Percy F Jones (died 1934)

In 1803, on October 20th, Congress ratified the Louisiana Purchase. The United States agreed to pay France $15 million for the Louisiana Territory - an area of about 830,000 sq miles. This one act doubled the size of the United States.

In 1832, by February 12th, a cholera epidemic in London claimed at least 3,000 lives - it eventually killed 6,536. The epidemic spread to France and North America later in the year. Cholera is spread through contaminated food and water but at the time, it was thought to be spread by a "miasma” - a bad smell - in the air.

In 1872, on May 10th, Victoria Woodhull became the first woman to be nominated for President of the United States. She was too young to qualify for President - a year under the minimum age, 35 - and women couldn't vote but she was nominated by the Equal Rights Party, which supported equal rights and suffrage for women. She didn't appear on the official ballot.

In 1905, the German born physicist, Albert Einstein, proposed the Special Theory of Relativity: 1) that observers can never detect uniform motion except relative to other objects and that 2) unlike the velocity of massive objects, the speed of light is a constant and is the same for all observers independent of their constant velocity toward or away from the light source. Not such simple concepts that lead to the equation everyone now knows: E = mc2.

In 1934, in the year of Percy F Jones's passing, on November 11th 1933, an extremely strong dust storm hit South Dakota, stripping topsoil. Other strong dust storms had occurred during 1933. Severe droughts continued to hit the Great Plains and the dust storms devastated agricultural production as well as people's' lives for several years. The Roosevelt administration and scientists eventually determined that farming practices had caused the conditions that led to the dust storms and the changes they implemented in farming stopped the Dust Bowl.