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Speaker 1: Hey, y'all. Were rerunning two episodes today, which means that

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Speaker 1: you'll hear two hosts me and Tracy V. Wilson. Enjoy

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Speaker 1: the show. Welcome to this Day in History Class from

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Speaker 1: how Stuff Works dot Com and from the desk of

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Speaker 1: Stuff You Missed in History Class. It's the show where

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Speaker 1: we explore the past, one day at a time with

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Speaker 1: a quick look at what happened today in history. Hello,

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Speaker 1: and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and

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Speaker 1: its January. The Boston Molasses Flood took place on this

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Speaker 1: day in nineteen nineteen. Today folks probably associate molasses more

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Speaker 1: with food or maybe with making rum, but in the

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Speaker 1: early ens, it was a lot more important for munitions,

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Speaker 1: especially because of World War One. Purity Distilling Company, owned

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Speaker 1: by the United States Industrial Alcohol Company, wanted to fill

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Speaker 1: that need and make money. Even before the United States

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Speaker 1: was directly involved in the war, the US was providing

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Speaker 1: munitions to the Allies, so molasses was a big business

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Speaker 1: to support that whole goal. They built a tank in

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Speaker 1: nineteen fifteen, but they had a lot of problems. The

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Speaker 1: ideal location for this tank was near both the harbor

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Speaker 1: and the railroad. They needed the harbor to receive all

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Speaker 1: the molasses from the Caribbean, and they needed the railroad

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Speaker 1: to ship it out for processing. So they planned a

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Speaker 1: tank that would hold two point five million gallons of molasses.

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Speaker 1: This was fifty feet high and ninety feet in diameter,

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Speaker 1: or a fifteen meters high and twenty seven in diameter,

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Speaker 1: and between the permitting process and terrible weather and other obstacles,

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Speaker 1: they got way behind schedule and wound up with a

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Speaker 1: team of about thirty men working around the clock to

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Speaker 1: try to get this thing built on time, and they

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Speaker 1: also cut corners to try to make up for lost

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Speaker 1: time and spend less money. The material that they used

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Speaker 1: to build this massive tank was both too thin and

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Speaker 1: too brittle to do the job. When they finally filled

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Speaker 1: this up with molasses, it leaked so much that people

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Speaker 1: in the neighborhood would come scrape the residue off the sides.

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Speaker 1: They didn't really do much to fix that problem. They

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Speaker 1: did cock some of the worst of it, and otherwise

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Speaker 1: they painted it brown so that the leaks wouldn't show

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Speaker 1: as much. By nineteen nineteen, with World War One over,

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Speaker 1: the need for munitions had really dropped, but the company

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Speaker 1: still had a license for industrial alcohol, and on January fifteenth,

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Speaker 1: nineteen nineteen, at twelve thirty pm, the tank, which had

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Speaker 1: been making ominous rumbling noises for a while, finally ruptured.

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Speaker 1: This followed some unseasonably warm weather for January in Boston,

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Speaker 1: and the tank was mostly full at the time. When

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Speaker 1: the tank ruptured, it's steel plates were torn completely apart,

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Speaker 1: and a fifteen foot high or four point six meter

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Speaker 1: wave of molasses raced through Boston's North End at thirty

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Speaker 1: five miles an hour that's about fifty six kilometers an hour.

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Speaker 1: This was deadly. The flying debris flew at least two

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Speaker 1: hundred eat knocked down girders of an elevated train. People

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Speaker 1: were knocked to the ground, and then because they were

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Speaker 1: on the ground, people and animals drowned in the molasses.

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Speaker 1: Buildings collapsed or were knocked off their foundations by the

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Speaker 1: force of it all. And even people who survived that

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Speaker 1: initial wave and were able to keep their heads out

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Speaker 1: of the molasses died because they just couldn't get out.

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Speaker 1: Animals that were in that position had to be put

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Speaker 1: down because there was no way to rescue them from

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Speaker 1: this just immobile, sticky mass. Most of the neighborhood's residents

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Speaker 1: were Irish and Italian immigrants. A lot of them did

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Speaker 1: not have a lot of money, and in the end,

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Speaker 1: twenty one people were dead and a hundred and fifty injured.

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Speaker 1: Clean Up took months. Investigations of what happened followed. There

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Speaker 1: were a hundred and nineteen separate civil suits that were

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Speaker 1: filed against the company within a year. Six years of

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Speaker 1: litigation and the longest most expensive civil suit and Massachusetts

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Speaker 1: history followed this. The owners claimed that it had been

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Speaker 1: anarchist sabotage, but there was no evidence that that was

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Speaker 1: true at all. In April, the state auditor released a

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Speaker 1: fifty one page verdict that found the company liabele for

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Speaker 1: what had happened, and the company later paid six twenty

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Speaker 1: eight thousand dollars and damages. Today, some people say that

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Speaker 1: on hot days you can still smell the molasses in

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Speaker 1: Boston's North End. There's more to this story in the

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Speaker 1: October fifth, two thousand nine Stuff You Miss in History Class.

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Speaker 1: Thanks to Casey Pegram and Chandlert Mays for their audio

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Speaker 1: work on the show, You can subscribe to the Stay

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Speaker 1: in History Class on Apple podcast, Google podcast, The I

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Speaker 1: Heart radio app and where every else you get podcast

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Speaker 1: and you can tune in tomorrow for a constitutional amendment

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Speaker 1: that did not work out as planned. Hello again, I'm

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Speaker 1: Eves and you're listening to This Day in History Class,

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Speaker 1: a show where we drop history knowledge every single day.

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Speaker 1: The day was January eighteen fifty. Russian mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya

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Speaker 1: was born in Moscow, Russia. Kovalevskaya was the first woman

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Speaker 1: to get a modern doctorate in mathematics. She was the

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Speaker 1: second of three children born into a family of wealthy

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Speaker 1: Russian aristocrats. Her father was an artillery general in the

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Speaker 1: Russian Army, so the family had to move a lot

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Speaker 1: when she was young, but when she was around six

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Speaker 1: years old, the family settled at an estate near Russia's

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Speaker 1: border with Lithuania. There, Kovalevskaya learned under her English governess

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Speaker 1: and Polish tutor. She was good at and enjoyed writing,

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Speaker 1: and even though too much intellectual stimulation was deemed unhealthy

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Speaker 1: for girls at the time, she read books that were

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Speaker 1: in her family's library. In fact, she said that her

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Speaker 1: father had a quote strong prejudice against learned women, and

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Speaker 1: when she was caught with books, he punished her Still,

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Speaker 1: she continued her studies and though she wasn't the best

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Speaker 1: at math. Initially, Sophia had a lot of scholars and

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Speaker 1: mathematicians in her family lineage. By the time she was fifteen,

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Speaker 1: she had garnered more interest and proficiency in mathematics. She

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Speaker 1: began taking lessons from a mathematician at the Naval school

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Speaker 1: in St. Petersburg. But even though she clearly had a

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Speaker 1: talent for mathematics, she could not continue her education in

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Speaker 1: Russia since women were not allowed to attend higher education institutions.

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Speaker 1: Sophia was able to attend lectures by academics, but she

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Speaker 1: wanted to go to school abroad, something her father did

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Speaker 1: not support. But she needed to get permission to study

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Speaker 1: abroad from her father or a husband, so she decided

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Speaker 1: to pursue her goal by getting married to a man

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Speaker 1: named Vladimir cople of Skaya, a paleontology student at the

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Speaker 1: University of Moscow. The agreement was that the marriage was

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Speaker 1: a platonic one. They married in eight sixty eight. The

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Speaker 1: next year they moved to Heidelberg, Germany. There, Vladimir studied

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Speaker 1: geology and Sophia took math classes at the university. Her

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Speaker 1: professors had been students of the mathematician Karl t. Weierstrass,

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Speaker 1: so Sophia traveled to Berlin to study with him herself.

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Speaker 1: Her husband stayed behind. The university there forbade women from

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Speaker 1: attending Bierstrass's formal lectures, but Bierstrass agreed to teach her privately,

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Speaker 1: and he did so for the next few years. Kovalevskaya

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Speaker 1: ended up writing three doctoral dissertations, and Bierstrass submitted her

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Speaker 1: work to the University of Gottingen. The dissertation on the

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Speaker 1: theory of partial differential equations, which expanded on ideas first

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Speaker 1: posed by mathematician Augustin Louis Kushi, is considered the most

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Speaker 1: important of the dissertations. She got her doctorate degree in

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Speaker 1: eighteen seventy four, but she still had trouble getting a

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Speaker 1: teaching position, so she went back to Russia to live

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Speaker 1: with her husband. They had a child, and for a

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Speaker 1: while they put aside their academic work, but Vladimir died

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Speaker 1: by suicide in eighteen eighty three, and soon Kovalevskaya began

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Speaker 1: working as a lecturer in mathematics in Stockholm. She taught

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Speaker 1: about inverse functions elliptical integrals and Abelian functions, and she

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Speaker 1: also wrote more papers, some of which won her awards.

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Speaker 1: She earned a lifetime professorship at the University of Stockholm,

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Speaker 1: and she was the first female mathematician to hold a

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Speaker 1: chair at a European university. In her later years, Kovalevskaya

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Speaker 1: pursued a career in writing, authoring a play and novels.

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Speaker 1: She died of the flu complicated by pneumonia in eighteen

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Speaker 1: ninety one. I'm Eve Jeff Coo and hopefully you know

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Speaker 1: a little more about history today than you did yesterday.

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Speaker 1: No any little history buffs who would enjoy the show,

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Speaker 1: you can share it with them. We're on Twitter, Facebook,

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Speaker 1: and Instagram at t D I h C podcast, or

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Speaker 1: if you want to get a little more fancy, you

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Speaker 1: can send us an email at this day at I

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Speaker 1: heart media dot com. We're here every day, so you

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Speaker 1: know where to find us. By