On This Day...

[lewys-gp]

Hi everyone 

I thought it would be fun to begin an On This Day Topic on the community.

Very simply, whenever you hear about a past event that occurred on the current day, you can comment about it below! I'll start us off...

On This Day (14 February), in 1990, the Voyager 1 took the famous 'Pale Blue Dot' photo 🌎.

Seen from about 6 billion kilometres (3.7 billion miles), Earth appears as a tiny dot within deep space: the blueish-white speck almost halfway up the rightmost band of light.

Carl Sagan was the astronomer at NASA who said to take the photo. He also spoke about the Pale Blue Dot in this video:

Read more about the Pale Blue Dot here.

👨‍🚀🚀🌎🌌📸

I hope that was a fun one to start off our On This Day series! I look forward to the other events we timestamp and think about on this topic.

[pgn]

Missed this one, @lewys-gp, so here's a couple of related On This Day for 17th February: In 1911, the first Electric Self Start was installed in a Cadillac by General Motors in the USA. Up until this time, all cars needed to be started by cranking a starting handle which was hard work and could cause multiple minor injuries when the car backfired during the starting process.

Roll forward just over 60 years to 17th Feb, 1972, and the 15,007,034th Volkswagen Beetle rolled out of the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg, Germany, surpassing the Ford Model T's previous production record to become the most heavily produced car in history. The Beetle is the world's best selling car design, but the Toyota Corolla has sold more (currently over 30 million cars) since being introduced in 1966 - but with many more major design changes.

For any TV fanatics, Hyacinth Bucket, aka Katherine Patricia Routledge was born this day in 1928 at Birkenhead, Wirral, Merseyside.  On the other side of the planet, in 1934 at Kew, Melbourne, Australia, Barry Humphries, whose alter egoes Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson have amused and entertained, was born.

Hope some of that brightens a few days, assuming the storms last night haven't left you sitting in darkness...

[Cleoriff]

Interesting thread, which I also missed first time round @lewys-gp @pgn.

It also served to remind me that my Grandson was born on the 22nd of this month 23 years ago. It was also his mother's birthday. Of no interest to anyone but me of course but I do have flowers and cards to organise. 😰 So thanks for the timely reminder and the interesting facts above. 😉