February 5 in Nutella Day
Nutella, the delicious creamy hazelnut and cocoa spread was first produced in Italy in 1963, and quickly became a favorite around the world. It’s beginnings trace back to just after the second world war when baker Pietro Ferrara made a spread he called “Supercrema” made from hazelnuts and cocoa. In the early 60s, Ferrara’s son Michele refined the recipe, and produced the first jars of Nutella.
How popular is Nutella? A couple of weeks ago on January 25 Intermarche supermarkets in France announced a one day sale of Nutella at 75% off the regular price.
This video from Time Magazine shows what happened.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyjM62yLGFQ
Enjoy some Nutella today. But please don’t smash anyone in the supermarket just to get a jar. They make plenty.
Today in history: February 5, 1958. Broken Arrow
During a practice exercise off the coast of Georgia, an F-86 Sabre fighter jet collided with a B-47 Stratojet bomber. The medium range bomber was carrying a 7,600 pound Mark 15 nuclear bomb.
The B-47 was on a simulated combat mission from Homestead Air Force Base in Florida. At about 2:00 AM the collision occurred. The F-86 pilot ejected from the fighter plane, which then crashed into the sea. The damaged bomber remained airborne, plummeting 18,000 feet before the pilot regained flight control.
The crew requested permission to jettison the bomb in order to reduce weight and prevent the bomb from exploding during an emergency landing. Permission was granted, and the bomb was dropped. The crew said in their incident reports that they did not see an explosion when the bomb struck the sea. They managed to land the B-47 safely at Hunter Army Air Field in Savannah. The pilot, Colonel Howard Richardson, was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross after this incident.
Recovery efforts began the next day. The bomb contains 400 lbs. of conventional high explosive, but after that it’s a bit sketchy. No one seems to know if the bomb was a functional nuke or if it is an inert dummy bomb. The Air Force maintains that there is no enriched uranium core on the bomb.
You may note the use of the present tense in describing what the bomb is, and that is because it has never been found. By mid-April the search was called off, the bomb abandoned to the depths of the Atlantic. It is believed to be in the crevasse of the Wassaw Sound near Tybee Island, off the coast of Savannah, Georgia. As recently as 2004 a search team claimed to have narrowed the bomb’s location to an area the size of a football field, but nothing has come of it.
Neat Fact: February 5 1869: The Welcome Stranger
In the southern state of Victoria in Australia, 2 prospectors unearthed the largest gold nugget in history on this date in 1869.
Called “The Welcome Stranger”, the nugget measured 24 inches by 12 inches, and weighed over 214 pounds. It was found by John Deason and Richard Oates near the roots of a large tree, under just 1¼ inches of soil on a slope leading to a cut in the land known as Bulldog Gully.
Since there was no scale that could weigh such a nugget, a blacksmith was summoned to split it into 3 parts. After refinement the final weight was just under 193 pounds, or 2315.5 troy ounces.
Deason and Oates were paid out approximately £9,380 for the nugget. Oates invested in land and farming and died at age 79 as a wealthy man. Deason was not so lucky and finally became a storekeeper after losing much of his fortune in bad investments in other gold mining ventures.
In 2013 it was estimated that the Welcome Stranger was worth between 3 and 4 million dollars in modern value.