12 September 2018
Interesting tidbits:
1624 - The first submarine was publicly tested in London on the Thames.
1758 - Charles Messier observed the Crab Nebula and began his catalog.
1846 – Elizabeth Barrett eloped with Robert Browning.
1848 – Switzerland became a Federal state.
1857 – The SS Central America sank about 160 miles east of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, drowning 426 passengers and crew. The ship was carrying 13–15 tons of gold from the California Gold Rush.
1910 – Premiere performance of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 8 in Munich with a chorus of 852 singers and an orchestra of 171 players.
1933 – Leó Szilárd, waiting for a red light on Southampton Row in Bloomsbury, conceived the idea of the nuclear chain reaction.
1940 – Cave paintings were discovered in Lascaux, France.
1952 – Strange occurrences, including a monster sighting, took place in Flatwoods, West Virginia. The Flatwoods Monster, also known as the Phantom of Flatwoods, is an alleged unidentified cryptid reported to have been sighted in the town of Flatwoods.
1958 – Jack Kilby demonstrated the first integrated circuit.
1966 – Gemini 11, the penultimate mission of NASA's Gemini program, and the current human altitude record holder (except for the Apollo lunar missions).
1992 – NASA launched Space Shuttle Endeavour on STS-47 which marked the 50th shuttle mission.
Today's birthday crew:
1492 – Lorenzo de' Medici, Duke of Urbino.
1812 – Richard March Hoe, American inventor and industrialist, invented the lithographic rotary printing press that placed the type on a revolving cylinder, a design much faster than the old flatbed printing press.
1818 – Richard Jordan Gatling, American inventor, invented the Gatling gun, supposedly to make war too horrible to wage.
1880 – H.L. Mencken, American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, critic of American life and culture, and scholar of American English. Known as the "Sage of Baltimore", he is regarded as one of the most influential American writers and prose stylists of the first half of the twentieth century.
1894 – Billy Gilbert, American actor and comedian.
1897 – Irène Joliot-Curie, French chemist and physicist, Nobel Prize laureate, daughter of Marie and Pierre Curie.
1914 – Desmond Llewelyn, Welsh actor famous for having played Q in 17 of the James Bond films between 1963 and 1999.
1931 – Ian Holm, English actor whose well-known film roles include the android Ash in Alien, Father Vito Cornelius in The Fifth Element, and the hobbit Bilbo Baggins in the Lord of the Rings.
Happy birthday guys!
