Today in History - November 1st

original Post | BY TUNJI OKEGBOLA, dailytimes.com.ng/

Saturday November 1, 2014 the 303rd day and 43rd week of 2014, there are 62 days and 9 weeks left in the year.  Highlights of today in world history...

1800 John Adams moves into White House

On this day in 1800, President John Adams, in the last year of his only term as president, moved into the newly constructed President's House, the original name for what was known today as the White House.

Adams had been living in temporary digs at Tunnicliffe's City Hotel near the half-finished Capitol building since June 1800, when the federal government was moved from Philadelphia to the new capital city of Washington, D.C. In his biography of Adams, historian David McCullough recorded that when Adams first arrived in Washington, he wrote to his wife Abigail, at their home in Quincy, Massachusetts, that he was pleased with the new site for the federal government and had explored the soon-to-be President's House with satisfaction.

Although workmen had rushed to finish plastering and painting walls before Adams returned to D.C. from a visit to Quincy in late October, construction remained unfinished when Adams rolled up in his carriage on November 1. However, the Adams' furniture from their Philadelphia home was in place and a portrait of George Washington was already hanging in one room. The next day, Adams sent a note to Abigail, who would arrive in Washington later that month, saying that he hoped "none but honest and wise men [shall] ever rule under this roof."

Although Adams was initially enthusiastic about the presidential mansion, he and Abigail soon found it to be cold and damp during the winter. Abigail, in a letter to a friend, wrote that the building was tolerable only so long as fires were lit in every room. She also noted that she had to hang their washing in an empty "audience room" (the current East Room).

John and Abigail Adams lived in what she called "the great castle" for only five months. Shortly after they moved in, Thomas Jefferson defeated Adams in his bid for re-election. Abigail was happy to leave Washington and departed in February 1801 for Quincy. As Jefferson was being sworn in on March 4, 1801, John Adams was already on his way back to Massachusetts, where he and Abigail lived out the rest of their days at their family farm.

1914 The Battle of Coronel

In a crushing victory, a German naval squadron commanded by Vice-Admiral Maximilian von Spee sunk two British armoured cruisers with all aboard off the southern coast of Chile on November 1, 1914, in the Battle of Coronel.

World War I broke out on the European continent in August 1914; within months, it had spread by sea across the globe to South America. Previously stationed in the western Pacific, near China, Spree’s small East Asia Squadron made the two-month journey to Chile after Japan entered the war on August 22 and it was determined that the Germans could not stand up to the Japanese navy in the region. Neutral Chile, with its sizeable population of German immigrants and its ready supply of coal, would be a safer base from which to launch attacks against British shipping interests.

After eluding a large number of Japanese, British and Australian ships on its way, Spree’s ships encountered a British squadron commanded by Sir Christopher Cradock in the late afternoon of November 1, 1914. The Germans, with their newer, lighter ships, took quick advantage, opening fire at 7 pm. Cradock's flagship, the Good Hope, was hit before its crew could return fire; it sank within half an hour. The Monmouth followed two hours later, after attempting to withdraw and being sunk by the light cruiser Nurnberg. No fewer than 1,600 British sailors, including Cradock himself, perished along with the two ships; it was the Royal Navy's worst defeat in more than a century.

The quicker British ship Glasgow escaped the fray and fled south to warn another of Cradock's ships, the Canopus, stationed in the Falkland Islands, of Spee's proximity. In response, the British dispatched two battle cruisers, Inflexible and Invincible, from its Battle Cruiser Squadron in the North Sea. The two ships, commanded by Sir Doveton Sturdee, reached the Falklands on December 7; the following day they exacted their revenge on the aggressive Spee, sinking four German ships--including the Nurnberg and Spee's flagship Scharnhorst--with 2,100 crew members aboard. Among the dead were Spee and his two sons, Otto and Heinrich. By the end of 1914, the German cruiser threat to Britain's trade routes had been virtually eliminated; for the duration of the war, Germany's chief weapon at sea would be its deadly U-boat submarines.

1924 Legendary western lawman is murdered

On this day, William Tilghman was murdered by a corrupt prohibition agent who resented Tilghman's refusal to ignore local bootlegging operations. Tilghman, one of the famous marshals who brought law and order to the Wild West, was 71 years old.

Known to both friends and enemies as "Uncle Billy," Tilghman was one of the most honest and effective lawmen of his day. Born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, in 1854, Tilghman moved west when he was only 16 years old. Once there, he flirted with a life of crime after falling in with a crowd of disreputable young men who stole horses from Indians. After several narrow escapes with angry Indians, Tilghman decided that rustling was too dangerous and settled in Dodge City, Kansas, where he briefly served as a deputy marshal before opening a saloon. He was arrested twice for alleged train robbery and rustling, but the charges did not stick.

Despite this shaky start, Tilghman gradually built a reputation as an honest and respectable young man in Dodge City. He became the deputy sheriff of Ford County, Kansas, and later, the marshal of Dodge City. Tilghman was one of the first men into the territory when Oklahoma opened to settlement in 1889, and he became a deputy U.S. marshal for the region in 1891. In the late 19th century, lawlessness still plagued Oklahoma, and Tilghman helped restore order by capturing some of the most notorious bandits of the day.

Over the years, Tilghman earned a well-deserved reputation for treating even the worst criminals fairly and protecting the rights of the unjustly accused. Any man in Tilghman's custody knew he was safe from angry vigilante mobs, because Tilghman had little tolerance for those who took the law into their own hands. In 1898, a wild mob lynched two young Indians who were falsely accused of raping and murdering a white woman. Tilghman arrested and secured prison terms for eight of the mob leaders and captured the real rapist-murderer.

In 1924, after serving a term as an Oklahoma state legislator, making a movie about his frontier days, and serving as the police chief of Oklahoma City, Tilghman might well have been expected to quietly retire. However, the old lawman was unable to hang up his gun, and he accepted a job as city marshal in Cromwell, Oklahoma. Tilghman was shot and killed while trying to arrest a drunken Prohibition agent.

1930 Detroit-Windsor Tunnel is dedicated

On this day in 1930, President Herbert Hoover turned a telegraphic "golden key" in the White House to mark the opening of the 5,160-foot-long Detroit-Windsor Tunnel between the U.S. city of Detroit, Michigan, and the Canadian city of Windsor, Ontario. The tunnel opened to regular traffic on November 3. The first passenger car it carried was a 1929 Studebaker.

Since the beginning of the 19th century, Detroiters and Windscreens had been trying to find a way to move people and goods back and forth across the Detroit River. For decades, railroad interests proposed tunnels and bridges galore, but powerful advocates of marine shipping always managed to block those projects: They did not want to lose business to faster and more capacious trains. (Plans for bridges were particularly troubling to those shippers, since just one low-hanging over-the-water crossing had the potential to keep high-masted sailing vessels off the river altogether.)

In 1871, the region's railroads finally won permission to build a trans-national tunnel, and workers began to dig into the river at the foot of Detroit's San Antoine Street; however, they were forced to abandon the project just 135 feet under the river when they struck a pocket of sulphurous gas that made workers so ill that none could be persuaded to return. Likewise, in 1879, another tunnel had to be abandoned when it ran right into some unexpectedly difficult to excavate limestone under the river. The first successful Michigan-to-Canada tunnel project finally opened in 1891: the 6,000-foot-long Grand Trunk Railway Tunnel at Port Huron.

Soon enough, it was clear to most people on both sides of the border that they needed to build some sort of structure for transporting automobiles across the river. In June 1919, the mayors of Detroit and Windsor decided to build a city-to-city tunnel that would serve as a memorial to the American and Canadian soldiers who had died in World War I. Even after advocates of the under-construction Ambassador Bridge tried to frighten away the tunnel's backers, spreading rumors about the danger of subterranean carbon monoxide poisoning, tunnel boosters were undeterred. (They were, one said, "inspired by God to have this tunnel built.")

Construction began in 1928. First, barges dredged a 2,454-foot-long trench across the river; next, workers sank nine 8,000-ton steel-and-concrete tubes into the trench and welded them together. An elaborate ventilation system kept the air in the tunnel safe to breathe.

In the first nine weeks it was open, nearly 200,000 cars passed through the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel. Today, about 9 million vehicles use the tunnel each year.

1959 Jacques Plante is the first goalie to wear a facemask

On November 1, 1959, Montreal Canadian Jacques Plante became the first NHL goaltender to wear a full facemask. Montreal Maroon Clint Benedict had worn a leather half-mask for a brief time in 1930, after an errant puck smashed his nose and cheekbone—but it blocked his vision, he said, and he took it off after only a few games. By contrast, Plante wore his mask from then on. A few seasons later, his idea began to catch on, and soon almost every keeper in the league wore a mask.

Plante had been practicing in his white fiberglass mask all season, but the Canadians’ coach, the legendarily difficult Toe Blake, wouldn’t allow him to wear it during games. But on November 1, Plante simply put his foot down. Barely three minutes into that night’s game against the Rangers at Madison Square Garden, ace right winger Andy Bathgate wound up and fired a backhand shot from only a few feet away. It cracked Plante across the face, splitting his lip from the corner of his mouth up into his nostril. Blood was everywhere. He kept playing for a few minutes, and then went into the locker room to get stitches from the Garden’s Dr. Kazuo Yanagisawa (who, reporters said, could "stitch a wound, smoke a cigar, and play gin rummy all at the same time"). He was gone for about 20 minutes—an unusually long time for locker-room stitches at a hockey game—and when he returned to the ice he was carrying his cream-colored mask. Blake had pitched a fit about it, the newspapers reported, but Plante insisted. "If I don’t wear the mask," he said, "I’m not playing."

Teammates, opponents, fans and reporters mocked Plante mercilessly about it, but Plante didn’t care. "I already had four broken noses, a broken jaw, two broken cheekbones and almost 200 stitches in my head," he pointed out. "I didn’t care how the mask looked." And the truth is that Plante was such a good goalie that it almost didn’t matter what he did. (Case in point: Plante always knitted his own underwear and stocking caps, saying that knitting were the only thing that truly soothed him. "Someday," he said wistfully, "I’m going to learn to knit with my feet.") He won the Vezina Trophy, the NHL’s goaltending prize, seven times, and he won it every year from 1956 to 1960. He was the NHL MVP in 1962. He was named to the All-Star Team seven times, and his team won six Stanley Cups.

Once it caught on, most goaltenders wore Plante-designed masks until the end of the 1960s, when Soviet goalies introduced cage-style masks that made it easier to see. And his insistence on protecting his face probably extended Plante’s career—he played in the NHL until 1975.

1993 European Union goes into effect

The Maastricht Treaty comes into effect, formally establishing the European Union (EU). The treaty was drafted in 1991 by delegates from the European Community meeting at Maastricht in the Netherlands and signed in 1992. The agreement called for a strengthened European parliament, the creation of a central European bank, and common foreign and security policies. The treaty also laid the groundwork for the establishment of a single European currency, to be known as the "euro."

By 1993, 12 nations had ratified the Maastricht Treaty on European Union: Great Britain, France, Germany, the Irish Republic, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Denmark, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Austria, Finland, and Sweden became members of the EU in 1995. After suffering through centuries of bloody conflict, the nations of Western Europe were finally united in the spirit of economic cooperation.