February 25 in History

Canada's Pickering Nuclear Generating Station brought its first unit online on February 25, 1971, inaugurating the nation's commercial nuclear power era on the shore of Lake Ontario, roughly 30 kilometers east of downtown Toronto. The station used CANDU reactors, a Canadian-designed pressurized heavy water system that ran on natural uranium fuel without the expensive enrichment process required by American and European reactor designs. This engineering advantage gave Canada a distinct competitive position in the global nuclear market: countries that lacked enrichment infrastructure could operate CANDU plants independently, making the technology attractive to India, South Korea, Argentina, and Romania. Pickering eventually grew to eight reactors with a combined capacity exceeding 4,000 megawatts, enough to power roughly two million homes and making it one of the largest nuclear generating stations in the world at its peak. The plant also became a persistent flashpoint for environmental and safety debate. Its proximity to Canada's largest metropolitan area raised questions that never fully went away, particularly after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986 sharpened public anxiety about nuclear risk. The station's thermal discharge into Lake Ontario drew sustained criticism from fisheries scientists who documented changes to local aquatic ecosystems near the cooling water outlets. Despite these controversies, Pickering operated for more than fifty years before Ontario Power Generation began the decommissioning process, having generated more electricity than virtually any other nuclear facility in Canadian history.

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 roughly 1,400 soldiers surrendered unconditionally near Fishguard, Wales, on February 24, 1797, ending what remains the last foreign invasion of British soil. The force was commanded by Irish-American Colonel William Tate, a veteran of the American Revolution who had been recruited by the French Directory to lead a diversionary raid while larger forces attacked Ireland. The plan called for landing near Bristol to cause chaos and draw British troops away from Ireland's coast. Bad weather forced the ships southward, and Tate's men landed on the rocky Pembrokeshire coast instead. The soldiers were not France's finest. Most were convicts and deserters recruited from prisons with the promise of pardons and loot. They had minimal training and even less discipline. Within hours of landing, many broke into farmhouses and began drinking seized wine and spirits. The force was supposed to march inland and burn settlements. Instead, it got drunk. Local militia forces, including the Pembroke Yeomanry, mobilized quickly and surrounded the invaders. According to persistent local legend, a group of Welsh women in traditional red cloaks and tall black hats were mistaken for British regular soldiers at a distance, convincing Tate that he was outnumbered by professional troops. Whether this story is literally true remains debated, but Tate's men were in no condition to fight regardless. The surrender took place on Goodwick Sands after less than two full days ashore. The entire episode was farcical, but it was the last time a foreign military force set foot on British soil as invaders.

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-Adelaide became Grand Duchess of Luxembourg at seventeen because the country had no male heirs and had only recently changed the law to prevent the throne from passing to a foreign prince. Her father, Grand Duke William IV, died in February 1912 after a long illness. The constitution had been amended just three years earlier to allow female succession — without the change, the throne would have gone to a distant German relative, effectively ending Luxembourg's independence as a sovereign state. Marie-Adelaide wore a military uniform to her oath of office, projecting authority she would struggle to maintain. Her six-year reign was dominated by World War I. Luxembourg was invaded by Germany in 1914, and Marie-Adelaide chose to remain in the country rather than flee to exile. She met with Kaiser Wilhelm II and cooperated with the occupation government to protect her people from the worst depredations of military rule. The strategy was pragmatic but politically fatal. After the war, Allied powers accused her of collaboration. The Belgian government openly discussed annexing Luxembourg. Domestically, republicans and socialists demanded her removal. Facing pressure from all sides, Marie-Adelaide abdicated on January 14, 1919, in favor of her younger sister Charlotte. She entered a Carmelite convent in Italy and took vows as a nun. Charlotte proved far more politically adept, ruling for forty-five years and navigating Luxembourg through a second world war without losing her throne. The emergency constitutional fix that brought Marie-Adelaide to power had worked — Luxembourg remained independent — just not in the way anyone had 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 levied the first state gasoline tax in American history on February 25, 1919: one cent per gallon. The logic was straightforward. Automobiles were destroying roads at a rate that horse-drawn traffic had never approached, and the state was spending thirteen million dollars annually on road maintenance while collecting only two million in vehicle registration fees. Someone had to pay for the damage, and Oregon's legislators decided the fairest approach was to make drivers pay in proportion to how much they drove. More miles meant more gas, which meant more tax. The principle was elegant and immediately popular with other states. Within four years, every state in the union had adopted some form of gasoline tax. The federal government followed in 1932 with a one-cent-per-gallon levy that was supposed to be temporary — it was billed as a Depression-era revenue measure. It never went away. Instead, it grew. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 formalized the relationship between gas taxes and road construction, channeling fuel tax revenue into the Highway Trust Fund that financed the Interstate Highway System. Ninety percent of America's highway construction has been funded through this mechanism. The gas tax became the invisible backbone of American infrastructure, so embedded in the system that most drivers never think about it. Oregon's one-cent experiment in 1919 grew into a nationwide funding structure that built 48,000 miles of interstate highway. The irony is that the same tax mechanism is now collapsing as electric vehicles and fuel-efficient cars reduce gasoline consumption while road maintenance costs continue to climb. Oregon, characteristically, was the first state to experiment with alternatives: a per-mile road usage charge piloted in 2015.

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 established diplomatic relations for the first time on January 20, 1925, signing a convention in Beijing that formally ended decades of hostility dating back to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905. The treaty addressed the most contentious issue between the two nations: Japan's occupation of northern Sakhalin Island, which Japanese forces had seized during the Russian Civil War in 1920. The Soviets wanted the territory back. Japan wanted economic concessions. The compromise gave Moscow sovereignty over northern Sakhalin in exchange for Japanese fishing rights in Soviet waters and oil and coal concessions on the island itself. Japan also extracted a promise that the Soviet Union would not support communist revolutionary movements in Asia or interfere in Japanese domestic politics. That promise was worth precisely nothing. Within months, Soviet agents were funding communist organizations in China and working to undermine Japanese interests throughout East Asia. Both governments understood the treaty as a tactical pause rather than a genuine rapprochement. Japan continued to view the Soviet Union as its primary strategic threat on the Asian continent. Soviet military planners built their Far Eastern defenses around the assumption that war with Japan was inevitable. Both sides spent the next sixteen years preparing for exactly that conflict. Border skirmishes at Khasan in 1938 and Khalkhin Gol in 1939 brought them to the edge of full-scale war. They signed a neutrality pact in 1941 that lasted until the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria in August 1945, four days before Japan's surrender.

Charles Jenkins received the first television broadcast license from the Federal Radio Commission on February 25, 1928, for station W3XK in Washington, D.C. His system was mechanical, not electronic — it used spinning disks with holes arranged in a spiral pattern, synchronized between transmitter and receiver, to reconstruct images line by line. The picture was roughly the size of a postage stamp, rendered in orange neon, and flickered at 48 lines of resolution. A modern smartphone screen displays 2,532 lines. Jenkins had been experimenting with television since the 1890s and held patents dating back to 1894. His broadcasts reached a small audience of hobbyists who assembled their own receivers from mail-order kits and magazine instructions. The experience was more like looking at a slightly animated photograph than watching television as we understand it today. But Jenkins proved something critical: moving images could be transmitted through the air, legally licensed, and received by the public. He started broadcasting regularly, using the license to transmit short films and simple animations. He even sold receiver kits through advertisements. The commercial and regulatory framework for television was being assembled in real time. Jenkins' mechanical system, however, was a technological dead end. By the early 1930s, RCA's Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin were developing fully electronic television systems that could produce sharper pictures, handle motion more naturally, and scale to mass production. Jenkins' company went bankrupt in 1932. His contribution was not the technology but the proof of concept and the regulatory precedent: television was real, licensable, and commercially viable.