Important Events From This day in History – 18th December

Today in History

• 1966 Saturn’s Moon, Epimetheus, discovered

  Epimetheus, one of Saturn’s 150 natural satellites or moons, orbits alongside another moon, Janus. Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is the only natural satellite in the Solar System with an atmosphere.

• 1958 World’s first communication satellite launched

  A highly classified project, SCORE (Signal Communications by Orbiting Relay Equipment) was launched aboard the Atlas rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Once in orbit, it transmitted the first message from space to Earth, a brief statement by American President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

• 1912 Piltdown Man Hoax

  The announcement made by British archeologist Charles Dawson at a Geological Society of London conference was met with little skepticism in the field of paleoanthropology. The discovery of unidentified human ancestor fossilized remains in Piltdown, East Sussex, England, was thought to have provided valuable clues about human evolution. It wasn’t until 1953 that the Piltdown Man was discovered to be a hoax, with the skull made up of orangutan jawbones and an adult human cranium.

• 1892 The Nutcracker makes it debut in St. Petersburg, Russia

  The two-part ballet was inspired by the novella The Nutcracker and the Mouse King by German author Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann. Even though the ballet’s score was written by the famous Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, it received negative reviews. It wasn’t until the mid-twentieth century that The Nutcracker became popular among theatregoers, particularly during Christmas in the United States.

• 1865 Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution adopted

  The Thirteenth Amendment, the first of three Reconstruction Amendments, abolished slavery and involuntary servitude. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments extended citizenship rights, equal protection under the law, and the right to vote to all Americans, regardless of their “race, colour, or previous condition of servitude.”