December 23 · This Day in America
He could have been king. He had the army, the adoration, and a chance no general in history had refused. Instead, on December 23, 1783, George Washington walks into the Maryland State House at Annapolis, stands before Congress, and gives the power back. His voice reportedly shakes as he reads: "Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theatre of action, and bidding an affectionate farewell to this august body … I here offer my commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life." Then he climbs on a horse and rides for Mount Vernon, hoping to be home by Christmas. A victorious commander voluntarily becoming a private citizen — that was the new thing, the thing that made a republic possible. The whole experiment turned on a man who knew when to stop.
Source: history.house.gov
Also on this day · 1947
In a New Jersey lab on December 23, 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain show their colleagues a tiny crook of germanium and gold foil that amplifies an electrical signal — the first working transistor. It looked like nothing. It was everything: the seed of every computer, phone, and chip that followed. Bardeen, Brattain, and William Shockley would share a Nobel Prize, and the modern world would quietly run on what they built that afternoon.
Source: www.computerhistory.org
“If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”King George III, as reported by painter Benjamin West, on hearing Washington meant to resign