February 1 in History

The world’s first building designed solely for making movies looked like a coffin on a turntable. Thomas Edison’s Black Maria, completed in February 1893 at his West Orange, New Jersey laboratory, was a cramped, tar-paper-covered room with a retractable roof that opened to let sunlight hit the performers inside. The entire structure sat on a circular track so it could rotate to follow the sun throughout the day. Edison and his assistant W.K.L. Dickson needed the studio to produce short film strips for the Kinetoscope, a peephole viewing device Edison was developing alongside the motion picture camera called the Kinetograph. The project had begun in 1888 when Edison filed a caveat describing a device that would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear." Construction of the Black Maria started in December 1892 and cost just $637.67. The first public demonstration of films shot in the Black Maria took place in May 1893 at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. Early subjects included vaudeville performers, boxing matches, strongmen, dancers, and segments from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Fred Ott’s Sneeze, filmed in January 1894, became one of the first motion pictures registered for copyright at the Library of Congress. The performers worked in brutal conditions. The black interior absorbed heat, and on sunny days the studio became an oven, earning it the nickname after the paddy wagons of the era. The Black Maria launched an industry. Within two years, Edison was producing and distributing films commercially. By 1895, the Lumiere brothers in France had developed a superior projection system that allowed audiences to watch films together rather than peering into individual machines. Edison had invented the factory; others would invent the theater.

A single photograph changed the trajectory of the Vietnam War. Eddie Adams, an Associated Press photographer, captured South Vietnamese National Police Chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing suspected Viet Cong officer Nguyen Van Lem with a point-blank pistol shot to the temple on a Saigon street on February 1, 1968. The image, frozen in the instant before the bullet struck, became one of the most reproduced photographs in history. The execution came during the chaos of the Tet Offensive, when North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces launched coordinated surprise attacks on more than 100 cities across South Vietnam. Lem had allegedly been caught near a mass grave of South Vietnamese officers and their families. Loan, exhausted and enraged, acted as both judge and executioner on camera. Adams shot the photograph with a 35mm Nikon, capturing the exact moment of the gunshot. NBC cameraman Vo Suu filmed the execution simultaneously, and the footage aired on American television that evening. The still image ran on the front pages of newspapers worldwide the next morning. Lem crumpled to the pavement. Loan holstered his pistol and walked past Adams, saying "They killed many of my people, and yours too." The photograph galvanized the American antiwar movement, arriving at the precise moment when public opinion was tipping against the conflict. Tet had already shattered the Johnson administration’s claims of progress. Adams’s image gave that disillusionment a face. Loan became a symbol of South Vietnamese brutality; Lem became a martyr. Walter Cronkite traveled to Vietnam weeks later and told CBS viewers the war was unwinnable. Adams later expressed regret, saying the photograph destroyed Loan’s life unfairly. The general had been fighting a war, and the moment lacked all context. But the camera had already delivered its verdict to millions.

Two gunshots in Lisbon’s busiest square ended the Portuguese monarchy in everything but name. King Carlos I and Crown Prince Luis Filipe were riding through the Terreiro do Paco in an open carriage on February 1, 1908, when at least two assassins opened fire at close range. The king died almost instantly. The crown prince, struck multiple times, died twenty minutes later. The queen and the younger prince, Manuel, survived only because bystanders tackled the attackers. Portugal in 1908 was a country in crisis. Carlos had appointed Joao Franco as prime minister with near-dictatorial powers, dissolving parliament and ruling by decree. The economy was failing, the colonial empire was draining resources, and republican sentiment was spreading through Lisbon’s educated classes. A failed republican uprising in January had been brutally suppressed, and dozens of political dissidents had been arrested or deported without trial. The assassins were members of the Carbonaria, a secret republican society modeled on Italian revolutionary networks. Alfredo Luis da Costa and Manuel Buica fired from the crowd with pistols and a carbine before being shot dead by royal bodyguards. The attack was planned to coincide with the royal family’s return from their country estate, when security would be lightest during the carriage procession from the river ferry. Eighteen-year-old Prince Manuel was hastily crowned Manuel II, but he inherited a throne no one could stabilize. The Republican Party continued to gain strength. Military officers shifted their loyalties. Two years later, in October 1910, a republican revolution drove Manuel into exile in England, ending over seven centuries of Portuguese monarchy. The double assassination proved that killing a king could not save a system already collapsing under its own contradictions.

Werner Heisenberg published his uncertainty principle in 1927 when he was twenty-five years old, upending three centuries of classical physics in a paper of remarkable brevity. The principle states that you cannot know precisely both the position and momentum of a subatomic particle at the same time. The more accurately you measure one, the less accurately you can know the other. This was not a limitation of instruments or technique. It was a property of reality itself. Born in Wurzburg, Bavaria on December 5, 1901, Heisenberg studied physics at the University of Munich under Arnold Sommerfeld and completed his doctorate at 22. He worked with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, where the two men developed the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which remains the standard framework for understanding subatomic physics, though it remains fiercely debated. His 1925 paper on matrix mechanics, written before the uncertainty principle, was the first mathematically consistent formulation of quantum mechanics. He was 23 when he wrote it. Erwin Schrodinger independently developed wave mechanics the following year, and Paul Dirac showed the two approaches were mathematically equivalent. Heisenberg won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932, at 31. His role in the German nuclear weapons program during World War II remains one of the most debated questions in the history of science. He led the Uranverein, the German uranium project, which never came close to building a bomb. Whether this failure was due to genuine scientific errors, deliberate sabotage, or insufficient resources and priority has been argued for decades. Farm Hall transcripts, recordings of interned German scientists reacting to the news of Hiroshima, suggest Heisenberg did not fully understand the bomb's design, though he may have been performing for what he suspected were hidden microphones. He died on February 1, 1976, in Munich, at 74. Classical physics had assumed a clockwork universe where everything could, in principle, be measured and predicted. Heisenberg proved the clockwork had been an illusion.

Twenty-seven years of work produced a single volume covering the letters A through Ant. The first fascicle of what would become the Oxford English Dictionary was published on February 1, 1884, and it was already running decades behind schedule. The Philological Society of London had proposed the project in 1857, estimating it would take ten years and fill four volumes. The finished dictionary would not appear for another forty-four years. The original editor, Herbert Coleridge, grandson of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, died of tuberculosis in 1861 at age thirty. His successor, Frederick Furnivall, was brilliant but chaotic, spending more energy founding rowing clubs and feuding with colleagues than organizing the thousands of quotation slips volunteers were sending in. By 1879, the project had no published pages and boxes of unsorted material were scattered across England. James Murray, a self-taught Scottish lexicographer, took over in 1879 and built a corrugated iron shed called the Scriptorium in his Oxford garden to house the work. Volunteers worldwide, called "readers," sent in quotations illustrating how English words had been used throughout history. One of the most prolific contributors, Dr. W.C. Minor, turned out to be a convicted murderer confined to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, sending in thousands of entries from his cell. Murray worked on the dictionary until his death in 1915, having reached the letter T. The complete first edition was published in 1928 in ten volumes containing 414,825 entries. It remains the most comprehensive historical record of the English language ever assembled. The OED proved that a language cannot be pinned down by any single generation. It can only be documented mid-flight.

Eighty-two seconds into launch, a piece of insulating foam the size of a briefcase broke off Columbia’s external tank and struck the leading edge of the left wing at roughly 500 miles per hour. Sixteen days later, on February 1, 2003, superheated atmospheric gases poured through the resulting breach as the shuttle reentered Earth’s atmosphere, tearing the orbiter apart over Texas and Louisiana and killing all seven crew members. NASA engineers had actually spotted the foam strike on launch footage and spent days debating whether it posed a threat. Three separate requests for satellite imagery of the wing were made by lower-level engineers, all of which were either declined or not forwarded up the chain of command. Program managers concluded the foam could not have caused serious damage, partly because similar foam strikes had occurred on previous missions without catastrophic failure. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board would later call this reasoning a textbook case of "normalization of deviance." The crew, commanded by Rick Husband and including payload commander Michael Anderson, mission specialists David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, and Laurel Clark, pilot William McCool, and payload specialist Ilan Ramon of Israel, had spent sixteen days conducting scientific experiments in orbit. At 8:44 a.m. Eastern Time, mission control lost contact. Debris rained across a corridor stretching from Dallas to western Louisiana. The investigation led to a two-and-a-half-year grounding of the shuttle fleet and sweeping changes to NASA’s safety culture and management structure. The disaster also accelerated the decision to retire the shuttle program entirely, which NASA completed in 2011 after 135 missions. Columbia was the second shuttle lost, twenty years after Challenger. Both tragedies shared a root cause: institutional pressure to maintain launch schedules overriding engineering concerns about known risks.