On this day the United States officially took over active construction of the Panama Canal, a decade after France's disastrous attempt collapsed amid bankruptcy and disease. American engineers, led eventually by John Stevens and George Goethals, would spend a decade battling yellow fever, landslides, and the Culebra Cut before ships finally passed through in 1914.
On August 5, 1926, National Geographic's team, led by naturalist William Longley and photographer Charles Martin, achieved the first natural-color photographs taken underwater, using a raft-mounted magnesium flash powder rig off the Florida Keys. The technical feat, requiring precise timing between flash ignition and shutter, opened an entirely new visual frontier of marine life.
Neil Alden Armstrong was born on August 5, 1930, in Wapakoneta, Ohio, to a family with no particular aviation pedigree. He earned his student pilot's license before he could legally drive a car, flew Navy jets in Korea, and in July 1969 became the first person to set foot on the Moon as commander of Apollo 11.
On August 5, 1945, ground crews on Tinian Island prepared the plutonium implosion bomb nicknamed 'Fat Man' for loading, while weather forecasts for the following day pushed the mission's target city toward Nagasaki after Kokura was obscured by cloud. The bombing three days after Hiroshima would kill an estimated 40,000 people instantly.
On August 5, 1960, Upper Volta declared independence from France as part of the wave of decolonization sweeping the African continent that year. Maurice Yaméogo became the country's first president; the nation would later be renamed Burkina Faso, meaning 'Land of Upright Men,' under revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara in 1984.
On August 5, 1962, housekeeper Eunice Murray discovered Marilyn Monroe dead in her Brentwood bedroom, an apparent overdose of barbiturates ruled a 'probable suicide' by the Los Angeles County coroner. The actress, born Norma Jeane Mortenson, had become the era's defining sex symbol through films like 'Some Like It Hot' and 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,' and her death at 36 spawned decades of conspiracy theories.
On August 5, 1963, foreign ministers from the United States, Soviet Union, and United Kingdom signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in Moscow, prohibiting nuclear tests in the atmosphere, outer space, and underwater. Coming less than a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, the treaty marked the first major arms control agreement of the Cold War.
