December 24 in History

A broken church organ forced the creation of the most recorded song in history. On Christmas Eve 1818, Father Joseph Mohr arrived at the home of schoolteacher and organist Franz Xaver Gruber in Arnsdorf, Austria, carrying a poem he had written two years earlier and an urgent problem: the organ at St. Nikolaus Church in nearby Oberndorf had malfunctioned, and Mohr needed a musical setting that could be performed with just a guitar for that evening Mass. Gruber composed the melody in a matter of hours. That night, the two men stood before their small congregation and performed "Stille Nacht" as a duet accompanied by Gruber guitar, with the choir repeating the last two lines of each verse in four-part harmony. The song made little impression beyond the village. When organ builder Karl Mauracher came to repair the instrument, he heard the composition and carried it back to the Zillertal region, where traveling folk singers picked it up and spread it across Europe. The song reached the United States in 1839 when the Rainer Family Singers performed it during a concert tour that included a performance for the New York State Legislature. By the American Civil War, soldiers on both sides of the conflict sang it in the trenches. The melody proved so universally appealing that it transcended language, denomination, and culture. Bing Crosby 1935 recording became one of the best-selling singles of all time, with over 30 million copies sold. The original manuscript was lost for over a century until a version in Mohr handwriting was discovered in 1995. UNESCO designated "Silent Night" as an Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2011. The song has been translated into more than 300 languages and is performed billions of times each December, making it by most measures the most widely sung composition in human history. The little church in Oberndorf was demolished in the early twentieth century due to repeated flood damage, but a memorial chapel stands on the site.

Wireless operators on ships scattered across the Atlantic Ocean heard something impossible on Christmas Eve 1906: a human voice emerging from equipment that had only ever produced Morse code dots and dashes. Reginald Fessenden, a Canadian-born inventor broadcasting from a 420-foot antenna tower at Brant Rock, Massachusetts, played "O Holy Night" on his violin, read a passage from the Gospel of Luke, and wished listeners a Merry Christmas in what is generally regarded as the first AM radio broadcast in history. Fessenden had spent years developing an alternative to the spark-gap transmitters used by Guglielmo Marconi, which could only send the on-off pulses of Morse code. His breakthrough was the continuous wave transmitter, built by General Electric engineer Ernst Alexanderson, which generated a steady radio signal that could be modulated to carry the complex waveforms of voice and music. The technology was so far ahead of its time that most wireless operators who heard the broadcast were baffled by it, assuming their equipment was malfunctioning. The broadcast reached ships as far as several hundred miles offshore, though the exact range remains debated. Fessenden conducted a second demonstration on New Year Eve, and both transmissions were heard by United Fruit Company ships equipped with wireless receivers. Despite the technical triumph, Fessenden was unable to commercialize radio broadcasting. His financial backers at the National Electric Signaling Company cheated him out of his patents, triggering a legal battle that consumed decades of his life. Commercial radio broadcasting would not emerge until 1920, when Westinghouse station KDKA began regular programming from Pittsburgh. Fessenden died in 1932 with over 500 patents to his name but little public recognition. The technology he demonstrated at Brant Rock on that Christmas Eve became a trillion-dollar global industry.

Astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders became the first human beings to orbit another world when Apollo 8 fired its service propulsion engine behind the far side of the Moon on Christmas Eve 1968 and slowed into lunar orbit. For thirty-six agonizing minutes, Mission Control in Houston lost all communication as the spacecraft passed behind the Moon, unable to confirm whether the engine burn had succeeded or whether the crew had been flung into deep space. The signal returned precisely on schedule, and Lovell radioed back: "Please be informed, there is a Santa Claus." The crew spent twenty hours circling the Moon in ten orbits at an altitude of roughly sixty nautical miles. From that vantage point, William Anders took the photograph known as "Earthrise," showing the blue-and-white Earth rising above the gray lunar horizon against the blackness of space. The image would become one of the most reproduced photographs in human history and is widely credited with catalyzing the modern environmental movement. During their ninth orbit, the crew conducted a live television broadcast watched by an estimated one billion people, the largest audience for any broadcast at that time. As the lunar surface scrolled beneath them, the astronauts took turns reading the first ten verses of Genesis: "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth." The broadcast ended with Borman saying, "Good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth." Apollo 8 proved that the navigation, communication, and life support systems required for a lunar mission worked reliably. The crew returned safely on December 27 after a flawless trans-Earth injection burn. The mission gave NASA the confidence to attempt a lunar landing just seven months later with Apollo 11. Time magazine named the Apollo 8 crew its Persons of the Year, calling their flight the most hopeful moment of a year battered by assassinations, riots, and Vietnam.

Soviet airborne troops seized Kabul airport on the evening of December 24, 1979, beginning a military intervention that would kill over a million Afghan civilians, drain the Soviet treasury, and set in motion a chain of consequences leading directly to the September 11 attacks two decades later. Within forty-eight hours, special forces from the KGB Alpha Group stormed the Tajbeg Palace and assassinated Afghan President Hafizullah Amin, replacing him with the more compliant Babrak Karmal. The Soviet Politburo had debated the invasion for months. Afghanistan Marxist government, installed by a 1978 coup, was losing control of the countryside to a growing Islamic insurgency. Amin, who had seized power by murdering his predecessor, was proving unpredictable and had made quiet overtures to the United States. Soviet leaders feared losing a client state on their southern border and convinced an ailing Leonid Brezhnev to authorize the intervention despite objections from the military general staff. The United States responded by funneling billions of dollars in weapons and training to the Afghan mujahideen through Pakistan intelligence services in what became the CIA largest covert operation. Saudi Arabia matched American funding dollar for dollar. The war attracted thousands of foreign jihadist volunteers, including a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden, who built training camps near the Pakistani border. The Stinger missile, provided to the mujahideen beginning in 1986, neutralized Soviet helicopter superiority. The last Soviet soldier crossed the Friendship Bridge out of Afghanistan on February 15, 1989, after nearly a decade of fighting that killed 15,000 Soviet troops and an estimated 850,000 to 1.5 million Afghan civilians. The financial and political costs accelerated the Soviet Union collapse. Afghanistan descended into civil war, creating the vacuum the Taliban filled in 1996 and that sheltered al-Qaeda as it planned the September 11 attacks.

British and American diplomats signed the Treaty of Ghent on December 24, 1814, in the Carthusian monastery at Ghent, Belgium, ending a war that both sides were eager to forget and that neither had decisively won. The treaty restored all conquered territory to prewar boundaries, said nothing about the maritime grievances that had caused the conflict, and left every major issue between the two nations unresolved on paper. Yet the peace it established between the United States and Britain proved permanent. The War of 1812 had been a confused and often embarrassing affair for both combatants. The United States declared war primarily over British impressment of American sailors and trade restrictions during the Napoleonic Wars. American invasions of Canada failed repeatedly, the British burned Washington and the White House in August 1814, and the Royal Navy blockade strangled American commerce. Neither side had the resources or the will for a prolonged conflict: Britain was exhausted from twenty years of war against Napoleon, and the American treasury was nearly empty. Negotiations at Ghent dragged on for four months, with British demands initially including the creation of a Native American buffer state in the Northwest Territory and territorial concessions along the Great Lakes. As the talks progressed, the Duke of Wellington advised the British government that its military position in North America did not justify such demands, and the treaty settled on a simple return to the status quo ante bellum. News traveled slowly, and the treaty most famous consequence occurred before word of peace reached America. On January 8, 1815, Andrew Jackson forces destroyed a British army at New Orleans, a victory that became a founding myth of American military prowess despite being strategically meaningless. The Treaty of Ghent led to the Rush-Bagot Agreement of 1817, demilitarizing the Great Lakes and producing the longest undefended border in the world.