Friday, July 17th. Harvard University, founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1636, is the oldest institution of higher education in the United States. Thus, it was already a bit long in the tooth when on this date in 1867, it opened the first dental school associated with a medical school. It was also the first to be permanently established by a university, making the full scholarly and scientific resources of a university available to dental education. Today, there are 65 dental schools at universities across the U.S. and Puerto Rico. Graduates of these and foreign schools make up the147,000 dentists nationwide. They practice in nearly 134,000 dental offices, which employ over 880,000 people. You can find more facts about America’s people, places and economy, from the American Community Survey, at <www.census.gov>.
Saturday, July 18th. On this date 60 years ago in West Milton, New York, a species of turning swords into plowshares was created. That was when the Atomic Energy Commission sold electric power from a General Electric nuclear reactor. The buyer was the Niagara-Mohawk Power Corporation, purchasing the power for civilian distribution. Some 10,000 kilowatts were supplied from the reactor, which was a prototype for the one used in the nuclear submarine USS Seawolf. Last year, nearly 1 billion kilowatt-hours were generated at nuclear plants — about 19 and a half percent of the nation’s total electricity output. There are 147 nuclear power generating establishments in the U.S., employing over 50,000 workers in America’s $530 billion a year utilities sector. You can find more facts about America from the U.S. Census Bureau online at <www.census.gov>.
Sunday, July 19th. The past few decades have seen ever more frequent public opinion polls, whether from the traditional Gallup and Harris firms, to those commissioned by newspapers or political campaigns. The first such poll in U.S. history appeared this month in 1824 in the Harrisburg Pennsylvanian, finding that Andrew Jackson was favored over John Quincy Adams in the four-man presidential race. But most favored “none of the above,” as that contest recorded the lowest participation rate in our history. Less than 27 percent of voters bothered to cast a ballot. Although Jackson won the most popular and electoral college votes, he had a majority in neither, and the House of Representatives then elected Adams president. In 2012, nearly 133 million voters — 62 percent of those eligible — went to the polls to cast presidential ballots.Profile America is in its 19th year as a public service of the U.S. Census Bureau.