Wikipedia:Main Page history/2019 March 3

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From today's featured article

The Liberty Head double eagle is an American twenty-dollar gold piece struck as a pattern coin in 1849, and for commerce from 1850 to 1907. The eagle, or ten-dollar piece, had been the largest denomination authorized by the Mint Act of 1792, but Congress considered new denominations of gold coinage in the 1840s after the discovery of gold in California generated a large amount of bullion. The gold dollar and double eagle were the result. After considerable infighting at the Philadelphia Mint, United States Mint Chief Engraver James B. Longacre designed the double eagle. Only one 1849 double eagle is known to survive; it rests in the National Numismatic Collection at the Smithsonian. The coin was immediately successful; merchants and banks used it in trade, and it was struck until replaced by the Saint-Gaudens double eagle in 1907. Many were melted when President Franklin D. Roosevelt recalled gold coins from the public in 1933. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

Bracha Zefira

... that singer Bracha Zefira (pictured) is credited with bringing Yemenite and other Oriental Jewish folk songs into the mix of ethnic music in Palestine to create a new "Israeli style"?
... that MLS Cup 2007 was the first Major League Soccer championship rematch to be played in consecutive years?
... that Yan Jici, a founder of modern physics in China, has a minor planet named after him?
... that St Peter's Bridge in Burton upon Trent, opened in 1985, is the newest road crossing of the River Trent?
... that cricketer Lionel Collins scored six centuries in ten days in a feat described as "quite without parallel in the history of the game"?
... that the glaucoma medication levobunolol is more than 60 times as active as its mirror image?
... that Lynnwood Farnam was the first North American organist to play the entire repertoire of Johann Sebastian Bach's organ works?
... that the 2003 Melbourne runaway train avoided a disastrous collision by less than a second?

In the news

George Pell

The military confrontation between India and Pakistan escalates after both countries conduct airstrikes.
Muhammadu Buhari is re-elected President of Nigeria.
Cardinal George Pell (pictured) becomes the highest ranking member of the Catholic Church to be convicted of child sexual abuse.
Green Book wins Best Picture and Bohemian Rhapsody wins in four categories at the Academy Awards.

On this day

March 3: Liberation Day in Bulgaria (1878); Hinamatsuri in Japan

Jethro Tull in concert

1776 – American Revolutionary War: Samuel Nicholas and the Continental Marines successfully landed on New Providence and captured Nassau in the Bahamas.
1875 – The first indoor game of ice hockey was played at the Victoria Skating Rink in Montreal by James Creighton and McGill University students.
1945 – Second World War: The Royal Air Force accidentally bombed the Bezuidenhout neighbourhood in the Dutch city of The Hague, killing 511 evacuees.
1972 – Jethro Tull (pictured) released Thick as a Brick, a concept album supposedly written by an eight-year-old boy, Gerald Bostock.
2012 – Two passenger trains collided head-on near the town of Szczekociny in Poland, resulting in 16 deaths and 58 injuries.

Michael Kantakouzenos Şeytanoğlu (d. 1578) · Georg Cantor (b. 1845) · Rebecca Lancefield (d. 1981)

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Today's featured picture

How a Mosquito Operates (1912) is a silent animated film by American cartoonist Winsor McCay. The six-minute short, about a giant mosquito tormenting a dozing man who tries in vain to shoo it away, is one of the earliest works of animation. It is considered far ahead of its contemporaries in its technical quality. McCay had a reputation for his proficiency as a cartoonist, exemplified in the children's comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland. He delved into the infant art of animation with the 1911 film Little Nemo, and followed its success by adapting an episode of his comic strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend into How a Mosquito Operates. McCay gives the animation naturalistic timing, motion, and weight, and displays a more coherent story and developed character than in Little Nemo. The film was enthusiastically received when McCay first unveiled it during a chalk talk (a vaudeville act with drawings) and in a theatrical release that soon followed. In 1914 McCay further developed his character animation style in his best-known animated work, Gertie the Dinosaur.

Film: Winsor McCay

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