From a quick survey of the internet, it seems that the 15th April was a date when an afwul lot of things happened. There are a surprising number of notable events, births and deaths so I'll just offer a selection:
1755: Samuel Johnson's Dictionary is published. While far fromthe first dictionary ofEnglish, it is seen as being the first to offer a comprehensive view of English as it was used. It took nine years to complete, and Johnson was paid 1,500 guineas - roughly equivalent to £230,000 today.
1912: at 2:20am the Titanic finally sank after hitting an iceberg nearly three hours before. 1,517 people died.
1923: insulin becomes widely available for the treatment of diabetes
1945: Liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. 50-60,000 prisoners were found and liberated. They had been living with some 13,000 unburied bodies. Liberators described the day as the most horrifying of their lives. Many of the prisoners were dying - starving and sick, the Allied troops were hindered intheir efforts to help them by the SS officers who sabotaged water tanks before they left. Nearly 14,000 prisoners died after liberation - having been too far gone to save.
1989: The Hillsborough Disaster. 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death when a stand at Sheffield Wednesday's Hillsborough stadium collapsed.
Obviously, it has not been a good day. Actually today of course, the grounding of all flights in the country because of a volcanic eruption putting tonnes of ash into the atmosphere.
Thursday 15 April 2010
Friday 9 April 2010
What happened today?
Since being unemployed (my boss at the pub having stopped giving me any hours three weeks ago) and separated from one's friends by their universities leaves one very little to talk about, I'm going to start writing posts inspired by things that happened 'on this date in history'. Today is the ninth of April, and here are some things that happened on that date:
1860 - The oldest audible recording of a human voice is made. 150 years ago, a man sang 'Au Clair de la Lune' into a machine called a phonoautograph, which transcribed the sounds onto a sheet of glass covered in lamp-black.
To be fair, I'm not sure it counts as such, since at the time, people used these things to look at a sound - rather like the oscilloscopes we had in science lessons - rather than to be able to listen back to it later on. There was no way to turn the phonoautogram made by the machine back into sound. of course, computers have now made it possible to transfer the 'recordings' back into something you can hear. It sounds like the singer was in a high wind at the time but it's definitely a human voice, from more than a century ago.
in 1867, the USA bought Alaska from the Russians. This caused Sarah Palin.
then in both world wars there were battles going on, including the German invasion of Denmark and Norway in 1945, there were the funerals of Martin Luther King (1968) and the Queen mother (2002) and Georgia claimed independence from the Soviet union in 1991
Today, we have electioneering, some protesters in Thailand invading a TV station and for me, preparations for the third annual spring picnic which is on Sunday
1860 - The oldest audible recording of a human voice is made. 150 years ago, a man sang 'Au Clair de la Lune' into a machine called a phonoautograph, which transcribed the sounds onto a sheet of glass covered in lamp-black.
To be fair, I'm not sure it counts as such, since at the time, people used these things to look at a sound - rather like the oscilloscopes we had in science lessons - rather than to be able to listen back to it later on. There was no way to turn the phonoautogram made by the machine back into sound. of course, computers have now made it possible to transfer the 'recordings' back into something you can hear. It sounds like the singer was in a high wind at the time but it's definitely a human voice, from more than a century ago.
in 1867, the USA bought Alaska from the Russians. This caused Sarah Palin.
then in both world wars there were battles going on, including the German invasion of Denmark and Norway in 1945, there were the funerals of Martin Luther King (1968) and the Queen mother (2002) and Georgia claimed independence from the Soviet union in 1991
Today, we have electioneering, some protesters in Thailand invading a TV station and for me, preparations for the third annual spring picnic which is on Sunday
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