Births which occurred on
a December 03:
 
2001 Segway Human Transporter
“IT” is introduced.
“IT“ (temporary code
name: the permanent name is not likely to be the initials of
Segway Human Innovative Transporter) is a standup vehicle on
one axle wiith a T-shaped handle. Gyroscopes keep it steady
and its computer and sensors responds to the rider action on
the handle so as to go forward, backward, faster, slower, turn
even on one spot (one wheel going forward and the other backward),
or stop. Pilot models are demonstrater on the ABC TV show Good
Morning America [photo >].
It will run all day on an overnight
charge of its battery (by plugging it in to an ordinary wall
outlet), at a maximum speed of 20 km/h. The US Postal Service
intends to test the first heavy-duty production models (at 36
kg and $8000 each) for its letter carriers. Consumer models
will come later, weighing 30 kg and costing $3000).
Just what couch potatoes need
to keep completely out of shape, by now eliminating even walking.
It is the creation of inventor
Dean Kamen [< 16 March 2001 photo], 50,
who holds roughly 100 US patents, including those for a heart
stent, a wheelchair that can climb stairs, and the first portable
kidney dialysis machine. |
1960 Camelot, the musical, opens on Broadway.
1953 Kismet, the musical, opens on Broadway.
1952 Mel Smith author (Morons From Outer Space) [Has anyone thought
of writing Mormons From Outer Space ?]
1949 La Alta Comisaría de las Naciones Unidas
para los Refugiados (ACNUR) se crea.
1947 A Streetcar Named Desire, play by Tennessee Williams,
opens on Broadway.
1946 Poemas de Alberto Caeiro y Odas de Ricardo Reis,
de Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessoa, se publican.
1934 Nicolas Coster London, (Lionel-Santa Barbara, Electric Horseman)
1926 El huésped del sevillano,
zarzuela del maestro Jacinto Guerrero y Torres,
se estrena en el teatro Apolo de Madrid.
1924 John
Backus, mathematician, inventor of the FORTRAN computer language.
1917 Manuel Solís Palma, político panameño.
1917 Quebec Bridge opens. At the time, it was the world's longest
cantilever truss span, (in which stiff trusses extend from the bridge
piers, without additional support).
1915 Manuel Tuñón de Lara, historiador
español.
1908 C.F.D. Moule, Anglican clergyman and New Testament scholar.
He authored numerous autographs on Biblical studies, including The
Phenomenology of the New Testament (1967).
1903 John von Neumann,
mathematician.
Although mathematician John von
Neumann is best known for his work on the Manhattan Project,
helping develop the atomic bomb, he also played a critical role
in the history of the electronic computer. After consulting
with John Mauchly and Presper Eckert (developers of ENIAC, one
of the first electronic computers), von Neumann proposed a method
for adding memory to an electronic computer and wrote a 101-page
proposal detailing EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic
Computer), an electronic computer with memory. The proposal,
which also described in detail the thinking behind ENIAC, later
became an important piece of evidence in the patent suit that
ultimately denied Mauchly and Eckert patents on ENIAC. |
1903 Goldstein,
mathematician.
1902 Mitsuo Fuchida, the pilot who flew the lead plane in Japan's
air attack on Pearl Harbor (12/7/1941). Following WWII, through representatives
of the Pocket Testament League, Fuchida was converted to Christianity
in 1950.
1900 Richard Kuhn Austria, biochemist, worked with vitamins
(Nobel '38)
1896 Tabulating Machine Company
(future IBM) is incorporated.
Hermann Hollerith incorporated
the Tabulating Machine Company on this day in 1896. At age twenty-nine,
Hollerith, who had worked at the Census Bureau in 1880, won
a competition to develop the most efficient counting system
for the 1890 census. His tabulating machine counted punched
cards, inspired by a card system developed by Joseph Jacquard
of France to program patterns into textile looms. Through a
series of mergers and reorganizations, the Tabulating Machine
Company eventually became IBM. |
1895 Anna Freud, psicoanalista austriaca.
1889 Los amantes del miserable, poema de Juan Ramón Jiménez Mantecón, casi adolescente, se publica
y le abre las puertas de la fama.
1883 Anton (Friedrich Wilhelm)
von Webern Vienna Austria, 12-tone composer
1879 The electric light bulb
is demonstrated by Edison
In 1878, while on an expedition
to measure a solar eclipse, Thomas Edison boasted that he could
create a safe, cheap, electric light: Although electric arc
lights had existed for more than ten years, their high intensity
made them a fire hazard. Financiers, including J.P. Morgan and
the Vanderbilt family, took Edison at his word and established
the Edison Electric Light Company later that year. After more
than a year of experiments, Edison and his young assistant,
Francis Upton, finally developed a carbon filament that would
burn in a vacuum in a glass bulb for forty hours. They demonstrated
the light bulb to their backers on Dec. 3, 1879, and by the
end of the month, were exhibiting the invention to the public.
On December 31, 1879, the Pennsylvania Railroad ran special
trains to Edison's Menlo Park laboratory to let the public witness
a demonstration of the invention. |
1857 Salvador Rueda, poeta
1857 Józef
Teodor Konrad Korzeniowskij "Joseph Conrad"
Born of Polish parents, Conrad
would become one of the greatest English novelist and short-story,
whose works include the novels
Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo
(1904), and The
Secret Agent (1907) and the short story Heart
of Darkness (1902).
Józef spent his early childhood
in northern Russia, where his father, a Polish poet and patriot,
had been exiled. His parents both died of tuberculosis when
he was 12. An uncle raised Joseph for the next five years. At
age 17, Korzeniowskij set out for Marseilles, France, where
he joined the merchant marine and sailed to the West Indies.
His many harrowing adventures at sea set the scene for much
of his work.
In 1878, when Korzeniowskij was
21, he traveled to England as a deck hand on a British freighter.
He perfected his English during six voyages on a small British
trade boat and spent 16 years with the British merchant navy.
He had numerous adventures around the world, became a British
subject in 1886, and got his first command in 1888. In 1889
he commanded a Congo River steamboat for four months, which
set the stage for his well-known story Heart of Darkness(1902).
Korzeniowskij began writing in
the late 1890s and used the name Conrad. His first novel, Almayer's
Folly, was published in 1895. In 1896 he married an English
woman and gave up the sea to write full time. His work evolved
from hearty sea-adventure tales to sophisticated and pessimistic
explorations of morals, personal choices, and character. His
best-known works, including Lord Jim, Nostromo and The Secret
Agent, were published between 1900 and 1911, and brought him
financial security.
In
A Personal Record (also titled Some
Reminiscences)Conrad relates that his first introduction
to the English language was at the age of eight, when his father
was translating the works of Shakespeare.
In July 1876 he sailed to the
West Indies, as a steward on the Saint-Antoine. On this
gunrunning voyage, Conrad sailed along the coast of Venezuela,
memories of which were to find a place in Nostromo.
The first mate of the vessel, a Corsican named Dominic Cervoni,
was the model for the hero of that novel and was to play a picturesque
role in Conrad's life and work.
In April 1881 Conrad joined the
Palestine, a bark of 425 tons. This move proved to be
an important event in his life; it took him to the Far East
for the first time, and it was also a continuously troubled
voyage, which provided him with literary material that he would
use later. Beset by gales, accidentally rammed by a steamer,
and deserted by a sizable portion of her crew, the Palestine
nevertheless had made it as far as the East Indies when her
cargo of coal caught fire and the crew had to take to the lifeboats;
Conrad's initial landing in the East, on an island off Sumatra,
took place only after a 13-1/2-hour voyage in an open boat.
In 1898 Conrad published his account of his experiences on the
Palestine, with only slight alterations, as the short story
Youth,
a remarkable tale of a young officer's first command.
In 1883 Conrad joined the Narcissus
at Bombay. This voyage gave him material for his novel The
Nigger of the "Narcissus,", the story of an egocentric black
sailor's deterioration and death aboard ship.
In February 1887 Conrad sailed
as first mate on the Highland Forest, bound for Semarang,
Java. Her captain was John McWhirr, whom he later immortalized
under the same name as the heroic, unimaginative captain of
the steamer Nan Shan in
Typhoon. He then joined the Vidar, a
locally owned steamship trading among the islands of the southeast
Asian archipelago. During the five or six voyages he made in
four and a half months, Conrad was discovering and exploring
the world he was to re-create in his first novels, Almayer's
Folly, An
Outcast of the Islands, and Lord
Jim, as well as several short stories.
After leaving the Vidar Conrad
unexpectedly obtained his first command, on the Otago, sailing
from Bangkok, an experience out of which he was to make his
stories The
Shadow Line and Falk.
In London in the summer of 1889,
Conrad began to write Almayer's
Folly. He interrupted that to go to the Congo Free
State, which was four years old as a political entity and already
notorious as a sphere of imperialistic exploitation. Conrad
obtained the command of a Congo River steamboat. What he saw,
did, and felt in his 4 months in the Congo are largely recorded
in Heart
of Darkness, his most famous, finest, and most enigmatic
story, the title of which signifies not only the heart of Africa,
the dark continent, but also the heart of evil--everything that
is corrupt, nihilistic, malign--and perhaps the heart of man.
The story is central to Conrad's work and vision, and it is
difficult not to think of his Congo experiences as traumatic.
He may have exaggerated when he said, "Before the Congo I was
a mere animal," but in a real sense the dying Kurtz's cry, "The
horror! The horror!" was Conrad's. He suffered psychological,
spiritual, even metaphysical shock in the Congo, and his physical
health was also damaged; for the rest of his life, he was racked
by recurrent fever and gout.
Almayer's Folly was published in April 1895. It was
as the author of this novel that he adopted the name Conrad.
Almayer's Folly was followed in 1896 by An
Outcast of the Islands, which repeats the theme of a
foolish and blindly superficial character meeting the tragic
consequences of his own failings in a tropical region far from
the company of his fellow Europeans. These two novels provoked
a misunderstanding of Conrad's talents and purpose which dogged
him the rest of his life. Set in the Malayan archipelago, they
caused him to be labeled a writer of exotic tales, a reputation
which a series of novels and short stories about the sea--The
Nigger of the Narcissus (1897), Lord
Jim (1900), Youth
(1902),
Typhoon (1902), and others--seemed only to confirm.
But, as he wrote about the Narcissus, in his view "the
problem . . . is not a problem of the sea, it is merely a problem
that has risen on board a ship where the conditions of complete
isolation from all land entanglements make it stand out with
a particular force and colouring. “ This is equally true
of his other works; the latter part of Lord
Jim takes place in a jungle village not because the
emotional and moral problems that interest Conrad are those
peculiar to jungle villages, but because there Jim's feelings
of guilt, responsibility, and insecurity--feelings common to
mankind--work themselves out with a logic and inevitability
that are enforced by his isolation.
Conrad's finest novels are considered
to be Lord
Jim (1900), Nostromo
(1904), The
Secret Agent (1907), and Under
Western Eyes (1911), the last being three novels of
political intrigue and romance
Nostromo
(1904) is a story of revolution, politics, and financial manipulation
in a South American republic. It centers, for all its close-packed
incidents, upon one idea--the corruption of the characters by
the ambitions that they set before themselves, ambitions concerned
with silver, which forms the republic's wealth and which is
the central symbol around which the novel is organized. The
ambitions range from simple greed to idealistic desires for
reform and justice. All lead to moral disaster, and the nobler
the ambition the greater its possessor's self-disgust as he
realizes his plight.
Heart
of Darkness,(one of the Two Other Stories in Youth
and Two Other Stories, the third one being The End
of the Tether) which follows closely the actual For
Conrad's Congo journey, tells of the narrator's fascination
by a mysterious white man, Kurtz, who, by his eloquence and
hypnotic personality, dominates the brutal tribesmen around
him. Full of contempt for the greedy traders who exploit the
natives, the narrator cannot deny the power of this figure of
evil who calls forth from him something approaching reluctant
loyalty.
The
Secret Agent (1907) is a sustained essay in the ironic
and one of Conrad's finest works. It deals with the equivocal
world of anarchists, police, politicians, and agents provocateurs
in London.
Victory describes the unsuccessful attempts of a
detached, nihilistic observer of life to protect himself and
his hapless female companion from the murderous machinations
of a trio of rogues on an isolated island.
Conrad died on 3 August 1924.
CONRAD ONLINE: [Conrad
links] |
|
Amy Foster
Chance
Falk
Lord Jim
Lord
Jim
Lord
Jim
Lord
Jim
Lord
Jim (zipped)
Nostromo
Nostromo
Typhoon
Typhoon
Victory
A Set of Six
A
Set of Six
To-morrow
|
The Rover
The
Rover Part 1 Part
2
Almayer's Folly
The
Arrow of Gold
The
Arrow of Gold
A Personal Record
A
Personal Record
Some Reminiscences
The
Secret Agent
The
Secret Agent
The
Secret Agent
The Secret Sharer
The
Secret Sharer
The
Secret Sharer
Tales of Unrest
Tales of Unrest
Under
Western Eyes
|
'Twixt Land and Sea
The Mirror of the Sea
The Nigger of the Narcissus
Notes on Life and Letters
An Outcast of the Islands
Heart of Darkness
Heart
of Darkness
Heart
of Darkness
The Heart of Darkness (magazine version)
The Rescue: A Romance of the Shallows
The Shadow Line: A Confession
Youth and Two Other Stories
Within the Tides
End
of the Tether
The
Informer: An Ironic Tale
An
Anarchist: A Desperate Tale
co-author of
The Inheritors
|
1851 Gustav Schönleber, German artist who died on 01 February
1917.
1843 Daniele Ranzoni, Italian artist who died on 20 October 1889.
[No, Ranzoni is not a kind of pasta]
1830 Lord Frederick Leighton, English Pre-Raphaelite
painter and sculptor who died on 25 January 1896. [photo]
. — MORE
ON LEIGHTON AT ART “4” DECEMBER
— LINKS
— Cymon
and Iphigenia — Nausicaa
— Pavonia
— Lieder
Ohne Wörte — The
Garden of the Hesperides — Flaming
June — Dante
in Exile — A
Girl with a Basket of Fruit — Acme
and Septimus — Actaea,
the Nymph of the Shore — Bacchante
— Clytie
— Clytie
— Daedalus
and Icarus — Greek
Girls Playing Ball — Helen
of Troy — Idyll
— Invocation
— Lachrymae
— Light
of the Harem — Mother
and Child — Odalisque
— Perseus
and Andromeda — Perseus
on Pegasus Hastening to the Rescue of Andromeda — Return
of Persephone — Seaside
Flowers — Solitude
— Sybil
— The
Bath of Psyche — The
Fisherman and the Siren — The
Golden Hours — The
Maid with the Golden Hair — The
Music Lesson — The
Painter’s Honeymoon — The
Spirit of the Summit — Venus
Disrobing for the Bath — Winding
the Skein — Cimabue's
Madonna Carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence
1826 George McClellan, future
Union General, is born in Philadelphia.
Although McClellan emerged early
in the US Civil War as a Union hero, he failed to effectively
prosecute the war in the East. McClellan graduated from West
Point in 1846, second in his class. He served with distinction
in the Mexican War under General Winfield Scott, and continued
in the military until 1857. After retiring from the service,
McClellan served as president of the Illinois Central Railroad,
where he became acquainted with Abraham Lincoln, who was then
an attorney for the company.
When the war began, McClellan
was appointed major general in charge of the Ohio volunteers.
In 1861, he command Union forces in western Virginia, where
his reputation grew as the Yankees won many small battles and
secured control of the region. Although many historians have
argued that it was McClellan's subordinates who deserved most
of the credit, McClellan was elevated to commander of the main
Union army in the east, the Army of the Potomac, following that
army's humiliating defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run.
McClellan took command in July
1861 and did an admirable job of building an effective force.
He was elevated to general-in-chief of all Union armies when
his commander during the Mexican War, Scott, retired at the
end of October. McClellan was beloved by his soldiers but was
arrogant and contemptuous of Lincoln and the Republican leaders
in Congress. A staunch Democrat, he was opposed to attacking
the institution of slavery as a war measure. While his work
as an administrator earned high marks, his weakness was revealed
when he took the field with his army in the spring of 1862.
McClellan lost to Robert E. Lee
during the Seven Days' battles, and as a field commander he
was sluggish, hesitant, and timid. President Lincoln then moved
most of McClellan's command to John Pope, but Pope was beaten
badly by Lee at the Second Battle of Bull Run. When Lee invaded
Maryland in September 1862, Lincoln restored McClellan's command.
Though the president had grave misgivings about McClellan's
leadership, he wrote during the emergency that "we must use
the tools we have...There is no man in the Army who can man
these fortifications and lick these troops into shape half as
well as he."
McClellan pursued Lee into western
Maryland, and on 17 September 1862 the two armies fought to
a standstill along Antietam Creek. Heavy loses forced Lee to
return to Virginia, providing McClellan with a nominal victory.
Shortly after the battle, Lincoln declared the Emancipation
Proclamation, which converted the war into a crusade against
slavery, a measure bitterly criticized by McClellan. The general's
failure to pursue Lee into Virginia led Lincoln to order McClellan's
permanent removal in November. The Democrats nominated McClellan
for president in 1864. He ran against his old boss, but managed
to garner only 21 of 233 electoral votes. After the war, he
served as governor of New Jersey. He died on 29 October 1885,
in Orange, New Jersey. |
1793 William Clarkson Frederick Stanfield, English painter who
died on 18 May 1867. — LINKS
— An Italian
Lake Town
1755 Gilbert Stuart, US painter specialized in portraits, who
died on 09 July 1828. — MORE
ON STUART AT ART “4” DECEMBER
— LINKS
— Josiah
Quincy — James
MacDonald of Inglesmauldie — Reverend
William Ellery Channing — William
Rufus Gray — Richard
Yates — Washington
(half-length) (1795) — George
Washington (1796) — Washington
at Dorchester Heights (1806) — James
Madison — John
Adams (1810) — John
Adams (1826)
1729 Padre Antonio Soler Olot Spain, composer (Fandango)
1684 Ludvig Baron Holberg, a founder of Danish & Norwegian literature
1621 Pieter Gysels (or Gheysels, Gyzens, Gysen), Flemish painter
who died in 1690. — LINKS
— Still
Life near a Fountain (1685) — Garden
— A Winter
Carnival in a Small Flemish Town
1368 Charles VI [the Well-Beloved], king of France (1380-1422)
|
2000
Gwendolyn Brooks, 83, poet, of cancer.
