On This Day In History, January 4, 2025 Edition
Today’s Feature - The Tallest Building in the World Opens (2010)
2010 - Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, opens in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
It has 163 floors and a height of 2,717 feet, 72.5 feet taller than one half of one mile when measuring from the ground to the top of the antenna. The building’s antenna has a height of five (5) feet.
You may also find this Researcher’s Note on building height interesting, given the topic.
The 2025 This Day in Science 365 Day Calendar
2011 - Stress causes healthy cats to act sick
Veterinary researchers from Ohio State University published their findings on the tendency of physically healthy cats to emulate sickness during periods of stress or turmoil. Healthy house cats may refuse to eat, regurgitate hair balls, or boycott their litter boxes due to stress from disruptions in their routines.
NB: In trying to find a link to the original paper, I found there may be some discrepancy with dates. It turns out that the Orange County Register reported this story on January 4, 2011, but according to this archived version of Ohio State University’s website, the research was published on January 1 of that year.
The 2025 History Channel Military History 365 Day Calendar
1847 - Samuel Colt signs gun contract with government
On January 4, 1847, Samuel Colt rescued his failing gun company when he signed a contract with the U.S. government to supply one thousand .44 caliber revolvers for troops during the Mexican-American War. At the time, most soldiers were using knives for hand-to-hand combat. Colt's revolving chamber within the gun made it attractive for combat, as soldiers could fire five or six shots before having to reload and could hit targets up to about thirty yards away.
The 2025 History Channel 365 Day Calendar
1974 - Richard Nixon refuses to hand over Watergate recordings
On January 4, 1974, President Richard Nixon refused to hand over tape recordings and documents that had been subpoenaed by the U.S. Senate Watergate Committee. The refusal marked the beginning of the end of Nixon's presidency, and eight months later, he would resign from office.
Encyclopedia Britannica
Featured Event
1948 - Burma granted independence
On this day in 1948, the Southeast Asian nation of Burma (Myanmar) formally gained independence, completing the transfer of power negotiated by Burmese leader Aung San and British Prime Minister Clement Attlee in 1947.
Britannica does not have a separate entry for Burmese Independence Day, but Wikipedia does.
Other Events
1853 - Solomon Northrup, a free Black man who had been kidnapped and sold into slavery, legally obtained his freedom, and he later wrote about his experiences in Twelve Years a Slave (1853).
1965 - In his State of the Union message, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson proclaimed his vision of a “Great Society” and called for an enormous program of social welfare legislation.
The United States is still paying for this boondoggle.
2007 - U.S. politician Nancy Pelosi was elected speaker of the House of Representatives, becoming the first woman to hold the office.
The United States is still paying for this boondoggle.
Born On This Day
1643 - Isaac Newton
1746 - Benjamin Rush
1785 - Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm
1809 - Louis Braille
1838 - General Tom Thumb
1930 - Don Shula
1943 - Doris Kearns Goodwin
Died On This Day
1821 - St. Elizabeth Ann Seton (first native-born American to be canonized as a saint)
1961 - Erwin Schrödinger (allegedly; no one took a peak in the casket after it was sealed)
1965 - T.S. Eliot
Wikipedia
1649 - English Civil War: The Rump Parliament votes to put Charles I on trial.
1896 - Utah is admitted as the 45th U.S. state.
1958 - Sputnik 1, the first artificial Earth satellite, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957, falls to Earth from orbit.
1999 - Former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura is sworn in as governor of Minnesota, United States.
2004 - Spirit, a NASA Mars rover, lands successfully on Mars at 04:35 UTC.
The Book of This Day in History
1847 - Samuel Colt makes his first sale of revolver pistols.
While this event was already featured above in the Military History On This Day 2025 calendar, I wanted to quote the passage in the book because of who the book claims made the purchase on the government side of the deal:
The buyer was Captain Samuel Walker of the Texas Rangers. The revolver, named the Colt Walker, helped establish Colt as the leading firearms inventor in the United States. Samuel Walker was killed later that year in action during the Mexican-American War.
1863 - James Plimpton patents the first four-wheeled roller skates.
Plimpton, a Massachusetts inventor, was the first to design the skates with independent axles that allowed the user to turn by pressing on one side of the skate, a huge improvement on the existing design. Plimpton's skates led to a burst of popularity in roller skating that lasted for more than fifty years. His design is still in use today.
1903 - Topsy the elephant is electrocuted.
The Edison film company films the electrocution of Topsy in Luna Park, Coney Island. Topsy was considered a "bad" elephant because she had killed a drunken circus spectator who had burnt her trunk with a lit cigar a few years earlier. She was strangled, poisoned, and finally electrocuted via copper bracelets attached to her ankles. The 74-second film was shown on Edison coin-operated kinetoscopes around the United States.
There is a Wikipedia entry for the film and you can watch the entire one minute, seventeen second film today.
With yesterday’s newsletter mentioning the start of the Mary Surratt trial, and, having recently and serendipitously picked up a copy of The Assassin's Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln, I watched The Conspirator last night after writing yesterdays newsletter. Death, therefore, has been on my mind quite a bit in the past 24 or so hours. Having watched Electrocuting an Elephant while writing this entry of today’s newsletter, the topic is still top of mind.
While I’m not an animal right’s activist, I don’t care to have non-pest animals needlessly caused pain; the world is already painful enough. And since, as far as we know, humans can only experience death once1, I’ve always wondered what a human’s final moments are like.
Short of circumstances akin to dying in one’s sleep or being immediately vaporized in a nuclear attack, most death is a painful process. For example, hanging is really death by suffocation. The reason for wanting a longer fall is for the fall to break the neck thus causing paralyzation. Whether that’s to hasten death, to keep the executed from crying out in pain or all the the above, I don’t know.
For a brief second, I got Topsy confused with Tusko (apparently more of a generic term than a name) the elephant that Dr. Jolly West gave 267mg of LSD in the so-called Oklahoma City Zoo Experiment.
1954 Elvis Presley records a 10-minute demo at Sun Records in Nashville, Tennessee.
The record included the songs "It Wouldn't Be the Same Without You" and "I'll Never Stand in Your Way.'
1958 - Sir Edmund Hillary and his party reach the South Pole.
Hillary's group was the first to reach the South Pole on an overland expedition since Roald Amundsen had reached it in 1911, and were also the first explorers to use motor vehicles to do so.
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I will accept the possibility it’s possible for a human to experience clinical death more than once.