Edmund Halley, he of the comet, appeared for the first time today in 1656. The comet itself made its most recent appearance on February 9th 1986; the comet orbits the sun (the technical term is a "perihelion") once every 75-and-a-bit years, a statistic confirmable from sightings in 1758, 1835, 1910, and 1986. The next sighting is predicted for 28th July 2061; however, predictions about movements of heavenly objects belong in the realm of astrology, not astronomy, and so it cannot be regarded as scientifically sound.
Halley did not create or invent the comet, he merely witnessed it, and found his name attached. The earliest known sighting was in China, in 240 BCE, after which there is a reference in a Babylonian tablet of 164 BCE. You can find a complete list of sightings here, and watch a video here
Manon Roland died on the guillotine, today in 1793. “Manon” was a nickname: in full she was Marie-Jeanne "Manon" Roland de la Platière, though born as Marie-Jeanne Phlipon on March 17 1754. And why was she guillotined? Two reasons: she was a serious thinker, and possibly even worse than that, she was a serious she.
"Serious thinker" in the school of enlightenment of men like Jean-Jacques Rousseau; "serious she" as a fellow saloniste of Madame de Staël. Her husband was the politician, though it was widely known that she wrote most of his speeches and parliamentary bills, while he just did the delivering. A serious writer in her own name too, mostly of letters, mostly about the politics of her day; the principal volume of them that has been preserved includes the memoirs that she wrote during her five months in prison before the axe was dropped; but they are not the authentic texts. Nor are they forgeries. History books tell us that "while in prison she wrote her voluminous memoirs, which were inadvertently burned by the foolish person in care of transporting them from prison. Devastated, she dutifully re-wrote all that had been lost to the best of her ability." Inadvertently my... you can fill in that vulgarity for yourself.
Ironically, amongst the welcome guests at her salon both before and during the early months of the Revolution when the Girondins held power, was the Jacobin leader Maximilien Robespierre. But she was a Girondin, a moderate, and when the Jacobins seized power...
Her last words, as she stepped up to be murdered.
Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (or Roentgen) discovered X-rays, today in 1895, no doubt a vital tool for Dr Christian Neethling Barnard, the man who invented heart transplant surgery, born today in 1922 - but see December 3 for that.
The "Beer Hall Putsch" took place, today in 1923, in Munich
The Museum of Modern Art in New York opened today, in 1929
Rubin “Hurricane” Carter's conviction for a triple-murder in 1966 overturned, today in 1985. But they could never "give him back the time he's done" (click here for Dylan live in 1975); he died of prostate cancer in Toronto in 2014, aged 76.
No comments:
Post a Comment