On This Day
1957 – The Windscale fire results in Britain’s worst nuclear accident.
The Windscale fire of 10 October 1957 was the worst nuclear accident in Great Britain’s history, and one of the worst in the world, ranked in severity at level 5 out of a possible 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale.[4] The fire took place in Unit 1 of the two-pile Windscale facility on the northwest coast of England in Cumberland (now Sellafield, Cumbria). The two graphite-moderated reactors, referred to at the time as “piles”, had been built as part of the British post-war atomic bomb project. Windscale Pile No. 1 was operational in October 1950 followed by Pile No. 2 in June 1951.[5]
The fire burned for three days and released radioactive fallout which spread across the UK and the rest of Europe.[6] The radioactive isotope iodine-131, which may lead to cancer of the thyroid, was particularly concerning at the time. It has since come to light that small but significant amounts of the highly dangerous radioactive isotope polonium-210 were also released.[7][6] It is estimated that the radiation leak may have caused 240 additional cancer cases, with 100 to 240 of these being fatal.[1][2][3] At the time of the incident no one was evacuated from the surrounding area, but milk from about 500 square kilometres (190 sq mi) of nearby countryside was diluted and destroyed for about a month due to concerns about its exposure to radiation. The UK government played down the events at the time and reports on the fire were subject to heavy censorship, as Prime Minister Harold Macmillan feared the incident would harm British-American nuclear relations.[3]
The event was not an isolated incident; there had been a series of radioactive discharges from the piles in the years leading up to the accident.[8] In the Spring of 1957, only months before the fire, there was a leak of radioactive material in which dangerous strontium-90 isotopes were released into the environment.[9][10] Like the later fire, this incident was also covered up by the British government.[9] Later studies on the release of radioactive material as a result of the Windscale fire revealed that much of the contamination had resulted from such radiation leaks before the fire.[8]
A 2010 study of workers involved in the cleanup of the accident found no significant long term health effects from their involvement.[11][12]
1890 – In Washington, D.C., the Daughters of the American Revolution is founded.
The Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) is a lineage-based membership service organization for women who are directly descended from a person involved in the United States’ efforts towards independence.[1] A non-profit group, they promote historic preservation, education, and patriotism. The organization’s membership is limited to direct lineal descendants of soldiers or others of the Revolutionary period who aided the cause of independence; applicants must have reached 18 years of age and are reviewed at the chapter level for admission. The DAR has over 185,000 current members[2] in the United States and other countries.[3] Its motto is “God, Home, and Country”.[4][5][6]
Born On This Day
1870 – Louise Mack, Australian journalist, author, and poet (d. 1935)
Marie Louise Hamilton Mack (10 October 1870 – 23 November 1935) was an Australian poet, journalist and novelist. She is most known for her writings and her involvement in World War I in 1914 as the first woman war correspondent in Belgium.
1793 – Maria James, Welsh-born American poet, domestic servant (d. 1868)[3]
Maria James (October 11, 1793 – September 11, 1868[1]) was a Welsh-born American poet and domestic servant. Her poetry includes Ode on the Fourth of July 1833.
Early years and education
Maria James was born in 1793, in Wales. She was about seven years old when she emigrated to the United States with her family,[2] landing at Dutchess County, New York, where her father went to work at the slate quarries.[1]
She was fond of reading the common hymnbook, and the New Testament was her only school book. She heard Joseph Addison’s paraphrases of the twenty-third psalm, which she described as the first time that she ever heard a good reader.[2] Her parents moved house, and James found herself in a school where the elder children used the American Preceptor. She found herself entranced by the sounds of their reading of Timothy Dwight IV’s “Columbia”, the meaning of which she did not understand at the time.[2]
Career
At the age of ten, her parents arranged for her to enter the family of Rev. Freeborn Garrettson,[1] where she lived till she was seventeen. Besides carrying out household tasks, she had further opportunities for reading.[2] The heads of the family constantly impressing on the children that ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ and that to ‘depart from iniquity is understanding’. In her leisure hours, she read from the Female Mentor, two odd volumes of the Adventurer; Miss Hannah More’s Cheap Repository; and Pilgrim’s Progress.[2]
In her seventeenth year, she left the Garrettsons to learn dressmaking, but it proved unsuccessful as a career. After this, she worked for several households, mainly in the nursery. [2] In 1833, Bishop Alonzo Potter, then one of the professors in Union College, was shown by his wife, who had just returned from a visit to Rhinebeck on the Hudson, the “Ode for the Fourth of July”, and informed that it was the production of a young woman at service in the family of a friend there, whom he had often noticed on account of her retiring and modest manners, and who had been in that capacity more than twenty years. When he learned more about Maria James, he looked at some of her other poetry, and arranged for them to be published, with a preface by him, in a volume entitled Wales and other Poems, by Maria James, published in 1839.[3]
Potter’s long introduction to the collection assures readers that Maria James “solaced a life of labour with intellectual occupations,” and that “her achievements should be made known to repress the supercilious pride of the privileged and educated.”[4] In this way, Potter vindicated, in an admirable manner, against the sneers of Johnson, the propriety of recognising the abilities of the humblest classes.[3]
With respect to some of her early poems, she recollected trying something in this way for the amusement of a little boy who was very dear to her. Except this, with a very few other pieces, no attempt of the kind was made until “The Mother’s Lament”, and “Elijah”, with a number of epitaphs. Others early verses included “Hummingbird” and “The Adventure”. In the summer of 1832, when she heard a reading of Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, by Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, it brought to her mind certain conversations which she heard in the early part of her life regarding Bonaparte. The poem was produced the following summer. In the year 1819, “The American Flag” appeared in the New York American, signed ‘Croaker & Co.’: fourteen years later, this was her inspiration for the “Ode on the Fourth of July, 1833”. After publication, it was popularly assumed that she had not written the poem without help. Many of the pieces were written from impressions received in youth, particularly the “Whippoorwill”, the “Meadow Lark”, the “Firefly”, and others.[3]
James died in Rhinebeck, New York, in 1868, age 74.[1]
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