First drunk driving arrest
On September 10, 1897, a 25-year-old London taxi driver named George Smith becomes the first person ever arrested for drunk driving after slamming his cab into a building. Smith later pleaded guilty and was fined 25 shillings.
In the United States, the first laws against operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of alcohol went into effect in New York in 1910. In 1936, Dr. Rolla Harger, a professor of biochemistry and toxicology, patented the Drunkometer, a balloon-like device into which people would breathe to determine whether they were inebriated. In 1953, Robert Borkenstein, a former Indiana state police captain and university professor who had collaborated with Harger on the Drunkometer, invented the Breathalyzer. Easier-to-use and more accurate than the Drunkometer, the Breathalyzer was the first practical device and scientific test available to police officers to establish whether someone had too much to drink. A person would blow into the Breathalyzer and it would gauge the proportion of alcohol vapors in the exhaled breath, which reflected the level of alcohol in the blood.
Despite the invention of the Breathalyzer and other developments, it was not until the late 1970s and early 1980s that public awareness about the dangers of drinking and driving increased and lawmakers and police officers began to get tougher on offenders. In 1980, a Californian named Candy Lightner founded Mothers Against Drunk Driving, or MADD, after her 13-year-old daughter Cari was killed by a drunk driver while walking home from a school carnival. The driver had three previous drunk-driving convictions and was out on bail from a hit-and-run arrest two days earlier. Lightner and MADD were instrumental in helping to change attitudes about drunk driving and pushed for legislation that increased the penalties for driving under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs. MADD also helped get the minimum drinking age raised in many states. Today, the legal drinking age is 21 everywhere in the United States and convicted drunk drivers face everything from jail time and fines to the loss of their driver’s licenses and increased car insurance rates. Some drunk drivers are ordered to have ignition interlock devices installed in their vehicles. These devices require a driver to breathe into a sensor attached to the dashboard; the car won’t start if the driver’s blood alcohol concentration is above a certain limit.
Despite the stiff penalties and public awareness campaigns, drunk driving remains a serious problem in the United States. Each year, roughly 10,000 people die in alcohol-related crashes and more than one million people are arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
INVENTIONS & SCIENCE
2008
CERN Large Hadron Collider is powered up
On September 10, 2008, scientists successfully flip the switch for the first time on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) lab in Geneva, kicking off what many called history’s biggest science experiment.
ART, LITERATURE, AND FILM HISTORY
1991
Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is released as a single
You either had to be part of a fairly small subculture of music fans or a professional on the business side of the music industry to have heard of Nirvana before the autumn of 1991. To the few who followed their particular brand of alternative music before “alternative” went mainstream, Nirvana had announced themselves as a band to watch with their independently produced 1989 album Bleach. And to the music-business pros who knew that Bleach sold 30,000 copies after being produced for only $600, Nirvana was seen as a prime candidate for a breakout with their second album being released by the major label Geffen Records. But absolutely no one—not Nirvana’s biggest fans, not their biggest industry supporters and certainly not the band-members themselves— suspected the magnitude of what was about to happen. In just a few short months, a group that was a complete nonentity to the mainstream music-buying public would become the most important rock band on earth. The transformation began on September 10, 1991, with the release of Nirvana’s landmark single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
FRANCE
1977
The guillotine falls silent
At Baumetes Prison in Marseille, France, Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian immigrant convicted of murder, becomes the last person executed by guillotine. The guillotine first gained fame during the French Revolution when physician and revolutionary Joseph-Ignace Guillotin won passage of a law requiring all death sentences to be carried out by “means of a machine.” Decapitating machines had been used earlier in Ireland and England, and Guillotin and his supporters viewed these devices as more humane than other execution techniques, such as hanging or firing squad. A French decapitating machine was built and tested on cadavers, and on April 25, 1792, a highwayman became the first person in Revolutionary France to be executed by this method.
WAR OF 1812
1813
The Battle of Lake Erie
In the first unqualified defeat of a British naval squadron in history, U.S. Captain Oliver Hazard Perry leads a fleet of nine American ships to victory over a squadron of six British warships at the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812.
COLONIAL AMERICA
1608
John Smith elected to lead Jamestown
English adventurer John Smith is elected council president of Jamestown, Virginia—the first permanent English settlement in North America. Smith, a colorful figure, had won popularity in the colony because of his organizational abilities and effectiveness in dealing with local Native American groups.
ART, LITERATURE, AND FILM HISTORY
1981
Picasso’s “Guernica” is returned to Spain
Spanish artist Pablo Picasso’s monumental anti-war mural Guernica is received by Spain after four decades of refugee existence on September 10, 1981. One of Picasso’s most important works, the painting was inspired by the destruction of the Basque town of Guernica by the Nazi air force during the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, Picasso gave the painting to New York’s Museum of Modern Art on an extended loan and decreed that it not be returned to Spain until democratic liberties were restored in the country. Its eventual return to Spain in 1981–eight years after Picasso’s death–was celebrated as a moral endorsement of Spain’s young democracy.
WORLD WAR I
1919
New York City parade honors World War I veterans
On September 10, 1919, almost one year after an armistice officially ended the First World War, New York City holds a parade to welcome home General John J. Pershing, commander in chief of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), and some 25,000 soldiers who had served in the AEF’s 1st Division on the Western Front.
U.S. PRESIDENTS
1833
Andrew Jackson shuts down Second Bank of the U.S.
President Andrew Jackson announces that the government will no longer use the Second Bank of the United States, the country’s national bank, on September 10, 1833. He then used his executive power to remove all federal funds from the bank, in the final salvo of what is referred to as the “Bank War."
CRIME
1977
Serial killers Charlene Williams and Gerald Gallego meet
Charlene Williams meets Gerald Gallego at a poker club in Sacramento, California, resulting in one of the worst serial killing teams in American history. Before they were finally caught, the Gallegos killed and sexually assaulted at least 10 people over a two-year period.
AMERICAN REVOLUTION
1776
Nathan Hale volunteers to spy behind British lines
General George Washington asks for a volunteer for an extremely dangerous mission: to gather intelligence behind enemy lines before the coming Battle of Harlem Heights. Captain Nathan Hale of the 19th Regiment of the Continental Army stepped forward and subsequently become one of the first known American spies of the Revolutionary War.
WORLD WAR II
1940
British War Cabinet reacts to the Blitz in kind
In light of the destruction and terror inflicted on Londoners by a succession of German bombing raids, called “the Blitz,” the British War Cabinet instructs British bombers over Germany to drop their bombs “anywhere” if unable to reach their targets.
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