February 25 in History

Canada's Pickering Nuclear Generating Station powers up its first unit, launching the nation's inaugural commercial nuclear power plant. This milestone immediately shifts the country's energy landscape by providing a massive, low-carbon source of electricity to Ontario's growing grid.

Theodoric the Great promised Odoacer they'd rule Italy together. They signed the treaty on March 5, 493. Ten days later, at a banquet meant to celebrate their partnership, Theodoric walked up behind Odoacer and split him in half with a sword. One stroke, shoulder to hip. Then he killed Odoacer's family and supporters. The siege of Ravenna lasted three years. The peace lasted ten days. Theodoric ruled Italy alone for the next 33 years, and nobody questioned the arrangement.

A French expeditionary force of 1,400 soldiers under Irish-American Colonel William Tate surrendered unconditionally to local militia near Fishguard, Wales, ending the last foreign invasion of British soil. The poorly disciplined troops, mostly ex-convicts, had spent two days looting farmhouses and drinking seized wine before Welsh defenders surrounded them. Legend credits a group of local women in traditional red cloaks with being mistaken for British regulars, hastening the French capitulation.

Miners in Calaveras County pulled a human skull from 130 feet underground, embedded in volcanic rock millions of years old. If real, it meant humans walked with mastodons. Scientists fought for decades. Josiah Whitney, California's state geologist, staked his reputation on it. Louis Agassiz at Harvard called it proof of ancient man in America. But the skull had no volcanic minerals in its cracks. The bone was too light. A miner later admitted they'd planted it as a joke on Whitney, who'd been insufferably pompous about his expertise. Whitney refused to believe the confession. He defended the skull until he died. The hoax made it into textbooks for forty years.

A three-year-old became Emperor of China because his aunt needed a puppet. Cixi chose her nephew Guangxu specifically — young enough to control, male enough to legitimize her power. She'd already ruled through one child emperor. This one would last longer. For thirteen years she made every decision while he sat on the throne. When he finally tried to reform China in 1898, she had him imprisoned in his own palace. He died in 1908, one day before she did. Probably poisoned.

Marie-Adélaïde became Grand Duchess at 17 because Luxembourg had no sons. Her father died suddenly. The constitution had been changed just three years earlier to allow female succession—otherwise the throne would have passed to a distant German prince. She was the first woman to rule Luxembourg in her own right. She wore a military uniform to her oath ceremony. Six years later, after accusations of German sympathies during WWI, she'd be forced to abdicate. Her younger sister Charlotte took over and ruled for 45 years. The emergency fix to keep the throne Luxembourgish worked—just not the way anyone planned.

A German patrol of 19 men walked into Fort Douaumont and found it nearly empty. The keystone of Verdun's defenses — supposedly impregnable, built to hold 500 guns and thousands of troops — had a skeleton crew of 57 territorial reservists. No combat troops. Most of the artillery had been removed weeks earlier for other fronts. The Germans couldn't believe it either. They thought it was a trap. France spent the next eight months trying to take it back.

Oregon needed money to fix its roads. Cars were tearing them up faster than horse-drawn wagons ever had. The state was spending $13 million a year on maintenance but only collecting $2 million in vehicle registration fees. Someone had to pay. On February 25, 1919, Oregon became the first state to tax gasoline—one cent per gallon. The logic was simple: the more you drive, the more you destroy the roads, the more you pay. Within four years, every state had copied it. Now the federal gas tax funds 90 percent of America's highway construction. The roads you drive on exist because Oregon couldn't afford to maintain them.

The Red Army took Tbilisi after three weeks of fighting that killed 5,000 people. Georgia had been independent for exactly three years — recognized by Lenin himself in a 1920 treaty. Then Stalin, who was Georgian, convinced Lenin to invade anyway. The Menshevik government fled. Most of the Georgian Bolsheviks opposed the invasion. Moscow installed them in power regardless. Georgia lost its independence until 1991. Seventy years. Stalin's homeland became his first colonial project.

Japan and the Soviet Union signed a treaty in Beijing establishing diplomatic relations for the first time. They'd been enemies since the Russo-Japanese War two decades earlier. They still hated each other. The Japanese occupied northern Sakhalin Island. The Soviets wanted it back. The treaty gave them that, plus oil and coal concessions. Japan got fishing rights and a promise the Soviets wouldn't support communist movements in Asia. That promise lasted about six months. Both sides spent the next sixteen years preparing to fight each other again. Which they did.

Charles Jenkins got the first television license in 1928 for a system that used spinning disks and neon bulbs. His broadcasts reached maybe a few hundred people who'd built their own receivers from kits. The picture was the size of a postage stamp, orange, and flickered at 48 lines of resolution. A modern smartphone has 2,532 lines. But Jenkins proved you could send moving images through the air legally. Within a decade, his mechanical system was obsolete. RCA's electronic television replaced it entirely.