Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary; 21 April 1926 – 8 September 2022)

On February 15, 1998, after 20 years of trying, racing great
Dale Earnhardt Sr. finally won his first Daytona 500, the
National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR)
season opener and an event dubbed the “Super Bowl of
stock car racing.”

Following his victory, crews from competing teams lined the
pit road at the Daytona International Speedway in Daytona
Beach, Florida, to congratulate Earnhardt, who drove his car
onto the grass and did several celebratory doughnuts, or
circles (below).

 
ROSS SIMPSON

The picture, known as Pale Blue Dot (above) depicts our
planet as a nearly indiscernible speck roughly the size
of a pixel. 

On Valentine’s Day, 1990, 3.7 billion miles away from the sun,  
the Voyager 1 spacecraft looked back at our solar system and
snapped the first-ever pictures of the planets from its perch at
that time beyond Neptune. This is the last image Voyager 1 ever
beamed back after which the cameras were turned off to save
power and memory.

Artist impression of Voyager-1.

On February 13, 1914, the American Society of Composers, Authors
and Publishers (ASCAP) was founded to help music creators make
a living from their work.

“If music did not pay, it would be given up.” So wrote Associate
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in a landmark Supreme Court
decision in 1917.

Holmes wasn’t referring to musicians themselves in that statement,
but to places of business in which copyrighted musical works could
be heard, whether such music was live or recorded—and, critically, whether or not it generated direct revenues. “Whether it pays or not,” continued Holmes, “the purpose of employing it is profit and that is enough.” Narrowly speaking, the decision in Herbert v. Shanley Co. forced Shanley’s Restaurant in New York City to pay a fee to the American songwriter Victor Herbert for playing a song of his on a
player-piano during dinner service. The case represented a much broader victory, however, for the new musicians’ advocacy
organization of which Herbert was the head: ASCAP.

Among the founding members of ASCAP were the musical giants
of the day: Irving Berlin, James Weldon Johnson, Jerome Kern
and John Philip Sousa.

Victor Herbert, on piano stool, poses with the founding
members of ASCAP in 1914. (Courtesy ASCAP)