GOOD MORNING – TODAY IS WEDNESDAY, August 31, the 244th day of 2016 with 122 to follow. Sunrise in the Boston area is @ 6:08 and sunset is @ 7:20. The moon is waning. The morning stars are stars are Neptune & Uranus. The evening stars are Mars, Mercury, Neptune, Saturn, & Venus.
ON THIS DAY IN: 1823 – Ferdinand VII was restored to the throne of Spain when invited French forces entered Cadiz. The event is known as the Battle of Trocadero.
1852 – The first pre-stamped envelopes were created with legislation of the U.S. Congress.
1881 – The first tennis championships in the U.S. were played.
1887 – The kinetoscope was patented by Thomas Edison. The device was used to produce moving pictures.
1920 – The first news program to be broadcast on radio was aired. The station was 8MK in Detroit, MI.
1920 – John Lloyd Wright was issued a patent for “Toy-Cabin Construction,” which are known as Lincoln Logs. (U.S. patent 1,351,086)
1935 – The act of exporting U.S. arms to belligerents was prohibited by an act signed by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
1940 – Lawrence Olivier and Vivian Leigh were married.
1941 – The radio program “The Great Gildersleeve” made its debut on NBC.
1946 – Superman returned to radio on the Mutual Broadcasting System after being dropped earlier in the year.
1950 – Gil Hodges of the Brooklyn Dodgers hit four home runs in a single game off of four different pitchers.
1959 – Sandy Koufax set a National League record by striking out 18 batters.
1962 – The Caribbean nations Tobago and Trinidad became independent within the British Commonwealth.
1964 – California officially became the most populated state in America.
1965 – The Department of Housing and Urban Development was created by the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate.
1980 – Poland’s Solidarity labor movement was born with an agreement signed in Gdansk that ended a 17-day strike.
1981 – The 30-year contract between Milton Berle and NBC-TV expired.
1989 – Great Britain’s Princess Anne and Mark Phillips announced that they were separating. The marriage was 16 years old.
1990 – U.N. Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar met with the Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz to try and negotiate a solution to the crisis in the Persian Gulf.
1990 – East and West Germany signed a treaty that meant the harmonizing of political and legal systems.
1991 – Uzbekistan and Kirghiziz declared their independence from the Soviet Union. They were the 9th and 10th republics to announce their plans to secede.
1991 – In a “Solidarity Day” protest hundreds of thousands of union members marched in Washington, DC.
1993 – Russia withdrew its last soldiers from Lithuania.
1994 – A cease-fire was declared by the Irish Republican Army after 25 years of bloodshed in Northern Ireland.
1994 – Russia officially ended its military presence in the former East Germany and the Baltics after a half-century.
1998 – A ballistic missile was fired over Japan by North Korea. The missile landed in stages in the waters around Japan. There was no known target.