not completed by March 31, 1889, however, so Gustave Eiffel ascended the tower's stairs with a few hardy companions and raised an enormous French tricolor on the structure's flagpole. Fireworks were then set off from the second platform. Eiffel and his party descended, and the architect addressed the guests and about 200 workers. In early May, the Paris International Exposition opened, and the tower served as the entrance gateway to the giant fair.

The Eiffel Tower remained the world's tallest man-made structure until the completion of the Chrysler Building in New York in 1930. Incredibly, the Eiffel Tower was almost demolished when the International Exposition's 20-year lease on the land expired in 1909, but its value as an antenna for radio transmission saved it. It remains largely unchanged today and is one of the world's premier tourist attractions.

This Day in History

 Mar 30, 1981:
Obsessed Jodie Foster fan John Hinckley Jr. shoots President Reagan



On this day in 1981, John Hinckley Jr. attempts to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in a crowd of onlookers and security personnel--including police and Secret Service officers--outside a Hilton hotel in Washington, D.C. When asked about his motive for shooting the president, Hinckley revealed that he was seeking to gain the attention of the actress Jodie Foster.

After growing up in an affluent family in Oklahoma, Texas and Colorado, Hinckley moved to Hollywood in 1976. That same year saw the release of Martin Scorsese’s dark drama Taxi Driver. Hinckley watched the film some 15 times and apparently strongly identified with the title character, Travis Bickle (played by Robert De Niro). A violent loner, Bickle seeks the attention of a socialite by trying to assassinate a political candidate and later becomes obsessed with protecting a child prostitute by shooting her pimp. The screenwriter, Paul Schrader, based the character on Arthur Bremer, who shot the Alabama governor and U.S. presidential candidate George Wallace in 1972. In his diaries, Bremer expressed that political assassination was a way to escape anonymity and powerlessness.

As was recounted in testimony given at his 1982 trial, Hinckley began--either consciously (according to the prosecution) or unconsciously (according to the defense)--mirroring Bickle. He wore similar clothes, drank the same peach brandy and amassed a collection of firearms. He also became fixated on Jodie Foster, who played the young prostitute in the film. During the 1980 presidential campaign, Hinckley stalked President Jimmy Carter, getting himself arrested in the process when he was caught at the Nashville airport in possession of firearms. After sending him to a psychiatrist, Hinckley’s family cut him off financially. When he read that Foster was attending Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, Hinckley traveled there repeatedly, all the while seeking some grand gesture he could make that would earn her attention.

On March 30, 1981, Hinckley made his grand gesture, managing to fire six bullets in three seconds at Reagan in the middle of the crowd outside the Washington Hilton. One of the bullets struck Reagan underneath the left arm; it failed to explode on impact, leaving the president seriously injured but alive. Hinckley also shot a police officer and a Secret Service agent and seriously wounded Reagan’s press secretary, James Brady. Upon his arrest, Hinckley reportedly asked the officers if the news would disrupt the Academy Awards ceremony, scheduled for that night. The ceremony was indeed postponed until the following night, only the third time in history that the Oscars had failed to go ahead as scheduled.

At the conclusion of his trial--during which the defense showed Taxi Driver to bolster its case--Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity. He was confined to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., and has remained there ever since. The case led to legislation limiting the insanity plea in several states and, 12 years later, to the signing of the Brady Bill, which required a waiting period and background check on people wishing to purchase a handgun.

This Day in History

 Mar 29, 1973:
U.S. withdraws from Vietnam



Two months after the signing of the Vietnam peace agreement, the last U.S. combat troops leave South Vietnam as Hanoi frees the remaining American prisoners of war held in North Vietnam. America's direct eight-year intervention in the Vietnam War was at an end. In Saigon, some 7,000 U.S. Department of Defense civilian employees remained behind to aid South Vietnam in conducting what looked to be a fierce and ongoing war with communist North Vietnam.

In 1961, after two decades of indirect military aid, U.S. President John F. Kennedy sent the first large force of U.S. military personnel to Vietnam to bolster the ineffectual autocratic regime of South Vietnam against the communist North. Three years later, with the South Vietnamese government crumbling, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered limited bombing raids on North Vietnam, and Congress authorized the use of U.S. troops. By 1965, North Vietnamese offensives left President Johnson with two choices: escalate U.S. involvement or withdraw. Johnson ordered the former, and troop levels soon jumped to more than 300,000 as U.S. air forces commenced the largest bombing campaign in history.

During the next few years, the extended length of the war, the high number of U.S. casualties, and the exposure of U.S. involvement in war crimes, such as the massacre at My Lai, helped turn many in the United States against the Vietnam War. The communists' Tet Offensive of 1968 crushed U.S. hopes of an imminent end to the conflict and galvanized U.S. opposition to the war. In response, Johnson announced in March 1968 that he would not seek reelection, citing what he perceived to be his responsibility in creating a perilous national division over Vietnam. He also authorized the beginning of peace talks.

In the spring of 1969, as protests against the war escalated in the United States, U.S. troop strength in the war-torn country reached its peak at nearly 550,000 men. Richard Nixon, the new U.S. president, began U.S. troop withdrawal and "Vietnamization" of the war effort that year, but he intensified bombing. Large U.S. troop withdrawals continued in the early 1970s as President Nixon expanded air and ground operations into Cambodia and Laos in attempts to block enemy supply routes along Vietnam's borders. This expansion of the war, which accomplished few positive results, led to new waves of protests in the United States and elsewhere.

Finally, in January 1973, representatives of the United States, North and South Vietnam, and the Vietcong signed a peace agreement in Paris, ending the direct U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War. Its key provisions included a cease-fire throughout Vietnam, the withdrawal of U.S. forces, the release of prisoners of war, and the reunification of North and South Vietnam through peaceful means. The South Vietnamese government was to remain in place until new elections were held, and North Vietnamese forces in the South were not to advance further nor be reinforced.

In reality, however, the agreement was little more than a face-saving gesture by the U.S. government. Even before the last American troops departed on March 29, the communists violated the cease-fire, and by early 1974 full-scale war had resumed. At the end of 1974, South Vietnamese authorities reported that 80,000 of their soldiers and civilians had been killed in fighting during the year, making it the most costly of the Vietnam War.

On April 30, 1975, the last few Americans still in South Vietnam were airlifted out of the country as Saigon fell to communist forces. North Vietnamese Colonel Bui Tin, accepting the surrender of South Vietnam later in the day, remarked, "You have nothing to fear; between Vietnamese there are no victors and no vanquished. Only the Americans have been defeated." The Vietnam War was the longest and most unpopular foreign war in U.S. history and cost 58,000 American lives. As many as two million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians were killed.

This Day in History

 Mar 28, 1979:
Nuclear accident at Three Mile Island



At 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979, the worst accident in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry begins when a pressure valve in the Unit-2 reactor at Three Mile Island fails to close. Cooling water, contaminated with radiation, drained from the open valve into adjoining buildings, and the core began to dangerously overheat.

The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant was built in 1974 on a sandbar on Pennsylvania's Susquehanna River, just 10 miles downstream from the state capitol in Harrisburg. In 1978, a second state-of-the-art reactor began operating on Three Mile Island, which was lauded for generating affordable and reliable energy in a time of energy crises.

After the cooling water began to drain out of the broken pressure valve on the morning of March 28, 1979, emergency cooling pumps automatically went into operation. Left alone, these safety devices would have prevented the development of a larger crisis. However, human operators in the control room misread confusing and contradictory readings and shut off the emergency water system. The reactor was also shut down, but residual heat from the fission process was still being released. By early morning, the core had heated to over 4,000 degrees, just 1,000 degrees short of meltdown. In the meltdown scenario, the core melts, and deadly radiation drifts across the countryside, fatally sickening a potentially great number of people.

As the plant operators struggled to understand what had happened, the contaminated water was releasing radioactive gases throughout the plant. The radiation levels, though not immediately life-threatening, were dangerous, and the core cooked further as the contaminated water was contained and precautions were taken to protect the operators. Shortly after 8 a.m., word of the accident leaked to the outside world. The plant's parent company, Metropolitan Edison, downplayed the crisis and claimed that no radiation had been detected off plant grounds, but the same day inspectors detected slightly increased levels of radiation nearby as a result of the contaminated water leak. Pennsylvania Governor Dick Thornburgh considered calling an evacuation.

Finally, at about 8 p.m., plant operators realized they needed to get water moving through the core again and restarted the pumps. The temperature began to drop, and pressure in the reactor was reduced. The reactor had come within less than an hour of a complete meltdown. More than half the core was destroyed or molten, but it had not broken its protective shell, and no radiation was escaping. The crisis was apparently over.

Two days later, however, on March 30, a bubble of highly flammable hydrogen gas was discovered within the reactor building. The bubble of gas was created two days before when exposed core materials reacted with super-heated steam. On March 28, some of this gas had exploded, releasing a small amount of radiation into the atmosphere. At that time, plant operators had not registered the explosion, which sounded like a ventilation door closing. After the radiation leak was discovered on March 30, residents were advised to stay indoors. Experts were uncertain if the hydrogen bubble would create further meltdown or possibly a giant explosion, and as a precaution Governor Thornburgh advised "pregnant women and pre-school age children to leave the area within a five-mile radius of the Three Mile Island facility until further notice." This led to the panic the governor had hoped to avoid; within days, more than 100,000 people had fled surrounding towns.

On April 1, President Jimmy Carter arrived at Three Mile Island to inspect the plant. Carter, a trained nuclear engineer, had helped dismantle a damaged Canadian nuclear reactor while serving in the U.S. Navy. His visit achieved its aim of calming local residents and the nation. That afternoon, experts agreed that the hydrogen bubble was not in danger of exploding. Slowly, the hydrogen was bled from the system as the reactor cooled.

At the height of the crisis, plant workers were exposed to unhealthy levels of radiation, but no one outside Three Mile Island had their health adversely affected by the accident. Nonetheless, the incident greatly eroded the public's faith in nuclear power. The unharmed Unit-1 reactor at Three Mile Island, which was shut down during the crisis, did not resume operation until 1985. Cleanup continued on Unit-2 until 1990, but it was too damaged to be rendered usable again. In the more than two decades since the accident at Three Mile Island, not a single new nuclear power plant has been ordered in the United States.

This Day in History

 Mar 27, 1905:
Fingerprint evidence is used to solve a British murder case



The neighbors of Thomas and Ann Farrow, shopkeepers in South London, discover their badly bludgeoned bodies in their home. Thomas was already dead, but Ann was still breathing. She died four days later without ever having regained consciousness. The brutal crime was solved using the newly developed fingerprinting technique. Only three years earlier, the first English court had admitted fingerprint evidence in a petty theft case. The Farrow case was the first time that the cutting-edge technology was used in a high-profile murder case.

Since the cash box in which the Farrow's stored their cash receipts was empty, it was clear to Scotland Yard investigators that robbery was the motive for the crime. One print on the box did not match the victims or any of the still-tiny file of criminal prints that Scotland Yard possessed. Fortunately, a local milkman reported seeing two young men in the vicinity of the Farrow house on the day of the murders. Soon identified as brothers Alfred and Albert Stratton, the police began interviewing their friends.

Alfred's girlfriend told police that he had given away his coat the day and changed the color of his shoes the day after the murders. A week later, authorities finally caught up with the Stratton brothers and fingerprinted them. Alfred's right thumb was a perfect match for the print on the Farrow's cash box.

The fingerprint evidence became the prosecution's only solid evidence when the milkman was unable to positively identify the Strattons. The defense put up expert Dr. John Garson to attack the reliability of the fingerprint evidence. But the prosecution countered with evidence that Garson had written to both the defense and prosecution on the same day offering his services to both.

The Stratton brothers, obviously not helped by the discrediting of Garson, were convicted and hanged on May 23, 1905. Since then, fingerprint evidence has become commonplace in criminal trials and the lack of it is even used by defense attorneys.

This Day in History

 Mar 26, 1979:
Michigan State defeats Indiana State in NCAA championship



On March 26, 1979, Earvin "Magic" Johnson leads the Michigan State Spartans to a 75- 64 victory over Larry Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores in the NCAA men’s basketball championship game. The most watched college finale of its time, the game established Magic vs. Bird as a rivalry for the ages, and would catapult both players to NBA superstardom.

Earvin "Magic" Johnson was listed as 6 feet 9 inches tall (although he was probably 6’ 7") and played point guard, a position usually held by the shorter men on the floor, who were charged with feeding the team’s big men the ball closer to the basket. Magic’s ball-handling skills and feel for the game were such that even in high school in East Lansing, Michigan, when he was the tallest player in any game, he was the go-to ball-handler. He was a sophomore at Michigan State in 1979, the unquestioned superstar on a team that also featured future NBA player Greg Kelser and junior guard Terry Donnelly.

Larry Bird, out of West Baden Springs and French Lick, Indiana, was also a high school basketball star. After graduation, he received a scholarship to play for legendary coach Bobby Knight at Indiana University, one of the finest teams in the country. However, Bird was homesick and uncomfortable in the spotlight in Bloomington and left after one month. He returned to French Lick, and eventually enrolled at the smaller Indiana State, far from a basketball powerhouse. There, Bird was a one-man offense, averaging 30 points per game as a sophomore, junior and senior. He led the Sycamores to an undefeated record in his senior season (1978-79) and that year scored 22, 29, 31 and 35 points, respectively, in the first four games of the NCAA tournament. Going into the final showdown with Magic and the Spartans, his team stood at an impressive 33-0.

Michigan State coach Jud Heathcoate’s game plan was to harass Bird into a bad offensive night, and that the team did. Although Bird still managed to stand out on defense, repelling Magic’s lob passes to forward Greg Kelser all night and grabbing 13 rebounds and five steals, Indiana State depended on Bird to score. The Spartans held him to seven of 21 shooting, 19 percent below his tournament average. Meanwhile, Magic was his typical brilliant self, scoring 24 points on his way to being named Most Outstanding Player of the tournament.

After college, Magic was drafted by the Los Angeles Lakers, while Bird went to play for the Boston Celtics. Their rivalry did much to reinvigorate the flagging NBA, boosting ticket sales and television tune-in. Much to fans’ delight, Magic and Bird played head-to-head for the NBA championship three times over the course of their pro careers: Bird’s Celtics won in 1984, and Magic’s Lakers won in 1985 and 1987.

Despite the rivalry, Bird and Magic became friends. In fact, when Johnson was diagnosed with HIV in 1991, Bird was the first player he called.

This Day in History

 Mar 22, 1933:
FDR legalizes sale of beer and wine

On this day in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Beer and Wine Revenue Act. This law levies a federal tax on all alcoholic beverages to raise revenue for the federal government and gives individual states the option to further regulate the sale and distribution of beer and wine.

With the passage of the 18th Amendment and the Volstead Act in 1919, temperance advocates in the U.S. finally achieved their long sought-after goal of prohibiting the sale of alcohol or "spirits." Together, the new laws prohibited the manufacture, sale or transportation of liquor and ushered in the era known as "Prohibition," defining an alcoholic beverage as anything containing over 0.5 percent alcohol by volume. President Woodrow Wilson had unsuccessfully tried to veto the Volstead Act, which set harsh punishments for violating the 18th Amendment and endowed the Internal Revenue Service with unprecedented regulatory and enforcement powers. In the end, Prohibition proved difficult and expensive to enforce and actually increased illegal trafficking without cutting down on consumption. In one of his first addresses to Congress as president, FDR announced his intention to modify the Volstead Act with the Beer and Wine Revenue Act.

No fan of temperance himself, FDR had developed a taste for alcohol when he attended New York cocktail parties as a budding politician. (While president, FDR refused to fire his favorite personal valet for repeated drunkenness on the job.) FDR considered the new law "of the highest importance" for its potential to generate much-needed federal funds and included it in a sweeping set of New Deal policies designed to vault the U.S. economy out of the Great Depression.

The Beer and Wine Revenue act was followed, in December 1933, by the passage of the 21st Amendment, which officially ended Prohibitio