On This Day, April 11, 1970, Apollo 13 Launched from Kennedy Space Center.

The mission was commanded by Jim Lovell with Jack Swigert as command module pilot and Fred Haise as Apollo Lunar Module pilot. Swigert was a late replacement for Ken Mattingly, who was grounded after exposure to rubella.

Two days later, the lunar landing was aborted after an oxygen tank in the service module failed two days into the mission, leading to famous expression, "Houston, we have a problem."

To survive, the crew needed to overcome limited power, loss of cabin heat, shortage of potable water, and make makeshift repairs to the carbon dioxide removal system.

There was a critical need to adapt the command module’s cartridges for the carbon dioxide scrubber system to work in the lunar module. Working together, thousands of miles apart, the crew and mission controllers were successful in improvising a solution.

Looping around the Moon, the crew returned safely to Earth six days later on April 1...

On This Day, April 9, 1940, the patent for the first shopping cart is granted to its inventor Sylvan Goldman, the owner of a Humpty Dumpty Grocery store in Oklahoma City. It was essentially a folding chair with wheels and baskets attached. The carts were initially a flop, as shoppers were reluctant to use them--men found them effeminate and women thought them too much like a baby carriage - so he hired models to shop with them.

Eventually, folding carts became very popular and Goldman became a multimillionaire by collecting a royalty on every folding design shopping cart in the United States.

By any measure, Goldman was an innovator. In addition to his invention of the shopping cart, early in his career as a grocer he developed many of the advertising and marketing techniques now commonly used by supermarkets.

He once said his idea for the shopping cart came from watching women carrying baskets. ''They had a tendency to stop shopping when the baskets became too full or too heavy,'...

Considered one of the most versatile athletes of modern sports, he won two Olympic gold medals in the 1912 Summer Olympics, and played professional football, professional baseball, and basketball, as well as boxing, wrestling, gymnastics, swimming, hockey, basketball, and track.

Thorpe’s career in sports was unparalleled. He played both professional football and professional baseball, and held records in both. He co-founded and was named the first President of the American Football League (later renamed the National Football League).

Thorpe was a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, and became the first Native American to win a gold medal for the United States.

Jim Thorpe was generally considered to have been born on May 22, 1887, he was born in a cabin on the North Canadian River near Prague, Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), but no birth certificate has ever been found.

Thorpe himself said in a note to The Shawnee News-Star in 1943 that he was born May 28, 1888, "near and south o...

This story came to mind today, because it was on this Day, February 26, 1829, that Levi Strauss was born in Buttenheim, Bavaria. Levi was the son of Hirsch Strauss and his second wife, Rebecca.

At age 18, Levi Strauss travelled with his mother and two sisters to the United States to join his brothers Jonas and Louis, who had begun a wholesale dry goods business in New York City called J. Strauss Brother & Co. Their business was thriving.

When the Gold Rush hit, they wanted to meet the needs of the miners and farmers also seeking their fortune, and devised a plan for Levi to travel to the West Coast and set up a version of their dry goods business there.

Strauss boarded a steamer bound for Panama, then walked across the isthmus and boarded another steamer sailing north to the shores of the California Gold Rush. He arrived on a rainy March day in 1853, and soon set up a dry goods wholesale business on San Francisco’s waterfront under his own name —Levi Strauss & Co.

Within two ...

This copy of a speech given at a "Dining In," a traditional formal military officers' dinner - usually an annual stag affair held by units on bases and posts. I've been told by friends who know him, that Guy Lofaro was a legendary professor at West Point and is a tremendous speaker. This speech provides exceptional insight into the values and dedication required by all of our military servicemen and women today. It's an excellent tribute, and has been making the rounds throughout the ranks....

Let me say before beginning, that it has been my pleasure to attend several dinings-in here at West Point and hence, I have some basis for comparison. You people have done a fine job and you ought to congratulate yourselves.

In fact, why don't we take this time to have the persons who were responsible for this event, stand, so we can acknowledge them publicly. I guess I am honored with these invitations because there exists this rumor that I can tell a story. Cadets, who I have had in class, so...