Birthdays: King George IV, Cecil B. DeMille, The alien Alf- 1757, Cantinflas, Buck Owens, Edith Hamilton, Diamond Jim Brady, screenwriter William Goldman, Mtsislav Rostropovitch, Xenia Sharpe (educator who invented the children’s reader Dick & Jane) Kathy Lee Bates-the author of the song America the Beautiful, Klara Schickelgruber- Hitlers mom, Dominique Swain, Pete Samprass, Sam Fuller, John Casale, George Hamilton is 85, Casey Affleck is 49.
1877- THE BIRTH OF RECORDED SOUND. Thomas Edison announced his sound recording invention and demonstrated it by recording "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on a tin cylinder. Edison never quite understood the possibilities of a music industry and was convinced that the recorded sound was going to be a used primarily for people to listen to the voices of deceased family, sort of like a voice from the grave. That idea was so popular that it translated to the Logo of the RCA Company with the familiar image of the dog listening to "His master's voice". The original image of that dog listening to his master's voice, had the dog sitting on a coffin.
A few years later Emile Berliner from Georgia invented the flat record disc. Edison thought the disc was clumsy and too fragile. In the future he declared, everyone would use recording cylinders. Flat vinyl records were the global standard for the next 100 years.
1898- According to H.G. Well’s book The War of the Worlds, this day the first Martian cylinders were launched at our planet.
1915 - "Of Human Bondage," by William Somerset Maugham, published.
1927- William Wellman’s movie WINGS opened with Clara Bow, Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers, the first silent film to win best picture at the Academy Awards before the advent of sound. Director Wild Bill Wellman was himself a former fighter pilot and flew many of the stunt shots. He bolted cameras to the nose of planes and had the actor’s film themselves while flying.
The second silent film to ever win best picture was The Artist, in the year 2012.
1932 Aldous Huxley's Brave New World first published. Before anyone ever heard of gene therapy, Huxley had written a scholarly paper on the moral dangers inherent in controlled genetic engineering. Writer H.L. Mencken urged Huxley to put his ideas in a fiction form to reach a wider audience. The title comes from Shakespeare's the Tempest " Oh Brave New World, that hath such people in it!'
1951- Bob McKimson’s Warner Bros short Hillbilly Hare. The short includes the long routine animated in part by Emery Hawkins when Bugs Bunny takes over calling a square dance and uses it to torture the two twin-brother hunters after him.
1953- The Soviet Union exploded its first Hydrogen Bomb, nicknamed "Joe-4" for Joe Stalin by the CIA. The scientific team led by Andrei Sakharov called it the Layer Cake. Alternating layers of hydrogen and uranium fuel wrapped around a conventional atomic bomb. Much like Robert Oppenheimer in America, Andre Sakharov later became a leading critic of the nuclear arms race and suffered for it.
1958- A Great Day in Harlem- Photographer Art Kane, working for Esquire Magazine, arranged a group photo of 57 of the most important figure in Jazz music and the Harlem Renaissance all standing togther on one stoop in Harlem, NY. Count Basie, Thelonius Monk, Maryann McPartland, Sonny Rollins, Gene Krupa and more.
1968- The album Cheap Thrills released from Big Brother and the Holding Company and their lead singer Janis Joplin. Robert Crumb drew the famous cover.
1981- IBM introduced its first PC- personal computer and PC-DOS I. Unlike Apple, IBM shared the basic hardware design, so a myriad of cheaper competitor PC’s from Commodore and Dell soon flooded the market.
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1983- The Nelvana animated feature Rock & Rule opened in theaters.
1988- Martin Scorcese’ film The Last Temptation of Christ opened in theaters to howls of protests from religious groups. There had been more inflammatory interpretations of the Christ story on screens in the past like Pasolini’s Gospel According to Saint Matthew and the Canadian film Hail Mary, but the church groups weren’t that media savvy yet. Like all these protest efforts, all the controversy really did was boost its box office.
1999- In Yorkshire England, Tish, the world’s oldest goldfish, died at age 43.
2008- TV entertainer and producer Merv Griffin died at age 82. The creator of shows like Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune and Merv Griffin Show, his last post on his website was " I was planning to go on vacation, but this is not the destination I intended."
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