June 3 in History

Twenty thousand chests of opium, approximately 1,210 metric tons, were dissolved in trenches of water, salt, and lime on the beach at Humen near Canton on June 3, 1839. Imperial Commissioner Lin Zexu had confiscated the drug from British and American merchants after a six-week standoff, and now he supervised its destruction in a process that took twenty-three days. Workers flushed the dissolved narcotic into the sea at each high tide. Lin reportedly apologized to the ocean creatures for the pollution. The opium trade had created a public health catastrophe in China. British merchants, primarily operating through the East India Company, had been smuggling Indian-grown opium into China for decades to offset a massive trade deficit. Britain bought enormous quantities of Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain but produced almost nothing the Chinese wanted in return. Opium reversed the flow of silver. By the 1830s, an estimated two million Chinese were addicted, and the drain on the treasury alarmed the Qing court enough to send Lin, one of the empire’s most capable officials, to Canton with orders to end the trade. Lin’s seizure of the opium was legal under Chinese law. He gave the merchants a deadline to surrender their stocks, blockaded the foreign trading post when they refused, and waited them out. The British superintendent, Charles Elliot, eventually ordered the merchants to comply, promising that the Crown would compensate them. That promise converted a dispute between Chinese authorities and private drug dealers into a conflict between sovereign nations. Britain declared war in 1840. The First Opium War lasted two years and ended with the Treaty of Nanking, which ceded Hong Kong to Britain, opened five Chinese ports to foreign trade, and imposed an indemnity of 21 million silver dollars. Lin was exiled to the frontier. The treaty system that followed hollowed out Chinese sovereignty for a century.

Fourteen miles of wire strung between a waterfall and a city changed how civilization used energy. On June 3, 1889, the first long-distance commercial electrical power transmission line in the United States began operating, carrying current generated at Willamette Falls in Oregon City to streetlights and businesses in downtown Portland. The project proved that electricity did not have to be consumed where it was produced. The challenge was distance. Thomas Edison’s direct current systems, which powered lower Manhattan, lost so much energy over wire that generating stations had to sit within a mile of their customers. Every city block needed its own small power plant. The Willamette Falls project used direct current at 4,000 volts, far higher than Edison’s standard, transmitted over telegraph-style poles. Even at that voltage, losses were significant, and the system could deliver only about 185 horsepower to Portland. The real breakthrough was already underway elsewhere. George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla were developing alternating current systems that used transformers to step voltage up for long-distance transmission and down again for safe use in homes and factories. AC could travel hundreds of miles with acceptable losses. The Willamette Falls line demonstrated the demand for long-distance power, but it was AC technology, proven at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the 1895 Niagara Falls generating station, that made the modern electrical grid possible. Portland’s modest fourteen-mile line nonetheless established the principle that shaped the twentieth century: energy could be generated wherever geography provided the cheapest fuel or water, then shipped invisibly to wherever people needed it. Factories no longer required riverside locations. Cities could grow without choking on coal smoke. The separation of power generation from power consumption remade the geography of industrial civilization.

Ed White refused to come back inside. Floating above the Pacific Ocean at 17,500 miles per hour, tethered to the Gemini 4 capsule by a 25-foot gold-wrapped umbilical cord, the Air Force lieutenant colonel was having the time of his life. When mission control in Houston ordered him to end America’s first spacewalk after 23 minutes, White radioed back: "This is the saddest moment of my life." NASA had accelerated the spacewalk after Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov completed the first EVA on March 18, 1965, beating the Americans by less than three months. Gemini 4 launched on June 3, 1965, and White exited the capsule during the third orbit, propelling himself with a handheld zip gun that fired bursts of compressed oxygen. He tumbled, spun, and grinned through a visor fogged with exertion while his crewmate James McDivitt struggled to photograph him through the capsule window. The mission proved that humans could function outside a spacecraft, a prerequisite for the lunar program that was only four years from its deadline. White demonstrated that an astronaut could maintain orientation, manipulate tools, and perform basic tasks in the vacuum of space without immediate physical collapse. The zip gun ran out of propellant after three minutes, forcing White to pull himself along the tether for the remainder of the walk, but the fundamental question was answered: extravehicular activity was survivable and productive. White died less than two years later in the Apollo 1 fire on January 27, 1967, trapped inside a command module with Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee during a launch pad test. He was 36. The redesigned Apollo capsule that emerged from the disaster investigation carried the program safely to the moon, a destination White had been selected to visit.

Drilling mud stopped circulating at 3:00 AM, and the crew of the Sedco 135F knew they were in trouble. The exploratory well Ixtoc I, operated by Mexico’s state oil company Pemex in the Bay of Campeche 600 miles south of Texas, blew out on June 3, 1979, when pressurized oil and gas roared up the wellbore and ignited. The drilling rig collapsed into the sea. The well would not be capped for nine months. Ixtoc I released an estimated 3.3 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, making it the second-largest accidental oil spill in history at the time. Oil slicks spread across 1,100 square miles. Prevailing currents carried crude northward to the Texas coastline, where tar balls fouled 162 miles of beaches from the Rio Grande to Corpus Christi. Mexican shrimpers and fishermen lost an entire season’s income. Sea turtles, dolphins, and seabird populations suffered losses that scientists struggled to quantify because baseline population data barely existed. Pemex attempted every available technique to stop the flow. Workers dropped steel balls and debris into the wellbore, injected chemical gelling agents, and used relief wells to intersect the blown-out shaft. Two relief wells were drilled simultaneously starting in June, but the geology of the seafloor complicated the drilling. Oil continued to pour out at a rate of 10,000 to 30,000 barrels per day throughout the summer and fall. The well was finally capped on March 23, 1980, 295 days after the blowout. The disaster produced recommendations for blowout prevention that went largely unimplemented. Thirty-one years later, the Deepwater Horizon spill in the same Gulf of Mexico repeated many of the same failures at far greater depth, suggesting that the lessons of Ixtoc I were studied but never absorbed by the industry.

Maurice Herzog lost his gloves near the summit and began losing his fingers within hours. On June 3, 1950, Herzog and Louis Lachenal stood on top of Annapurna at 8,091 meters, completing the first ascent of any peak above 8,000 meters. The triumph lasted minutes. The descent nearly killed them both. The French expedition had arrived in Nepal with incomplete maps and no certainty about which route up the mountain was even feasible. They spent weeks reconnoitering approaches to both Annapurna and neighboring Dhaulagiri before committing to Annapurna’s north face during a narrow weather window before the monsoon. The team established a chain of camps up the mountain, but the final push was made by just two men, exhausted and operating on the thin margin between ambition and survival. Lachenal, a professional Chamonix guide, reached the summit reluctantly. He had wanted to turn back, worried about frostbite in his feet, but Herzog pressed on and Lachenal followed out of loyalty and professional obligation. Both men were snow-blind and severely frostbitten by the time they stumbled back to Camp V. Herzog dropped his gloves during the descent and spent hours with his bare hands exposed to temperatures well below minus thirty degrees Celsius. Both climbers suffered severe frostbite. Herzog lost all his fingers and toes; Lachenal lost all his toes. Herzog’s book Annapurna, published in 1951, became the bestselling mountaineering book in history, selling eleven million copies. It presented the climb as a triumph of French national will and omitted or softened the conflicts within the expedition, including Lachenal’s reluctance and the chaotic, nearly fatal evacuation. Lachenal’s own diary, published posthumously decades later, told a darker story. Annapurna opened the era of Himalayan eight-thousander climbing, but it also established a pattern: the summit gets the glory, the descent takes the toll.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from fifteen years of exile in Paris on February 1, 1979, and within ten months had dismantled the Iranian monarchy, executed hundreds of officials of the old regime, and established a theocratic republic governed by Islamic jurists. Born on September 24, 1902, in Khomein, Iran, he was a Shia cleric who rose through the seminary system to become a Grand Ayatollah, the highest rank in Shia religious scholarship. He first gained national prominence in 1963 when he publicly denounced the Shah's White Revolution, a modernization program that included land reform and women's suffrage. The Shah's government arrested him, exiled him first to Turkey and then to Iraq, where he spent 13 years developing his theory of velayat-e faqih, governance by Islamic jurists, which argued that the most qualified cleric should have supreme political authority over the state. He moved to Paris in 1978 as the Iranian revolution gathered momentum. From a suburb of Paris, he directed the revolution through cassette tapes and telephone calls, coordinating strikes and demonstrations that paralyzed the Shah's government. His return to Tehran was watched by millions. No comparable revolution in the twentieth century moved from exile to total power faster. He sent a generation of young men to the front in the Iran-Iraq War with plastic keys around their necks, keys they were told would open the gates of paradise if they died as martyrs. He issued the fatwa against Salman Rushdie in 1989 for "The Satanic Verses." He died on June 3, 1989, at age 86. His funeral drew an estimated three million mourners. His picture hangs in government buildings across Iran today. The system he built has outlived him by over three decades.