Judgement Day Day 17 of 2008 349 days left in this year

Mokulele: Airplane

 

January 17th , 1929: Molokai and Lanai join the 20th century world of air travel as the first scheduled planes visit the islands. Inter-Island Airways Ltd. will now serve the islands with flights between Oahu and Lanai and Molokai by including the islands as stops on the plane’s way to Maui or the Big Island. Any plane could land at either small island on any day: you merely had to pay for a ticket. If no one had requested the stop, the planes didn’t land. The airline used the Sikorsky sea plane, for neither island had any airport or landing strips.

HISTORICAL EVENTS ON THIS DAY — January 17th

• 1773: Captain James Cook becomes the first person to cross the Antarctic Circle (66° 33′ S) 
• 1775: Nine women are burnt as witches for causing bad harvests (Kalisk Poland) 
• 1861: Thomas Crapper is granted a patent for the flush toilet 
• 1899: U.S. takes possession of Wake Island in the Pacific 
• 1904: Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” opens at the Moscow Art Theater 
• 1905: Charles Brewer & C.G. Scannell, both of Chicago, are granted a patent for punchboards 
• 1945: Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, credited with saving tens of thousands of persons of the Jewish faith from the Nazis, disappears in Hungary 
• 1955: Submarine USS Nautilus begins its first nuclear-powered test voyage 
• 1987: President Reagan signs the secret order permitting the covert sale of arms to Iran 
• 1994: A magnitude 6.7 earthquake hits Southern California, killing at least 61 people and causing $20 billion worth of damage 
• 2001: Faced with an Enron-price fixing electricity crisis, California used rolling blackouts to cut off power to hundreds of thousands of people.
•  2006: The Supreme Court protected Oregon’s assisted-suicide law, ruling that doctors there who helped terminally ill patients die could not be arrested under federal drug laws.

BORN ON THIS DAY — January 17th