August 11

The Dog Days of Summer end. Tonight is the peak of the Perseid meteors. 1896: The first electric light bulb socket featuring an on-and-off pull chain was patented by Harvey Hubbell. 1909: The liner Arapahoe was the first ship to use the radio distress call, SOS (save our ship, Morse Code ···---···). 1919: Industrialist Andrew Carnegie died. 1921: Tom Kilburn, who was the first to succeed in storing and then retrieving a bit of data via software, was born. 1934: A load of America's most dangerous prisoners became the first inmates on Alcatraz Island. 1942: Actress Hedy Markey (Lamarr) received a patent for a secret communication system. 1951: WCBS-TV in New York City televised the first baseball doubleheader (in color) between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Boston Braves. 1962: The Soviet Union launched cosmonaut Andrian Nikolayev on a 94-hour flight. 1977: Sir Frederic Williams, co-inventor of the CRT (the "Williams tube"), died. 1984: President Ronald Reagan joked during a voice test for a radio address that he had "signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." 1992: The Mall of America opened in Minneapolis as the largest shopping mall in the United States. 1997: President Clinton made the first the use of the line-item veto approved by Congress. 1999: The last total solar eclipse of the millennium occurred.