Maude Sturrock Brain (1868 - 1961)

Refresh this page to see various historical events that occurred during Maude's lifetime.

In 1868, in the year that Maude Sturrock Brain was born, on October 28th, Thomas Edison - age 21 - applied for his first patent. It was for the electric vote recorder and was designed to make voting quicker and the counting of votes more accurate. Congress didn't like the idea so Edison's voting machine was never used.

In 1880, Maude was merely 12 years old when in October, the "Blizzard of 1880" began in North America - considered the most severe winter ever known in the US. Many areas were snowbound throughout the whole winter, which was made famous in Laura Ingalls Wilder's book The Long Winter.

In 1892, she was 24 years old when on August 4th, the father and stepmother of Lizzie Borden were found murdered. Lizzie was accused of the crime and on June 20th of the next year, she was acquitted of murder by a jury. But she was never acquitted in the public mind.

In 1925, when she was 57 years old, in July, the Scopes Trial - often called the Scopes Monkey Trial - took place, prosecuting a substitute teacher for teaching evolution in school. Tennessee had enacted a law that said it was "unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school". William Jennings Bryan headed the prosecution and Clarence Darrow headed the defense. The teacher was found guilty and fined $100. An appeal to the Supreme Court of Tennessee upheld the law but overturned the guilty verdict.

In 1961, in the year of Maude Sturrock Brain's passing, on May 5th, Navy Cmdr. Alan B. Shepard, Jr., made the first manned Project Mercury flight, MR-3, in a spacecraft he named Freedom 7. He was the second man to go into space, the first was Yuri Gagarin - a Soviet cosmonaut.