#OnThisDay, 24 Feb 1968, Jocelyn Bell Burnell - along with her male supervisor and three other men - published a paper confirming the discovery of pulsars. She had built the array, picked up the signal and argued it was not an anomaly. Hewish received the Nobel prize for it in 1974: Bell Burnell did not.
In 2018 Bell Burnell received a £3m prize for her work. She's used it to set up a foundation to improve the diversity in STEM.
#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #Histodons
25 years ago, on February 13, 2000 the final "Peanuts" comic strip was released. It followed the death of Charles M. Schulz the day before, as he passed away only a few hours before its publication, serving as his final farewell to his readers.
#Peanuts #Comics #CharlesSchulz #comic #ComicStrip #ComicStrips #OTD #Snoopy
#OTD in 1814.
Lord Byron's semi-autobiographical tale in verse The Corsair is published by John Murray in London and sells 10,000 copies on this day and over 25,000 in the first month, going through seven editions. Walter Scott is to say of Byron's poetry: "He beat me out of the field in description of the stronger passions and in deep-seated knowledge of the human heart."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cors…
The Corsair at PG:
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On this day in 1983, the ARPANET network officially switched to using the TCP/IP protocol, effectively creating the Internet.
"January 1, 1983 is considered the official birthday of the Internet. Prior to this, the various computer networks did not have a standard way to communicate with each other."
"What are heavy? sea-sand and sorrow.
What are brief? today and tomorrow.
What are frail? spring blossoms and youth.
What are deep? the ocean and truth."
Christina Rossetti, who died #OTD in 1894, was an English writer of romantic, devotional and children's poems, including "Goblin Market" and "Remember".
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christin…
Christina Rossetti at PG:
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J. J. Thomson, who was born #OTD in 1856, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906 for his discovery of the electron, the first subatomic particle to be found.
Thomson was also a teacher, and seven of his students went on to win Nobel Prizes: Ernest Rutherford, Lawrence Bragg, Charles Barkla, Francis Aston, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, Owen Richardson and Edward Victor Appleton.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._J._Th…
Books by J.J. Thomson at PG:
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The first text message was sent on this day in 1992 by then a 22-year-old engineer Neil Papworth to wish "Merry Christmas" to his colleague.
"It didn't feel momentous at all. For me it was just getting my job done on the day and ensuring that our software that we'd been developing for a good year was working OK."
history.com/this-day-in-histor…
#OTD #OnThisDay #technology #history #phone #TextMessage #MerryChristmas
On December 3, 1992, the first SMS text message in history is sent: Neil Papworth, a 22-year-old engineer, uses a personal computer to send the text message “Merry Christmas” via the Vodafone network to the phone of a colleague.Missy Sullivan (HISTORY)
Mária Telkes died #OTD in 1980. She was a Hungarian-American biophysicist, engineer, & inventor who worked on solar energy technologies.
During World War II, she developed a solar water distillation device, deployed at the end of the war, which saved the lives of downed airmen and torpedoed sailors. In the 1940s she and architect Eleanor Raymond created one of the first solar-heated houses, Dover Sun House, by storing energy each day.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A1r…
#science #technology #WomenInSTEM
#OnThisDay, 28 Nov 1967, Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovers the existence of pulsars.
Not included in the 1974 Nobel prize for the discovery, Bell received a £3m prize for her work in 2018. She's used it to set up a foundation to improve the diversity in STEM.
#WomenInHistory #OTD #History #WomensHistory #WomenInSTEM #Histodons
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:
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#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…
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#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:
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#books #literature #movie
Months ago, i learned about the restoration of the first film version of Frankenstein carried out by the Library of Congress and noticed that the picture...Internet Archive
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
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#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:
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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
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
"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:
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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:
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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
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
