August 3 in History

The USS Nautilus, the world's first nuclear-powered submarine, crossed beneath the geographic North Pole on August 3, 1958, completing Operation Sunshine after entering the Arctic ice pack near Point Barrow, Alaska. Commander William Anderson navigated using inertial guidance because compasses are useless near the magnetic pole. The transit took 96 hours under the ice cap. The voyage proved that nuclear submarines could operate anywhere in the world's oceans regardless of ice coverage, fundamentally changing Cold War strategy: submarine-launched ballistic missiles could now reach Soviet targets from positions beneath the Arctic that were virtually undetectable. The Nautilus received a Presidential Unit Citation and Anderson met with Eisenhower at the White House.

Christopher Columbus departed Palos de la Frontera on August 3, 1492, with three ships and roughly 90 men, heading west across the Atlantic on a voyage financed by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain after Portugal, France, and England had all rejected his proposal. Columbus believed the distance to Asia was far shorter than it actually was; every geographer who reviewed his calculations told him he was wrong. They were right. Had the Americas not existed, Columbus and his crew would have died of thirst in the open ocean. After 36 days at sea, they spotted land in the Bahamas on October 12, initiating permanent contact between Europe and the Americas that reshaped human history.

Germany declared war on France on August 3, 1914, two days after declaring war on Russia, and immediately invaded Belgium to execute the Schlieffen Plan's sweeping right flank through the Low Countries. The invasion of neutral Belgium, whose independence was guaranteed by an 1839 treaty that Britain had signed, gave London the legal and moral justification to enter the war the following day. Germany's chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg infamously dismissed the Belgian treaty as "a scrap of paper." Within a week, five of Europe's six great powers were at war. The conflict that started as an Austrian ultimatum to Serbia had escalated into the most destructive war humanity had ever experienced.

Emperor Theodosius II banished the deposed Patriarch Nestorius to a remote Egyptian monastery, enforcing the Council of Ephesus's condemnation of his Christological teachings. The exile permanently fractured Eastern Christianity, as Nestorius's followers established independent churches across Persia and Central Asia that survived for over a millennium.

Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis permanently banned the eight Chicago Black Sox on August 3, 1921 — one day after a jury acquitted them of conspiracy charges. The acquittal didn't matter to him. Landis had been hired specifically to restore public confidence in baseball after the 1919 World Series fixing scandal, and he understood that acquittal in a criminal court and fitness to play baseball were different questions. The eight players never played professional baseball again. The jury's verdict didn't follow them out of the courtroom.

Warren Harding died in a San Francisco hotel room on August 2, 1923, probably from a heart attack or stroke, though his wife refused to allow an autopsy. His vice president, Calvin Coolidge, learned the news at his father's farmhouse in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, where there was no telephone or electricity. Coolidge's father, a notary public, administered the presidential oath by kerosene lamp at 2:47 a.m. Coolidge went back to bed. He inherited an administration unraveling from the Teapot Dome scandal, in which Harding's Interior Secretary Albert Fall had secretly leased government oil reserves to private companies in exchange for bribes. Coolidge's reputation for personal integrity allowed him to survive the scandal his predecessor created.