January 24 Birthday
January 24, 1848: James Marshall found gold flakes in the tailrace of a sawmill he was building for John Sutter on the American River in Coloma, California. Sutter tried to keep the discovery secret, but word spread within months. By 1849, the Gold Rush was on — 300,000 people descended on California from the eastern US, China, Europe, and Latin America. San Francisco grew from 200 residents to 36,000 in six years. The gold financed the Union during the Civil War. It also destroyed the Native American population of California, who were hunted, enslaved, and systematically exterminated. California's statehood in 1850 was rushed through Congress to secure the gold for the Union. Winston Churchill died on January 24, 1965, at the age of ninety. He had suffered a severe stroke twelve days earlier and never recovered. His state funeral was the largest in British history — representatives from 112 nations attended, and 321,000 people filed past his coffin in Westminster Hall. The cranes along the Thames lowered their jibs as his body was taken by boat to Waterloo Station, an impromptu tribute by the dockworkers that became one of the most iconic images of the ceremony. He had warned about Hitler when no one wanted to listen, held Britain together during its darkest year, and then been voted out of office before the war was even over. On this day in 1984, Apple released the Macintosh. The famous "1984" Super Bowl ad — directed by Ridley Scott, showing an athlete smashing a screen of Big Brother — had aired two days earlier. The Mac cost $2,495, had 128KB of RAM, and a 9-inch screen. It was the first successful computer with a graphical user interface and a mouse. Xerox had invented both, at its PARC research lab, and let Steve Jobs tour the facility. Jobs understood what Xerox did not — that the interface was the product. Microsoft Windows copied the Mac, Apple sued, and the legal precedent established that you cannot copyright a "look and feel." Edith Wharton, born this day in 1862, was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for The Age of Innocence. She wrote about the society she was born into — the old New York aristocracy — with a precision that was both affectionate and devastating. She designed her own house, The Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts, and wrote 40 books. She lived in Paris during World War I and organized relief efforts for refugees, for which France made her a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor. People born on January 24 fall under the zodiac sign of Aquarius. The birthstone is Garnet and the birth flower is Carnation. Historical events on January 24 include 1848: Gold discovered at Sutter's Mill in California, 1965: Winston Churchill dies at age 90, 1984: Apple Macintosh personal computer released. Famous people born on January 24 include Edith Wharton (1862), Neil Diamond (1941), John Belushi (1949).