William Lee Holder (1868 - 1960)

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

In 1868, in the year that William Lee Holder 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 1899, by the time he was 31 years old, the meaning of Chinese "oracle bones" was rediscovered. Farmers in China had been turning up the bones in their fields for generations but most often they were ground up and sold as medicine. The chancellor of the Imperial Academy and a friend noticed, before they ground the bones, that they had writing. The bones had been used around the second millennium BC for divination.

In 1921, at the age of 53 years old, William was alive when on November 11th, the first burial was held at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery. The body of an unknown soldier - selected by Army Sgt. Edward F. Younger who was highly decorated for valor and received the Distinguished Service Cross in "The Great War" - was brought back from France (World War 1) and placed in the newly completed tomb. President Warren G. Harding officiated at the interment ceremonies.

In 1940, by the time he was 72 years old, on September 16th, the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, was enacted - the first peacetime draft in U.S. history. Men between 21 and 36 were required to register with their draft boards. When World War II began, men between 18 and 45 were subject to service and men up to 65 were required to register.

In 1960, in the year of William Lee Holder's passing, on May 1st, an American CIA U-2 spy plane, piloted by Francis Gary Powers, was shot down by a surface-to-air missile over the Soviet Union. Powers ejected and survived but was captured. The U.S. claimed that the U-2 was a "weather plane" but Powers was convicted in the Soviet Union of espionage. He was released in 1962 after 1 year, 9 months and 10 days in prison.