Sept. 23 historic events
1641 The Merchant Royal, carrying a treasure worth over a billion USD, is lost at sea off Land’s End. (Treasure hunt, anyone?)
1779 American Revolution: a squadron commanded by John Paul Jones on board the USS Bonhomme Richard wins the Battle of Flamborough Head, off the coast of England, against two British warships. (It was at this battle that John Paul Jones uttered his famous quote “I have not yet begun to fight!” Although the Bonhomme Richard was so badly damaged it later sank, the Americans defeated and boarded the British warship Serapis. )
1806 Lewis and Clark return to St. Louis, after exploring the Pacific Northwest of the United States.
1846 Neptune is discovered by French astronomer Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier and British astronomer John Couch Adams; the discovery is verified by German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle.
1889 Nintendo Koppai (Later Nintendo Company, Limited) is founded by Fusajiro Yamauchi to produce and market the playing card game Hanafuda.
1932 The Kingdom of Hejaz and Nejd is renamed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
1941 World War II: The first gas murder experiments are conducted at Auschwitz. (The evil of the Nazis YM”S and its scope is incomprehensible, even today.)
1942 World War II: First day of the September Matanikau action on Guadalcanal as United States Marine Corps forces attack Imperial Japanese Army units along the Matanikau River.
1952 Republican vice-presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon went on television to deliver what came to be known as the “Checkers” speech as he denied allegations of improper campaign financing. (Nixon’s touching speech about “his little dog Checkers, that his daughters loved” worked, and he remained on the ticket.)
1957 Nine black students who had entered Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas were forced to withdraw because of a white mob outside.
1990 Iraq threatened to destroy Middle East oil fields and attack Israel if other nations tried to force it from Kuwait. (Iraq later followed thru on their threats. B”H there was only one direct casualty of Iraqui scuds in Israel, although others suffocated when they incorrectly put on their gas masks.)
1999 NASA announces that it has lost contact with the Mars Climate Orbiter. (Incredible as it sounds, the Orbiter was lost because of a simple standard-metric error, that sent the spacecraft into the Martian atmosphere, where it burned up.)
1999 Qantas Flight 1 overruns the runway in Bangkok during a storm. While some passengers only receive minor injuries, it is still the worst crash in Qantas’s history since 1960. (This is the only Jet crash in Qantas’s history. They have had crashes, including fatal ones, on propeller-driven planes.)
2002 The first public version of the web browser Mozilla Firefox (“Phoenix 0.1”) is released. (Good job, guys. Thanks!)
2004 At least 1,070 in Haiti are reported killed by floods due to Hurricane Jeanne.