A Tuesday with no headline observance, which leaves 18 August to its anniversaries — and they run to firsts and to exits: an element found in the sky above Andhra Pradesh decades before anyone held it, a vote that took seventy years and turned on one man's mother, and a president reading his own resignation out live on television.
On this day
1920Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution, completing the three-quarters needed to bar the denial of the vote on the basis of sex. Its House had deadlocked 48-48 twice; 24-year-old Harry Burn switched his vote after his mother wrote urging him to.Constitutional Convention via Wikimedia Commons · Public domain
2008Pervez Musharraf resigned as President of Pakistan in a live midday address from Islamabad, ending nine years in power rather than face impeachment over his imposition of emergency rule and dismissal of judges. He denied every charge in the same speech.Pakistan Army via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0
1868IndiaObserving the total solar eclipse from Guntur, French astronomer Pierre Janssen recorded a bright yellow line in the Sun's spectrum at about 587.5 nanometres that matched no element known on Earth. It was helium — still the only element identified in space before it was found on this planet, 27 years before it was isolated in a laboratory.Wikimedia Commons · Public domain
Did you know
The helium found above Guntur in 1868 is the only element spotted in space before it was found on Earth — and the one industrial gas the planet cannot recover. Helium is light enough to escape Earth's gravity outright once it reaches the atmosphere, so every litre that boils off is gone for good. A single MRI scanner needs roughly 2,000 litres of liquid helium to keep its magnet cold.