Just a reminder that the unrest in the Middle East has been around forever…

On this day in 1979, hundreds of Iranian students storm the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, taking more than 60 American hostages. The students, supporters of the conservative Muslim cleric Ayatollah Khomeini, were demanding the return of Iran’s deposed leader, the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, who had fled to Egypt in January 1979 and by November was receiving cancer treatment in the United States. After the student takeover, President Jimmy Carter ordered a complete embargo of Iranian oil.

This embargo only exacerbated an energy crisis that had been going on since the beginning of 1979. An Iranian oil-field strike and the January revolution had disrupted oil supplies from that part of the Middle East, and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) cartel had announced a per-barrel fee increase that sent prices inching toward an all-time high. By the time the students took over the Embassy in November, Americans were already dealing with the effects of this crisis: long lines and short tempers at gas pumps, panics over gasoline and heating oil shortages, and frustration with the inefficient, gas-guzzling vehicles manufactured by American automakers.

.

André-Jacques Garnerin (31 January 1769 – 18 August 1823) was a balloonist and the inventor of the frameless parachute.  On 22 October 1797, he proceeded to make everyone else in the world dirty, nasty Legs.

Garnerin began experiments with early parachutes based on umbrella-shaped devices and carried out the first parachute descent with a silk parachute  in Paris. Garnerin’s first parachute resembled a closed umbrella before he ascended, with a pole running down its center and a rope running through a tube in the pole, which connected it to a balloon. Garnerin rode in a basket attached to the bottom of the parachute; at a height of approximately 3,000 feet he severed the rope that connected his parachute to the balloon. The balloon continued skyward while Garnerin, with his basket and parachute, fell. The basket swung violently during descent, then bumped and scraped when it landed, but Garnerin emerged uninjured.