GOOD MORNING – TODAY IS THURSDAY, December 18, the 352nd day of 2014 with 13 to follow. Sunrise in the Boston area is @ 7:08 and sunset is @ 4:12. The moon is waxing. The morning stars are stars are Jupiter, Mercury & Saturn. The evening stars are Mars, Neptune, Uranus & Venus.
ON THIS DAY IN: 1787 – New Jersey became the third state to ratify the Constitution of the United States of America.
1865 – The 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, abolishing slavery, went into effect.
1892 – Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker” was first performed, in St. Petersburg by the Russian Imperial Ballet.
1912 – The discovery of the Piltdown Man in East Sussex was announced; it was proved to be a hoax in 1953.
1915 – President Woodrow Wilson, widowed the year before, married Edith Bolling Galt at her Washington home.
1940 – Adolf Hitler signed a secret directive ordering preparations for a Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
1956 – Japan was admitted to the United Nations.
1956 – The show “To Tell the Truth” premiered on TV.
1957 – The Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania, the first civilian nuclear facility to generate electricity in the United States, went online.
1958 – The first communications satellite broadcast was made when President Dwight Eisenhower delivered his Christmas message.
1979 – The sound barrier was broken on land for the first time by Stanley Barrett, driving at 739.6 mph, in California.