February 14, 278

St. Valentine beheaded

On February 14 around the year 278 A.D., Valentine, a holy priest in Rome in the days of Emperor Claudius II, was executed.

Under the rule of Claudius the Cruel, Rome was involved in many unpopular and bloody campaigns. The emperor had to maintain a strong army, but was having a difficult time getting soldiers to join his military leagues. Claudius believed that Roman men were unwilling to join the army because of their strong attachment to their wives and families.

To get rid of the problem, Claudius banned all marriages and engagements in Rome. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret.

When Valentine's actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death. Valentine was arrested and dragged before the Prefect of Rome, who condemned him to be beaten to death with clubs and to have his head cut off. The sentence was carried out on February 14, on or about the year 270.

Legend also has it that while in jail, St. Valentine left a farewell note for the jailer's daughter, who had become his friend, and signed it "From Your Valentine."

For his great service, Valentine was named a saint after his death.

In truth, the exact origins and identity of St. Valentine are unclear. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, "At least three different Saint Valentines, all of them martyrs, are mentioned in the early martyrologies under the date of 14 February." One was a priest in Rome, the second one was a bishop of Interamna (now Terni, Italy) and the third St. Valentine was a martyr in the Roman province of Africa.

Legends vary on how the martyr's name became connected with romance. The date of his death may have become mingled with the Feast of Lupercalia, a pagan festival of love. On these occasions, the names of young women were placed in a box, from which they were drawn by the men as chance directed. In 496 AD, Pope Gelasius decided to put an end to the Feast of Lupercalia, and he declared that February 14 be celebrated as St Valentine's Day.

Gradually, February 14 became a date for exchanging love messages, poems and simple gifts such as flowers.

February 14, 1903

Dept. of Commerce and Labor established

On February 14, 1903, Congress followed the lead of President Theodore Roosevelt and passed legislation that gave birth to the Department of Commerce and Labor, as well as the Bureau of Corporations. Under the charge of Secretary of Commerce and Labor George B. Cortelyou, who was appointed on February 16, the newly formed departments were charged with probing into the activities of corporations involved in interstate trade. For the president, the quick creation of these organizations was another visible symbol of his campaign to clamp down on business corruption. While these efforts proved popular with the public, they rankled business leaders who felt that Roosevelt was waging an unfair fight to limit the size and, more importantly, the profits of the nation's leading corporations. Despite his avowed stance as a trustbuster, Roosevelt was not necessarily opposed to businesses becoming profit-churning behemoths. And, he took some pains to assure the business community that the new departments were in fact "sane and conservative" steps towards cleansing corporate America. "The legislation," Roosevelt wrote in response to his critics, "was moderate. It was characterized throughout by the idea that we were not attacking corporations, but endeavoring to provide for doing away for any evil in them

February 22, 1879

Woolworth opens five-cent store

On this day in 1879, Frank Winfield Woolworth kicked off a retail revolution by opening the Great 5 Cents Store in Utica, New York. Pledging to sell "nothing" that cost more than a nickel, Woolworth packed his store with a smorgasbord of goods, ranging from items for the kitchen to beauty products. Though the Utica store ultimately failed, Woolworth hit pay dirt that same year when he opened another discount variety store in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The shop, which was expanded to include items that cost up to a dime, proved to be a fast success with Pennsylvanians and emboldened Woolworth to establish an empire of discount stores. The dawn of 1890s saw Woolworth's "five and ten" stores dot America's East Coast; by 1904 he had opened some 120 stores in twenty-one states, including chunks of the West and the District of Columbia. In 1911, he cemented his dominance of the burgeoning variety store field by merging with four rival companies. The move armed Woolworth with a fleet of 596 stores and, in 1912, he christened the shops with the now familiar name, F.W. Woolworth. Though WoolworthÝs stores continued to flourish during the first half of the century, the years following World War II were not so kind to the company. The sprawl of suburbs, and the attendant spread of malls, coupled with the recent rise of super-sized discount rivals like Target and Wal-Mart, ultimately spelled the end for Woolworth's. In 1997, the granddaddy of five-and-tens threw in the towel and closed its last 400 shops.

March 4, 1811

First Bank of U.S. forced to liquidate

The battle between Federalists and states' rights advocates claimed a high-profile victim on March 4, 1811. On this day, the first Bank of the United States was forced to liquidate its assets and shutter its doors after suffering the slings of local bankers and state-centric politicians. Founded in 1791, the creation of the bank had been one of the first acts of the newly formed U.S. Congress. But, the bank was an almost instant source of controversy: though backed by Federal funds, the bank was essentially a private company, complete with investors, which engendered a loud and powerful chorus of critics. Some feared that the bank would become an all too potent central institution, a la the Bank of England, while merchants hoping to open their own state-based financial institutions carped over the competition from the bank's network of branch offices. The call for dissolution grew louder when it was revealed that the bank's coffers leaned heavily on foreign investments, most notably from British interests. So, even though the bank was profitable and paid out relatively handsome dividends to investors, the critics won out and forced its demise.

March 4, 1909

Hello to Harry Helmsley

"The best advice I ever got was from my mother," Harry Helmsley once noted. "It was simply, 'Buy real estate.' And like a dutiful son, I bought and bought and continue to buy throughout the country." Helmsley, who was born on this day in 1909, did indeed buy his fair share of real estate: at one point he owned twenty-seven hotels, 50,000 apartments, and the Empire State Building to boot. Owning real estate proved to be quite lucrative for Helmsley, whose net worth was estimated at $1.7 billion by Forbes magazine in 1996. These far-flung achievements belied Helmsley's rather humble origins: the son of a dry goods salesman, Helmsley opted to skip college to enter the real estate business. However, whatever Helmsley's achievements in the business world, it's likely that he will always be remembered as the husband of the notorious Leona Helmsley. Dubbed the "Queen of Mean," for her domineering rule over the duo's hotel chain, Leona bore the brunt of the scorn and punishment for her and Harry's well-publicized trial for tax evasion in the late 1980s. Leona was slapped with a stiff fine and served eighteen months in prison for her tax crimes, while Harry, who had since decayed into senility, was deemed mentally unfit to stand trial. Harry Helmsley died on January 4, 1997.

March 7, 1876

Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone

On this day in 1876, 29-year-old Alexander Graham Bell receives a patent for his revolutionary new invention--the telephone.

The Scottish-born Bell worked in London with his father, Melville Bell, who developed Visible Speech, a written system used to teach speaking to the deaf. In the 1870s, the Bells moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where the younger Bell found work as a teacher at the Pemberton Avenue School for the Deaf. He later married one of his students, Mabel Hubbard.

While in Boston, Bell became very interested in the possibility of transmitting speech over wires. Samuel F.B. Morse's invention of the telegraph in 1843 had made nearly instantaneous communication possible between two distant points. The drawback of the telegraph, however, was that it still required hand-delivery of messages between telegraph stations and recipients, and only one message could be transmitted at a time. Bell wanted to improve on this by creating a "harmonic telegraph," a device that combined aspects of the telegraph and record player to allow individuals to speak to each other from a distance.

With the help of Thomas A. Watson, a Boston machine shop employee, Bell developed a prototype. In this first telephone, sound waves caused an electric current to vary in intensity and frequency, causing a thin, soft iron plate--called the diaphragm--to vibrate. These vibrations were transferred magnetically to another wire connected to a diaphragm in another, distant instrument. When that diaphragm vibrated, the original sound would be replicated in the ear of the receiving instrument. Three days after filing the patent, the telephone carried its first intelligible message--the famous "Mr. Watson, come here, I need you"--from Bell to his assistant.

Bell's patent filing beat a similar claim by Elisha Gray by only two hours. Not wanting to be shut out of the communications market, Western Union Telegraph Company employed Gray and fellow inventor Thomas A. Edison to develop their own telephone technology. Bell sued, and the case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld Bell's patent rights. In the years to come, the Bell Company withstood repeated legal challenges to emerge as the massive American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) and form the foundation of the modern telecommunications industry.

March 7, 1889

Windom takes over as treasurer

Lawyer turned Republican legislator William Windom stepped into office as the 33rd Secretary of the Treasury on this day in 1881 and promptly set about attacking the nation's various fiscal maladies. Windom's primary task was taming the mountain of public debt that had piled up in the wake of the Civil War. Flying in the face of the drive to refund the debt through government issued bonds, Windom called on the nation's banks to ease the situation by swapping their high-interest bonds for issues that were pegged at a far lower rate. Bank leaders initially resisted the plan, prompting Windom to resort to a bit of arm twisting to win their compliance. Once executed, Windom's bond swap proved effective: though the maneuver came in at a cost of roughly $10,000 to the government, the savings generated by the interest rate charge stretched past the $10 million mark. Windom's run in the Treasury was soon cut short by the assassination of President James Garfield; after eight rather eventful months in office, Windom retired his post on November 13, 1881. However, later in the decade, Windom returned for another term as the Secretary of the Treasury, this time under the charge of President Benjamin Harrison.

March 7, 1997

Wall Street swindler heads to jail

Declaring that Steven Hoffenberg had "wreaked havoc on innocent lives," Federal Judge Robert Sweet sentenced the notorious Wall Street swindler to a twenty-year prison term. In the ruling, handed down on this day in 1997, Sweet ordered the former chief of Towers Financial Corps to pay out $462 million in restitution, as well as a $1 million in fines. Hoffenberg had been accused of pawning off vast sums of "worthless" Tower-backed bonds to unsuspecting investors. All told, Hoffenberg had conned investors out of a whopping $500 million, money which he used to fund his extravagant habits. Though this wasn't Hoffenberg's first brush with the law he confessed to a series of charges, including obstruction of justice and tax evasion, it was certainly his biggest. Indeed, Hoffenberg's attorney, Daniel Meyers, questioned the severity of Sweet's sentence. However, Robert Blackburn, associate director of enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission, deemed the ruling "very reasonable" given the "horrible, massive" scope of Hoffenberg's crimes.

March 14, 1812

War bonds go on sale

By the end of 1811, the United States government had tired of seeing the nation's merchant ships suffer at the hands of the British and French. Having already tried to retaliate through fiscal measures, namely an embargo that only served to hurt U.S. businesses, the government was on the verge of committing its military to what would be later known as the War of 1812. However, scrounging up resources for the war proved to be an issue, leading U.S. President James Madison to call on Congress to provide for means for bolstering the nation's defenses. On March 14, 1812, legislators heeded Madison's plea and approved the issue of the very first war bond, worth some eleven million dollars. Over the next three years of the war, Congress would authorize six more war bonds, and also hike tariffs on imports, all in the name of another battle against Great Britain.

March 14, 1816

Second Bank of U.S. is established

Proponents of a nationalized banking system won what must have seemed like a great victory on March 14, 1816. Indeed, on this day, the House of Representatives heeded President James Madison's call for a bank-based remedy to the nation's fiscal woes and voted to establish the Second Bank of the United States. The legislation soon made its way through the Senate and by the dawn of 1817, the Second Bank, complete with a twenty-year charter and $35 million in federal funding, was up and running in Philadelphia. However, this moment of glory was short lived: the Bank floundered under the lead of its first chief, William Jones. An inept fiscal manager, Jones's policies exacerbated the wounds that the United States' economy had suffered in the wake of the War of 1812. Thanks in no small part to Jones's bungling, the nation was plunged into a year-long financial panic during 1819. Although the Bank later flourished under the charge of Nelson Biddle, it didn't survive past the term of its initial charter: states' rights activists, led by President Andrew Jackson, mounted a hotly contested, though ultimately successful, drive to abolish the Bank and its network of branch offices.

March 18, 1850

American Express founded

This day in 1850 marked the founding of one of America's stalwart companies, American Express. The brainchild of Henry Wells and William G. Fargo, American Express was a union of three express transport concerns: Livingston, Fargo & Company, Wells & Co., and Butterfield & Wasson. The newly formed, and initially unincorporated, transportation company was a fast hit with the public; by the close of the Civil War, American Express had set up 900 offices in 10 states. Success, however, bred competition, and the upstart Merchants Union Express Company, founded in 1866, gave American Express a good run of it for a few years. After two years of furious competition, the companies decided that it would be more profitable to merge than to fight; in late 1868, the American Express and Merchants Union joined together as American Merchants Union Express Company. Fargo took the reigns of the new concern, which, in 1873, adopted its more familiar moniker as the American Express Company. American Express, of course, has since mutated into a giant in the fields of finance and travel, with offices spread across the globe.

March 18, 1852

Wells and Fargo start shipping and banking company

On this day in 1852, in New York City, Henry Wells and William G. Fargo join with several other investors to launch their namesake business.

The discovery of gold in California in 1849 prompted a huge spike in the demand for cross-country shipping. Wells and Fargo decided to take advantage of these great opportunities. In July 1852, their company shipped its first loads of freight from the East Coast to mining camps scattered around northern California. The company contracted with independent stagecoach companies to provide the fastest possible transportation and delivery of gold dust, important documents and other valuable freight. It also served as a bank--buying gold dust, selling paper bank drafts and providing loans to help fuel California's growing economy.

In 1857, Wells, Fargo and Co. formed the Overland Mail Company, known as the "Butterfield Line," which provided regular mail and passenger service along an ever-growing number of routes. In the boom-and-bust economy of the 1850s, the company earned a reputation as a trustworthy and reliable business, and its logo--the classic stagecoach--became famous. For a premium price, Wells, Fargo and Co. would send an employee on horseback to deliver or pick up a message or package.

Wells, Fargo and Co. merged with several other "Pony Express" and stagecoach lines in 1866 to become the unrivaled leader in transportation in the West. When the transcontinental railroad was completed three years later, the company began using railroad to transport its freight. By 1910, its shipping network connected 6,000 locations, from the urban centers of the East and the farming towns of the Midwest to the ranching and mining centers of Texas and California and the lumber mills of the Pacific Northwest.

After splitting from the freight business in 1905, the banking branch of the company merged with the Nevada National Bank and established new headquarters in San Francisco. During World War I, the U.S. government nationalized the company's shipping routes and combined them with the railroads into the American Railway Express, effectively putting an end to Wells, Fargo and Co. as a transportation and delivery business. The following April, the banking headquarters was destroyed in a major earthquake, but the vaults remained intact and the bank's business continued to grow. After two later mergers, the Wells Fargo Bank American Trust Company--shortened to the Wells Fargo Bank in 1962--became, and has remained, one of the biggest banking institutions in the United States.

March 18, 1985

Cap Cities snags media mainstay

After a few months of negotiations, Capital Cities Communications sealed a deal to acquire media stalwart American Broadcasting Cos. (ABC) on this day in 1985. Capital Cities handed over $3.5 billion in cash and warrants, marking what was then one of the biggest mergers in U.S. corporate history. On paper, the acquisition was a tremendous boon for Capital Cities who, despite having but a fraction of ABC's revenues, was able to translate healthy profit margins and an efficient management system into a major stake in the broadcast industry. The deal also made sense for ABC, which had recently become ripe fodder for a hostile takeover. However, selling out to Capital Cities was something of a bittersweet moment for seventy-nine-year-old company chief Leonard Goldenson. Indeed, when Goldman took control of ABC in the early 1950s, the network was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy; not only did he save ABC from the scrap heap, but Goldman also kept the company humming along for roughly three decades. Wall Street, however, held back its tears and stamped its seal of approval on the deal: in a day of zesty trading, ABC's stock surged $31.375 to close at $105.875.

March 27, 1836

Father of automotive luxury is born

Sir Henry Royce, the British industrialist whose fleet of high-end, high-priced cars stand as an enduring symbol of wealth, was born on this day in 1863. Royce entered the working world at the tender age of fifteen, first serving as an apprentice engineer for the Great Northern Railway company. Royce enjoyed a successful career as an engineer and in the mid-1880s, he set up his own shop, which eventually became Royce Ltd. Royce initially focused his company on the production of motors, electric cranes, and generators. However, by 1904, he had unveiled the nascent version of what would become his signature product, the luxury automobile. Royce's first batch of cars caught the eye of C.S. Rolls, a British "motor dealer." Rolls snapped up Royce's initial line and, two short years later, the duo merged their companies as Rolls-Royce Ltd

April 1, 1864

First travel insurance policy sold

James Batterson made history on this day in 1864 by purchasing the very first travel insurance policy. The policy, issued by industry stalwart, the Travelers Insurance Company, seemingly sold Batterson on the benefits of insurance coverage: three months later he purchased Travelers' very first general insurance plan.

April 1, 1992

House bank abusers listed

On this day in 1992, the House Ethics Committee released a list of the twenty-two most flagrant abusers of the defunct House bank. The bank, which had been closed in the fall of 1991, was not a financial institution, but rather served as a common place for legislators to tuck their paychecks. The representatives in question were accused of overdrawing on this collective account. But, though the legislators' habit of overdrafting neither violated the bank's rules nor led to the loss of federal money, it reeked of fiscal irresponsibility and stirred yelps of protest from the American public. The House Ethics Committee held that legislators who had overdrafted on their payroll deposits for a minimum of eight months out of a sample thirty-nine-month stretch were indeed in the wrong. The committee's findings, as well as the decision to name names, sent Capitol Hill into a tizzy. A number of the legislators fingered on the list lashed out at what one accused representative deemed a "libelous indictment." But, such protests did little to quell the controversy: during the ensuing months, the committee revealed that some 350 former and current House members had written bad checks. With the public outcry hardly abating, fifty-three representatives tendered their resignations by May 4 of that same year.

April 8, 1935

WPA established by Congress

On April 8, 1935, Congress votes to approve the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a central part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's "New Deal."

In November 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, Governor Roosevelt of New York was elected the 32nd president of the United States. In his inaugural address on March 4, 1933, Roosevelt promised Americans that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself" and outlined his New Deal--an expansion of the federal government as an instrument of employment opportunity and welfare.

In April 1935, the WPA was established under the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act, as a means of creating government jobs for some of the nation's many unemployed. Under the direction of Harry L. Hopkins, the WPA employed more than 8.5 million persons on 1.4 million public projects before it was disbanded in 1943. The program chose work that would not interfere with private enterprise, especially vast public building projects like the construction of highways, bridges, and dams. However, the WPA also provided federal funding for students, who were given work under the National Youth Administration. The careers of several important American artists, including Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning, were also launched thanks to WPA endowments. Although its scale was unprecedented, the WPA never managed to serve more than a quarter of the nation's unemployed. Its programs were extremely popular, though, and contributed significantly to Roosevelt's landslide reelection in 1936.

April 8, 1942

WPB ends non-war production

After a lengthy spate of speculation and debate, in which anti-war forces and isolationists went toe-to-toe with advocates of engagement, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in late 1941 finally pushed U.S. forces into battle. Along with myriad cultural and social adjustments, America's entrance into World War II also triggered a profound fiscal shift: the industrial sector was now forced to gear its efforts almost exclusively toward wartime production. On April 8, 1942, the War Production Board accelerated the transformation of the nation's economy by ordering a halt to all production that was not deemed necessary to the war. The War Production Board's mandate quickly took hold; at the peak of the war, the military utilized nearly half of the nation's production and services. Far from causing fiscal woe, World War II proved to be a great boon to the economy: unemployment, which had climbed up to fourteen percent in 1940, all but evaporated, while the gross national product doubled by the close of the war.

April 8, 1952

Truman takes on steel plants

Trouble was brewing in Youngstown, Ohio, during the spring of 1952, as the city's steelworkers prepared to go out on strike. With the U.S. embroiled in the Korean War, the walkout loomed as an ill-timed irritant to the government's battle against communism. And so on this day in 1952, President Truman stepped into the breach and placed the steel plants under his control. There was some reason to believe that Truman's bald face play to squelch the strike was a legal maneuver. Indeed, Article II of the Constitution held that the President could only unilaterally pass and/or create legislation during periods of war. Nonetheless, Truman's seizure of the steel mills stirred controversy and led to a heated battle before the Supreme Court. In June of that same year, the Court rule in Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co. v. Sawyer that Truman had, in fact, overstepped his bounds. The finding effectively proscribed the president's power during times of national emergency

April 11, 1930

Nicholas Brady is born

Today marks the birthday of Nicholas Brady, a stalwart figure in the banking industry who eventually became the 68th secretary of the Treasury. Born in New York City in 1930, Brady worked in banking for thirty-four years, serving a stint as the chairman of Dillon, Read & Company. He also worked as a director for a host of companies, including the NCR Corporation and H.J. Heinz. By the early 1980s, Brady had switched to the public sector, briefly holding a seat in the U.S. Senate, and serving in various posts in the Reagan administration. Brady was tapped for the spot atop the Treasury in the fall of 1988.

April 11, 1941

FDR fights inflation

During the early 1940s, President Franklin Roosevelt set about readying the nation for its entrance into World War II. Along with converting American industry to the cause of wartime production, Roosevelt also moved to sa[censored]uard the nation's economy. Towards this end, Roosevelt issued an executive order on April 11, 1941, that created the Office of Price Administration (OPA). Charged with waging war against inflation, the OPA imposed price caps on a vast array of goods and attempted to keep a tight fist on key items with low inventories. Though under other circumstances such measures might have stirred controversy, Americans generally complied with the OPA. However, the agency could not quell the spread of black markets for certain items, including meat, gas and cigarettes. Following the close of the war, the OPA also proved impotent against the attacks of corporate leaders and business-friendly legislators who were itching to kill off price controls. Thus, in 1946, the OPA began curtailing its efforts and slashing its then sizable staff of 73,000 paid employees and 200,000 volunteers. Coupled with the demise of price controls, the closing of the OPA led to a heady spate of inflation.

April 11, 1970

Apollo 13 launched to moon

On April 11, 1970, Apollo 13, the third lunar landing mission, is successfully launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carrying astronauts James A. Lovell, John L. Swigert, and Fred W. Haise. The spacecraft's destination was the Fra Mauro highlands of the moon, where the astronauts were to explore the Imbrium Basin and conduct geological experiments. After an oxygen tank exploded on the evening of April 13, however, the new mission objective became to get the Apollo 13 crew home alive.

At 9:00 p.m. EST on April 13, Apollo 13 was just over 200,000 miles from Earth. The crew had just completed a television broadcast and was inspecting Aquarius, the Landing Module (LM). The next day, Apollo 13 was to enter the moon'[censored]t, and soon after, Lovell and Haise would become the fifth and sixth men to walk on the moon. At 9:08 p.m., these plans were shattered when an explosion rocked the spacecraft. Oxygen tank No. 2 had blown up, disabling the normal supply of oxygen, electricity, light, and water. Lovell reported to mission control: "Houston, we've had a problem here," and the crew scrambled to find out what had happened. Several minutes later, Lovell looked out of the left-hand window and saw that the spacecraft was venting a gas, which turned out to be the Command Module's (CM) oxygen. The landing mission was aborted.

As the CM lost pressure, its fuel cells also died, and one hour after the explosion mission control instructed the crew to move to the LM, which had sufficient oxygen, and use it as a lifeboat. The CM was shut down but would have to be brought back on-line for Earth reentry. The LM was designed to ferry astronauts from the orbiting CM to the moon's surface and back again; its power supply was meant to support two people for 45 hours. If the crew of Apollo 13 were to make it back to Earth alive, the LM would have to support three men for at least 90 hours and successfully navigate more than 200,000 miles of space. The crew and mission control faced a formidable task.

To complete its long journey, the LM needed energy and cooling water. Both were to be conserved at the cost of the crew, who went on one-fifth water rations and would later endure cabin temperatures that hovered a few degrees above freezing. Removal of carbon dioxide was also a problem, because the square lithium hydroxide canisters from the CM were not compatible with the round openings in the LM environmental system. Mission control built an impromptu adapter out of materials known to be onboard, and the crew successfully copied their model.

Navigation was also a major problem. The LM lacked a sophisticated navigational system, and the astronauts and mission control had to work out by hand the changes in propulsion and direction needed to take the spacecraft home. On April 14, Apollo 13 swung around the moon. Swigert and Haise took pictures, and Lovell talked with mission control about the most difficult maneuver, a five-minute engine burn that would give the LM enough speed to return home before its energy ran out. Two hours after rounding the far side of the moon, the crew, using the sun as an alignment point, fired the LM's small descent engine. The procedure was a success; Apollo 13 was on its way home.

For the next three days, Lovell, Haise, and Swigert huddled in the freezing lunar module. Haise developed a case of the flu. Mission control spent this time frantically trying to develop a procedure that would allow the astronauts to restart the CM for reentry. On April 17, a last-minute navigational correction was made, this time using Earth as an alignment guide. Then the repressurized CM was successfully powered up after its long, cold sleep. The heavily damaged service module was shed, and one hour before re-entry the LM was disengaged from the CM. Just before 1 p.m., the spacecraft reentered Earth's atmosphere. Mission control feared that the CM's heat shields were damaged in the accident, but after four minutes of radio silence Apollo 13's parachutes were spotted, and the astronauts splashed down safely into the Pacific Ocean.