August 31 in History

Meriwether Lewis departed Pittsburgh on August 31, 1803, in a 55-foot keelboat, beginning the expedition that would map the American West and fulfill Thomas Jefferson's vision of a transcontinental nation. William Clark joined him at Clarksville, Indiana, and together they led the Corps of Discovery up the Missouri River, across the Rocky Mountains, and down the Columbia River to the Pacific Ocean, returning in September 1806. The expedition covered roughly 8,000 miles, documented 178 plants and 122 animals previously unknown to Western science, and established diplomatic contact with dozens of Native American nations. Sacagawea, a teenage Shoshone woman, served as interpreter and guide. Lewis and Clark's journals remain the most detailed record of pre-settlement western North America.

Polish workers at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk went on strike on August 14, 1980, demanding the reinstatement of fired crane operator Anna Walentynowicz. Within two weeks, the strike had spread across the country, paralyzing the Polish economy. On August 31, the government signed the Gdansk Agreement, granting workers the right to form independent trade unions for the first time in any Soviet bloc country. Lech Walesa, a 37-year-old electrician, led the negotiations and became chairman of the new Solidarity movement, which swelled to 10 million members within a year. The agreement cracked the foundation of communist control in Eastern Europe. Martial law crushed Solidarity in 1981, but the movement reemerged to win free elections in 1989.

Princess Diana died at 4:00 a.m. on August 31, 1997, at Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital in Paris after a car crash in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel. Her driver Henri Paul, who had a blood alcohol level three times the legal limit, was traveling at over 120 mph while pursued by paparazzi on motorcycles. Dodi Fayed and Henri Paul also died; only bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones survived. Diana was 36. Her televised funeral on September 6 drew an estimated 2.5 billion viewers worldwide. Elton John performed a rewritten "Candle in the Wind" that became the best-selling single in chart history. The public outpouring of grief, unprecedented in modern British history, forced Queen Elizabeth II to break protocol and address the nation.

Mary Ann Nichols was found dead in Buck's Row, Whitechapel, at 3:40 a.m. on August 31, 1888, by a carter named Charles Cross. Her throat had been cut twice, and her abdomen was mutilated. She was 43, homeless, and had been turned away from a doss house because she couldn't afford the four-pence bed fee. She was the first of five women whose murders are attributed with reasonable certainty to an unidentified killer the press named "Jack the Ripper." The subsequent murders of Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly escalated in brutality. Despite the largest police investigation in Victorian history, the killer was never identified. The case remains open at the Metropolitan Police.

Thomas Edison filed a patent for the Kinetoscope on August 31, 1897, though the device had been in commercial operation since 1894. The Kinetoscope was a peephole viewer that allowed a single person to watch a short loop of film. It was not a projector; each customer looked through an eyepiece into a cabinet containing a 50-foot strip of film running over a series of spools at 46 frames per second. The first Kinetoscope parlor opened at 1155 Broadway in Manhattan on April 14, 1894, where customers paid 25 cents to view five films in a row. Edison had deliberately chosen not to develop projection, believing the one-viewer-per-machine model was more profitable. The Lumiere brothers proved him wrong within two years.