November 23: ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
ON THIS DAY IN 1913, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, “A public hearing on a proposed reduction of the telephone rates between the principal boroughs of the Greater City to a uniform rate of 5 cents per five-minute talk will be held before the Public Service Commission of the Second District tomorrow at 10 o’clock a.m. in the assembly room on the eleventh floor of the Metropolitan Building, 1 Madison avenue, Manhattan. Large delegations from civic associations in the different boroughs will be present to offer arguments in favor of the reduced rates. The hearing has been granted on the complaint of M.H. Winkler of 90 Wall street, Manhattan, who alleges that although a regular subscriber to the telephone service of the New York Telephone Company, his firm has been charged 10 cents per call of five minutes’ duration between the Wall street office and 231 Hudson avenue, Brooklyn — points less than two miles apart.”
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ON THIS DAY IN 1924, the Eagle reported, “WASHINGTON, Nov. 22 — Confirmation of the view that the spiral nebulae which appears in the heavens as whirling clouds are in reality distant stellar systems, or ‘island universes,’ has been obtained by Dr. Edwin Hubbell of the Carnegie Institution’s Mount Wilson Observatory through investigations carried out with the observatory’s powerful telescopes. The number of spiral nebulae, the observatory officials have reported to the institution, is very great, amounting to hundreds of thousands, and their apparent sizes range from small objects, almost starlike in character, to the great nebulae in Andromeda, which extends across an angle some three degrees in the heavens, about six times the diameter of the full moon. ‘The investigations of Dr. Hubbell were made photographically with the 60-inch and 100-inch reflectors of the Mount Wilson Observatory,’ the report said, ‘the extreme faintness of the stars under examination making necessary the use of these great telescopes. The revolving power of these instruments breaks up the outer portions of the nebulae into swarms of stars, which may be studied individually and compared with those in our own system.”
Brooklyn Boro
View MoreNew York City’s most populous borough, Brooklyn, is home to nearly 2.6 million residents. If Brooklyn were an independent city it would be the fourth largest city in the United States. While Brooklyn has become the epitome of ‘cool and hip’ in recent years, for those that were born here, raised families here and improved communities over the years, Brooklyn has never been ‘uncool’.