Dec 6, 2017 2 min read

Today is Wednesday, Dec. 6, the 340th day of 2017. There are 25 days left in the year.

On Dec. 6, 1917, some 2,000 people were killed when an explosives-laden French cargo ship, the Mont Blanc, collided with the Norwegian vessel Imo at the harbor in Halifax, Nova Scotia, setting off a blast that devastated the Canadian city. Finland declared its independence from Russia.

In 1790, Congress moved to Philadelphia from New York.

In 1889, Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the Confederate States of America, died in New Orleans.

In 1907, the worst mining disaster in U.S. history occurred as 362 men and boys died in a coal mine explosion in Monongah, W.Va.

In 1922, the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which established the Irish Free State, came into force one year to the day after it was signed in London.

In 1942, comedian Fred Allen premiered “Allen’s Alley,” a recurring sketch on his CBS radio show spoofing small-town America.

In 1957, America’s first attempt at putting a satellite into orbit failed as Vanguard TV3 rose about four feet off a Cape Canaveral launch pad before crashing down and exploding.

In 1967, three days after the first human heart transplant took place in South Africa, a surgical team at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., led by Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz transplanted the heart of a brain-dead two-day-old baby boy into an 19-day-old infant who died six hours later.

In 1973, House minority leader Gerald R. Ford was sworn in as vice president, succeeding Spiro T. Agnew.

“When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this – you haven’t.”

– Thomas Edison, American inventor (1847-1931)