On February 6 1958, a British European Airways flight crashes just after takeoff from the Munich Airport. Twenty-three people died in the crash, including eight players from the Manchester United soccer team, which had just qualified for the semifinals of the European Cup.
The Manchester United team was returning from Belgrade, where they had played the Red Star team. Manchester was led by Coach Matt Busby; his young players were known as the “Busby Babes.” A 3-3 tie with Red Star meant that Manchester United moved on to the semi-finals of the European Cup. The team’s flight back to Manchester was delayed an hour because one of the players forgot his passport. The Airspeed Ambassador G-ALZU charter then stopped at Munich-Riem Airport to re-fuel. Munich had just had a snowstorm and conditions were not ideal for flying. Pilot James Thain had to abort his first two attempts at take-off because of engine trouble. On the third attempt, just after 3 p.m., the plane was unable to get enough lift and crashed into a fence at the end of the runway. It then plowed into an empty house.
Twenty-two of the 43 people on board died in the crash. Seven players were among the dead and an eighth, Duncan Edwards, died from his injuries two weeks later, bringing the total death toll to 23. Coach Busby suffered severe injuries and was in critical condition for weeks. The plane’s captain survived the crash and was later charged with criminal negligence after photos appeared to show that he had ignored an icy buildup on the wings.
A subsequent investigation revealed that there was little ice on the wings but that slush at the end of the runway had slowed the plane at a critical point in the takeoff, making it impossible to achieve proper lift. Still, German prosecutors did not clear the captain until 1968. That same year, Coach Busby led Manchester United to their first European Cup title. The team included two players who had survived the crash. Singer Morrissey (formerly of the band The Smiths) immortalized the crash with his 2004 song “Munich Air Disaster 1958.”
February 9, 1964
It is estimated that 73 million Americans were watching The Ed Sullivan Show that night as the Beatles made their live U.S. television debut. Sullivan gave his now-famous intro, “Ladies and gentlemen…the Beatles!” and after a few seconds of rapturous cheering from the audience, the band kicked into “All My Lovin’.” Fifty seconds in, the first audience-reaction shot of the performance shows a teenage girl beaming and possibly hyperventilating. There’s screaming at the end of every phrase in the lyrics, of course, but to view the broadcast today, it seems driven more by anticipation than by the relatively low-key performance itself.
February 10, 1996
On this day in 1996, after three hours, world chess champion Garry Kasparov loses the first game of a six-game match against Deep Blue, an IBM computer capable of evaluating 200 million moves per second. Man was ultimately victorious over machine, however, as Kasparov bested Deep Blue in the match with three wins and two ties and took home the $400,000 prize. An estimated 6 million people worldwide followed the action on the Internet.
Kasparov had previously defeated Deep Thought, the prototype for Deep Blue developed by IBM researchers in 1989, but he and other chess grandmasters had, on occasion, lost to computers in games that lasted an hour or less. The February 1996 contest was significant in that it represented the first time a human and a computer had duked it out in a regulation, six-game match, in which each player had two hours to make 40 moves, two hours to finish the next 20 moves and then another 60 minutes to wrap up the game.
