February 1 in History

Thomas Edison built the Black Maria in West Orange, New Jersey, in 1893, the world's first structure specifically designed for film production. The building was covered in black tar paper to absorb light from outside, while the roof could be opened to let in sunlight, the only illumination source available. The entire structure sat on a circular track so it could be rotated to follow the sun throughout the day. Edison's team produced short films of vaudeville acts, boxing matches, Annie Oakley shooting glass balls, and an employee named Fred Ott sneezing. Each film lasted less than a minute, the maximum length his Kinetoscope could display. The Black Maria's output demonstrated that moving pictures could capture real events as well as staged performances. Though Edison initially envisioned film as an individual viewing experience through his peephole Kinetoscope, the Lumiere brothers' public projection model soon proved more commercially viable.

South Vietnamese police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan pulled a snub-nosed revolver from his holster and shot captured Viet Cong officer Nguyen Van Lem in the temple on a Saigon street. Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams captured the exact moment of impact. The photograph became the single most powerful anti-war image of the Vietnam era, winning the Pulitzer Prize and appearing on front pages worldwide. What the image did not show was context: Lem had just been caught at a mass grave containing the bodies of South Vietnamese police officers and their families. Loan was executing a man who had personally killed civilians. Adams later expressed regret that his photograph destroyed Loan's life, saying 'The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera.' Loan fled to the US after Saigon fell, opened a pizza restaurant in Virginia, and died in 1998.

King Carlos I and Crown Prince Luis Filipe were riding through Lisbon's Terreiro do Paco in an open carriage on February 1, 1908, when assassins opened fire at close range. The king died instantly. His eldest son Luis Filipe was fatally wounded and died twenty minutes later. His younger son Manuel survived with a bullet wound to the arm and was immediately proclaimed King Manuel II at the age of eighteen. The assassins, Alfredo Luis da Costa and Manuel Buica, were both killed on the spot by police. They belonged to the Carbonaria, a revolutionary republican secret society. The double assassination exposed the terminal weakness of the Portuguese monarchy, which had been propped up by authoritarian prime minister Joao Franco. Manuel II lasted only two years before the October 1910 revolution forced him into exile in England, ending the House of Braganza's 268-year reign.

Werner Heisenberg published his uncertainty principle in 1927 when he was twenty-five, upending three centuries of physics in eight pages. You cannot know precisely both the position and momentum of a particle at the same time — the act of measuring one disturbs the other. This wasn't a limitation of instruments. It was a property of reality. Classical physics assumed a clockwork universe. Heisenberg proved the clockwork had been an illusion.

The first volume of what would become the Oxford English Dictionary was published on February 1, 1884, covering only the words from A to Ant. The project had begun in 1857 when the Philological Society of London declared existing dictionaries inadequate and appointed Herbert Coleridge to create a new one. Coleridge died of tuberculosis two years later. His successor Frederick Furnivall proved a better recruiter than editor. The real transformation came when James Murray took charge in 1879, building a corrugated iron 'Scriptorium' in his Oxford garden where he processed millions of quotation slips sent by volunteer readers worldwide. One of the most prolific contributors, W.C. Minor, was a criminally insane American surgeon confined to Broadmoor asylum who submitted over 10,000 citations. The dictionary was not completed until 1928, seventy-one years after it began. It has never stopped being updated.

A piece of insulating foam broke off the external tank during launch on January 16, 2003, and struck the leading edge of Columbia's left wing, punching a hole in the reinforced carbon-carbon panels that protected the shuttle during reentry. Mission Control knew about the foam strike but managers dismissed engineers' concerns, concluding that foam impacts had occurred on previous flights without catastrophic consequences. Sixteen days later, superheated plasma entered the wing during reentry at Mach 18, destroying the internal structure. Columbia broke apart over Texas at 9:00 AM on February 1, 2003, killing all seven crew members. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board concluded that NASA's organizational culture was as much to blame as the physical foam strike, finding that dissenting safety opinions were systematically suppressed by management hierarchies. The disaster accelerated the retirement of the entire shuttle fleet.