1775 – Patrick Henry gives an impassioned speech wherein he proclaims “Give me liberty or give me death!”
1839 – “OK” enters the national vernacular. Boomer comes later.
1857 – Elisha Otis installs the first public elevator in New York City
1875 – The British survey ship, H.M.S. Challenger discovers the deepest known region of the Earth’s oceans when it made its first sounding of the Mariana Trench.
1882 – The Edmunds (Anti-Polygamy) Act is adopted by the US Senate and aimed squarely at the Utah Territory. 1300 men are later imprisoned under the act.
1884 – Florence Ellinwood Allen is born in Salt Lake City. She became the first woman to serve on a state supreme court (Ohio) and later became the first woman to serve as a United States federal judge when FDR appointed her to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals.
1981 – The US Supreme Court decides in Kirchberg v Feenstra that Louisiana’s ‘head and master’ law stipulating that marital property was under the control of the husband was, in fact, unconstitutional. In 1981.
1983 – 112 days after becoming the world’s first recipient of a permanent artificial heart, Barney Clark dies at the University of Utah Medical Center.