14 June 2017
Interesting tidbits:
1789 – Mutiny on the Bounty: HMS Bounty mutiny survivors including Captain William Bligh and 18 others reach Timor after a nearly 7,400 km (4,600 mi) journey in an open boat.
1789 – Whiskey distilled from maize is first produced by American clergyman the Rev Elijah Craig. It is named Bourbon because Rev Craig lived in Bourbon County, Kentucky.
1822 – Charles Babbage proposes a difference engine in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society entitled "Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables".
1919 – John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown depart from St. John's, Newfoundland on the first nonstop transatlantic flight.
1834 - Hardhat diving suit patented by Leonard Norcross of Dixfield, Maine.
1834 - Sandpaper patented by Isaac Fischer Jr of Springfield, Vermont.
1847 - Robert von Bunsen invents the Bunsen burner.
1881 - Player piano patented by John McTammany Jr of Cambridge, Mass.
1919 – John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown depart from St. John's, Newfoundland on the first nonstop transatlantic flight. Eight years before Charles Lindbergh's solo flight, British aviators Alcock and Brown made the first non-stop transatlantic flight in June 1919. They flew a modified World War I Vickers Vimy bomber from St. John's, Newfoundland, to Clifden, Connemara, County Galway, Ireland.
1937 – US House of Representatives passes the Marihuana Tax Act.
1947 – A supposed UFO crash lands in Roswell, New Mexico.
1949 – Albert II, a rhesus monkey, rides a V2 rocket to an altitude of 134 km (83 mi), thereby becoming the first monkey in space.
1951 – UNIVAC I is dedicated by the U.S. Census Bureau.
1959 – Disneyland Monorail System, the first daily operating monorail system in the Western Hemisphere, opens to the public in Anaheim, California.
1962 – The European Space Research Organisation is established in Paris – later becoming the European Space Agency.
1967 – Mariner 5 was launched towards Venus.
2002 – Near-Earth asteroid 2002 MN misses the Earth by 75,000 miles (121,000 km), about one-third of the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
Today's birthday crew:
1856 – Andrey Markov, Russian mathematician.
1864 – Alois Alzheimer, German physician.
1871 – Jacob Ellehammer, Danish inventor remembered chiefly for his contributions to powered flight. In 1904 he produced his first motorcycle, the Elleham motorcycle. In 1905, he constructed a monoplane, and in the following year a "semi-biplane". In this latter machine, he made a tethered flight on 12 September 1906. Ellehammer's later inventions included a successful triplane and helicopter. His helicopter was a coaxial machine. A famous photo shows it hovering in 1914, though there is no evidence that it was successful in achieving translational flight. Ellehammer later studied a disc-rotor configuration - a compound helicopter with coaxial blades that extended from the hub for hover, and retracted for high speed vertical flight. Although a wind tunnel model was constructed, there's no evidence that anything more was studied.
1905 – Arthur Davis, American animator and director for Warner Brothers' Termite Terrace cartoon studio. Davis got his start at a young age at the New York studio of Max Fleischer where he tapped out the famous "bouncing ball" of the "Follow the Bouncing Ball" cartoons of the 1920s. While one of the Fleischer brothers played the ukulele, Davis would keep time with a wooden stick with a white thumbtack on the end, which was photographed and incorporated into the films as the actual moving ball. In 1942, Davis joined Warner Bros as an animator. When Bob Clampett left to start his own studio, Davis took over Clampett's unit. He directed a number of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts, with a tone somewhere between those of Clampett and McKimson. He had a distinctive characteristic visual style, in which the characters move from the foreground to the background, as well as from side to side, using all axes of the animation field. His department was shut down only three years later in 1949 when Warners was having a budget problem. After the studio closed in 1963, Davis went to Walter Lantz Productions as an animator. He left Lantz in 1965 to work briefly for Hanna-Barbera Productions, before moving over to DePatie-Freleng Enterprises to direct Pink Panther shorts.
1919 – Gene Barry, American actor (The Atomic City, The War of The Worlds).
1942 – Andy Irvine, English singer-songwriter and musician. In the scene from the movie Titanic where the Irish band is playing, one of the musicians is playing a bouzouki. That is historically incorrect as the bouzouki became a Celtic instrument in the 1960s and Irvine is usually credited with its introduction.
1949 – Harry Turtledove, American novelist best known for his works in several genres, including alternate history, historical fiction, fantasy, and science fiction. Turtledove has been dubbed "The Master of Alternate History". Within that genre he is known both for creating original alternate history scenarios such as survival of the Byzantine Empire or an alien invasion in the middle of the Second World War and for giving a fresh and original treatment to themes previously dealt with by many others, such as the victory of the South in the American Civil War and of Nazi Germany in the Second World War. His novels have been credited with bringing alternate history into the mainstream. His style of alternate history has a strong military theme with scenes of combat happening throughout many of his works.
1969 – Kyle Hebert, American voice actor who works for anime and video game series, such as adult Gohan and the narrator in the Funimation dub of Dragon Ball Z. His credits include Fullmetal Alchemist, Kiba Inuzuka on Naruto, Sosuke Aizen and Ganju Shiba in Bleach, Kamina in Gurren Lagann, Ryu in Street Fighter series and Big the Cat in Sonic the Hedgehog. At Anime Expo 2009, Kyle won best English Voice Actor in the SPJA Awards for his role as Kamina in Gurren Lagann.
Happy birthday guys!