Today -100: January 24, 1921: Of reapportionment, lynchings, and helicopters

States which would lose seats in Congress after reapportionment if membership were kept at 435 are uniting to fight that plan.

A race riot in Warrenton, North Carolina which developed from “a quarrel over a trade involving some apples”, is followed by the lynching of two black men.

Argentinian inventor Raúl Pateras Pescara claims to have invented a helicopter, which is good because that word was coined 60 years ago and it’s just been waiting all that time to be applied to something in the real world. He’s planning to sell it to the French military, if it works. He’s gotten it (literally) off the ground, but is still working on hovering and, you know, flying (it will take him two or three years to make one with a powerful enough engine to do those things).

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