Tom Armstrong (born 1878)

In 1878, in the year that Tom Armstrong was born, on June 15th, photographer Eadweard Muybridge - at the request of Leland Stanford - produced the first sequence of stop-motion still photographs. Stanford contended that a galloping horse had all four feet off the ground. Only photos of a horse at a gallop would settle the question and, using 12 cameras and a series of photos, Muybridge settled the question: Stanford was right. Muybridge's use of several cameras and stills led to motion pictures.

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 1941, in his State of the Union address on January 6th, President Roosevelt detailed the "four freedoms" that everyone in the world should have: Freedom of speech, Freedom of worship, Freedom from want, and Freedom from fear. In the same speech, he outlined the benefits of democracy which he said were economic opportunity, employment, social security, and the promise of "adequate health care".

In 1954, from April 22 through June 17th, the Army v. McCarthy hearings were held. The U.S. Army accused Roy Cohn (chief counsel to Senator McCarthy and later trusted mentor of Donald Trump) of blackmail. McCarthy and Cohn accused the U.S. Army of harboring communists. The Army allegations were found to be true. The U.S. Senate later censured McCarthy.

In 1991, on December 25th, the Soviet Union flag was lowered and replaced by the Russian tricolor flag. It was the end of the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as President of the Soviet Union and Boris Yeltsin became President of the Russian Republic.