January 24 · This Day in America
A carpenter named James Marshall is inspecting the tailrace of a sawmill on the American River at Coloma, California, when something in the gravel catches the light. He picks up a few bright flakes. The crew tests them — boiled in lye, hammered for malleability — and the answer holds: gold. John Sutter tries to keep it quiet. Gold does not stay quiet. Within months the rush is on, and within two years roughly 300,000 people pour into California from the rest of the country and the rest of the world. A territory just taken from Mexico becomes a state almost overnight. Fortunes are made and lost; San Francisco explodes from village to city; and for California's Native peoples the rush brings catastrophe. One of the first flakes is mailed to President Polk and sits today in the Smithsonian. A glint in the riverbed bent the whole nation westward.
Source: www.loc.gov
Also on this day · 1986
Nearly nine years out from Earth, NASA's Voyager 2 sweeps within about 50,600 miles of Uranus. It has 5.5 hours at close range and uses every minute, sending home over 7,000 photographs, finding 11 new moons, two new rings, and a magnetic field tilted crazily off the planet's poles. No spacecraft had ever been there. None has been back since. A machine built by humans, smaller than a car, is still the only thing we have ever sent to that pale blue world.
Source: www.nasa.gov