110 years ago today, the first-ever baseball game was played at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Then known as Weeghman Park, its original occupants were the Chicago Whales, then known as the “Chi-Feds.” Wrigley Field is known for its ivy-covered brick outfield wall, the unusual wind patterns off Lake Michigan, the iconic red marquee over the main entrance, the hand-turned scoreboard, its location in a primarily residential neighborhood with no parking lots and views from the rooftops behind the outfield, and for being the last Major League park to have lights installed for night games. READ a bit more… (1914)
In 1916, it became home to the Chicago Cubs. Wrigley Field was the first Major League ballpark to introduce live organ music on April 26, 1941, and by July 2019, Cub’s organist Gary Pressy, holds the record for 2,653 consecutive games played; never having missed a day’s work in 33 years.
Another interesting tradition from this grand old ground has been the traditional raising of a flag with either a “W” for win, or an “L” loss, to inform passersby of the day’s result. It started back in the days of former Cubs owner, P.K. Wrigley, and the 1937 bleacher/scoreboard reconstruction.
MORE Good News on this Day:
- On Shakespeare‘s 33rd birthday, an acclaimed honor was bestowed on the young playwright when Queen Elizabeth I attended the Globe Theater to see his play, The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597)
- After graduating from the Law College of Howard University (Phi Beta Kappa), the first black woman lawyer in the United States, Charlotte E. Ray, was admitted to the Washington, DC Bar Association (1872)
- Hank Aaron of the Milwaukee Braves hit the first of his record 755 major-league baseball home runs (1954)
- The Ramones released their debut album. which included the well-known track, Blitzkrieg Bop, igniting the punk rock era from Queens, New York (1976)
- Eritreans voted overwhelmingly for independence from Ethiopia in a UN-monitored referendum (1993)
- The French National Assembly voted 331-225 to approve marriage equality, making France the 14th country to legalize gay marriage (2013)
166 years ago today, Max Planck was born in Kiel, Germany. As the father of quantum theory, he changed everything about the understanding of the atomic and the subatomic worlds. He collected the Nobel Prize in physics for his troubles, and his fame was such that the Germans renamed the most prestigious scientific academy in the country after him, removing Kaiser Wilhelm’s name in the process. The Max Planck Society, for which Planck was president twice, now contains 83 institutions representing a wide range of scientific directions.
Planck was working at the University of Berlin as an associate professor/lecturer when he began working on the earliest principles of quantum mechanics. “In those days,” he wrote, “I was essentially the only theoretical physicist there, whence things were not so easy for me, because I started mentioning entropy, but this was not quite fashionable, since it was regarded as a mathematical spook.”
Over a series of interpretations, discoveries, failures, and reinterpretations, he established the Planck postulate on black-body radiation, describing that light leaves a source of energy and heat grouped together in multiples. High-frequency light would accept only certain multiples, or quanta, and was thus “fussy” and would only group together in large amounts at a specific frequency, while lower-frequency quanta would be emitted from, say, a light bulb, more evenly.
The discovery of Planck’s constant enabled him to define a new universal set of physical units (such as the Planck length and the Planck mass), all based on fundamental physical constants upon which much of quantum theory is based. In recognition of Planck’s fundamental contribution to a new branch of physics, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1918. (1858)
53 years ago today, the Rolling Stones released their ninth album, Sticky Fingers.
The original cover artwork, conceived by Andy Warhol, showed a man’s tight jeans and had an actual working zipper that opened to reveal underwear—but the cover was expensive to make and the zipper was soon removed because it damaged the vinyl.
Sticky Fingers was a return to basics for the English rockers. With hits like Wild Horses, Can’t You Hear Me Knocking, Dead Flowers, and Brown Sugar—which was the most popular song of 1971. The LP was part-primitive blues and part-country (the latter thanks to their new guitarist Mick Taylor, who joined after Brian Jones died).
Also featuring saxophonist Bobby Keys and keyboardist Billy Preston, it was their first album to reach No.1 on both the UK and US albums charts—and their first one on their new label ‘Rolling Stones Records’. It was later named as one of Rolling Stone magazine’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. WATCH a live version of the catchy, melodic Dead Flowers… (1971)
Happy 34th Birthday to Dev Patel, the London-born actor whose breakthrough performance in Slumdog Millionaire earned the film 8 Academy Awards. Patel went on to co-star in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel franchise, The Last Airbender, and the HBO TV journalism drama series The Newsroom.
For his portrayal in the 2016 drama Lion he won the BAFTA Award for Best Supporting Actor and an Oscar nomination. A Taekwondo black belt, Dev Patel starred in 2019 in The Green Knight, and played the title role in The Personal History of David Copperfield, a Charles Dickens adaptation. (1990)
And, on this day 19 years ago, the first video was uploaded to YouTube. Entitled ‘Me at the zoo’, the short clip was posted by co-founder Jawed Karim, a programmer who partnered with two of his former PayPal co-workers, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, to create the company. Just 19 months later, YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65 billion. (2005)
On this day in 1995, a man from Liverpool found a reel-to-reel tape in his attic that contained some of the earliest recordings of The Beatles ever made. It was 1959 and the 16 songs included ‘Hello Little Girl’, a Lennon-McCartney composition that the Beatles never recorded, along with Ray Charles’ ‘Hallelujah, I Love Her So’. The sessions, discovered by Peter Hodgson, had been made on a recorder that Hodgson’s father had lent to Paul McCartney.
Also on this day in 1969, The Beatles scored their 16th No.1 hit on the UK singles chart with Get Back. The credit for the song went to ‘The Beatles with Billy Preston’, the first single for the group that credited any other artist. Preston played electric piano, invited by Harrison partly to deter bickering among the band. The album version of the song ends with Lennon famously quipping “I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition,” taken from the January 1969 rooftop concert version recorded atop the Apple Studios building.
The US release of Get Back was also the first recorded in stereo, along with the b-side, Don’t Let Me Down, featuring Starr’s drum kit in true stereo, mixed across the left and right channels… “Get Back, Loretta!” HEAR the remastered version…
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