Good afternoon. This website is a demonstration of smart content rendering. The content updates continuously without the help of Internet monkeys. All the information was current at the time you arrived here. Today is Friday, the 26th day of June and the 176th day of 2026. Most of the United States is under Daylight Saving Time (DST) at the moment. It will end on November 1st at 2:00 AM when clocks "fall back" one hour. While many countries observe DST, the beginning and ending times vary, as with the Sun as we see it, of course.
On the Jewish calendar, today is the 11th day of Tammuz in the year 5786.
We are under a waxing crescent moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 11 days, 16 hours, and 28 minutes. We will be under a new moon again on Tuesday, July 14th at 8:27 AM. The next full moon will occur on Monday, June 29th at 2:05 PM. For now, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter are visible in the night sky. Mercury can be seen in the eastern sky just before dawn. Looking into the night sky, far beyond our Lunar and Solar System neighbors, we see that we are under the constellation of Cancer.
For today, our sunrise and sunset times (at -96.852/32.847) are
6:16 AM
and
8:27 PM,
giving us 14 hours and 11 minutes of daylight.
On this day in 1927, the Cyclone roller coaster opened on Coney Island.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of Louis XII, King of France (1462), Charles IX, King of France (1550), Helen Keller (1880), Abner Doubleday (1819), Anthony G. de Rothschild (1887), Pearl S. Buck (1892), Peter Lorre (1904), Babe Didrikson Zaharias (1914), Eleanor Parker (1922), Julie Duffey (1951), Chris Isaak (1956), Greg LeMond (1961), Harriet Wheeler (1963), Chris O'Donnell (1970), Reggie Brown (1973), and Khloé Kardashian (1985).
Today in History: Poisoning the Soil
It was on this day in 1797 that Charles Newbold of Burlington County, New Jersey received a patent for an iron plow. Although a vast improvement over the existing technology, it was not accepted because farmers feared the iron would poison the soil. Remember, this was in the day before "high" chemistry came into being and most farmers had no clue iron was an abundant element that existed everywhere, including the soil and our blood. The few farmers who weren't spooked by the iron hazard found that the plow, being of cast iron, was brittle and easily broken if it struck a rock or large root. It wasn't until 1803 that a method was developed to render the iron more durable.
David Peacock, also from New Jersey, was granted a patent on April 1, l807 for an iron plow. Newbold sued for patent infringement winning $1500 in damages. Even so, Peacock's plow was an improvement, for the moldboard, share and point were cast in three separate pieces, that were joined together: the point of the colter entering a notch in the breast of the share.
The two men's plow innovations gave way in 1819 to the design by Jethro Wood. On his plow, if the point broke by striking a rock or root, spare parts were interchangeable, and it was not necessary to buy an entire new plow. Wood enjoyed more commercial success, but enjoyed little net profit as he had to spend the proceeds defending his patent from infringers.
Although each of these inventors contributed to a major breakthrough for farmers, none of them enjoyed major financial success. That came when, in 1833, the benefits of steel were incorporated on a plow designed, manufactured, and astutely marketed by John Deere, of Moline Illinois. Given the fact that all plows of the day were pulled by horses or oxen, we are left to wonder whether it ever occurred to Mr. Deere that "Nothing runs like a Deere." (Source: Today in Science History)
When good people in any country cease their vigilance and struggle, then evil men prevail.
Pearl S. Buck, born on this day 134 years ago in Hillsboro, West Virginia.
The Technology
This site is a working demonstration of on-demand PHP scripting. The code tightly integrates computed and imported data with text, spewing forth natural-sounding narrative output with flawless grammar and syntax. The birthdays, history section and the text below--which all change daily--are from an in-house database. Raw data used in the financial and weather sections is imported at page generation time. All the other data, particularly the celestial stuff, is derived and rendered by several hundred lines of code at the time the page is generated at the Linux/Apache server.
Contact Information
Email: tony@tonysartain.com
Cell: 903-360-0002
The links below will take you to other things on this site.