NOW YOU KNOW

• On August 1, 1981,  the rock music video channel MTV made its debut.
• On August 2, 1990,  Iraq invaded Kuwait, seizing control of the oil-rich emirate. (The Iraqis were later driven out in Operation Desert Storm.)
• On August 3, 1981,  U.S. air traffic controllers went on strike, despite a warning from President Ronald Regan they would be fired, which they were.
• On August 4, 1944,  Anne Frank, 15, was arrested along with her sister, parents and four others by German security after hiding for two years inside a building in Amsterdam.
• On August 5, 1962,  actress Marilyn Monroe, 36, was found dead in her Los Angeles home.  Her death was ruled a probable suicide from an overdose of sleeping pills.
• On August 6, 1890,  convicted murderer William Kemmler became the first person to be executed in the electric chair as he was put to death at Auburn State Prison in New York.
• On August 8, 1974,  in the wake of new revelations in the Watergate scandal, President Richard M. Nixon announced during an address that he would resign at noon the following day, and that Vice President Gerald R. Ford would succeed him.
• On August 9, 1945,  three days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, the United States exploded a nuclear device over Nagasaki, killing an estimated 74,000 people.
• On August 10, 1846,  President James K. Polk signed a measure establishing the Smihsonian Institution.
• On August 11, 1965,  rioting and looting that claimed 34 lives broke out in the predominantly black Watts section of Los Angeles.
• On August 12, 1985,  the world's worst single-aircraft disaster occurred as a crippled Japan Air Lines Boeing 747 on a domestic flight crashed into a mountain, killing 520 people.  (Four people survived.)
• On August 14, 1910,  Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing, died in London at age 90. 
• On August 15, 1969,  the Woodstock Music and Art Fair opened in upstate New York.
• On August 16, 1977, Elvis Presley died at his Graceland estate in Memphis,Tenn., at age 42.
• On August 17, 1969,  Hurricane Camille slammed into the Mississippi coast as a Category 5 storm that was blamed for 256 U.S. deaths, three in Cuba.
• On August 18, 1910,  floral delivery service FTD began under the name Florists' Telegraph Delivery(the "T' now stands for "Transworld").
• On August 19, 1955,  severe flooding inundated the Northeastern U.S. Bucks County was particularly hard hit, destroying the Yardley bridge across the Delware and isolating New Hope.
• On August 20, 1940,  during World War 2, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill paid tribute to the Royal Air Force before the House of Commons, saying, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few".
• On August 22, 1787,  inventor John Fitch demostrated his steamboat on the Delaware River to delegates from the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
• On August 23, 1960,  Broadway librettist Oscar Hammerstein 2, 65, died in Doylestown, nine months after the opening of his final collaboration with composer Richard Rodgers, "The Sound of  Music".
• On August 24, 1992,  Hurricane Andrew smashed into Flordia, causing $30 billion in damage; 43 U.S. deaths were blamed on the storm.  Also, five years ago, Tropical Depression 12 strengthened into Tropical Storm Katrina.
• On August 29, 1944,  15,000 American troops marched down the Champs Elysees in Paris as the French capital continued to celebrate its liberation from the Nazis.
• On August 30, 1963,  the "Hot Line" communication link between Washington and Moscow went into operation.
• On August 31, 1980,  Poland's Solidarity labor movement was born with an agreement signed in Gdansk that ended a 17-day-old strike.