1502
Portuguese explorers under the captaincy of Gaspar de Lemos and Gonçalo Coelho came ashore at a place which at first they called Guanabara, trying to imitate the speech of the local indigenous population; a Tupi word that should really be pronounced goanã-pará, from gwa, meaning "bay", nã, meaning "similar to", and pará, "the sea". A great river ended its own journey in that bay, flowing out of the west where they had come out of the east, and they knew immediately that the next stage of their explorations would be inland along that river, and not, for the moment anyway, along the coast, for they had found what they had been sent to find: a new land, which they would name Brazil.
Celebrations on board ship the night before had partly been inspired by the sight of land, partly by the arbitrariness of the calendar. It had been New Year's Eve. Had they arrived just a single day earlier, the river which would later give the city the name by which it is still known might well have been Rio de Dezembro.
The Act of Union of England and Ireland came into force today. No troubles anticipated.
1885
Most people, I suspect, have never knowingly read anything by Sinclair Lewis, Harry Lewis to his parents, unclear which of the two was used in Heaven - his wonderfully-titled self-satire “The God-Seeker” was published today in 1949. Given that he became the first American recipient of the only literary prize worth competing for, the Nobel, he ought to be as obvious and automatic as his great contemporaries - Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, Dos Passos, Odets, Williams, O’Neill... the list, which is surprising in its length and quality, goes on a while further, but never seems to reach Sinclair Lewis.
The Chambers Biographical Dictionary offers a number of titles, but they might as well be fictional as well as fictions - "Main Street", "Babbitt", "Martin Arrowsmith", "Elmer Gantry", "Dodsworth". Something of Dickens, do I hear? In the names, and also, apparently, in his satirising of "the materialism and intolerance of American small town life". Perhaps his obscurity was self-willed. He was awarded the Pullitzer Prize for "Martin Arrowsmith", but turned it down. In "Cass Timberlane" and "Kingsblood Royal" he reversed his own radicalism, espousing the very values he had previously assailed. Coward or turncoat? I like to imagine him as a self-destructive Shelley, sailing to Viareggio, but I suspect that this is false, that really it was the death of a salesman, turning over the Chevvie he would never finally own, or which would have proven junk and obsolescent by the time he did.
Amber pages
Samuel Pepys began keeping his diary, today in 1660; excerpts
from it can be found, witnessing the Great Fire on Sept 2, attending shul on Sept
30, and writing scathingly about George Downing on Dec 4.
Huldrych Zwingli, born today in 1484, died October 11, 1531 - one of the leading figures in the Reformation of the Catholic Church and a founder of the Swiss Reformed Church, even before John Calvin, though at much the same moment as Martin Luther.
Betsy Ross, born today in 1752 as Elizabeth Griscom, later known by her second and third married names, Betsy Ashburn and Betsy Claypoole, died 30 January 1836, all of this in Philadelphia, where she is accredited with personally weaving (though not designing) the first American flag.
First edition of the London Times, today in 1785. Its founder, publisher and editor was John Walter, but at that time the 2½d broadsheet was named The Daily Universal Register, and only became "The Times" on its third birthday. Why the change? He started it as an advertising opportunity, but then discovered he could sell more copies if he included tittle-tattle, scandals and gossip about famous people in London: so a tabloid right from the outset, role-model for the gutter press. So bad did it get, a story about the Prince of Wales got him fined £50 and locked up for two years in Newgate Prison. His son took the paper over in 1803, expanded it from four small pages to twelve large ones, and began transforming it into the “pre-eminent national journal” that it would remain until Rupert Murdoch returned it to its original lack-of-principles in 1981. The typeface known as Times Roman was developed by Stanley Morison for the newspaper in the 1930s.
First asteroid discovered, today in 1801. There are huge numbers of asteroid, star, nebula and planet discoveries, each one as exciting as the first ship through the North-West passage or the first climber of Mount Everest, and I shall note all of them that I discover on their respective dates, but I shall also be listing them all here, eventually (see the foot of this page for the full list).
The importing of slaves to America became illegal on this day in 1808, though it would take till this day in 1863 before the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, and, let's be honest, for about two-thirds of the descendants of those slaves, it still hasn't been fully implemented yet.
Sir James George Frazer, born today in 1854, died May 7, 1941, one of the giants of anthropology, author of "The Golden Bough, A Study in Magic and Religion", which, alongside Robert Graves' encyclopedia of the Greek Myths, started me on the path that led to TheBibleNet. Generally in the the world of scholarship today, Frazer's views are regarded as "discredited", though the evidence of the texts and of history suggests that he could not have been more correct and that the word "discredited" needs to be replaced by the word "inconvenient".
E.M. (Edward Morgan) Forster born today in 1879, died June 7, 1970, author, inter alia, of "Howards End", "A Room with a View", "A Passage to India" ...
Ellis Island opened to immigrants on this day in 1892; at that time Moslems, Cubans and Mexicans were still included.
John Kingsley Orton ("Joe" was a nickname"), born today in 1933, died - murdered by his gay lover - August 9, 1967. Playwright.
And in addition, but marked in red because they are never going to be followed up:
The Australian Commonwealth was established, today in 1901
Sudan gained independence, today in 1956
And since my main goal is to pursue the poetikos through the human calendar - the achievements of the actively engaged mind, creatively, morally, culturally, artisanly, philosophically, scientifically... let us set out on this opening date...
The Scientific Achievements List
The "full list" of scientific discoveries, or at
least, those that are recorded in this blog (with the exception of the special list for the epoch of Sanctorius which is on March 29) - though I confess that I am beginning to have my doubts about
quite a few of them: how many of these “so-called” achievements have actually
done more harm than good?:
January 1 1801: First asteroid discovered 1801
January 2 1839: first ever photograph of the moon, taken by Louis Daguerre
January 7 1610: Galileo Galilei discovered the first 3 satellites of Jupiter (see the Index of Names for his other listings)
Jan 24 1984: Apple Computer unveiled the Macintosh computer
Jan 28 1807: First street to be lighted by gas lamps
Jan 31 1966: Luna 9 launched; 1971 Apollo 14 launched
Feb 1 1949: RCA Victor unveiled the 45 rpm record, today in 1949
Feb 18 1930: Planet Pluto “discovered” by Clyde Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.
March 1 1896: Radioactivity discovered by Henri Becquerel
March 5 1979: Voyager 1 passed Jupiter
March 8 1618: Johannes Kepler announced the 3rd law of planetary motion
March 21 1543: Mikolaj Kopernik's "De revolutionibus orbium coelestium" published
March 25 1655: Titan (moon of Saturn) discovered by Christiaan Huygens
March 31 1781: Uranus discovered by William Herschel (or possibly on the 13th?)
April 3 1966: Luna 10 (USSR) became the first spacecraft to orbit the moon
April 6 648 BCE: first recorded eclipse/Archilocus (there are others on June 4 and Oct 13, while June 4 disputes “first recorded”). April 6 also records eclipses on January 9th 2001, in August 1978 in Botswana, and on August 21 2017, plus the Transit of Venus on June 8 is mentioned, but not blogged on that date
April 12 1961: Vostok 1 (USSR), first man in space (Yuri Alexseyevich Gagarin), launched
April 14 1629: Christiaan Huygens discovered Saturn's rings
April 20 1902: Pierre and Marie Curie isolated radium
June 6 1971: Soyuz 11 (USSR) (first humans to die in space) launched
June 13 1983: Pioneer 10 (US) became the first manmade object to leave the solar system
June 22 1978: Charon (Pluto's moon) discovered by James Christy and Robert Harrington
July 4 1976: the spacecraft Viking landed on Mars
July 16 1969: Apollo 11 (US), first manned lunar landing mission, launched. Ist atom bomb tested (but see Jan 27)
July 17 1975: Apollo and Soyuz spacecraft docked in space
July 20 1976: Viking 1 (US) landed on Mars; 1969: Apollo 11 (US) landed the first man, Neil Armstrong, on the moon (4:17 pm)
August 4 1971: First satellite launched from a manned spacecraft (Apollo 15)
August 7 1959: Explorer 6 takes 1st photos of earth from space; 1961: Vostok 2 orbited the earth 17 times
August 11 1877: Asaph Hall, US astronomer, discovered the two moons of Mars (Phobos and Deimos)
August 23 1966: First image of Earth from the vicinity of the Moon (Lunar Orbiter 7)
August 25 1981: Voyager 2 (US) made its closest approach to Saturn
September 3 1976: Viking 2 (US) softlanded on Mars
September 23 1846: Neptune discovered by Johann Gottfried Galle
October 4 1957 : Sputnik 1 (USSR), first manmade space satellite, launched. 1959: Luna 3 (USSR), first satellite to photograph the distant side of the moon, launched; it returned its first images of the Moon's farside on Oct 7 (which is why I have the event on both dates; but see Oct 7 for my questioning the whole thing)
October 15 1984: First photographic evidence of another solar system presented
October 16: China set off its first atom bomb, today in 1964 (America has carried out more than 50 nuclear tests over the years, starting on July 16, above, and not including Hiroshima and Nagasaki)
October 22 1975: Venera 9 (USSR) returned the first photographs of Venus' surface
October 24 1851: Two of Uranus' moons discovered (Ariel and Umbriel) by William Lassell
October 28 1914: Dr. Jonas Edward Salk born. Who did what? Developed the polio vaccine? Seriously? But that's an enormous thing to have done - why have I never heard of him? And Bill Gates born on the same day - but a different year: 1955
November 7 1980 : Voyager I photographs identify 95 separate Saturn rings
November 8 1895: Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen discovered X-rays; Edmund Halley, he of the comet, born today in 1656; and Christian Barnard in 1922 - but see December 3 for that
November 11 1925: Cosmic Rays named, and reported, by Robert Millikan in the journal “Science”, though actually the work had been done by Victor Hess in 1912
November 12 1980: Voyager 1 (US) made its closest approach to Saturn
November 13 1971: Mariner 9 (US) became the first spacecraft to orbit Mars
November 15 1738: Sir William Herschel, discoverer of the planet Uranus, born today
November 17 1970: Lunokhod I, Russia's belated response to Kennedy, landed on the moon
November 20 1877: The first recording of human speech may or may not have been made today by Thomas Edison
November 21 1783: First manned balloon flight, by Jean de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes
November 22 1977: Concorde began flying to New York from London and Paris
Nov 23 1948: the Zoom lens patented by Frank G Back
November 25 1611: Orion Nebula discovered by Nicholas Peiresc
December 2 1971: Mars 3 (USSR) made the first softlanding on Mars; and in 1982, the first heart transplant sadly failed; see December 3
December 3 1973: Pioneer 10 (US) made the first flyby of Jupiter
December 3 1787, first steam-powered boat demonstrated; and the first successful human heart transplant, surgical team led by Dr. Christian Barnard, 1967
December 4 1978: Pioneer Venus 1 (US) became the first craft to orbit Venus
December 5 1846: C.F. Schoenbein obtained the patent for cellulose nitrate explosive - does this really count as an achievement, or should it go with Henry Ford’s cars on a special GER list for the sciences? and then what about, also on Dec 5:
1876 Daniel Stillson of Massachusetts patented the 1st adjustable pipe wrench
and
1879 the 1st automatic telephone switching system patented - by Almon B Strowger as it happens, in Kansas City
and
1893 1st electric car, the "Still Car", named for its creator
December 7
1945: Microwave oven patented by Percy L. Spencer; and 1972: Apollo 17 (US), final manned lunar landing mission, launched.
December 10 1984: the first "planet" outside our solar system was discovered - the man in charge was Dr Donald McCarthy Jr
December 11 1719: 1st recorded display of Aurora Borealis in US (New England) - apparently it sent the entire colony into mass-hysteria, mostly of a typically religious sort: click here for the tale
December 11 1843: Robert Koch, German pioneer bacteriologist, born;
and still on December 11, but now in 1844: anaesthesia first used in dentistry by Horace Wells (though actually the pioneering work on N2O (nitrous oxide or laughing gas) was done fifty years previously by Humphrey Davy)
December 18 1856: Joseph Thompson, discoverer of the electron, born; also Edwin Howard Armstrong, inventor of FM radio, born today in 1890
December 24 1948: the first solar heating system was set up, by Dr. Mária Telkes, in Dover, Massachussetts
The almanacs
also tell me that:
today (we're back on Jan 1) in 1797,
the first parachute jump was made, by André-Jacques Garnerin
that
today in
1911, an airplane was used in war for the first time: in the 1911 Italo-Turkish
War as it happens, with Italian Army Air Corps Blériot XI and Nieuport IV
monoplanes bombing a Turkish camp at Ain Zara in Libya.
that
today in 1934,
"instantaneous phonograph recording was made possible" - by who though? I thought that Thomas Edison already invented this
that
Hopefully someone can enable me to complete this list by finding something of significance to record on all 366 days in the calendar.
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