December 31 · This Day in America
She had already changed naval war forever — the low iron raft with the revolving turret that fought the Virginia to a draw and ended the age of wooden fleets in an afternoon. Now, under tow around Cape Hatteras on New Year's Eve, the Monitor meets a storm she was never built for. Seas break over her flat deck, water finds the seams, the pumps lose. In the dark the rescue ship Rhode Island pulls man after man from the waves, but sixteen of the sixty-two cannot be reached, and just past midnight the Monitor slides down to two hundred forty feet of black water. The ship that won the future of the Navy was killed by the ocean within a year of her birth. She lies there still, a war grave and a sanctuary, the iron heart of the Civil War's most famous machine.
Source: www.dncr.nc.gov
Also on this day · 1879
On New Year's Eve, Thomas Edison throws open his New Jersey laboratory and strings the grounds with glowing carbon-filament lamps. Special trains run from the city. Crowds in winter coats stand in the snow and watch a street lit without a single flame — steady, clean light from a wire. Most of them had never imagined such a thing. They went home into the last night of the gas-lamp world, and a wired, luminous century was waiting on the other side of midnight.
Source: www.thehenryford.org