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. — more
with links to images.
1830 Lord Frederick Leighton,
English Pre-Raphaelite
painter and sculptor who died on 25 January 1896. — MORE
ON LEIGHTON AT ART “4” DECEMBER
with links to images.
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. — MORE
ON STANFIELD AT ART “4” DECEMBER
with links to images.
1755 Gilbert Stuart, US painter
specialized in portraits, who died on 09 July 1828. — MORE
ON STUART AT ART “4” DECEMBER
with links to images.
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. — more
with links to images.
1368 Charles VI [the Well-Beloved], king of France
(1380-1422) |
On
a December 03: 
2000
Gwendolyn Brooks, 83, poet, of cancer.
