This Day in History – July 17

Jul 17, 2022 News

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Compiled by Zena Henry

Linden remains quiet after hike in electricity tariffs

Kaieteur News – For 17 days, the mining town of Linden remained quiet after an unbearable increase in electricity tariffs was levied on the community on July 1, 2012 by the then Donald Ramotar Administration. Leaders of the town had planned a massive five-day protest to commence on July 18 in rejection of the hike.

Things, however, turned deadly when members of the local police force used tear gas, rubber pellets and live rounds on protestors who blocked roads and bridges, bringing the gold mine gateway community to a standstill.  Three male protestors were killed, and dozens of persons were injured. With a population of 60,000 and an unemployment rate of 70 percent, residents of the bauxite-rich location decided that they could not afford any increases. The protest moved from the original focus to encompass a number of other community development deficiencies as well as justice for those killed during the demonstrations.

 

The discovery of a dozen irregular moons of Jupiter was announced

Twelve new moons orbiting Jupiter were announced on July 17, 2018; 11 “normal” outer moons, and one that is called an “oddball”, bringing Jupiter’s total number of known moons to a whopping 79—the most of any planet in our Solar System. A team led by Carnegie’s Scott S. Sheppard first spotted the moons in the spring of 2017 while they were looking for very distant Solar System objects as part of the hunt for a possible massive planet far beyond Pluto.

In 2014, this same team found the object with the most-distant known orbit in our Solar System and was the first to realise that an unknown massive planet at the fringes of our Solar System, far beyond Pluto, could explain the similarity of the orbits of several small extremely distant objects. This putative planet is now sometimes popularly called Planet X or Planet Nine.  Jupiter just happened to be in the sky near the search fields where the team was looking for extremely distant Solar System objects when they were serendipitously able to look for new moons around Jupiter while at the same time looking for planets at the fringes of our Solar System. The International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center used the team’s observations to calculate orbits for the newly found moons with the process taking about one year. Nine of the new moons are part of a distant outer swarm of moons that orbit it in the retrograde, or opposite direction of Jupiter’s spin rotation.  These distant retrograde moons are grouped into at least three distinct orbital groupings and are thought to be the remnants of three once-larger parent bodies that broke apart during collisions with asteroids, comets, or other moons. The newly discovered retrograde moons take about two years to orbit Jupiter. (Source: Carnegie Institution for Science)

 

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court is adopted

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court is the treaty that established the International Criminal Court (ICC). It was adopted at a diplomatic conference in Rome, Italy on July 17, 1998 and entered into force on July 1, 2002 with 123 states party to the statute by November 2019. Among other things, the statute establishes the court’s functions, jurisdiction and structure. The Rome Statute established four core international crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. Those crimes “shall not be subject to any statute of limitations”. Under the Rome Statute, the ICC can only investigate and prosecute the four core international crimes in situations where states are “unable” or “unwilling” to do so themselves; the jurisdiction of the court is complementary to jurisdictions of domestic courts. The court has jurisdiction over crimes only if they are committed in the territory of a state party or if they are committed by a national of a state party; an exception to this rule is that the ICC may also have jurisdiction over crimes if its jurisdiction is authorised by the United Nations Security Council.

The World’s first modern air conditioning system is designed

In Buffalo, New York, on July 17, 1902, in response to an air quality problem experienced at the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing & Publishing Company of Brooklyn, New York, Willis Carrier submitted drawings for what became recognised as the world’s first modern air conditioning system. It was so humid that summer that the paper grew and shrank, which resulted in poor quality images, because the colour printing process involved running the same piece of paper up to four times, each with a different colour ink.

The 1902 installation marked the birth of air conditioning because of the addition of humidity control, which led to the recognition by authorities in the field that A/C must perform four basic functions: control temperature, control humidity, control air circulation and ventilation cleanse the air. After several more years of refinement and field testing, on January 2, 1906, Carrier was granted U.S. Patent 808,897 for an Apparatus for Treating Air, the world’s first spray-type air conditioning equipment. It was designed to humidify or dehumidify air, heating water for the first function and cooling it for the second.

The ship which rescued hundreds of Titanic survivors is torpedoed

On July 17, 1918, in the latter stage of World War I, the RMS Carpathia, a ship made famous for rescuing 705 of the passengers of the infamous RMS Titanic when she sank in 1912, was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland by German submarine SM U-55 and sunk, losing only five lives in the process, a far different circumstance than the Titanic. Carpathia had a passenger capacity of 1700 when finally launched. Only 2 years later, in 1905, she was refitted to carry a quite respectable 2550 passengers. Capable of only about 15 knots top speed, she was 558 feet long and displaced 13,555 tons.

On April 14-15, 1912, Carpathia responded to the SOS distress call from the RMS Titanic, which had struck an iceberg and was sinking in the icy Northern Atlantic Ocean. Captain Arthur Henry Rostron quickly grasped the dire nature of the call and issued orders for Carpathia to respond to Titanic’s location with all haste. All steam was ordered directly to the engines and extra men were assigned as stokers. These measures enabled Carpathia to exceed her designed speed by a couple knots, and Carpathia arrived at the disaster scene 58 miles away only 3½ hours after receiving the SOS call. The prompt response and urgency directed by Carpathia’s captain and the life-saving efficiency of her crew resulted in a remarkable rescue of over 700 of Titanic’s passengers from the icy waters. During World War I, Carpathia was pressed into service by the Royal Navy and was used to transport Canadian and then American troops and cargo to and from Europe. Some trips were made as part of a convoy, and some voyages were solo affairs. On July 15, 1918, Carpathia carried only 57 passengers and 166 crew when she left Liverpool with a convoy for Boston. While off Ireland, she was spotted by the German submarine, SM U-55, which fired two torpedoes at the big ship while submerged and a third when it surfaced. All but five crew members and all passengers were safely evacuated before the ship sank. (History and Headlines)

Allies meet to discuss Germany’s fate after World War 2 defeat

The Potsdam Conference was held in Potsdam, Germany, from July 17 to August 2, 1945, to allow the three leading Allies to plan the postwar peace, while avoiding the mistakes of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. The participants were the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They were represented respectively by General Secretary Joseph Stalin, Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee, and President Harry S. Truman. They gathered to decide how to administer Germany, which had agreed to an unconditional surrender nine weeks earlier.

The goals of the conference also included establishing the postwar order, solving issues on the peace treaty, and countering the effects of the war. The foreign ministers and aides played key roles: Vyacheslav Molotov, Anthony Eden and Ernest Bevin, and James F. Byrnes. From July 17 to July 25, nine meetings were held, when the Conference was interrupted for two days, as the results of the British general elections.

 

 

 

 

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