Moments in Time

Mar 15, 20120

The History Channel

• On April 1, 1700, English pranksters begin popularizing the annual tradition of playing April Fool’s jokes. In keeping with the fun, in 1957 the BBC reported that Swiss farmers were experiencing a record spaghetti crop and showed footage of people harvesting noodles from trees.

• On March 29, 1806, the Great National Pike, also known as the Cumberland Road, becomes the first highway funded by the national treasury. The initial appropriation of $30,000 was made by congressional act and covered the first leg through the Appalachian Mountains to Wheeling on the Ohio River.

• On March 30, 1867, the U.S. government puts the finishing touches a deal to purchase Alaska. It paid Alaska’s owner, Russia, $7.2 million, or roughly 2 cents per acre of land. Among many Republicans the deal was derisively known as “Seward’s Folly,” after U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward.

• On March 31, 1889, the Eiffel Tower is dedicated in Paris. Gustave Eiffel’s tower was greeted with skepticism from critics, who argued that it would be structurally unsound. Within a few decades the tower came to be regarded as an architectural masterpiece.

• On March 26, 1937, America’s first monument to a comic strip hero is unveiled in Crystal City, Texas. The 6-foot-tall, brightly colored concrete statue of Popeye was unveiled in Popeye Park during the city’s second annual Spinach Festival.

• On March 27, 1964, the strongest earthquake in American history, measuring 8.4 on the Richter scale, slams southern Alaska, creating a deadly tsunami. Some 125 people were killed and thousands injured. The tidal wave devastated towns along the Gulf of Alaska and caused carnage in British Columbia, Canada; Hawaii and the West Coast of the United States.

• On March 28, 1979, the worst accident in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry begins when a pressure valve in the Unit-2 reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania fails to close. As engineers struggled to understand what had happened, the reactor came within less than an hour of a complete meltdown.