- 27th Day of 2015 / 338 Remaining
- Spring Begins in 52 Days
- Sunrise:7:16
- Sunset:5:28
- 10 Hours 12 Minutes
- Moon Rise:11:54am
- Moon Set:12:54am
- Phase: 57%
- Full Moon February 3 @ 3:10pm
- Tides
- High:4:15am/5:33pm
- Low:11:14am/10:43pm
- Holidays
- Thomas Crapper Day
- National Chocolate Cake Day
- Vietnam Day-Vietnam
- Auschwitz Liberation Day
- WWII Genocide Memorial Day-Germany/United Kingdom
- International Holocaust Remembrance Day
- On This Day
- 1302 --- Dante Alighieri is exiled from Florence, where he served as one of six priors governing the city. Dante's political activities, including the banishing of several rivals, led to his own banishment, and he wrote his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, as a virtual wanderer, seeking protection for his family in town after town.
- 1606 --- The trial of Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators began. They were executed on January 31.
- 1880 --- Thomas Edison was granted patent Patent No. 223,898 for electric lamps giving light by incandescence (patent application filed Nov 4, 1879).
- 1888 --- The National Geographic Society is founded in Washington, D.C., for "the increase and diffusion of geographical knowledge." The 33 men who originally met and formed the National Geographic Society were a diverse group of geographers, explorers, teachers, lawyers, cartographers, military officers and financiers. All shared an interest in scientific and geographical knowledge, as well as an opinion that in a time of discovery, invention, change and mass communication, Americans were becoming more curious about the world around them.
- 1910 --- Thomas Crapper died. He is the frequently said to have invented the flush toilet. He was a plumber, he had several patents issued, but they seem to be improvements to devices invented by others.
- 1918 --- Plagued by hunger and increasingly frustrated with the continuing Great War, hundreds of thousands of long-suffering German workers prepare for a massive strike in Berlin. Although the year 1917 had brought a string of military triumphs to the Central Powers—Kaiser Wilhelm, on a visit to the Western Front in December, told his troops that the year's events proved that God was on the side of the Germans—it had also seen hunger and discontent on the home front rise to unprecedented levels. There were a total of 561 strikes in 1917, up from 240 the year before and 137 in 1915. Real wages—or the ratio of wages to cost of living—were falling, with disastrous effects for industrial and white-collar workers alike.
- 1926 --- John Logie Baird, a Scottish inventor, gives the first public demonstration of a true television system in London, launching a revolution in communication and entertainment. Baird's invention, a pictorial-transmission machine he called a "televisor," used mechanical rotating disks to scan moving images into electronic impulses. This information was then transmitted by cable to a screen where it showed up as a low-resolution pattern of light and dark. Baird's first television program showed the heads of two ventriloquist dummies, which he operated in front of the camera apparatus out of view of the audience.
- 1943 --- Air Force bombers, dispatched from their bases in England, fly the first American bombing raid against the Germans, targeting the Wilhelmshaven port. Of 64 planes participating in the raid, 53 reached their target and managed to shoot down 22 German planes—and lost only three planes in return.
- 1944 --- Soviet forces permanently break the Leningrad siege line, ending the almost 900-day German-enforced containment of the city, which cost hundreds of thousands of Russian lives. The siege began officially on September 8, 1941. The people of Leningrad began building antitank fortifications and succeeded in creating a stable defense of the city, but as a result were cut off from all access to vital resources in the Soviet interior, Moscow specifically. In 1942, an estimated 650,000 Leningrad citizens perished from starvation, disease, exposure, and injuries suffered from continual German artillery bombardment.
- 1945 --- Soviet troops liberated the Nazi concentration camps Auschwitz and Birkenau in Poland.
- 1948 --- Wire Recording Corporation of America announced the first magnetic tape recorder. The ‘Wireway’ machine with a built-in oscillator sold for $149.50.
- 1951 --- In the U.S., atomic testing in the Nevada desert began as an Air Force plane dropped a one-kiloton bomb on Frenchman Flats.
- 1956 --- Elvis Presley released "Heartbreak Hotel."
- 1961 --- Leontyne Price made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.
- 1965 --- The Shelby GT 350, a version of a Ford Mustang sports car developed by the American auto racer and car designer Carroll Shelby, is launched. The Shelby GT 350, which featured a 306 horsepower V-8 engine, remained in production through the end of the 1960s and today is a valuable collector's item.
- 1967 --- A launch pad fire during Apollo program tests at Cape Canaveral, Florida, kills astronauts Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Edward H. White II, and Roger B. Chafee. An investigation indicated that a faulty electrical wire inside the Apollo 1 command module was the probable cause of the fire. The astronauts, the first Americans to die in a spacecraft, had been participating in a simulation of the Apollo 1 launch scheduled for the next month.
- 1967 --- More than 60 nations signed a treaty banning the orbiting of nuclear weapons.
- 1970 --- "I wrote it for breakfast, recorded it for lunch and we're putting it out for dinner." That's the way John Lennon told the story of "Instant Karma," one of his most memorable songs as a solo artist and the third Lennon single to appear before the official breakup of the Beatles. The only exaggeration in John's description was the part about dinner: "Instant Karma" wasn't actually released to the public until 13 days after it was written and recorded over the course of a single Tuesday, on January 27, 1970. By any measure, it was one of the fastest pop songs ever to come to market.
- 1973 --- The United States, South Vietnam, Viet Cong, and North Vietnam formally sign "An Agreement Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam" in Paris. Due to South Vietnam's unwillingness to recognize the Viet Cong's Provisional Revolutionary Government, all references to it were confined to a two-party version of the document signed by North Vietnam and the United States—the South Vietnamese were presented with a separate document that did not make reference to the Viet Cong government. This was part of Saigon's long-time refusal to recognize the Viet Cong as a legitimate participant in the discussions to end the war.
- 1984 --- Michael Jackson's hair catches fire while filming a Pepsi commercial.
- 1996 --- Mahamane Ousmane, the first democratically elected president of Niger, was overthrown by a military coup. Colonel Ibrahim Bare Mainassara declared himself head of state.
- 1996 --- Serbian-born tennis player Monica Seles, the former No. 1 women’s player in the world, defeats Anke Huber of Germany to win the Australian Open. The win in Melbourne was Seles’ first Grand Slam title since she was stabbed by Gunther Parche, a self-professed fan of the German tennis champion Steffi Graf during the quarterfinals of the Citizen Cup tournament in Hamburg on April 30, 1993.
- 2010 --- Steve Jobs unveiled the Apple iPad.
- Birthdays
- Bridget Fonda
- Jerome Kern
- Margo Timmons
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756)
- Charles Lutwidge Dodgson / Lewis Carroll
- William Randolph Hearst Jr
- Skitch Henderson
- Bobby “Blue” Bland
- James Cromwell
- Mikhail Baryshnikov
- Cheryl White
Tuesday January 27, 2015
