Category: Today

On February 7, 1990, the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party agreed to give up its monopoly on power, thus ushering the way for the dissolution of the putatively communist empire.

On February 6, 2018, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, a super heavy launch vehicle, made its maiden flight.

The payload was random/not-random: A Tesla Roadster. Elon Musk runs both SpaceX and Tesla.

Paul Jacob wrote about this at the time.

SpaceX boasts the Falcon Heavy as one of its chief successes:

Falcon Heavy is composed of three reusable Falcon 9 nine-engine cores whose 27 Merlin engines together generate more than 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, equal to approximately eighteen 747 aircraft. As one of the world’s most powerful operational rockets, Falcon Heavy can lift nearly 64 metric tons (141,000 lbs) to orbit.

On February 5, 1958, a hydrogen bomb known as the Tybee Bomb was lost by the U.S. Air Force off the coast of Savannah, Georgia. It has yet to be recovered.

On February 4, 1789, George Washington was unanimously elected as the first President of the United States, under the new Constitution, by the U.S. Electoral College.

On the same date five years later, the French legislature abolished slavery throughout all territories of the French Republic.

On February 3, 1783, Spain recognized the independence from Britain of the United States of America.

Walter Bagehot (pronounced “badge-it”), famed editor of The Economist and author of Lombard Street, was born on this date in 1826.

In 2009, on February Second, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe officially devalued the Zimbabwean dollar for the third and final time, making Z$1 trillion now only Z$1 of the new currency, equivalent to Z$10 septillion before the first devaluation. Politicians in Zimbabwe looked up, saw their shadow, and realized that they had only a couple months more of their inflation binge. Indeed, the legalization of trading currencies, the previous month, had sealed the fate of Zimbabwe’s independent dollar. The Zimbabwean dollar was abandoned officially on the Ninth of April.

February First in History

1835 — Slavery was abolished in Mauritius.

1861 — Texas seceded from the United States.

1865 — President Abraham Lincoln signed the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, finally abolishing slavery in all United States.

On January 31, 1849, the Corn Laws were abolished in the United Kingdom, one of the most impressive and far-reaching anti-protectionist moves of all time.

“Corn” stood for all grains, including wheat, oats & barley; the free-trade agitation by John Bright & Richard Cobden was one of the main impetuses for the reform.

On January 30, 1835, a house painter named Richard Lawrence attempted to shoot former military leader and then-President Andrew Jackson, but failed. He attempted to fire with two pistols, but both misfired, and he was subdued by a crowd, including several congressmen. That marked the first attempt on the life of a sitting U.S. president.

On January 29, 1850, Henry Clay introduced the Compromise of 1850 to the U.S. Congress — which was a package of five separate bills passed by the United States Congress in September 1850, designed to defuse tensions between slave and free states during the years leading up to the American Civil War. Produced by Whig senator Henry Clay and Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas, with the support of President Millard Fillmore, the compromise centered on how to handle slavery in recently acquired territories from the Mexican–American War (1846–1848).

The compromise included a provision approving California’s request to enter the Union as a free state; it also strengthened fugitive slave laws with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. In addition, the compromise

• banned the slave trade in Washington, D.C. (while still allowing slavery itself to exist),
• defined northern and western borders for Texas
• while establishing a territorial government for the Territory of New Mexico, with no restrictions on whether any future state from this territory would be a free or slave state and established a territorial government for the Territory of Utah also with no restrictions on whether the territory would become a slave or free state.