Month: January 2018

Henry Justice Ford

Henry Justice Ford, Illustration of Beowulf from Andrew Lang’s  “The Red Book of Animal Stories”, 1899

Henry Justice Ford was a prolific and successful English artist and illustrator, active from 1886 through to the late 1920s. Sometimes known as H. J. Ford or Henry J. Ford, he came to public attention when he provided the numerous beautiful illustrations for Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books, which captured the imagination of a generation of British children and were sold worldwide in the 1880s and 1890s.

Calendar: January 31

Year: Day to Day Men: January 31

Stereoscopic Viewing

On January 31st in 1800, one of the earliest Native American literary writers, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, was born in Sault Ste. Marie located in the upper peninsula of the present state of Michigan. She was of Scottish-Irish and Ojibwe ancestry, born to John Johnston, a fur trader, and Ozhaguscodaywayquay, the daughter of Waubojeeg, a prominent Ojibwe war chief. Her parents were historically famous leaders in both the Ojibwe and Euro-American communities. 

Jane Johnson Schoolcraft was fluent in the language and learned of both the English and Ojibwe cultures, which offered her a unique perspective for her creative work. She wrote poetry and traditional Ojibwe stores and translated many Ojibwe songs into English. Schoolcraft mostly wrote in English but published some poems in the Ojibwe language. 

In her early twenties, Jane Johnston met Henry Schoolcraft, an American ethnologist and geographer who was conducting an expedition in the territory of present-day Michigan. They married in 1822 and began a relationship that proved significant for both of them. The marriage offered Jane a means to express her own literary talents; she also provided Henry insights on Ojibwe culture and language that aided his ethnological work. 

Jane Schoolcraft’s poetry and translated Obijwe stories made noteworthy contributions to American literature. Her work is one of the earliest examples of Native American literature published in the United States. Schoolcraft’s influence is evident in many of the stories that Henry Schoolcraft collected; her translations and insights aided him in his later role as a government agent for Native Americans.

In 1826 and 1827, Schoolcraft’s writings were published in a handwritten magazine entitled “The Literary Voyager”, produced by Henry Schoolcraft. These issues were distributed widely to residents of Sault Ste. Marie as well as people in New York, Detroit and other cities. Her work also appeared in a six-volume study known as “Indian Tribes of the United States” that was commissioned in 1846 by the United States Congress. 

In 1841, Henry and Jane Schoolcraft moved to New York City where Henry was employed by the state of New York to research Native American culture. After having suffered several illnesses, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft died at the age of forty-two in May of 1842 while visiting her married sister in Canada. She was buried at St. John’s Anglican Church in present-day Ancaster, Ontario. Schoolcraft is recognized as the first Native American literary writer, both as a woman and a poet, as well as the first to write out traditional Native American stories.

Notes: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s Ojibwe name was Bamewawagezhikaquay, the literary translation means “Woman of the Sound (that the stars make) Rushing Through the Sky”. Her writings began to attract interest in the 1990s as work by minority communities began to be more widely studied. In 2008, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft was inducted into the Michigan’s Women’s Hall of Fame. 

Xavier and Antonio Bueno

Xavier and Antonio Bueno, “Double Self Portrait”, 1944, Oil on Canvas, Museo Civico Pier Alessandro Garda

This double self portrait is an exemplary painting, sealing the extraordinary artistic and personal symbiosis between the two Bueno brothers. The unique iconography depicting the brothers intent on portraying each other on the same canvas is unheard of in the whole of art history. There was a close artistic symbiosis and a relationship of mutual influence between the two brothers.

The sons of an international journalist, the brothers Bueno stayed for ten years in Italy after spending their childhood in Berlin, Geneva and Paris. In 1940, they arrived in Florence to study its Renaissance heritage, intending to stay only a short while. Both artists, however, ended up living out the rest of their days in the Tuscan capital.

During their lives there, the biographies of the two brothers are practically indiscernible, and their creative processes proceed following an apparent common matrix. Both of these artists, along with artistic peers Pietro Annigoni and Gregory Sciltian, were part of the small group that signed the Manifesto of Modern Realist Painters, and part of the related movement that lasted from 1947 to 1949.

Steven K. Simons and Sonya Nevin

Steven K. Simons and Sonya Nevin, Gifs from “The Panoply Vase Animation Project’

Steve K. Simons and Sonya Nevin are in Westminster, England. The Panoply Vase Project site is: http://www.panoply.org.uk

Steve Simons has been making vase animations since 2007.  With a history in software engineering, Steve studied multimedia production and design before becoming a freelance animator.

Sonya Nevins is a Research Fellow at the University of Roehampton in London.  She did her doctorate on ancient Greek warfare at University College Dublin.   She has worked and volunteered in the Ure Museum, the UCD Classical Museum, and the Royal Museums Greenwich.  Sonya’s research and teaching interests include religion, warfare, and historiography.

Calendar: January 30

Year: Day to Day Men: January 30

Ginger on White

January 30th of 1910 marks the death of African-American inventor Granville Tailer Woods who registered nearly sixty patents in his lifetime and made vital contributions to the railroad industry. He also made improvements to technological devices such as the telephone, telegraph and phonograph.

Born in Columbus, Ohio in April of 1856, Granville Woods received little education as a young man. As a teenager, he was employed in a variety of work including as  a steel mill worker and an engineer in both a railroad machine shop and onboard the British steamer, Ironsides. Between 1876 and 1878, Woods resided in New York City and took courses in engineering and electricity, subjects he knew were necessary for industry’s future. 

Returning to Ohio in 1878, Woods was employed by the Springfield, Jackson and Pomeroy Railroad Company for eight months and later by the Dayton and Southeastern Railroad Company as an locomotive engineer for thirteen months. It was during this time that he began to form ideas for his later invention, the inductor telegraph. In the spring of 1880, Woods moved to Cincinnati where he founded the Woods Electric Company to develop, manufacture and sell electrical apparatus. In 1884, he filed his first patent for an improved steam boiler furnace; his later patents were predominantly for electrical devises. 

Granville Wood’s 1885 patent for an improved telephone transmitter, which allowed a station to send voice as well as Morse code over a single wire, was purchased by the American Bell Telephone Company owned by Alexander Graham Bell. In 1887, he secured his patent for the creation of a magnetic coiled-wire field, that placed under a train, enabled communication between stations and moving trains by using the ambient static electricity of the existing telegraph lines. Challenged twice in court by Thomas Edison over the rights to this patent, Woods defeated Edison by proving there were no existing devices by which he could have relied on to make his device. 

Woods manufactured a system of overhead electric conducting lines for railroads, an idea he modeled after a system developed by Charles van Depoele. Wood’s 1888 patent relied on wire brushes to make connections with metallic terminal heads, without exposing wires, through electrical contact rails. Once the train car had passed, the wires were no longer live and risk of injury was diminished. The invention was successfully tested in 1892 on the Figure Eight Roller Coaster in Coney Island. Patented in 1893, Woods sold the patent to General Electric in 1901.

In 1896, Granville Woods patented a system for controlling electrical lights in theaters, which became known as the safety dimmer. This device was safe and efficient and saved theaters forty per cent of electricity use. Between 1902 and 1907, Woods patented twelve devices that made improvements on the country’s railway system. Among these were devices that improved motor and vehicle control, automatic air brakes, and safety apparatus.

The first African American mechanical and electrical engineer after the Civil War, Granville Tailer Woods died of a cerebral hemorrhage at New York City’s Harlem Hospital on the 30th of January in 1910. His burial at St. Michael’s Cemetery in East Elmhurst, New York was without headstone or ceremony. In 1975 with donations from cooperations that used Woods’s patents, a headstone was erected at his grave site. In 2006, Granville T. Woods was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Alexandria, Virginia.

Pectoral Ornamental Necklace

Pectoral Ornamental Necklace, Egypt, 18th Dynasty

This pectoral necklace clasped with three scarab beetles was discovered in the intact KV62 tomb of Tutankhamun who ruled during the 18th dynasty of Egypt’s New Kingdom. This jewellry depicts Scrab Beetles or Kehpri, pushing the sun. The pectoral is today part of the collection of the Cairo Museum. This photo was taken at the King Tut exhibition at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, Washington State, USA.

Calendar: January 29

A Year: Day to Day Men: 29th of January

When in Rome… Live as the Romans Do.

January 29, 1845 marked the first publication date of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”.

The Raven is a narrative poem by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe. The poem is often noted for its musicality, stylized language, and supernatural atmosphere. It tells of a talking raven’s’s mysterious visit to a distraught lover, tracing the man’s slow fall into madness. The lover, often identified as being a student, is lamenting the loss of his love, Lenore. Sitting on a bust of Pallas, the Greek Goddess of Wisdom, the raven seems to further instigate his distress with its constant repetition of the word “Nevermore”. The poem makes use of a number of folk, mythological, religious, and classical references.

Poe emphasized the occult undertones by setting the poem in December, a month which is traditionally associated with the forces of darkness. The use of the raven—the “devil bird”—also suggests this. This devil image is emphasized by the narrator’s belief that the raven is “from the Night’s Plutonian shore”, or a messenger from the afterlife, referring to Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld. Poe also said that the raven is meant to symbolize “mournful and never-ending remembrance’.

Poe claimed to have written the poem very logically and methodically, intending to create a poem that would appeal to both critical and popular tastes, as he explained in his 1846 follow-up essay, “The philosophy of Composition”. Poe borrowed the complex rhythm and meter of Elizabeth Barrett’s poem “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship”.

“The Raven” was first attributed to Poe in print in the New York Evening Mirror on January 29, 1845. Its publication made Poe widely popular in his lifetime, although it did not bring him much financial success. Critical opinion is divided as to the poem’s literary status, but it nevertheless remains one of the most famous poems ever written.