Reading 3 of 6 free1776 Club · all 6 storiesSaturday, September 12
From the desk
Start with 1847: American guns opened on Chapultepec Castle at 7 a.m., pounding the hilltop fortress all day while roughly 832 defenders huddled behind sandbags and shallow trenches. Scott halted at dark, planning to send infantry up the hill at dawn, the siege still undecided. Worth a longer look: 1958, when Jack Kilby, a new engineer burning quiet summer weeks alone, wired a sliver of germanium and produced a sine wave on an oscilloscope, the first integrated circuit. Kennedy's 1962 Rice Stadium speech rounds out the day, a promise made before anyone knew it could be kept.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1847Featured · This day in history
Scott's cannon open on Chapultepec at dawn; the castle has nowhere to hide
By September 1847, General Winfield Scott's army had fought its way from Veracruz to the gates of Mexico City, and one obstacle stood between them: Chapultepec, a military academy and powder depot perched atop a 200-foot hill. At 7 a.m. on September 12, American batteries opened fire on the castle and kept firing all day. The roughly 832 defenders inside, sheltered only by sandbags, beams, and shallow trenches, had nowhere to escape the shelling. Scott halted the guns at nightfall, planning to send infantry up the hill at first light.
The bombardment set up the assault that broke Mexican resistance outside its capital and forced the war toward the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which handed the United States Texas, California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Wyoming. Marine Corps tradition links the red trouser stripe and the opening line of its hymn to this battle, though historians note the stripe's design predates the war.
Did you know
QWhy were thirty captured American soldiers hanged where they could watch the flag change atop Chapultepec?
Colonel William S. Harney ordered the executions of members of the Saint Patrick's Battalion, mostly Irish immigrants who had deserted the U.S. Army to fight for Mexico after being captured at Churubusco, timed to the moment. Harney specified the men be hanged with Chapultepec in full view, and that the trapdoors drop at the exact moment the American flag replaced the Mexican tricolor over the castle, which happened at 9:30 that morning. The men had no loyalty to the army they abandoned, and Mexican authorities had recruited deserters into the Batallon de San Patricio with promises of land and rank. Their deaths were staged as a public spectacle of the war's final hours, not an afterthought of battlefield justice.
QHow did a lieutenant's speech in a war council change the entire American attack plan?
When Scott's officers met on September 11 to decide how to break into Mexico City, most senior commanders, including Captain Robert E. Lee, favored striking the heavily fortified southern gates rather than Chapultepec. Only General David E. Twiggs sided with Scott's preference for the western route. The deciding moment came when a young lieutenant named P. G. T. Beauregard, who would later command Confederate forces at Fort Sumter, gave a speech that persuaded General Franklin Pierce to switch his vote toward attacking Chapultepec instead. That reversal is often credited with helping tip the council toward attacking Chapultepec rather than the southern causeways.
QWhat happened to the bells of Mexico City in the months before the battle?
In May 1847, four months before American guns opened on the castle, Mexican authorities melted down church and city bells and recast them into cannonballs, a desperate bid to keep pace with an army that had already stripped away much of their artillery in earlier defeats. By the time Scott's forces reached Chapultepec, prior American victories at Cerro Gordo, Contreras, and Churubusco had already depleted Mexico's reserves so severely that recycled bell metal was going into the defense. The garrison's seven guns at Chapultepec, a mix of 24-, 8-, and 4-pounders plus one howitzer under General Manuel Gamboa, reflected just how thin those reserves had become.
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1962exploration
We choose to go to the Moon, Kennedy tells 40,000 at Rice Stadium
Fifteen months after Kennedy asked Congress to fund a Moon landing, the goal was still an expensive gamble, one polls showed most Americans doubted. On a warm September afternoon in 1962, Kennedy stood before roughly 40,000 people at Rice Stadium in Houston, many of them Rice students, and reaffirmed it. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade, he said, not because it is easy, but because it is hard. He framed the landing as a test of will as much as engineering.
Kennedy turned a cost estimate, 22 billion dollars, into a national commitment argued in public, on a football field, to ordinary Texans in Houston. That choice, selling the Space Race as a test of American character rather than a budget line, is why NASA's funding survived a president who did not live to see Apollo 11 land.
Did you know
QWho scoffed that spending 40 billion dollars to reach the Moon was "just nuts"?
Former president Dwight Eisenhower, who had watched the space budget balloon after leaving office, told reporters flatly that spending 40 billion dollars to reach the Moon was "just nuts." He was not alone. Senator Barry Goldwater argued the civilian space program was crowding out the military one, and Senator William Proxmire worried it would siphon scientists away from defense research entirely. A budget cut to Apollo was only narrowly averted in Congress. Rice faculty member Robert Curl, sitting in the crowd that day, later admitted he too was staggered by the cost. Kennedy's Houston speech built public enthusiasm, but Eisenhower's complaint kept circulating in Washington for years afterward.
QDid Kennedy ever try to get the Soviets to go to the Moon together instead of racing them?
Yes, twice. Kennedy first raised a joint lunar mission with Nikita Khrushchev at their June 1961 summit, and the Soviet leader waved it off. Kennedy tried again publicly at the United Nations General Assembly on September 20, 1963, barely a year after the Rice speech. Khrushchev stayed cautious, announcing that October that the Soviet Union had no plans to send cosmonauts to the Moon at all. Behind the scenes, though, his own military advisors argued the offer was worth taking, since cooperation would let Moscow quietly absorb American technology. The idea died for good with Kennedy's assassination two months later, and Apollo remained a solely American undertaking.
QWhat happened to the stadium where Kennedy gave the speech?
Rice Stadium, built in 1950, outlived the speech that made it famous by hosting an entirely different kind of national spectacle. In January 1974 it staged Super Bowl VIII, the same grass where 40,000 people once heard a president promise the Moon later serving as a Super Bowl end zone.
1958innovation
A sliver of germanium hums to life; Kilby proves the integrated circuit works
Texas Instruments had just returned from its summer shutdown, and Jack Kilby, a new engineer with no accrued vacation, had spent the quiet weeks alone with a problem the industry called the tyranny of numbers. On September 12, 1958, he brought a small piece of germanium, wired with a transistor, a capacitor, and three resistors linked by fine gold wires, into a room with company management, including Mark Shepherd. He attached an oscilloscope and pressed a switch. A continuous sine wave appeared on the screen, An entire circuit could live on a single piece of semiconductor.
Kilby's germanium sliver, built inside a Dallas lab because a junior engineer had nowhere else to be that August, became U.S. Patent 3,138,743 and the founding document of the American semiconductor industry. Every silicon chip made in Silicon Valley traces back to that oscilloscope reading.
Did you know
QWhy did Kilby originally propose micromodules to the Army instead of an integrated circuit?
Kilby had pitched the U.S. Army on a different fix for circuit complexity: small ceramic substrates called micromodules, each holding one miniaturized component that could be stacked into a compact grid. The Army bit, launching the short-lived Micromodule Program in 1957, patterned after an earlier effort called Project Tinkertoy. Kilby continued developing this idea after joining Texas Instruments in 1958, before abandoning it for the integrated circuit. Kilby kept working the problem after moving to Texas Instruments, and as the micromodule project gained momentum he abandoned it for something more radical: putting every component on one piece of semiconductor rather than assembling many tiny finished parts. The integrated circuit grew directly out of walking away from his own government-funded idea.
QWhat made Kilby's germanium chip technically inferior to what powers phones and computers today?
Kilby's 1958 device was not a true monolithic chip. It depended on external gold-wire connections strung between components, a method that made large-scale manufacturing impractical. About six months later, Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor solved that problem with a silicon chip built using Jean Hoerni's planar process, which allowed reliable aluminum interconnections printed directly onto the chip surface. That approach, not Kilby's germanium-and-gold-wire original, became the template for every modern IC. The distinction mattered enough that patent law and Nobel committees treated the two men as co-inventors working on separate halves of the same breakthrough, one proving the concept, the other making it manufacturable at scale.
QWho bought the very first integrated circuits off the line?
The U.S. Air Force was the first customer for Kilby's invention, not a consumer electronics company. Military demand carried the technology through its expensive, unproven early years: Texas Instruments built the first computer incorporating integrated circuits for military use, and the Minuteman missile program contracted for TI integrated circuits in 1962. NASA's Apollo Program then became the largest single consumer of integrated circuits between 1961 and 1965, buying chips in volumes no commercial buyer would have risked on brand-new technology. Government contracts, not the consumer market, kept integrated circuit production alive long enough for prices to fall and civilian uses to catch up.
