Saturday, January 20, 2018

Year 1717

  • January 4, 1717
    The Netherlands, Britain and France sign the Triple Alliance in the Hague to prevent Spain to become a superpower in Europe
  • 1717
    In France John Law proposes a company with exclusive rights to trade with and exploit the resources of the Mississippi territory and to pay down the government's debt from company profits, which becomes the Company of the West
  • April 26, 1717
    Black Samuel Bellamy, the wealthiest pirate in recorded history, dies at the age of 27 along with 143 others when their ship, the Whydah, sank off of Wellfleet, Cape Cod, sending over 4.1 tonnes of silver and gold to the ocean floor
  • June 4, 1717
    The Freemasons, who begun in the 13th century as a guild of masons, establish their Grand Lodge in London, the oldest Grand Lodge in the world
  • August 22, 1717
    The Austrian army under Eugene of Savoy force the Turkish army out of Belgrade, ending the Turkish revival in the Balkans
  • 1717
    The Mississippi Scheme, an attempt to hold a business monopoly in French colonies in North America and the West Indies, leads to increased settlement in Louisiana
  • 1717
    Dzungar tribes of Mongolia invade Tibet starting a period of internal strife and civil war
  • 1717
    Voltaire, a French Enlightenment writer, is imprisoned in the Bastille, a fortress in Paris used as a state prison by the kings of France, for criticizing the French aristocracy
  • December 25, 1717
    A northwesterly storm, which hit the coast area of the Netherlands, Germany and Scandinavia, results in approximately 14,000 drowned people

Tuesday, January 2, 2018

Fyodor Pirotsky

  • February 17, 1845
    Fyodor Apollonovich Pirotsky, a Ukrainian-born inventor and engineer, is born in family of Ukrainian Cossacks ancestry in Lokhvytsia Uezd of Poltava Gubernia, modern-day Ukraine
  • 1871
    Russian engineer Fyodor Pirotsky develops a new type of blast furnace
  • February 17, 1875
    Fyodor Pirotsky puts electrically powered railway cars running on isolated from the ground and working as conductors rails on the Sestroretsks railway Miller's line in Russian Empire
  • May 16, 1881
    World's first electric tram, invented and made of two-decker horse tramway by Ukrainian-born Russian engineer Fyodor Pirotsky, goes into service in Saint Petersburg, Russia
  • 1881
    Fyodor Pirotsky meets with German entrepreneur Carl Heinrich von Siemens to discuss regular electric transportation
  • February 28, 1898
    Fyodor Pirotsky, inventor of the world's first electric tram, dies in poverty and is buried on a credit secured by the furniture in the town of Aleshki, now Ukraine