Today is...

[IceWizard]

Monday 27 June 2016

Sunglasses Day





Elton John has over a thousand pairs, ZZ Top wrote a song about them, Canadian singer Corey Hart only wears his at night, and you can tell the good guys from the bad guys in The Matrix by the shape of theirs.

What am I talking about?

Sunglasses, of course!

There’s nothing quite as stylish as a pair of shades, so get out your aviators or your wayfarers and start celebrating Sunglasses Day!

Although the origins of Sunglasses Day are unknown, the history of sunglasses stretches as far back as 14th century China, where judges used eyewear made of smoke-coloured quartz to mask their emotions. Fast-forward 600 years and modern sunglasses as we know them today were first marketed by entrepreneur Sam Foster on the Atlantic City Boardwalk.

One other thing to remember is that sunglasses also help protect your eyes from harmful UV light, so channel your inner-cool and slip on those shades on Sunglasses Day!

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Also This Day in History

1847 - New York and Boston were linked by telegraph wires.

1871 - The yen became the new form of currency in Japan.

1885 - Chichester Bell and Charles S. Tainter applied for a patent for the gramophone. It was granted on May 4, 1886.

1893 - The New York stock market crashed. By the end of the year 600 banks and 74 railroads had gone out of business.

1905 - The battleship Potemkin succumbed to a mutiny on the Black Sea.

1918 - Two German pilots were saved by parachutes for the first time.

1923 - Yugoslav Premier Nikola Pachitch was wounded by Serb attackers in Belgrade.

1924 - Democrats offered Mrs. Leroy Springs for vice presidential nomination. She was the first woman considered for the job.

1927 - The U.S. Marines adopted the English bulldog as their mascot.

1929 - Scientists at Bell Laboratories in New York revealed a system for transmitting television pictures.

1931 - Igor Sikorsky filed U.S. Patent 1,994,488, which marked the breakthrough in helicopter technology.

1940 - Robert Pershing Wadlow was measured by Dr. Cyril MacBryde and Dr. C. M. Charles. They recorded his height at 8' 11.1." He was only 22 at the time of his death on July 15, 1940.

1942 - The FBI announced the capture of eight Nazi saboteurs who had been put ashore from a submarine on New York's Long Island.

1944 - During World War II, American forces completed their capture of the French port of Cherbourg from the German army.

1949 - "Captain Video and His Video Rangers" premiered on the Dumont Television Network.

1950 - Two days after North Korea invaded South Korea, U.S. President Truman ordered the Air Force and Navy into the Korean conflict. The United Nations Security Council had asked for member nations to help South Korea repel an invasion from the North.

1954 - The world's first atomic power station opened at Obninsk, near Moscow.

1955 - The first "Wide Wide World" was broadcast on NBC-TV.

1955 - The state of Illinois enacted the first automobile seat belt legislation.

1958 - NBC's "Matinee Theatre" was seen for the final time.

1959 - The play, "West Side Story," with music by Leonard Bernstein, closed after 734 performances on Broadway.

1961 - Arthur Michael Ramsey was enthroned as the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury.

1964 - Ernest Borgnine and Ethel Merman were married. It only lasted 38 days.

1966 - "Dark Shadows" began running on ABC-TV.

1967 - The world's first cash dispenser was installed at Barclays Bank in Enfield, England. The device was invented by John Sheppard-Barron. The machine operated on a voucher system and the maximum withdrawal was $28.

1967 - Two hundred people were arrested during a race riot in Buffalo, NY.

1969 - Patrons at the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City's Greenwich Village, clashed with police. This incident is considered to be the birth of the homosexual rights movement.

1972 - Bobby Hull signed a 10-year hockey contract for $2,500,000. He became a player and coach of the Winnipeg Jets of the World Hockey Association.

1973 - Former White House counsel John W. Dean told the Senate Watergate Committee about an "enemies list" that was kept by the Nixon White House.

[1973[/b] - Nixon vetoed a Senate ban on bombing Cambodia.

1980 - U.S. President Carter signed legislation reviving draft registration.

1984 - The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that individual colleges could make their own TV package deals.

1984 - The Federal Communications Commission moved to deregulate U.S. commercial TV by lifting most programming requirements and ending day-part restrictions on advertising.

1985 - Route 66 was officially removed from the United States Highway System.

1985 - The U.S. House of Representatives voted to limit the use of combat troops in Nicaragua.

1986 - The World Court ruled that the U.S. had broken international law by aiding Nicaraguan rebels.

1991 - Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall resigned from the U.S. Supreme Court. He had been appointed in 1967 by President Lyndon Johnson.

1995 - Qatar's Crown Prince Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani ousted his father in a bloodless palace coup.

1998 - An English woman was impregnated with her dead husband's sperm after two-year legal battle over her right to the sperm.

1998 - In a live joint news conference in China U.S. President Clinton and President Jiang Zemin offered an uncensored airing of differences on human rights, freedom, trade and Tibet.

2002 - In the U.S., the Securities and Exchange Commission required companies with annual sales of more than $1.2 billion to submit sworn statements backing up the accuracy of their financial reports.

2005 - In Alaska's Denali National Park, a roughly 70-million year old dinosaur track was discovered. The track was form a three-toed Cretaceous period dinosaur.