1908 - The first Model T Ford was completed at the company’s plant in Detroit. Before the Model T, automobiles were a luxury, but Ford marketed his car for ordinary people to drive everyday. And the automobile industry was never the same.
1918 - The Liberty Loan parade in Philadelphia prompts a huge outbreak of Spanish Flu in the city. The city morgue, built to hold 36 bodies, was now faced with the arrival of hundreds within a few days. The entire city was quarantined and nearly 12,000 city residents died.
1950 - Charles M. Schultz's “Peanuts” comic strip debuts in just seven US newspapers. The cartoonist almost named Charlie Brown's dog Sniffy—not Snoopy—but another comic dog had that name.
1958 - The American Express Company issues its first paperboard, charge card in the U.S. and Canada to give traveling customers more flexibility.
1982 - Billy Joel's 1978 album "52nd Street" is re-released in Japan, on compact disc—the first album put out on a CD.
The “American” Flu
On September 28, 1918, The Liberty Loan parade in Philadelphia prompts a huge outbreak of Spanish Flu in the city. The entire city is quarantined and nearly 12,000 city residents die. Additionally, hundreds of soldiers in Massachusetts in every armed service were killed within weeks. In America, five out of every thousand people fell victim to the flu.
The flu had already been a problem for years but nothing like this new mutated strain. This highly contagious strain of the flu arguably originated from a bird or farm animal in the American Midwest.
However, during the summer of 1918, it traveled very slow and under the radar in the US. It didn’t really pick up until American soldiers brought it to Europe during WW1. Spain got hit with the worst of it and gave the flu its unofficial name, Spanish Flu. By the end of the summer, 10,000 were dead in Europe.
From America and Europe, the mutated flu traveled through ports all over the world. In Latin America, 10 out of every thousand people died. In Africa, it was 15 per thousand and in Asia it was as high as 35 per thousand. It is estimated that up to 20 million people perished in India alone. More people died from the flu than from all of the battles of World War I combined.
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