Endre Ady was born #OTD in 1877.

Some of his notable poetry collections include "Új versek" (New Poems, 1906), "A Holnap" (Tomorrow, 1908), and "A halottak élén" (At the Head of the Dead, 1918).

Books by Endre Ady at PG:
gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/39…

#books #literature #poetry

#OTD in 1843.

William Rowan Hamilton invents quaternions, a 3D system of complex numbers.

Important precursors to this work included Euler's four-square identity (1748) & Olinde Rodrigues' parameterization of general rotations by 4 parameters (1840), but neither of these writers treated the four-parameter rotations as an algebra. Carl Friedrich Gauss had discovered quaternions in 1819, but this work was not published until 1900.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaterni…

gutenberg.org/ebooks/9942

#mathematics

#OnThisDay, 18 May 1953, Jackie Cochran becomes the first woman pilot to break the sound barrier.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #AviationHistory #Histodons

17 May is Día das Letras Galegas (Galician Literature Day).

#OnThisDay, 17 May 1863, María Rosalía Rita de Castro's poetry is published. It’s the first publication by a single author in Galician for 400 years. The public holiday was introduced to celebrate the centenary of Rosalia de Castro's work.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #Galicia #LiteraryWomen #FlashbackFriday

Very early #OnThisDay, 6 May 1944, Marguerite 'Peggy' Knight parachutes into occupied France to be a courier for the Special Operations Executive. The British SOE supported the French resistance.

Knight fought her way out of an attempted capture, and returned to the UK in September 1944.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #WorldWar2 #Histodons

#OnThisDay, 19 Apr 1967, Katherine Switzer becomes the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon as a registered runner, despite the organiser physically trying to stop her.

She ran it again in 2017, 50 years later.

#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #AmericanHistory

"Instead of the perfect human, Frankenstein created a monster."

#OTD in 1910.

The first movie version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) is released in the U.S. by Edison Studios. One of the first horror films, it features unbilled the actor Charles Ogle as Frankenstein's monster, & Mary Fuller as the doctor's fiancée.

The short film Frankenstein is available at @internetarchive
archive.org/details/frankenste…

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley at PG:
gutenberg.org/ebooks/41445

#books #literature #movie

Nellie Bly completes her round-the-world journey in 72 days #OTD in 1890.

In 1888, Bly suggested to her editor at the New York World that she take a trip around the world, attempting to turn the fictional Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) into fact for the1st time. November 14, 1889, and with two days' notice, she boarded the Augusta Victoria, a steamer of the Hamburg America Line, and began her 40,070 kilometer journey. via @wikipedia

Nellie Bly at PG
gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/96…

#books
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Lebanese writer, poet and visual artist Kahlil Gibran was born #OTD in 1883. He is best known as the author of The Prophet, which was first published in the United States in 1923 and has since become one of the best-selling books of all time, having been translated into more than 100 languages. His principal works in English (besides the above mentioned) are The Madman, The Forerunner, Sand and Foam, and Jesus, the Son of Man.

Kahlil Gibran at PG:
gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/18…

#books #literature

French educator Louis Braille was born #OTD in 1809.

He was the inventor of a reading and writing system named after him, braille, intended for use by visually impaired people. His system is used worldwide and remains virtually unchanged to this day. He was blinded when he was 3 years old. But when he was still a student, Louis Braille was frustrated by his inability to read and write.
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The Apollo 8 astronauts performed lunar orbit insertion #OTD in 1968.

Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders became the first humans to orbit the moon, the first to see an earthrise, fifty five years ago today.

Anders spotted the Earth coming up over the Moon’s horizon:

"Oh my God, look at that picture over there! It's the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!"

Image: NASA

December 18th, 256 BCE—#OTD #OnThisDay the foremen of a group of stonecutters write to the architect Kleon, complaining that the quarry supervisor is wearing away their tools by assigning them all the hard stone while he assigns his own men all the soft stone.

papyri.info/ddbdp/sb;18;13881

A paper by the Reverend John Michell was read before the Royal Society #OTD in 1783. It included the first prediction of what, given the understanding of gravity at the time, you might call a Black Hole.

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi…

Klára Dán von Neumann died #OTD in 1963.

Hungarian mathematician, self-taught engineer and computer scientist, noted as one of the first computer programmers. She was the first woman to execute modern-style code on a computer. Klára made significant contributions to the world of programming, including work on the Monte Carlo method, ENIAC, and MANIAC I. She was introduced to a lot of her work through her husband, John von Neumann. via @wikipedia

#science #mathematics

"No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be."
Dracula

Irish novelist and critic, who created Count Dracula, Bram Stoker was born #OTD in 1847. Dracula is an epistolary novel, written as a collection of realistic but completely fictional diary entries, telegrams, letters, ship's logs, and newspaper clippings, all of which added a level of detailed realism to the story.

Bram Stoker at PG:
gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/19…

#books #literature

Physicist Lise Meitner was born #OTD in 1878. She discovered fission in uranium with Otto Frisch, and was the first person to understand both its mechanics and implications.

Per usual, the Nobel Committee awarded a prize to some of her colleagues, but left her off.

Image: Atomic Heritage Foundation (photographer unknown)

Mathematician Karl Weierstrass was born #OTD, Halloween, in 1815.

The fools at The Academy all said he was mad, but in 1872 he announced that he had succeeded in creating a ~monster~.

Image: Smithsonian Institution Libraries

46 years ago today
Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols is the only relevant studio album by the English punk rock band The Sex Pistols, which was released on October 28, 1977 on Virgin Records in the UK and on November 11, 1977 on Warner Bros. in the USA.

#punk #punkrock #history #punkrockhistory #otd

Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born #OTD in 1943. As a grad student at Cambridge in 1967, she discovered an entirely new type of celestial object: Pulsars!

Photo: National Science & Media Museum / Science & Society Picture Library

"The face, which, duly as the sun,
Rose up for me with life begun,
To mark all bright hours of the day
With hourly love, is dimmed away —
And yet my days go on, go on."
De Profundis (1862)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning died #OTD in 1861. Her work had a major influence on prominent writers of the day, including Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson. via @Wikipedia

Books by Elizabeth Barrett Browning at PG:
gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/78…

#books #literature #poetry

First performance of O Canada at the Congrès national des Canadiens-Français. The song would later become the national anthem of Canada #OTD in 1880.

The song was originally commissioned by Lieutenant Governor of Quebec Théodore Robitaille for the 1880 Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day ceremony; Calixa Lavallée composed the music, after which words were written by the poet and judge Sir Adolphe-Basile Routhier. The original French lyrics were translated to English in 1906. via @Wikipedia

#music

Artist Ralph McQuarrie was born #OTD in 1929. He is probably best known as the primary concept artist for the Star Wars movies, but he also did work for Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, and E.T., and he won an Academy Award for his work on Cocoon.

Image: Ralph McQuarrie

Happy 33rd birthday to the Hubble Space Telescope, launched onboard space shuttle Discovery (STS-31) #OTD in 1990.

The 2023 anniversary image is the nebula NGC 1333, a star forming region about 970 light years away in the constellation Perseus.

Image: NASA, ESA, STScI

76 years young 🔥🍾💥

Happy Birthday to James Newell Osterberg aka Iggy Pop, designated the "Godfather of Punk, born on this day in 1947, Muskegon, Michigan

Photo by Rob Baker Ashton

#punk #punks #punkrock #iggypop #history #punkrockhistory #otd

Happy Birthday to Walter Rodney, who was born #OTD in Guyana in 1942! After becoming a professor in Jamaica, he was barred from the country for his communist views, a decision which caused riots in his support. He later taught and lectured around the world, especially in Tanzania. His book “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” made him a towering figure in anti-colonial circles.

You can buy today's artwork here: l-boe.redbubble.com/

#history #Guyana #communism #PanAfricanism #HiaG #Mar23

Émilie du Châtelet, who hypothesized conservation of energy, established kinetic energy as distinct from momentum and proportional to (speed)², and combined work by Newton and Leibniz with her own original ideas in "Institutions de Physique," was born #OTD in 1706.

Du Châtelet is an important figure in the development of classical physics, but she is not nearly as well known as many of her male contemporaries.

Portrait: M. Q. de La Tour

Today is the 50th anniversary of the last time humans went to the Moon.

Apollo 17, the final mission of the Apollo program and the last time we ventured beyond low Earth orbit, launched from Kennedy Space Center #OTD in 1972.

Images: NASA flic.kr/s/aHskm64ger
#Apollo50

Chemist Rachel Fuller Brown was born #OTD in 1898. She discovered the antifungal antibiotic nystatin while doing research for the NY State Department of Health, hence the name.

Rather than keep the profits from the drug, Brown (standing in the photo) and co-discoverer Elizabeth Hazen assigned nystatin’s patent royalties to the nonprofit Research Corporation of New York, to help support other researchers.

Image: Smithsonian Institution

Physicist Lise Meitner was born #OTD in 1878. She discovered fission in uranium with Otto Frisch, and was the first person to understand both its mechanics and its implications.

Image: Atomic Heritage Foundation (photographer unknown)