Birthdays: Tomaso Albinioni, Fighting Bob LaFollette, Margaret Bourke-White, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sam Wanamaker, Cliff Edwards the voice of Jiminy Cricket, Dorothy McGuire, Burl Ives, Gene Barry, Jerzy Kosinski, Diablo Cody is 45, Donald Trump is 78.
1816- Writers Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and Mary Shelley were spending the summer at the Villa Deodati on Lake Geneva. This day among the revels, drinking, partner swapping and opium taking, Byron suggested they all write a ghost story. Byron told a tale of a vampire, Polidori. But the real winner was Shelley’s wife, 19-year-old Mary. She invented a story of a Swiss scientist who created an artificial man. She called it Frankenstein. It was published in 1819.
1822- Charles Babbage presented a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society in London proposing to build a "Difference Engine" a machine that could calculate equations and print the results-i.e. a computer. His early machine required 8,000 moving parts. Countess Ada Lovelace wrote the first program for it. After ten years and a small fortune it never quite comes off, but today it is considered the ancestor of the computer. In the 1930s MIT’s Vannevar Bush and Cambridge’s Alan Turing both used Babbage’s writings as their starting off point.
1834- Isaac Fischer Jr. of Vermont invented sandpaper. .
1865- A group of Englishmen climbed the Materhorn Mountain in Switzerland, inventing the sport of mountain climbing.
1940- The German Army goose-stepped down the Champs Elysees into Paris. The Nazi propaganda that night broadcast from Radio Berlin declared" The decadent, democratic Paris of Jews and Negroes is gone, never to rise again!!" Marc Chagall and Jean Renoir (son of Auguste) fled the city on bicycles with their paintings strapped to their backs. German Jewish writers H.A. and Margaret Rey left on bicycles they had to repair from spare parts. In the basket of one bicycle was a manuscript for a new children’s book they had written. Curious George.
1951- Univac I, built by John W, Mauchly and J. Prosper Eckert Jr. of the Remington Rand Company to be the first U.S. commercial built electronic computer, went online for the census bureau in Philadelphia.
1954- The U.S. government ordered the adding of the words "Under God" to the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance.
1957- Nelson Mandela married Winnie Mandela.
1959- Three new rides are debuted at Disneyland in Anaheim. The first monorail the Disneyland-Alweg Monorail System, Matterhorn Mountain, and the Submarine Voyage.( the submarine ride had been running since June 5). Disney publicity declared Disneyland now has the third largest submarine fleet in the world!
1977- Skinny Carnaby Street fashion model Twiggy got married to Michael Whitney.
1983- The Pioneer 10 space probe left its orbit around Jupiter and headed off into deep space. NASA lost all contact in 1997. Pioneer 10 is expected to reach the solar system of the star Ross 246 in the Constellation Taurus in the year 34,600 AD.
1989- Elderly actress Zsa Zsa Gabor was arrested for slapping a Beverly Hills policeman who was writing her a traffic ticket.
1990- Warren Beatty’s film Dick Tracy premiered at Disneyworld. And opened generally the next day.
1995- MP3. The researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits decided to use "mp3" as the file name extension for their new audio coding technology. Development on this technology started in 1987. By 1992 it was considered far ahead of its time. MP3 became the generally accepted acronym as the popular standard for digital music on the on the Internet.
2001- The Oxford English Dictionary admitted the slang expletive of Homer Simpson "D’OH!" into its august pages.
2024- Pope Francis met with American comedians Stephen Colbert, Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Rock, Jimmy Fallon and Jim Gaffigan.
No comments:
Post a Comment