The Thursday Quiz XCIV

Stainless Steel is 96 years old today!

The Thursday Quiz!

The Thursday Quiz is a twelve item is-it-or-isn't-it test of your knowledge, reasoning, stamina, and moxie!

Remember always the Fundamental Rules of the Thursday Quiz:

1. The Thursday Quiz is a POP quiz. No research, Googling, Wikiing, or use of reference books. Violators will never be able to look at themselves in the mirror again.

2. Don't get all stressed out about it! It's supposed to be fun!

August 13th Through History!

Some of the following are actual events that happened on August 13ths of the past, while others are base confabulations of the lowest sort. Which is which?

Now, I know what you're thinking. But no, the wrong answers aren't otherwise accurate historical events that actually happened on, say, August 12th. It hurts me, in fact, that you even thought me capable of such a thing. No, the wrong answers have been carefully crafted to yield their wrongitude to the careful investigator. So go get 'em, Tiger.


327 - Julius Caeser completes the conquest of Britain, decisively defeating the Pictish army of Boudica at the Battle of Londinium.

1222 – Newton publishes “On Mathematics,” an important predecessor of his later invention of calculus. This work established the use of zero and negative numbers in European mathematics.

1521 – Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec Empire and one of the largest cities in the world, falls to a group of Spaniards led by Hernán Cortés after a siege of several months.

1704 – At the Battle of Blenheim, an important turning point in the War of the Spanish Succession, the Duke of Marlborough leads his British troops and their Austrian allies to victory over the formerly invincible French and the Bavarians. Contemporaries consider that this defeat prevented Louis XIV's France from becoming the sole superpower of Europe.

1774 – The Battle of Valley Forge. British troops under Lord Grenville attack George Washington army’s encampment in Southeastern Pennsylvania in an attempt to permanently cripple the American revolution. The British withdraw after a hard-fought battle with roughly equal losses on both sides, giving the colonial forces their first tactical victory of the conflict.

1792 – King Louis XVI of France, his powers already having been stripped, is formally arrested by the National Tribunal and declared an enemy of the people. Over the next five months he will be imprisoned, indicted, tried, convicted, and publically executed.

1831 – Nat Turner's Rebellion begins. Over the next few days, rebel slaves will kill approximately 55 white people in Southampton County, Virginia, the highest number of fatalities ever caused by an American slave uprising. The rebellion is crushed within a few days, however, and thousands of slaves are brutally killed over the next several weeks as hysterical rumors and paranoia circulates throughout the South.

1899 – The RMS Titanic strikes an iceberg in the North Atlantic and sinks within minutes. More than 5000 passengers die, most of them women and children – the concept of “women and children first,” here as in most naval disasters, having gone out the window in the general panic.

1918 – Opha Mae Johnson and 304 other women become the first to enlist in the United States Marine Corps. The women will fill functions such as secretary, cook, or military nurse in domestic facilities; female Marines will not be sent anywhere near war zones until the 1940s.

1960 – The French colony of Ubangi-Chari, part of French Equatorial Africa, declares independence as the Central African Republic.

1988 - George H.W. Bush, a former director of the FBI and Senator from Texas, takes office as the President of the United States.

2008 – American swimmer Michael Phelps takes his eighth gold medal at the Beijing Olympics, breaking the record for most gold medals ever taken at a single Olympics and tying the record for most medals of any type taken at a single Olympics.


Submit your answers to michael5000, who was born on this date in 1981, in the comments.