- 41st Day of 2015 324 Remaining
- Spring Begins in 38Days
- Sunrise:7:03
- Sunset:5:43
- 10 Hours 40 Minutes
- Moon Rise:12:12am (Wednesday)
- Moon Set:10:28am
- Phase: 63%
- Full Moon February 3 @ 3:10pm
- Since the heaviest snow usually falls during this month, native tribes of the north and east most often called February’s full Moon the Full Snow Moon. Some tribes also referred to this Moon as the Full Hunger Moon, since harsh weather conditions in their areas made hunting very difficult.
- Tides
- High:2:39am/3:08pm
- Low:9:15am/8:42pm
- Rainfall:
- This Year to Date:17.01
- Last Year:5.84
- Avg YTD:15.27
- Annual Avg:23.80
- Holidays
- National Cream Cheese Brownie Day
- Plimsoll Day
- Umbrella Day
- Extraterrestrial Culture Day
- On This Day
- 1763 --- The Treaty of Paris ended the French and Indian War. In the treaty France ceded Canada to England.
- 1846 --- Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints – the Mormons – began an exodus west from Illinois.
- 1870 --- The YWCA was founded in New York City.
- 1874 --- Lewis Latimer and Charles W. Brown of Massachusetts were issued U.S. patent No. 147,363 for a special toilet system for trains ("Improvements in Water-Closets for Railway Passenger-Cars").
- 1897 --- "The New York Times" began printing "All the news that's fit to print" on their front page.
- 1933 --- The singing telegram was introduced by the Postal Telegraph Company of New York City.
- 1934 --- The first imperforated, ungummed sheets of postage stamps were issued by the U.S. Postal Service in New York City.
- 1942 --- The Normandie, the former French liner, capsized in New York Harbor. The day before the ship had caught fire while it was being fitted for the U.S. Navy.
- 1949 --- "Death of a Salesman" opened at the Morocco Theatre in New York City.
- 1957 --- The ‘Styrofoam’ cooler was invented.
- 1962 --- Francis Gary Powers, an American who was shot down over the Soviet Union while flying a CIA spy plane in 1960, is released by the Soviets in exchange for the U.S. release of a Russian spy. The exchange concluded one of the most dramatic episodes of the Cold War. Powers had been a pilot of one of the high altitude U-2 spy planes developed by the United States in the late-1950s. Supposedly invulnerable to any Soviet antiaircraft defense, the U-2s flew numerous missions over Russia, photographing military installations. On May 1, 1960, Powers' U-2 was shot down by a Soviet missile. Although Powers was supposed to engage the plane's self-destruct system (and commit suicide with poison furnished by the CIA), he and much of the plane were captured. The United States at first denied involvement with the flight, but had to admit that Powers was working for the U.S. government when the Soviets presented incontrovertible evidence. In retaliation, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev called off a scheduled summit with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Powers was put on trial, convicted of espionage, and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. In February 1962, the Soviet Union announced that it was freeing Powers because of a petition from the prisoner's family. American officials made it quite clear, however, that Abel was being exchanged for Powers—a spy-for-a-spy trade, not a humanitarian gesture on the part of the Soviet Union. The U.S. government announced that in exchange for Powers, it would release Col. Rudolf Abel, a Russian convicted of espionage in the United States. On February 10, Abel and Powers were brought to the Gilenicker Bridge that linked East and West Berlin for the exchange. After the men were successfully exchanged, Powers was flown back to the United States.
- 1964 --- Bob Dylan's album "The Times They Are A-Changin"' was released.
- 1966 --- Ralph Nader, a young lawyer and the author of the groundbreaking book "Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile," testifies before Congress for the first time about unsafe practices in the auto industry. By the mid-1960s, U.S. automakers were still largely unregulated. Nader's book, which was published in November 1965, accused car companies of designing vehicles with an emphasis on style and power at the expense of consumer safety. One chapter of "Unsafe at Any Speed" focused on handling problems with the Chevrolet Corvair, a car produced by auto giant General Motors (GM). Shortly after Nader's congressional testimony, the news media reported that Nader had been followed by detectives. It was later determined that starting in early February 1966, GM sent investigators to spy on Nader and look into his personal life in an effort to discredit him. Nader sued GM for harassment and invasion of privacy and won a settlement. The publicity surrounding GM's actions helped make "Unsafe at Any Speed" a best-seller and turn Ralph Nader a household name.
- 1967 --- The 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified. The amendment required the appointment of a vice-president when that office became vacant and instituted new measures in the event of presidential disability.
- 1970 --- An avalanche crashes down on a ski resort in Val d'Isere, France, killing 42 people, mostly young skiers. This disaster was the worst such incident in French history. The resort at Val d'Isere was operated by a nonprofit youth organization and attracted many young ski enthusiasts. On the morning of February 10, most of the guests were eating breakfast in a large room facing the mountain. Suddenly, there was an explosion-like sound and approximately 100,000 cubic yards of snow came rushing down the mountain. Three trail workers who were on the hill were swept away and killed. The young people inside the hotel had little time to react. The snow exploded through the hotel's large windows and swallowed the crowd inside. Some people were thrown down hallways and through windows. Others were buried so deeply that they could not move at all. Outside, the snow pushed cars right off the road and blocked access to the hotel. The snow was 100 yards high in some spots.
- 1972 --- It was one of those events that virtually nobody witnessed, yet almost but many wish they had: the concert at London's Toby Jug pub, when David Bowie became the spaceman Ziggy Stardust.
- 1989 --- Ronald H. Brown, a former Supreme Court lawyer and leader of the National Urban League, is elected chairman of the Democratic Party National Committee. He was the first African American to hold the top position in a major political party in the United States.
- 1990 --- South African President F.W. de Klerk announced that black activist Nelson Mandela would be released the next day after 27 years in captivity.
- 1996 --- In the first game of a six-game match, an IBM computer dubbed “Deep Blue” becomes the first machine to beat a reigning world chess champion, Garry Kasparov. Despite this initial upset victory, man ultimately triumphed over machine as Kasparov goes went on to win the match, 4-2. Garry Kasparov, considered one of the greatest players in the history of chess, was born April 13, 1963, in the Russian republic of Azerbaijan. At 13, he was the Russian junior chess champ and in 1985, at 22, he became the youngest world champion in history when he defeated Anatoly Karpov. Deep Blue’s origins date back to 1985, when Carnegie Mellon University doctoral student Feng Hsiung Hsu began developing a chess-playing computer called “ChipTest.” Hsu was joined on the project by Thomas Anantharaman and Murray Campbell and the computer later came to be known as “Deep Thought,” after a machine in the science-fiction novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The men were later hired by IBM, where they continued to work on the chess-playing computer. In 1989, Gary Kasparov easily trounced Deep Thought when they met for a 2-game match. Developers continued to refine the supercomputer, which in 1993 was renamed “Deep Blue,” a combination of Deep Thought and Big Blue, IBM’s nickname. The 6-game match between Kasparov and Deep Blue began on February 10, 1996, at the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia. Although Deep Blue was capable of evaluating 100 million different chess positions per second, the IBM team wasn’t sure how the computer would perform in competition and Kasparov was favored to win. Instead, much to his frustration, the world chess champ lost the first game to Deep Blue. However, the tenacious, brilliant Kasparov quickly staged a comeback by winning the second game. The third and fourth games ended in a draw, while Kasparov took the fifth and sixth games, for a score of 4-2.
- 2004 --- Rapper-producer Kanye West's debut CD, "The College Dropout," was released.
- 2009 --- A Russian and an American satellite collide over Siberia.
- Birthdays
- Charles Lamb
- Frances Moore Lappe
- Boris Pasternak
- Jimmy Durante
- Harold MacMillan
- Dame Judith
- Bertolt Brecht
- Stella Adler
- Dame Judith Anderson
- Lon Chaney Jr
- Leontyne Price
- Roberta Flack
- Mark Spitz
- George Stephanopoulos
- Laura Dern
Tuesday February 10, 2015
