17 June 2017
Interesting tidbits:
1462 – Vlad III attempted to assassinate Ottoman sultan Mehmed II (The Night Attack) forcing him to retreat from Wallachia. Vlad III, also known as Dracula (the little dragon) and Tsepes (the Impailer) so frightened Mehmed that he retreated to Constantinople and left the war of conquest in the Balkans to his generals.
1579 – Sir Francis Drake claimed a land he called Nova Albion (modern California) for England. Drake skirted the coast of California while circumnavigating the globe in his flagship, The Golden Hinde, between 1577 and 1580. According to a journal kept by the ship's chaplain the company put into a convenient and suitable harbor for refitting in June 1579, a task requiring about one month. While in the harbor Drake received throngs of Native Americans, claimed California on behalf of Queen Elizabeth I, and caused a brass plaque to be made and erected on a wooden post as a token of his discovery and conquest. A small hole chiseled in the plaque, or plate, accommodated a silver sixpence bearing the Queen's portrait. In 1936 a young Californian found a crudely lettered brass plaque partially buried on a ridge overlooking San Francisco Bay, which history buffs and civic boosters were eager to accept as a genuine relic of Drake's visit. In 1976 MIT metallurgist Cyril Stanley Smith studied the composition, microstructure, directionality, and other characteristics of the plate. His examination suggested that the brass was rolled flat, not hammered flat, and that its edges had been sheared instead of being chiseled. Elizabethan smiths would have used a hammer and chisel to shape the plate. He found that the composition of the brass had an unusually high zinc content for the 16th century. His analysis revealed a number of other anomalies, including a superficial patina and surface corrosion that was surprisingly uniform, given the assumption that the plate had been buried for centuries. In short, the plate was a modern fake.
1631 – Mumtaz Mahal died during childbirth. Her husband, Mughal emperor Shah Jahan I, spent the next 17 years building her mausoleum, the Taj Mahal.
1775 – American Revolutionary War: Colonists inflict heavy casualties on British forces while losing the Battle of Bunker Hill.
1837 - Charles Goodyear obtains his first rubber patent.
1885 - The Statue of Liberty arrived in NYC aboard the French ship `Isere'.
1928 - Amelia Earhart left Newfoundland to become the first woman to fly the Atlantic as a passenger in a plane piloted by Wilmer Stultz.
Today's birthday crew:
1704 – John Kay, English inventor of the flying shuttle, which he patented in 1733. It was a key contribution to the Industrial Revolution. The flying shuttle greatly accelerated weaving, by allowing the shuttle carrying the weft to be passed through the warp threads faster and over a greater width of cloth. It was designed for the broad loom, for which it saved labour over the traditional process, needing only one operator per loom instead of the usual two. No industrial unrest was anticipated, this being the first device of the modern era to significantly enhance productivity. But by September of that year the Colchester weavers, were so concerned for their livelihoods that they petitioned the King to stop Kay's inventions. The flying shuttle was to create a particular imbalance by doubling weaving productivity without changing the rate at which thread could be spun, disrupting spinners, and weavers alike. In 1738 Kay went to Leeds, where his problem had become royalty collection. The annual license fee was 15 Shillings per shuttle.
1867 – John Robert Gregg, American educator, publisher, and humanitarian, invented the Gregg shorthand.
1898 – M.C. Escher, Dutch illustrator known for his often mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints. These feature impossible constructions, explorations of infinity, architecture, and tessellations.
1903 – Ruth Graves Wakefield, was the inventor of the Toll House Cookie, the first chocolate chip cookie. Wakefield was a dietitian who lectured about foods. In 1930, she and her husband Kenneth bought a tourist lodge in the town of Whitman, Massachusetts. Located about halfway between Boston and New Bedford, it was a place where passengers had historically paid a toll, changed horses, and ate home-cooked meals. When the Wakefields opened their business, they named the establishment the Toll House Inn. Ruth cooked and served all the food and soon gained local fame for her desserts. In 1930 she was mixing a batch of cookies for her guests when she discovered that she was out of baker's chocolate. She substituted broken pieces of semi-sweet chocolate, expecting it to melt and absorb into the dough to create chocolate cookies, but instead she accidentally invented chocolate chip cookies. Ruth contacted Nestlé and they struck a deal: The company would print her recipe on the cover of all their semi-sweet chocolate bars, and she would get a lifetime supply of chocolate. Nestlé began marketing chocolate chips to be used especially for cookies. Ruth wrote a cookbook, Toll House Tried and True Recipes, that went through 39 printings starting in 1930.
1904 – Ralph Bellamy, American actor.
1927 – Wally Wood, American comic book writer, artist and publisher, best known for his work on EC Comics's Mad and Marvel's Daredevil. He was one of Mad's founding cartoonists in 1952. In addition to Wood's hundreds of comic book pages, he illustrated for books and magazines while also working in a variety of other areas — advertising; packaging and product illustrations; gag cartoons; record album covers; posters; syndicated comic strips; and trading cards, including work on Topps' landmark Mars Attacks set. Wood was instrumental in convincing EC publisher William Gaines to start a line of science fiction comics, Weird Science and Weird Fantasy (later combined under the single title Weird Science Fantasy). Wood penciled and inked several dozen EC science fiction stories, many considered classics. Wood also had frequent entries in Tales from the Crypt. He was the inaugural inductee into the comic book industry's Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1989, and was posthumously inducted into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame in 1992.
1943 – Burt Rutan, American aerospace engineer noted for his originality in designing light, strong, unusual-looking, energy-efficient aircraft. He designed the record-breaking Voyager, which was the first plane to fly around the world without stopping or refueling, and the sub-orbital spaceplane SpaceShipOne, which won the Ansari X-Prize in 2004 for becoming the first privately funded spacecraft to enter the realm of space twice within a two-week period. He has five aircraft on display in the National Air and Space Museum: SpaceShipOne, the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer, Voyager, Quickie, and the VariEze.
1945 – Art Bell, American broadcaster and author known as one of the founders and the original host of the paranormal-themed radio program Coast to Coast AM. He also created and formerly hosted its companion show Dreamland. Bell abandoned conventional political talk in favor of conspiracy theories, leading to a significant bump in his overnight ratings. Subsequently, Bell discussed off-beat topics like the paranormal, the occult, UFOs, protoscience and pseudo-science.
1951 – Starhawk, American author and activist (Neopagan).
1982 – Arthur Darvill, English actor best known for his role as the Eleventh Doctor's companion Rory Williams.
Happy birthday guys!