On This Day: May 11

On This Day, for May 11, by Britannica.

Today we’re looking at
• Alexa’s chess-playing grandfather
• Scientific history gone to scrap
• A nuclear Bikini bottom—but not the one you’re probably thinking of

Here’s our first story:

Deep Blue, a computer chess-playing system designed by IBM in the early 1990s, defeated world champion Garry Kasparov on this day in 1997.

As the successor to the computers named ChipTest and Deep Thought, Deep Blue was designed to succeed where all others had failed. In its final configuration, the IBM RS6000/SP computer used 256 processors working in parallel, with an ability to evaluate 200 million chess positions per second. In 1996 it made history by defeating Kasparov in one of their six games—the first time a computer had won a game against a world champion under tournament conditions. In the 1997 rematch, it won the deciding sixth game in only 19 moves. Deep Blue won two games and scored three draws, and its 3.5–2.5 victory marked the first time a current world champion had lost a match to a computer under tournament conditions.

While a chess-playing robot may not seem to be revolutionary, Deep Blue had erupted out of an era of exponential advancement in computing technology. Supercomputing placed researchers on or past the verge of being able, for the first time, to do computer simulations based on first-principle physics—not merely simplified models. This in turn raised prospects for breakthroughs in such areas as meteorology and global climate analysis, pharmaceutical and medical design, new materials, and aerospace engineering.

At the time, humans were considered to be the ultimate match for computers. Nowadays, we rely on computers for everything—from food to weather to photos of our friends. You’re probably using a descendant of the supercomputer to listen to this right now. You could even use it to go to Britannica.com. You’ll be shocked at how brilliant your computer truly is.

On this day in 1960, Adolf Eichmann was captured by Israeli agents in Buenos Aires. Eichmann, as a high official of the Nazi Party, had been a coordinator of the so-called “final solution.” He organized the identification and assembly of Jews from all over German-occupied Europe and their transportation to their final destinations: Auschwitz-Birkenau and other extermination camps in German-occupied Poland during World War II.

Following the war, U.S. troops captured Eichmann, but in 1946 he escaped from a prison camp. After living in Germany under a false identity for several years, Eichmann made his way via Austria and Italy to Argentina, where he settled in 1958. He was arrested by Israeli secret service agents near Buenos Aires on May 11, 1960, and nine days later they smuggled him out of the country and took him to Israel. Some called for an international tribunal to try Eichmann, and others wanted him tried in Germany, but Israel insisted on trying him itself for his role in the Holocaust. Justice and honor were at stake. The trial lasted eight months, and Eichmann was found guilty. He was sentenced to death—the only death sentence ever imposed by an Israeli court. Eichmann was hanged in 1962.

And now, Fast Facts for May 11th.

On this day in 1969, the well-loved British comedy troupe Monty Python was formed. Members Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin would go on to create classics like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and The Meaning of Life. The group’s antics set a standard with their quirky parodies and wacky humor on television and in later films. And to that, we say, “Ni!”. Or, as we say at Britannica, “Ni.”

Robert Frost’s book New Hampshire earned him the Pulitzer Prize for poetry on this day in 1924.

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s contentious musical Cats opened in London’s West End on this day in 1981. Based on T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, the musical ran for 21 years, making it the longest-running British production of a musical until it was eclipsed by Les Misérables. In 2019 Cats was adapted into a musical feature film by Universal and was met with a…a prickly response.

On this day in 1981, Jamaican reggae star Bob Marley died of cancer. The singer-songwriter is known for his electrifying rock-influenced hybrid of ska, rock steady, and reggae as well as his raw uncompromising songs for and about the disenfranchised people of the West Indian slums.

Glacier National Park, a scenic wilderness area in the northern Rocky Mountains of northwestern Montana, resting beside the Canadian border and Canada’s Waterton Lakes National Park, was established on this day in 1910.

On this day in 1965, Ellis Island was added to the Statue of Liberty National Monument. Ellis Island served as the United States’ major immigration station from 1892 to 1924, and during that period an estimated 12 million immigrants passed through its doors.

The HMS Beagle (the third of nine vessels to bear this name) was launched on this day, May 11, in 1820 at Woolwich, the site of the Royal Navy’s dockyards on the River Thames near London.

Eleven years later, on its second voyage, the Beagle became the temporary home of Charles Darwin, the father of modern evolutionary theory. Darwin slept in a hammock above the drafting table in the cabin below the poop deck and crammed his large collection of fossils and plant and animal specimens into the already overcrowded forecastle.

After its third and final voyage, the Beagle was stripped of its masts and moored in the Essex marshes for use by the Coast Guard Service as a watch station against smugglers. In 1870 it was sold for scrap. Pieces of the ship responsible for one of the most revolutionary discoveries in modern science may still lie at the bottom of the Thames today almost like a fossil.

On this day, May 11th, 1958, the USS Benner joined fellow ships in the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific. That one ship is not so significant when you consider the scale of the U.S. Navy at that time. But our story changes when you consider that early the next day, the United States performed an atmospheric nuclear-weapons test there, at Bikini Atoll—one of many such tests conducted between 1954 and 1958. The crew of the Benner were at the Pacific Proving Ground not only to observe the test blasts and monitor their effects but also to test shipboard radiological safety and decontamination procedures and equipment. All this was considered dutiful, necessary work, where open-air atomic blasts were normal.

This story has roots. After Japan was driven from the Marshall Islands in 1944, the islands and atolls came under the administration of the U.S. Navy. Bikini Atoll was among them. In 1946 Bikini became the site of Operation Crossroads, a vast military-scientific experiment to determine the impact of atomic bombs on naval vessels.

Here is how the U.S. Navy described those tests in a film from that time:

[archival audio]


Before it could begin the tests, the U.S. had to forcibly relocate the atoll’s 166 indigenous Micronesians to Rongerik and then to Kili Island, about 500 miles (800 km) southeast of Bikini.

The world’s first peacetime atomic-weapons test was conducted at Bikini on July 1, 1946. A 20-kiloton atomic bomb was dropped from an airplane and exploded in the air over a fleet of about 80 obsolete World War II naval vessels, among them battleships and aircraft carriers, all of them unmanned. The second test, on July 25, was the world’s first underwater atomic explosion; it raised an enormous column of radioactive water that sank nine ships. Further tests, some of them thermonuclear – meaning, the blasts were powered by hydrogen fusion, and not just by fission -- were conducted from 1954 to 1958, when Bikini and Eniwetok Atolls were the Pacific Proving Ground of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. In 1956 Bikini was the test site of the first hydrogen bomb dropped by a U.S. airplane. And, by the way, Britannica has a video on that.

By 1969 the U.S. government began work on a long-range project to reclaim the land at Bikini and, ultimately, to repatriate the Bikinian population. Some islanders began returning to Bikini in the late 1960s, but they had to be moved back to Kili in 1978 when it became clear that radioactivity levels at Bikini were still dangerously high. In 1985, in response to a lawsuit filed by Bikini islanders, the U.S. government agreed to fund a cleanup of the island chain. Work began in 1991, and the first cleanup project was completed in 1998. But radiation still lingered at levels too high to allow resettlement, although they were deemed low enough to permit tourism on the atoll. So you can put it on your list if, say, you’ve thought about visiting Chernobyl but were hoping for a more tropical destination.

Thanks for listening today. Whether you’re a chess fanatic, a Cats lover, or a nuclear enthusiast, there’s always more to read and discover. Just hop on your personal supercomputer and head to Britannica.com.

Today’s program was written by Emily Goldstein and edited by yours truly. I’m Kurt Heintz.

This program is copyrighted by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.