TITLE: September 9: Crowns, Code, and the Birth of a Name
1. 1513 - The Battle of Flodden
On a rain-soaked afternoon in Northumberland, the armies of Scotland and England met in what would become the bloodiest battle ever fought between the two kingdoms. King James IV of Scotland had invaded England in support of his French allies while Henry VIII was away campaigning in France. Facing him was an English army commanded by the elderly Earl of Surrey, raised and dispatched under the authority of Queen Catherine of Aragon, who was acting as regent. James held the high ground at Flodden Edge, but Surrey marched around his flank and forced the Scots to attack downhill across boggy ground. The Scottish pike formations, modeled on the latest continental tactics, lost cohesion in the mud. English soldiers armed with shorter, more maneuverable billhooks cut them apart at close quarters. By nightfall, James IV lay dead along with an archbishop, nine earls, fourteen lords, and thousands of ordinary soldiers. Flodden was a national catastrophe for Scotland. James IV was the last monarch anywhere in Britain to die on a battlefield, and the slaughter of a generation of Scottish leaders left the kingdom in the hands of an infant king. The lament "Flowers of the Forest," still played at Scottish funerals and memorials, remembers the dead of that day.
2. 1543 - An Infant Queen Is Crowned
Thirty years to the day after Flodden, the Scottish crown passed to another child. Mary Stuart had become queen at six days old when her father James V died in December 1542, reportedly muttering that his kingdom would "go with a lass." On September 9, 1543, she was carried into the Chapel Royal at Stirling Castle and crowned Queen of Scots at nine months of age. The ceremony itself was modest and hurried. Scotland was under pressure from Henry VIII, who wanted Mary betrothed to his son Edward and had already begun the coercive campaign later nicknamed the "Rough Wooing." Crowning her quickly asserted her legitimacy and Scotland's independence. Within a few years she would be shipped to France for safety and raised at the French court. Mary's life became a storyline that novelists could hardly improve upon. She was briefly Queen of France, returned to Scotland as a widow, married disastrously twice more, was forced to abdicate, fled to England, and was held captive for nineteen years before Elizabeth I signed her death warrant in 1587. Yet her infant son James would eventually inherit both thrones, uniting the crowns of Scotland and England in 1603.
3. 1776 - "United States" Becomes the Name
The Declaration of Independence in July 1776 referred to the "thirteen united States of America," but official correspondence and military commissions still used the older term "United Colonies." On September 9, the Continental Congress settled the matter. It resolved that in all continental commissions and other instruments where the words "United Colonies" had been used, the words "United States" should replace them. The change was bureaucratic on its face, but it carried real weight. A colony is by definition subordinate to a mother country. A state is a sovereign political entity. By formally adopting "United States," Congress was declaring, in the language of its own paperwork, that the break with Britain was complete and irreversible. The resolution arrived at a precarious moment. The Continental Army had just been driven off Long Island and was about to lose New York City. The men signing commissions as officers of the "United States" were doing so for an army in retreat. That the name stuck at all is a reminder that national identities are often asserted before they are secured.
4. 1850 - California Joins the Union
When the United States acquired California from Mexico in 1848, the region had perhaps a few thousand non-native residents. Then gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill. Within two years, roughly 100,000 people had poured in from every continent, and the new arrivals drafted a state constitution without waiting for Congress to organize a formal territory. That constitution banned slavery, which threw Washington into crisis. Admitting California as a free state would tip the balance in the Senate. The result was the Compromise of 1850, a package of bills engineered by Henry Clay and Stephen Douglas. California entered as a free state, the slave trade was abolished in the District of Columbia, and in exchange the South received a strengthened Fugitive Slave Act and the promise that new territories in the Southwest could decide the question themselves. California was admitted on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state, skipping the territorial stage entirely. The compromise bought the nation a decade of uneasy peace before the Civil War. California itself went on to become the most populous state and, by some measures, one of the largest economies in the world.
5. 1947 - The First Computer Bug Is Found
At Harvard University, a team operating the Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator was troubleshooting a fault when they traced it to Relay 70 in Panel F. Inside, they found a moth, crushed between the contacts. Someone removed it with tweezers and taped it into the logbook at 15:45 with the entry: "First actual case of bug being found." The team, which included Grace Hopper, knew exactly why the note was funny. Engineers had used "bug" to describe mechanical glitches since at least the days of Thomas Edison, who wrote about "bugs" in his inventions in 1878. The Harvard logbook entry was a joke about finally finding a literal one. Hopper told the story so often and so well that the moth became part of computing folklore. The page with the moth still survives, preserved at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Whether or not the incident truly coined the term, it cemented "bug" and "debugging" as the standard vocabulary of every programmer since. Every developer who has spent an evening hunting an elusive bug can take some comfort that the first one, at least, was easy to spot.
6. 1956 - Elvis Conquers The Ed Sullivan Show
Ed Sullivan had publicly declared that he would never book Elvis Presley. His variety show was family entertainment, and Presley's hip-shaking performances had been denounced from pulpits and editorial pages across the country. Then Presley appeared on Steve Allen's rival program and crushed Sullivan in the ratings. Sullivan changed his mind and signed the singer for three appearances at an unprecedented fee of $50,000. On September 9, 1956, Presley performed "Don't Be Cruel," "Love Me Tender," "Ready Teddy," and "Hound Dog," broadcasting from a CBS studio in Los Angeles where he was filming his first movie. Sullivan himself was not present. He was recovering from a serious car accident, and the British actor Charles Laughton hosted in his place. An estimated 60 million people watched, more than 80 percent of the television audience that night. It remains one of the most-watched entertainment broadcasts in American history relative to the number of televisions in use. The appearance marked the moment rock and roll moved from a youth rebellion into the mainstream living room, and it set the template for television as the launching pad for popular music.
7. 1976 - The Death of Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong died in Beijing shortly after midnight on September 9, 1976, at age 82, after a long decline marked by heart disease and what was likely Lou Gehrig's disease. He had led the Chinese Communist Party for more than four decades and ruled the People's Republic since its founding in 1949. Few individuals in the twentieth century shaped the lives of so many people. His legacy was staggeringly mixed. He unified a country shattered by a century of civil war and foreign invasion and made it a nuclear power. He also presided over the Great Leap Forward, whose famine killed tens of millions, and the Cultural Revolution, which tore apart Chinese society for a decade. At the time of his death, China remained desperately poor and isolated. What followed was one of history's great pivots. Within a month, the radical faction known as the Gang of Four, including Mao's widow Jiang Qing, had been arrested. By 1978, Deng Xiaoping had consolidated power and launched the "reform and opening up" policy that dismantled much of Mao's economic system. The China that emerged over the next four decades, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty and becoming the world's second-largest economy, began with the vacuum created on this day. Seven events separated by nearly five centuries, and yet the threads between them are hard to miss. A Scottish king dies in the mud, and thirty years later his granddaughter is crowned as an infant. A congress changes a word on its stationery, and seventy-four years later a gold-rush state joins the union that word described. A moth gets stuck in a relay, and every programmer since has inherited the vocabulary. History is less a list of dates than a long conversation, in which each generation answers questions it did not know the last one was asking. September 9 is one small page of that conversation, and we are still writing on it.