Today in history, August 3

Aug. 3

Today in history

Today is Aug. 3. On this date in:

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1492: Columbus sailed the ocean blue, launching from the port of Palos in Spain with the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria. The explorer hoped to find a western sea route to the spice-rich countries of Asia.

1888: Rubber baron Benjamin Franklin Goodrich died at age 46. Goodrich served as a Union Army surgeon in the Civil War, then bought into Hudson River Rubber in a licensing agreement with Charles Goodyear. He moved it from New York to Akron, Ohio, where he founded Goodrich, Tew and Co., which made products such as fire hoses and bicycle tires. In 1880 he bought out Tew and it became the B.F. Goodrich Company.

1905: Senior rights activist Maggie Kuhn was born. She founded an advocacy group that became the Gray Panthers after she was forced to retire due to her age.

1908: Three clergymen discovered a nearly complete Neanderthal skeleton in a cave in La Chapelle-aux-Saints, France. The “Old Man of La Chapelle” was relatively old when he died. A paleontologist depicted the man as bow-legged and hunched – a stereotype that persists to this day; in fact, the skeleton was that of an arthritic man.

1914: Two days after declaring war on Russia, Germany declared war on France, which had refused to promise neutrality. The next day, Germany invaded Belgium.

1921: Eight Chicago White Sox players were banned for life from Major League Baseball after being accused of taking bribes to lose the 1919 World Series. They had been acquitted at trial the day before, but baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis said that even just meeting with gamblers irrevocably tainted the players.

1923: Vice President Calvin Coolidge became president after the sudden death of President Warren Harding. He swore the oath of office on the family Bible to his father, a notary public. A Vermonter, Coolidge was known for his Yankee frugality and taciturnity.

1936: American Jesse Owens won the 100-meter dash for the first of his four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics. The Black athlete's success served as a rebuke of Hitler’s racist policies.

1948: Victoria Manalo Draves became the first Asian American to win Olympic gold, winning the 3-meter springboard diving event. The Filipino American used her White mother's name, Taylor, to compete and endured segregated pools.

1958: The USS Nautilus, the world's first atomic-powered submarine, became the first to travel under the ice of the geographic North Pole. The sailors had created a North Pole postal cancellation device and used it on 1,528 envelopes while they were there.

1960: The Republic of Niger gained independence from France. U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent his congratulations to Prime Minister Hamani Diori.

1982: Michael Hardwick of Atlanta was arrested and jailed for sodomy after police found him having sex at home with another man. Hardwick challenged the constitutionality of Georgia's sodomy law in a 1986 Supreme Court case, Bowers v. Hardwick; he lost the case, but the court overturned the decision with the 2003 case Lawrence v. Texas, holding that anti-sodomy laws are unconstitutional.

1996: Hey, Macarena! A catchy rumba remix of Los del Rio's "Macarena" first topped the Billboard Hot 100, where it stayed for 14 weeks.

– USA TODAY Network

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Today in history, August 3