This Day in History – November 12, 2011

1602 Sebastian Viscaino lands at and names San Diego, California. 1859 Jules Leotard performs 1st Flying Trapeze circus act (Paris). He also designed the garment that bears his name 1873 Bay District Race Track opens 1892 William “Pudge” Heffelfinger becomes the first professional American football player on record, participating in his first paid game for the Allegheny Athletic Association. 1910 1st Movie stunt: man jumps into Hudson river from a burning balloon 1912 The frozen bodies of Robert Scott and his men are found on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. 1918 Austria becomes a republic. 1920 Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis elected 1st baseball commissioner 1927 Notre Dame’s Fighting Irish changes blue jerseys for green 1927 Leon Trotsky is expelled from the Soviet Communist Party, leaving Joseph Stalin in undisputed control of the Soviet Union. 1933 Hugh Gray takes the first known photos of the Loch Ness Monster. 1933 1st Sunday football game in Philadelphia (previously illegal) 1933 Nazis receive 92% of vote in Germany 1936 1st TV Gardening show 1936 In California, the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge opens to traffic. 1938 Hermann Göring proposes plans to make Madagascar the “Jewish homeland”, an idea that had first been considered by 19th century journalist Theodor Herzl. 1940 Blizzard strikes midwest, 154 die (69 on boat on Great Lakes) 1941 World War II: temperatures around Moscow drop to -12° C as the Soviet Union launches ski troops for the first time against the freezing German forces near the city. 1946 1st drive-up bank window established (Chicago) 1946 Walt Disney’s “Song Of The South” released 1953 US district Judge Grim, rules NFL can black out TV home games 1955 Date returned to in “Back to the Future” & “Back to the Future II” 1956 Morocco, Sudan and Tunisia join the United Nations. 1958 A team of rock climbers led by Warren Harding completes the first ascent of The Nose on El Capitan in Yosemite Valley. 1968 Equatorial Guinea joins the United Nations. 1966 High schooler Robert Smith kills 7 for fame 1970 The Oregon Highway Division attempts to destroy a rotting beached Sperm whale with explosives, leading to the now infamous “exploding whale” incident. 1970 The 1970 Bhola cyclone makes landfall on the coast of East Pakistan becoming the deadliest tropical cyclone in history. 1971 Vietnam War: as part of Vietnamization, US President Richard M. Nixon sets February 1, 1972 as the deadline for the removal of another 45,000 American troops from Vietnam. 1975 The Comoros joins the United Nations. 1978 Pope John Paul II takes possession of his Cathedral Church, the Basilica of St. John Lateran, as the Bishop of Rome. 1979 Iran hostage crisis: in response to the hostage situation in Tehran, US President Jimmy Carter orders a halt to all petroleum imports into the United States from Iran. 1980 The NASA space probe Voyager I makes its closest approach to Saturn and takes the first images of its rings. 1981 Space Shuttle program: mission STS-2, utilizing the Space Shuttle Columbia, marks the first time a manned spacecraft is launched into space twice. 1984 Space shuttle astronauts snared a satellite 1st space salvage 1990 Tim Berners-Lee publishes a formal proposal for the World Wide Web. 1991 “Full House” 100th episode-The twins are born 1996 A Saudi Arabian Airlines Boeing 747 and a Kazakh Ilyushin Il-76 cargo plane collide in mid-air near New Delhi, killing 349. The deadliest mid-air collision to date. 1997 Ramzi Yousef is found guilty of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. 2001 In New York City, American Airlines Flight 587, an Airbus A300 en route to the Dominican Republic, crashes minutes after takeoff from John F. Kennedy International Airport, killing all 260 on board and five on the ground. 2003 Shanghai Transrapid sets a new world speed record (501 kilometres per hour (311 mph)) for commercial railway systems, which remains the fastest for unmodified commercial rail vehicles.]]]]> ]]>