16 June 2017
Interesting tidbits:
1816 – Lord Byron reads Fantasmagoriana to his four house guests at the Villa Diodati, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori, and challenges each guest to write a ghost story, which culminated in Mary Shelley writing the novel Frankenstein, John Polidori writing the short story The Vampyre, and Byron writing the poem Darkness. Some fans and authorities consider Frankenstein to mark the beginning of science fiction. Others consider it to be the beginning of modern science fiction.
1882 - 17" hailstones weighing 1.75 lbs fall in Dubuque Iowa.
1883 - The first baseball "Ladies' Day" (NY Gothams beat Cleve Spiders 5-2).
1884 - The first roller coaster is used (Coney Island NY).
1893 - RW Rueckheim invents Cracker Jack.
1903 – Roald Amundsen commenced the first east-west navigation of the Northwest Passage, leaving Oslo, Norway. He led the Antarctic expedition (1910-12) to discover the South Pole in December 1911 and he was the first expedition leader to (undisputedly) reach the North Pole in 1926. He is also known as the first to traverse the Northwest Passage (1903–06). He disappeared in June 1928 while taking part in a rescue mission. Amundsen, Douglas Mawson, Robert Falcon Scott, and Ernest Shackleton were key expedition leaders during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.
1903 – The Ford Motor Company is incorporated.
1903 - Pepsi Cola company forms.
1904 – Irish author James Joyce began a relationship with Nora Barnacle and subsequently used the date to set the actions for his novel Ulysses. This date is now traditionally called "Bloomsday".
1911 - A 772 gram stony meteorite strikes the earth near Kilbourn, Columbia County, Wisconsin damaging a barn.
1922 - Henry Berliner demonstrates his helicopter to the US Bureau of Aeronautics.
1963 – Soviet Space Program: Vostok 6 Mission – Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova becomes the first woman in space.
2010 – Bhutan becomes the first country to institute a total ban on tobacco.
2012 – China successfully launches its Shenzhou 9 spacecraft, carrying three astronauts – including the first female Chinese astronaut, Liu Yang – to the Tiangong-1 orbital module.
2012 – The United States Air Force's robotic Boeing X-37B spaceplane returns to Earth after a classified 469-day orbital mission.
Today's birthday crew:
1723 – Adam Smith, Scottish philosopher and economist.
1829 – Geronimo, Native American leader.
1890 – Stan Laurel, English actor and comedian, half of the classic comedy duo Laurel and Hardy.
1896 – Murray Leinster, American writer of science fiction and alternate history. He wrote and published over 1,500 short stories and articles, 14 movie scripts, and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays. Leinster's first science fiction story, "The Runaway Skyscraper", appeared in the February 22, 1919 issue of Argosy, and was reprinted in the June 1926 issue of Hugo Gernsback's first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. In the 1930s, he published several science fiction stories and serials in Amazing and Astounding Stories (the first issue of Astounding included his story "Tanks"). Leinster is credited with the invention of parallel universe stories. Four years before Jack Williamson's The Legion of Time came out, Leinster published his "Sidewise in Time" in the June 1934 issue of Astounding. Leinster's vision of extraordinary oscillations in time ('sidewise in time') had a long-term impact on other authors such as Isaac Asimov. Leinster's 1945 novella "First Contact" is also credited as one of the first (if not the first) instances of a universal translator in science fiction. Leinster was one of the few science fiction writers from the 1930s to survive in the John W. Campbell era of higher writing standards, publishing over three dozen stories in Astounding and Analog under Campbell's editorship. The last story by Leinster in Analog was "Quarantine World" in the November 1966 issue, thirty-six years after his appearance in the premier January 1930 issue. Murray Leinster's 1946 short story "A Logic Named Joe" contains one of the first descriptions of a computer (called a "logic") in fiction. In the story, Leinster was decades ahead of his time in imagining the Internet. He envisioned logics in every home, linked through a distributed system of servers (called "tanks"), to provide communications, entertainment, data access, and commerce; one character says that "logics are civilization." Leinster continued publishing in the 1950s and 1960s, appearing in Galaxy Magazine and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He won a Hugo Award for his 1956 story "Exploration Team". Leinster ended his writing career writing novelizations of episodes of the science fiction series Men into Space, The Time Tunnel, and Land of the Giants. (Note: Before there was Star Trek there was an adult science fiction program called Men Into Space. There are episodes on YouTube.)
1907 – Jack Albertson, American actor (Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory).
1924 – Faith Domergue, American actoress starred in sci-fi and monster films in the 1950S AND 1960S including It Came from Beneath the Sea, This Island Earth, Cult of the Cobra, and Voyage to a Prehistoric Planet.
1947 – Tom Wyner, English-American voice actor who has performed supporting voices in many anime and video game productions.
Happy birthday guys!