1293 – Earthquake strikes Kamakura Japan, 30,000 killed
1303 – Treaty of Paris restores Gascony to the English and arranges for marriage of English Prince Edward to French Princess Isabella
1521 – Ignatius Loyola seriously wounded by a cannon ball (and it wasn’t dropped on his toe.)
1639 – Dorchester Mass, forms first school funded by local taxes
1704 – Elias Neau forms school for slaves in New York
1830 – First railroad timetable published in newspaper (Baltimore American)
1830 – D Hyde patents fountain pen
1845 – HMS Erebus and HMS Terror with 134 men under John Franklin sail from the River Thames in England, beginning a disastrous expedition to find the Northwest Passage. All hands are lost.
1861 – US marshals appropriate previous year’s telegraph dispatches, to reveal pro-secessionist evidence
1882 – St Gotthard-railroad tunnel between Switzerland and Italy opens
1891 – History of cinema: The first public display of Thomas Edison’s prototype kinetoscope.
1895 – First commercial movie performance (153 Broadway, NYC)
1910 – Funeral for Britain’s King Edward VII
1916 – Codell, Kansas hit by tornado (also on same date in 1917 & 1918)
1916 – Saturday Evening Post cover features Norman Rockwell painting
1926 – Thomas Edison says Americans prefer silent movies over talkies
1927 – At 7:40 AM, pilot Charles Lindbergh takes off from NY to cross Atlantic for Paris
1930 – First airplane catapulted from a dirigible, Charles Nicholson, pilot
1932 – Amelia Earhart leaves Newfoundland first woman fly solo across Atlantic
1956 – Atomic fusion (thermonuclear) bomb dropped from plane-Bikini Atoll
1961 – White mob attacks “Freedom Riders” in Montgomery, Alabama
1967 – 10,000 demonstrate against war in Vietnam
1989 – China declares martial law in Beijing
1991 – Soviet parliament approves law allowing citizens to travel abroad
2013 – Yahoo purchases Tumbler for $1.1 Billion
Birthdays
1759 – William Thornton, architect (Capitol building, Wash DC)
1844 – Henri Julien Felix Rousseau, French ambassador/painter (Dream)
In 1844, Henri Julien Félix Rousseau was born in Laval France, the son of a plumber but was not interested in plumbing for a living. He ventured to Paris when he was 24 and married his landlord’s 15 year old daughter. They had six children, though only one survived. Rousseau was a Parisian bureaucrat earning his living collecting taxes of goods entering Paris and counting on retirement. He began painting in his early forties and a few years later when he did retire he painted full time. Self taught and claiming that he “had no teacher other than nature”.
He supplemented his pension with small jobs such as producing covers for Le petit journal and playing his violin on the streets of Paris. It’s said that Picasso saw a painting of his being sold on the street as a canvas to be painted over and actually hosted a banquet in this studio in Rousseau’s honor.
Rousseau exhibited his final painting, The Dream, at the 1910 Salon des Independants a few months before his death on September 2, 1910. Among his friends at his funeral were painter Paul Signac sculptor Brâncuși, Rousseau’s landlord Armand Queval and Guillaume Apollinaire who wrote the epitaph Brâncuși put on the tombstone:
We salute you Gentle Rousseau you can hear us.
Delaunay, his wife, Monsieur Queval and myself.
Let our luggage pass duty free through the gates of heaven.
We will bring you brushes paints and canvas.
That you may spend your sacred leisure in the
light and Truth of Painting.
As you once did my portrait facing the stars, lion and the gypsy.
1851 – Emile Berliner, Germany, inventor (flat phonograph record)
1944 – Joe Cocker, Sheffield England, rock vocalist
1946 – Cher [Cherilyn Sarkisian], California
deaths
1277 – John XXI, Portuguese Pope dies
1503 – Lorenzo de Medici, Italian patron (b. 1463)
1506 – Christopher Columbus, explorer, dies in poverty, in Spain at 55
2000 – Jean Pierre Rampal, French flutist (b. 1922)
2002 – Stephen Jay Gould, American paleontologist (b. 1941) |
