Once Upon A Time – May 20 – 1873 – Levi Strauss And Jacob Davis Patent The First Blue Jeans With Copper Rivets

1498 Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama arrives at Calicut, India becoming the first European to reach India by sea

1560 The scholar John Feckenham is taken to the Tower of London in England for refusing to take the oath of supremacy. He will spend twenty-four years there.

1609 Shakespeare’s Sonnets are first published in London, perhaps illicitly, by publisher Thomas Thorpe

1862 US President Abraham Lincoln signs into law the Homestead Act to provide cheap land for the settlement of the American West (80 million acres by 1900)

1864 Spotsylvania campaign in US Civil War ends after 10,920 killed or injured

1690 John Eliot, missionary to the American Indians, in the parsonage at Roxbury, passes on. He had translated the entire Bible into the Algonquin Indian language and published the first Bible printed in America.

1927 At 7:40 AM, Charles Lindbergh takes off from New York to cross the Atlantic for Paris, aboard Spirit of St Louis in the 1st solo nonstop transatlantic flight

1927 Treaty of Jeddah is signed between the United Kingdom and Ibn Saud recognizing the independence of the Kingdom of Hejaz and Nejd

1943 Smith College awards Wu Yi-fang, first Chinese woman to head a Chinese college (Ginling Women’s College), an honorary Doctor of Law degree.

1945 The Christian Airmen’s Missionary Fellowship is officially born. Later it will change its name to Missionary Aviation Fellowship (MAF). Betty Greene, an American wartime pilot, had written an article in which she suggested using planes to help missionaries. Jim Truxton, a Navy pilot, saw it, contacted Betty and suggested organizing to implement her idea.

1990 Hubble Space Telescope sends its 1st photographs from space

HISTORICAL EVENTS TODAY

TODAY IN FILM & TV

1891 1st public display of Thomas Edison’s prototype kinetoscope to members of the National Federation of Women’s Club

TODAY IN MUSIC

1983 “Every Breath You Take” single released by The Police (Billboard Song of the Year, 1983)

TODAY IN SPORT

1900 Second modern Summer Olympics (Games of the II Olympiad) opens in Paris and continues for 5 months

MORE FACTS

1873 Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis patent the first blue jeans with copper rivets

1896 The six ton chandelier of the Palais Garnier opera house in Paris falls on the crowd resulting in the death of one and the injury of many others