Hollow Leg History | What Happened on This Date, September 23?

Hollow Leg Podcast

1642

Harvard holds its first graduation ceremony as nine graduates participate in Harvard College's first commencement exercise. Fourteen undergrads, family members, clergy, plus Governor Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Company, look on. America's first college will go on to become one of the world's most prestigious universities.

1806

Amid much public excitement, American explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark return to St. Louis, Missouri, from the first recorded overland journey from the Mississippi River to the Pacific coast and back. The Lewis and Clark Expedition had set off more than two years before to explore the territory of the Louisiana Purchase. They would bring back a wealth of information about the largely unexplored region, as well as valuable U.S. claims to Oregon Territory.

1846

Neptune is plotted, discovered. French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier has used celestial mechanics to plot the coordinates of a faraway planet that can't be seen by the naked eye, and five days later, German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle's telescope spies Neptune almost exactly where Le Verrier calculated it would be.

1889

Nintendo is Founded. The Japanese gaming company was created by entrepreneur Fusajiro Yamauchi as a card company called Nintendo Koppai, which was based in Kyoto. The company originally produced and sold playing cards called Hanafuda. The release of Donkey Kong, an arcade game in 1981, brought Nintendo to the forefront of the electronic and video games industry.