#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
https://archive.org/details/frankenstein1910HD

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley at PG:
https://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
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/9648

#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:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/1813

#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.

https://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.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstl.1784.0008

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:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/190

#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:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/781

#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