Today is November 24th, 2006.

It was on this day 147 years ago that Charles Darwin published the groundbreaking and controversial book entitled “Origin of Species”. His book was the first to argue that organisms evolved over several generations through a process he called Natural Selection. The book was published on this date in the year 1859.

Did you know that it was on this date 28 years ago that a television icon made his very first appearance on late night television? It was on November 24th, 1978 that David Letterman made his very first guest appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. He would go on to appear on the show 50 times before getting his own show.

And it was 35 years ago today that the worlds only unsolved plane hijacking occurred. You may remember that a man, known only as Dan Cooper, hijacked a plane and then requested that it land in Seattle. After it landed, in exchange for 4 parachutes and $200,000, the hijacker allowed the passengers to leave. Most of them did not even know they were being hijacked. He then ordered the plane to take off toward Mexico with him and only 3 crewmembers still on board. After the plane took off, the hijacker used the ropes from one of the parachutes to tie the money to his chest and then tied another parachute to his back. At an elevation of 10,000 feet on this date in 1971, in heavy storms and thick clouds, he jumped out of the plane and took the money with him. He has not been heard from or seen since.

And finally...

Over 150 years ago a young man named Henry Froelich emigrated from Germany and he and his wife settled in a rural area of northeast Iowa. The year was 1847. Two years later, a son by the name of John was introduced to the world. And this child of a German immigrant would go on to leave his mark on the American landscape.

John Froelich grew up to become a farmer. And like many farmers, he would eventually develop a fondness for any and all machines. As an adult, he operated a grain elevator and a steam-powered wheat threshing operation.

As you may imagine, farming in the mid to late 1800’s was extremely hard work. If you were a wealthy farmer, perhaps you would have a steam-powered tractor, but most farms of the time were worked with horses or oxen. Even if you did have a steam-powered tractor, the coal and wood used to make the steam was not always available or affordable. And if you didn’t have steam, the tractor was nothing more than a big pile of heavy steel sitting in the field.

On the other hand, if you weren’t wealthy and didn’t have a tractor at all, it was nearly impossible for an individual farmer to care for more than just a few acres of farmland.

John Froelich decided that there had to be a better way. John’s grain elevator was operated by a gasoline-powered engine. He decided to remove the gasoline engine from the grain elevator and mount it instead on a tractor that had previously been powered only by steam. Yes, it seems like an obvious solution, but it wasn’t obvious until John Froelich did it first in the year 1892. He invented the very first gasoline powered farm tractor.

In 1893 he would start a company to sell his invention. The company was named the Waterloo Gasoline Traction Engine Company. The company would sell only 2 of the tractors and would you believe it, but both of them..yes both of them were returned by unsatisfied customers. Selling gasoline-powered tractors apparently was no way to make money. In order to stay in the business, the company would manufacture and sell other tools and pieces of farm machinery. But many years later, in the year 1918, another midwest farm implement company would buy the business that John Froelich started. This new company had thus far made only non-motorized farm equipment such as plows, planters and cultivators. That’s right, up until the company purchased Froelich’s business and with it, the rights to build his gasoline powered tractor, this company was not known at all for motorized farm machinery. But now, when most people think of gasoline-powered tractors, there is really only one company that comes to mind. And that company is John Deere. But John Deere did not invent the gasoline-powered tractor. John Froelich did. And he was born on this date, November 24th in the year 1849.

…And that is just one of the things that occurred on this day in history.