2006

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Today in History 01/02/17

Artist’s rendering of Kepler-10b, resembling the hypothetical planet Vulcan (© NASA/Kepler Mission/Dana Berry )(1860) The planet Vulcan is “discovered”
To explain Mercury’s seemingly inexplicable orbit, French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier hypothesizes that a planet must be located between Mercury and the Sun. He names this hypothetical planet after the Roman god of fire.
Vulcan is a small hypothetical planet that was proposed to exist in an orbit between Mercury and the Sun. Attempting to explain peculiarities of Mercury’s orbit, the 19th-century French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier hypothesized that they were the result of another planet, which he named “Vulcan”.
wiki/Vulcan_(hypothetical_planet)
USA,California,Death Valley National Park,Highway 190(1974) National speed limit becomes law
President Nixon signs an act that sets a highway speed limit of 55 mph throughout the US. Perhaps inspired more by the OPEC oil embargo than safety concerns, the law is eventually repealed in 1995.

On this day in 1974, President Richard M. Nixon signs the Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act, setting a new national maximum speed limit.

Prior to 1974, individual states set speed limits within their boundaries and highway speed limits across the country ranged from 40 mph to 80 mph. The U.S. and other industrialized nations enjoyed easy access to cheap Middle Eastern oil from 1950 to 1972, but the Arab-Israeli conflict changed that dramatically in 1973. Arab members of the Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) protested the West’s support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War by stopping oil shipments to the United States, Japan and Western Europe. OPEC also flexed its new-found economic muscle by quadrupling oil prices, placing a choke-hold on America’s oil-hungry consumers and industries. The embargo had a global impact, sending the U.S. and European economies into recession. As part of his response to the embargo, President Nixon signed a federal law lowering all national highway speed limits to 55 mph. The act was intended to force Americans to drive at speeds deemed more fuel-efficient, thereby curbing the U.S. appetite for foreign oil. With it, Nixon ushered in a policy of fuel conservation and rationing not seen since World War II.

The act also prohibited the Department of Transportation from approving or funding any projects within states that did not comply with the new speed limit. Most states quietly adjusted their speed limits, though Western states, home to the country’s longest, straightest and most monotonous rural highways, only grudgingly complied. Even after OPEC lifted the embargo in March 1974, drivers continued to face high gas prices and attempted to conserve fuel by buying revolutionary Japanese economy cars. For many, a desire for fuel-efficient automobiles became the standard until the trend toward gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) emerged in the 1990s. In 1987, Congress authorized states to reset speed limits within their borders, but proponents of the national maximum speed limit law claimed it lowered automobile-related fatalities, prompting Congress to keep it on the books until finally repealing it on November 28, 1995.

Today speed limits across the country vary between 35 and 40 mph in congested urban areas and 75 mph on long stretches of rural highway. U.S. drivers now drive almost as fast as their European counterparts, who average between 75 and 80 mph on the highway. On some roads in Italy, it is legal to drive as fast as 95 mph.
NIXON SIGNS NATIONAL SPEED LIMIT INTO LAW


wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law
TALLMANSVILLE, WV - JANUARY 9: The coal mine area, also known as slurry fields, located at the Sago mine, is shown January 9, 2006 in Tallmansville, West Virginia. Twelve of 13 miners perished following a mine explosion January 2 in Sago, West Virginia. (Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)(2006) West Virginia’s Sago Mine disaster kills 12
An explosion and subsequent collapse traps 13 miners 280 feet below ground for over 40 hours while media converge and report conflicting news of possible survivors. Only one miner will be found alive.
The Sago Mine disaster was a coal mine explosion on January 2, 2006, at the Sago Mine in Sago, West Virginia, United States, near the Upshur County seat of Buckhannon. The blast and collapse trapped 13 miners for nearly two days; only one survived. It was the worst mining disaster in the United States since the Jim Walter Resources Mine disaster in Alabama on September 23, 2001, and the worst disaster in West Virginia since the 1968 Farmington Mine disaster. It was exceeded four years later by the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, also a coal mine explosion in West Virginia, which killed 29 miners in April 2010.
Date: Jan 02, 2006

wiki/Sago_Mine_disaster
A rare 1937 Bugatti Type 57S Atalante Coupe, originally the property of Francis Curzon, the 5th Earl Howe, is seen displayed at the Retromobile Vintage Cars show, in Paris, Friday, Feb. 6, 2009. The car abandoned in the garage for 50 years has sold at auction for approximately euro3.100,000, US$ 4.006,000, Saturday. (AP Photo/Jacques Brinon)(2009) $4.4 million dollar sports car found in garage
After sitting idle for 50 years, a rare 1937 Bugatti Type 57S coupe, one of only 17 ever made, is found in good condition in a British garage. It will sell for millions just one month later.
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