February 1 ...

In 1790 the US Supreme Court met for the first time in New York's Royal Exchange Building, a year after it was established under the Judiciary Act. In 1793 France declared war on Britain and Holland. In 1861 Texas became the seventh state to secede from the Union. In 1862 The Battle Hymn of the Republic, by Julia Ward Howe, was first published in the Atlantic Monthly. In 1865 Illinois became the first state to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery throughout the US. In 1884 the first volume of the Oxford English Dictionary, covering words from "A" through "Ant," was published. In 1893 Thomas Edison completed the construction of the world's first motion picture studio at the Edison Laboratories in West Orange, NJ. In 1895 director John Ford was born in Maine. In 1901 actor Clarke Gable was born in Cadiz, OH. In 1902 Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, MO. In 1943 the traitor Vidkun Quisling became prime minister of Norway; he was arrested and shot at the end of WWII; also on this day, one of America's most highly decorated military units of World War II, the 442d Regimental Combat Team, made up almost entirely of Japanese-Americans, was authorized. In 1946 a press conference was held at the University of Pennsylvania to discuss what is considered the first computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC). The machine took up an entire room, weighed 30 tons and used more than 18,000 vacuum tubes. Designed by the US Army during World War II to make artillery calculations, it cost $450,000. Today's average calculator possesses more computing power than ENIAC did. In 1959 Texas Instruments requested a patent for the integrated circuit. In 1960 four black students staged the first civil rights sit-in, at the segregated Greensboro, NC lunch counter of F.W. Woolworth. In 1965 Martin Luther King Jr. and 770 others were arrested in protest against voter discrimination in Selma, AL. In 1979 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini received a tumultuous welcome in Tehran as he ended nearly 15 years of exile; also on this day, newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst, whose prison sentence for bank robbery had been commuted by President Carter, left a federal prison near San Francisco. In 1996 both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly to rewrite the 61-year-old Communications Act, freeing the exploding television, telephone, and home computer industries to jump into each other's fields. In 2003 the space shuttle Columbia broke up during its re-entry trajectory as it passed over East Texas. The seven astronauts aboard were lost.