Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge construction started
The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge is a suspension bridge connecting the New York City boroughs of Staten Island and Brooklyn. It spans the Narrows, a body of water linking the relatively enclosed New York Harbor with Lower New York Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. It is the only fixed crossing of the Narrows. The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge has a central span of 4,260 feet (1.30 km; 0.81 mi). It was the longest suspension bridge in the world until it was surpassed by the Humber Bridge in the United Kingdom in 1981. The bridge has the 18th-longest main span in the world, as well as the longest in the Americas.
Secondary Dam of Sella Zerbino failure
Lago di Ortiglieto is a reservoir in northwest Italy which straddles the Metropolitan City of Genoa in Liguria, and the Province of Alessandria in Piedmont. There were two dams there, the higher of 45 metres and another one of 15 metres. After a period of heavy rains of August 1935 the sella Zerbino dam crashed, generating a flood of the Orba which caused 111 deaths, mainly in the Ovada area. Nowadays Ortiglieto lake is much smaller than in the past and there is only one dam.
Lake Toxaway Dam collapse
On August 13, 1916 after severe flooding, which deluged the Toxaway River with 24 inches of rain in 24 hours, the dam, which had not been engineered with a water level control, gave way under the stress and sent more than 5 billion US gallons (19,000,000 m3) of water crashing over the falls into South Carolina. The only casualty of this disaster was the death of a mule. Toxaway Falls still shows the trauma of the dam burst, its granite rock exposed for a great distance down the falls.
1868 Arica earthquake
The 1868 Arica earthquake occurred on 13 August 1868, near Arica, then part of Peru, now part of Chile, at 21:30 UTC. It had an estimated magnitude between 8.5 and 9.3. A tsunami (or multiple tsunamis) in the Pacific Ocean was produced by the earthquake, which was recorded in Hawaii, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand.
Sir George Stokes, 1st Baronet was born
Sir George Gabriel Stokes, 1st Baronet, was an Irish physicist and mathematician. Born in County Sligo, Ireland, Stokes spent all of his career at the University of Cambridge, where he was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics from 1849 until his death in 1903. As a physicist, Stokes made seminal contributions to fluid mechanics, including the Navier-Stokes equations; and to physical optics, with notable works on polarization and fluorescence. As a mathematician, he popularised "Stokes' theorem" in vector calculus and contributed to the theory of asymptotic expansions. Stokes, along with Felix Hoppe-Seyler, first demonstrated the oxygen transport function of haemoglobin, and showed colour changes produced by the aeration of haemoglobin solutions.
