April 28 Dateline

Birthdays

1715 - Franz Josef Sparry, Austrian composer of the Baroque period born in Graz, studied theology at the University of Salzburg, and began his career as a composer. He wrote a Tafelmusik, his best-known work. He was director of music at Kremsmünster Abbey from 1747.

1900 - Jan Oort, Dutch astronomer, who made significant contributions to the understanding of the Milky Way and a pioneer in the field of radio astronomy. The Oort cloud, the Oort constants, and the asteroid, 1691 Oort, were all named after him. Oort determined that the Milky Way rotates and overturned the idea that the Sun was at its center. He also postulated the existence of the mysterious invisible dark matter in 1932, which is believed to make up roughly 84.5% of the total matter in the Universe and whose gravitational pull causes "the clustering of stars into galaxies and galaxies into connecting strings of galaxies". He discovered the galactic halo, a group of stars orbiting the Milky Way but outside the main disk. Oort is also responsible for important insights about comets, including the realization that their orbits "implied there was a lot more solar system than the region occupied by the planets."

1906 - Kurt Friedrich Goedel (or Gödel), Austro-Hungarian-born, and later American logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel had an immense effect upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and David Hilbert were using logic and set theory to investigate the foundations of mathematics. 

1908 - Oskar Schindler, Austro-German industrialist and a member of the Nazi Party who is credited with saving the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his enamelware and ammunitions factories in occupied Poland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

1926 - Harper Lee (born Nelle Harper Lee), American novelist, Pulitzer Prize winner of her famous 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird. It won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and has become a classic of modern American literature. Lee only published two books, yet she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007 for her contribution to literature. She also received numerous honorary degrees, though she declined to speak on those occasions. She assisted her close friend Truman Capote in his research for the book In Cold Blood (1966). Capote was the basis for the character Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird.

1928 - Yves Klein, French painter, important figure in post-war European art. He was a leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by art critic Pierre Restany. Klein was a pioneer in the development of performance art, and as a forerunner of minimal art, as well as pop art.(Yves Klein: With theVoid, Full Powers. Uploaded by Walker Art Center. Accessed April 28, 2020. The Life and Work of Yves Klein told by Rotraut. Uploaded by Louisiana Channel. Accessed April 28, 2020.)

1941 - Ann-Margret Olsson, Swedish-American actress, singer, and dancer. As an actress, she is known for her roles in Bye Bye Birdie, Viva Las Vegas, Carnal Knowledge, The Train Robbers, Tommy, and Going in Style, among others. She has won five Golden Globe Awards and been nominated for two Academy Awards, two Grammy Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and six Emmy Awards. In 2010, she won an Emmy Award for her guest appearance on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. Initially billed as a female version of Elvis Presley, she has a sultry, vibrant contralto voice. She had a minor success in 1961 and a charting album in 1964, and she scored a disco hit in 1979. She recorded a critically acclaimed gospel album in 2001 and an album of Christmas songs in 2004.

Lefties:
None known

More birthdays and historical events today, 28 April - On This Day.

 

Historical Events

1920 - Azerbaijan, a country in the Caucasus, joins the Soviet Union.

1947 - Norwegian marine biologist Thor Heyerdahl sets out from Peru on the raft Kon-Tiki to prove that Peruvians could have settled in Polynesia. The journey to the Tuamotu Islands takes 101 days.

April 27 Dateline

Birthdays

1759 - Mary Wollstonecraft, English writer, philosopher, advocate of women's rights, mother of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and her works as important influences. She wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. She is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. Wollstonecraft died at the age of 38 leaving behind several unfinished manuscripts. She died eleven days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who would become an accomplished writer and author of Frankenstein.

1791 - Samuel Morse (born Samuel Finley Breese Morse), American painter and inventor. After having established his reputation as a portrait painter, in his middle age Morse contributed to the invention of a single-wire telegraph system based on European telegraphs. He was a co-developer of Morse code and helped to develop the commercial use of telegraphy.

1822 - Ulysses S. Grant (born Hiram Ulysses Grant), American military leader who served as the 18th president of the United States from 1869 to 1877. As president, Grant was an effective civil rights executive who created the Justice Department and worked with the Radical Republicans during Reconstruction to protect African Americans. As Commanding General, he led the Union Army to victory in the American Civil War in 1865 and thereafter briefly served as Secretary of War.

1874 - Maurice Baring, OBE, English man of letters, known as novelist, essayist and poet, translator. He was also a travel writer and war correspondent. During World War I, Baring served in the Intelligence Corps and Royal Air Force. He is remembered in verse in Belloc's Cautionary Verses: "Like many of the upper class, He liked the sound of broken glass*. (* A line I stole with subtle daring.) From Wing-Commander Maurice Baring."

Lefties:
None known
 

More birthdays and historical events today, 27 April - On This Day.

 

Historical Events

1667 - Poet  John Milton, now blind and destitute, sells the publishing rights to his most famous work, the  epic Paradise Lost, for 10 British Pounds. (Here's a link, all about John Milton's Paradise Lost, uploaded by Eric Masters. © ''IntelliQuest World's 100 Greatest Books'' 1995. Accessed April 27, 2018.) 

1775 - The Tea Act is passed by the British Parliament, lowering the tea tax and allowing East India Company to monopolize the tea trade in America.

April 26 Dateline

Birthdays

121 C.E. - Marcus Aurelius (Latin: Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus), Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 and a stoic philosopher. He was the last of the rulers known as the Five Good Emperors (a term coined some 13 centuries later by Niccolò Machiavelli), and the last emperor of the Pax Romana, an age of relative peace and stability for the Roman Empire. He served as Roman consul in 140, 145, and 161.

1711 - David Hume, Scottish enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist. He is best known today for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, scepticism, and naturalism.

1812 - Alfred Krupp (Alfried Felix Alwyn Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach), German industrialist, a competitor in Olympic yacht races and a member of the Krupp family, prominent in German industry since the early 19th century. 

1812 - Friedrich Adolf Ferdinand (Freiherr von Flotow), German composer,  chiefly remembered for his opera Martha, a romantic comic opera in four acts set to a German libretto by Friedrich Wilhelm Riese and basedon a story by Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges. It was popular in the 19th century and the early part of the 20th. (Jonas Kaufmann; "Ach! so fromm"; Martha; Friedrich von Flotow. With Marco Armiliato, conducting the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra. 2007. Uploaded by liederoperagreats. Accessed April 26, 2017.)

1888 - Anita Loos (born Corinne Anita Loos), American screenwriter, playwright and author. In 1912, she became the first-ever female staff scriptwriter in Hollywood, when D.W. Griffith put her on the payroll at Triangle Film Corporation. She is best known for her 1925 comic novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, as well as her 1951 Broadway adaptation of Colette’s novella Gigi.

1889 - Ludwig Wittgenstein (Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein), Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He taught at the University of Cambridge. During his entire life only one book of his philosophy was published, the relatively slim 75-page Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung (Logical-Philosophical Treatise) (1921) which appeared, together with an English translation, in 1922 under the Latin title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. His only other published works were an article, "Some Remarks on Logical Form" (1929), a book review, and a children's dictionary. His voluminous manuscripts were edited and published posthumously. The first and best-known of this posthumous series is the 1953 book Philosophical Investigations.

1900 - Charles Francis Richter, American seismologist and physicist. He is most famous as the creator of the Richter magnitude scale, which, until the development of the moment magnitude scale in 1979, quantified the size of earthquakes. Inspired by Kiyoo Wadati's 1928 paper on shallow and deep earthquakes, Richter first used the scale in 1935 after developing it in collaboration with Beno Gutenberg. The quote "logarithmic plots are a device of the devil" is attributed to Richter.
 

1933 - Carol Creighton Burnett (born April 26, 1933) is an American stage, TV, and film actress, comedian, singer, and writer. She is best known for her groundbreaking comedy variety show, The Carol Burnett Show. She has also appeared on various talk shows and as a panelist on game shows. Burnett has written and narrated several memoirs, earning Grammy nominations for almost all of them, and a win for In Such Good Company: Eleven Years of Laughter, Mayhem, and Fun in the Sandbox. In 2005, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2013, Burnett was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. In 2019, the Golden Globes named an award after her for career achievement in television, called the Carol Burnett Award, and Burnett its first awardee. 

Leftie:
Comedienne Carol Burnett

 

More birthdays and historical events today, 26 April - On This Day.

 

 

Feature: 

Symphony No. 1 by Jean Sibelius.  This symphony was first performed this day 26th April, 1899, in Helsinki.

Historical Events

1607 - Captain John Smith lands with colonists in Virginia, named for the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I, establishing the first permanent settlement.  


1865 - John Wilkes Booth, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln's assassin, is found hiding in a barn and shot dead by the cavalry.

1899 - Jan Sibelius's Symphony No. 1 is first performed, in Helsinki.