This Month in History

One year ago, in April 2006, Tony Snow was named White House Press Secretary. Looking back on his decision a year later, he wonder whether he should have stayed with his original plan to spend a year vacationing at Guantanamo. It would have been less painful.

Ten years ago, in early April 1997, the infamous comet Hale Bop was visible in the night sky. As many already know, God’s apocalypse occurred later that same year. Members of the Heaven’s Gate Cult were the only humans spared from this corporeal Gulag.

100 years ago, in April 1907, James Bartlett Hammond, inventor of one of the first practical typewriters, was committed to the psychopathic ward at Bellevue Hospital after reports of insanity circulated. In other insane typewriter news, the contemporary QWERTY keyboard arrangement was invented in 1878 to slow down typists so the typewriter’s hammers wouldn’t get jammed. A century-and-a-half later, we’re still using the intentionally slower design.