Year: 2018

Calendar: December 12

A Year: Day to Day Men: 12th of December

The Library’s Leather Armchair

Born at Haggerston, Middlesex in November of 1656, Edmond Halley was an English astronomer, mathematician and physicist. Very interested in mathematics as a child, he studied at London’s St. Paul’s School where he developed an interest in astronomy. In July of 1673, Halley began studying at Queens’ College, Oxford where he was influenced by the work of the Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed’s effort to catalogue the stars of the northern hemisphere. While still an under graduate, he published papers on the solar system and sunspots. 

In 1676, Halley published his first paper about planetary orbits. He later dropped out of school to travel to the south Atlantic island of Saint Helena, west of Africa, to observe and chart the stars of the southern hemisphere with cross-references to the northern stars. Supported in his endeavor by King Charles II, he set up an observatory and observed a transit of Mercury across the Sun. From the solar parallax of the planet, he determined it was possible to trigonometrically to determine the distances between the Earth, Venus and the Sun. 

Edmond Halley produced his chart of the southern stars and, with the assistance of Charles II, was awarded his Master of Arts degree from Oxford in December of 1678; a few days later, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of twenty-two. In September of 1682, Halley conducted a series of observations on what would be known as Halley’s Comet. Because of his work on the orbit, he was able to predict its return in 1758. 

In 1691, Halley sought the post of Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford. While a candidate, he faced the opposition of both John Flamsteed, the Astronomer Royal, and the Anglican Church which questioned his religious views, specifically because he has questioned the Earth’s age as given in the Bible. Halley, also opposed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. was unsuccessful in his attempt.

On December 12th in 1696, Edmond Halley was censured by the Royal Society for suggesting in a 1694 paper. titled “Some Considerations About the Cause of the Universal Deluge”, the story of Noah’s flood in the Bible could be an account of a cometary impact. It should be noted that a similar theory was suggested three centuries later; however, it has generally been rejected by geologists of the present day. 

Halley eventually succeeded John Flamsteed as Astronomer Royal in 1720, a position he held until his death in 1742 at the age of eighty-five. He was interred at the old church of St. Margaret’s, Lee Terrace,  Blackheath; he lies within the same vault as Astronomer Royal John Pond and close to the unmarked grave of Astronomer Royal Nathaniel Bliss.  

Calendar: December 11

A Year: Day to Day Men; 11th of December

Handstand at Window

December 11 was the birthdate of American astronomer Annie Jump Cannon. 

Born in Dover, Delaware to Wilson Cannon, a shipbuilder, and Mary Jump, Annie Jump Cannon was encouraged by her mother to follow her own interests and suggested studies in chemistry, biology and mathematics at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. Taught by her mother to identify stars at an early age, Cannon decided to pursue her love of astronomy. She also made the choice not to marry or bear children. 

In 1880, Annie Cannon attended Wellesley College, one of the top academic schools for women, where she studied under Sarah Francis Whiting, one of the few women physicists in the United States at that time. Cannon graduated as the valedictorian of the college in 1884 with a degree in physics. She returned for a decade to Delaware where she developed skills in the new art of photography. Cannon traveled through Europe in 1892 taking photographs, later published along with her prose in a pamphlet, “In the Footsteps of Columbus”. This pamphlet was later used as a souvenir for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. 

Stricken with scarlet fever, Cannon became nearly deaf and immersed her self in her work. She became a junior physics teacher at Wellesley College in 1894 and took graduate courses in both physics and astronomy. In order to gain access to a more powerful telescope, Cannon enrolled at Radcliffe College as a special student; she was able to attend lectures by Harvard professors and gained access to the Harvard College Observatory. In 1896 Cannon was hired as an assistant to the observatory’s astronomer and physicist Edward C. Pickering. In 1907, she graduated with her Masters Degree from Wellesley in 1907. 

In 1896, Annine Cannon became a member of Pickering’s Harvard Computers, a group whose goal was to complete the Henry Draper Catalogue, a mapping and definition of every star in the sky to a photographic magnitude of nine. When Cannon first started cataloging stars, she was able to classify one- thousand stars in three years. By 1013, she was able to accurately classify two-hundred stars an hour by looking at their spectral patterns. 

Cannon is credited with the creation of the Harvard Classification Scheme, the first serious attempt to organize and classify stars based on their temperature and spectral types. She initially started by examining stars in the southern hemisphere and divided them into the spectral classes O, B, A, F, G, K, M based on the Balmer absorption lines that describe the spectral line emissions of the hydrogen atom. After this was understood, her initial classification system was rearranged to avoid updating previous star catalogues. 

In 1911, Annie Jump Cannon was made Curator of Astronomical Photographs at Harvard. Three years later, she became an honorary member of England’s Royal Astronomical Society. In 1922, the International Astronomical Society adopted Cannon’s classification system; except for a few minor changes, it is the basis of star classification to this date. Throughout her forty year career, Cannon manually classified more stars in a lifetime then anyone else, a total of approximately three-hundred and fifty thousand stars. 

Calendar: December 10

A Year: Day to Day Men: 10th of December

Warmth of the Sun

December 10th turned out to be an amazing day for film viewers.

On December 10, 1962, David Lean’s film “Lawrence of Arabia”, based on the life of Thomas Edward Lawrence, premiered at Odeon Leicester Square Academy. The epic historical drama is considered one of the most influential films in the history of cinema. The desert scenes were shot in Jordan and Morocco, as well as Almeria and Doñana in Spain. During the filming of the Aqaba scene, Peter O’Toole was nearly killed when he fell from his camel, but it fortunately stood over him, preventing the horses of the extras from trampling him. Coincidentally, a very similar mishap befell the real Lawrence at the Battle of Abu El Lissal in 1917. The film was nominated for ten Oscars at the 35th Academy Awards in 1963; it won seven in total including Best Picture, Best Cinematography, and Best Original Score.

On December 10, 1978, “Superman: The Movie, directed by Richard Donner and starring Christopher Reeve, Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman and Margot Kidder, premieres at the Uptown Theater in Washington, DC.

“Out of Africa” based on the book by Isak Dinesen, directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, premiered in Los Angeles on December 10th, 1985. This film won Best Picture at the Awards in 1986.

On December 10th, 2001, “The Fellowship of the Ring” directed by Peter Jackson and starring Elijah Wood and Ian McKellen premiered in London at the Odeon Leicester Square Theater. It became the second highest-grossing film for that year in the US and worldwide. In 2007, the film was voted Number 50 on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 Greatest American Film

Calendar: December 9

A Year: Day to Day Men: 9th of December

An Anchor on Black Cord

The animated television special “A Charlie Brown Christmas” made its television debut on the Columbia Broadcasting System, CBS, on the ninth of December in 1965. Produced by Lee Mendelson and directed by Bill Melendez, it was the first television special based on the comic strip “Peanuts”, written and drawn by American cartoonist Charles Schulz. The television special won an Emmy Award in 1966. 

Charles Schulz is widely regarded as one of the most influential cartoonists in history and a major influence for other cartoonists. Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in November of 1922, he always loved drawing through his early formative years. Drafted into the United States Army, Schulz served as a staff sergeant with the 20th Armored Division in the European theater during World War ii. For being under fire, he received the Combat Infantry Badge. 

In late 1945 upon his return to Minnesota, Schulz did lettering work for a Roman Catholic comic magazine “Timeless Topix”. In July of 1946, he was employed at Art Instruction, Inc. where he reviewed and graded students’ artwork. Schulz’s first group of regular cartoons, a weekly series of one-panel jokes called “Li’l Folks”, was published from June of 1947 to January of 1950 in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. It was in this series that a character with the name Charlie Brown and a dog quite like Snoopy first appeared. 

In January of 1950, United Feature Syndicate became interested in Schulz’s “Li’l Folks”. Schulz had expanded the strip to four panels, a version the syndicate preferred. However, due to legal reasons, the syndicate changed the name to “Peanuts”. The comic strip’s first appearance was in seven newspapers on the second of October in 1950. Its appearance on the weekly Sunday page debuted on the sixth of January in 1952. The “Peanuts” strip eventually became one of the most popular comic strips of all time, as well as one of the most influential.

During the entire run of “Peanuts”, Charles Schulz took only one vacation, a five-week break in late 1997 to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday. Many of the ideas for the characters in the strip were taken from family members and close friends, such as Peppermint Patty who was inspired by his cousin Patricia and the peppermint candies Schulz kept in his house. Charles Schulz was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian medal the United States legislature can bestow. He also received the Silver Buffalo Award, the highest adult award given by the Boy Scouts of America, as well as a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, adjacent to the Star of Walt Disney.

Ellsworth Kelly

Ellsworth Kelly, “Self Portrait with Thorn”,  1947, Oil on Wood, 36 x 24 Inches, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California

Born in Newburgh, New York, in 1923, Ellsworth Kelly studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. After serving in the military from 1943 to 1945, he attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and later enrolled in 1949 at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. It was in France where Kelly was introduced to Surrealism which resulted in his experimental geometric abstractions.

Ellsworth Kelly met the Abstractionist painter Jean Arp in 1950 and began making shaped wood collages and reliefs. He also began making paintings on various panels which could be rearranged in various compositions. Kelly’s travels through France in the early 1950s brought him in contact with abstract and cubist painters and sculptors, such as Alexander Calder, Francis Picabia and Constantin Brancusi. 

Kelly had his first solo show in 1951 at the Galerie Arnaud Lefebvre in Paris. Returning to the United States in 1954, he continued his exploration of painting, working with form and ground on flatly painted canvases. By the late 1950s, his work stressing shape and flat surfaces bridged the gap between the 1930s to 1940s geometric abstraction to the minimalism of the mid-1960s and 1970s. Kelly and his contemporary American artists developed a style of abstraction with shaped panels of bright colors and rigid forms. which later was termed “hard-edge painting” by art historian Jules Langsner.

In 1956, Ellsworth Kelly had his first solo show in the United States located at the Betty Parsons Gallery on 57th Street in New York City. In 1959 his work was included in the show “16 Americans” at the New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Kelly began working in 1974 on a series of metallic totemic sculptures, fashioned from steel and aluminum. He received many public commissions: a 1978 sculpture for the city of Barcelona, a mural for UNESCO in Paris, and a memorial sculpture for the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.

“I realized I didn’t want to compose pictures … I wanted to find them. I felt that my vision was choosing things out there in the world and presenting them. To me the investigation of perception was of the greatest interest. There was so much to see, and it all looked fantastic to me.”- Ellsworth Kelly, 1996

Note: More information on Ellsworth Kelly, including images of his Color-Field paintings, can be found in the January 21, 2022, article in the Ultrawolves Archive.

Calendar: December 8

A Year: Day to Day Men: 8th of December

Saturday Morning After Shower

On the eighth of December in 1881, Vienna’s Ring Theater was destroyed by a gaslight fire that killed three hundred and eighty-four people.

The popular Ring Theater in Vienna, Austria was built between 1872 and 1874 by architect Heinrich von Förster from plans drawn by Emil Ritter. Opening in January of 1874 under the direction of operatic tenor and actor Albin Swoboda Sr, it was originally the Opéra Comique. In September of 1878, it changed its name to the Ring Theater and its focus to spoken plays and variety presentations as well as German and Italian operas. 

As the footprint of the theater was small and it was intended for an audience of seventeen hundred, the architect designed the theater with four levels. On the eight of December in 1881, a fire began shortly before a performance of “Les Contes Fantastiques d’Hoffmann”, a French libretto written by composer Jacques Offenbach. The theater’s entire interior was engulfed in flames and collapsed; three hundred and eight-four people perished. In 1882, new regulations for theaters were passed regarding public safety provisions, including outward-opening doors, safety curtains and the fireproofing of the theater sets. 

The Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary Franz Joseph used his private funds to build an apartment building on the site of the demolished Ring Theater. Although a private residence, it supported worthy public causes. This building also suffered a fire in 1945 with heavy damages and eventually collapsed in 1951.

Between the years 1969 and 1974, an office building occupied the site and served as the federal headquarters for the Vienna police and federal security guards: a plaque commemorating the fire is installed on the police headquarters. The original Attic-styled statues from the Ring Theater are now in Vienna’s Pötzleinsdorfer Schlosspark, a sprawling natural preserve with statues, wildlife areas and a small farm. 

Calendar: December 7

A Year: Day to Day Men: 7th of December

Doffed Pants of Purple Hue

On December 7th in 1995, the unmanned Galileo spacecraft arrived at the planet Jupiter on its mission to study the planet and its moons. It had been launched six years earlier by the Space Shuttle Atlantis on October 18th of 1989. 

The Galileo was an American robotic space probe which consisted of an orbiter and an entry probe. It was named after the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei. Called the father of observational astronomy, Galilei studied speed, velocity, gravity and free fall, inertia, projectile motion and the principle of relativity. He also improved military compasses and the telescope that he used to observe the four largest satellites of Jupiter.

The U. S. Jet Propulsion Laboratory built the Galileo spacecraft and managed the Galileo program for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA. Its propulsion unit was supplied by West Germany’s aerospace manufacturer Messerschmitt-Bölkow-Blohm. The Ames Research Center of NASA managed the atmospheric probe that was built by the Hughes Aircraft company. The combined mass of the orbiter and probe was 2,562 kilograms and had a height of 6.15 meters. 

The nuclear powered Galileo orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003. After ten months of operating and sending information to Earth, the Galileo was intentionally destroyed in Jupiter’s atmosphere on the 21st of September in 2003. Its successor, Juno, part of the New Frontiers program, entered the polar orbit of Jupiter on the 5th of July in 2016. The Juno is powered by three solar panels, the largest ever deployed on a planetary probe at the time of its launching.

Takahiro Kimura

Takahiro Kimura, Titles Unknown, 2000, Paint and Collage on Canvas

Born in the Fukuoka Prefecture of Tokyo in 1965, Takahiro Kimura is a Japanese animator, illustrator, and character designer. He studied painting and graphic design at Salesian Polytechnic. Kimura later studied drawing, landscape painting and fashion design at Setsu Mode Seminar. While experimenting with collages and combining paint and photographs, he produced illustrations for books and advertisements. 

Kimura’s work focuses on the human face. His collages are formed by arranging different segments of facial photographs and applying overlays of paint. With this distortion process,  Kimura attempts to expose the human spirit in his figurative work. He has also produced several collage animations, a short film, and an art book entitled “Risky Dolls

Several of Takahiro Kimura’s animation films, as well as collages and paintings, can be found on http://www.faceful.jp/distinations/movie/

Tim O’Brien: “The Implacable Otherness of Others”

Photographer Unknown, Title Unknown, (The Red Wall)

“We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible.”
― Tim O’Brien, In the Lake of the Woods

Calendar: December 6

A Year: Day to Day Men: 6th of December

Apple Picker

On December 6, 1421, Henry VI was born. The only child of Henry V,  he succeeded to the English throne at the age of nine months upon his father’s death, and succeeded to the French throne on the death of his maternal grandfather Charles VI shortly afterwards.

Completely unlike his aggressive father, Henry had a timid, shy, and passive personality, seemed mostly well-intentioned, and disliked warfare and violence; he was also at times mentally unstable. This resulted in various nobles (who often had diverging interests among themselves) attempting to establish control over him, throughout his reign. He proved an indecisive and ineffective ruler, overall incapable of leading his country in times of adversity.

As the situation involving the contesting of the claims to the throne in France worsened, political instability in England also increased. General misrule brought in waves of civil unrest and a breakdown in law and order. Parts of the English nobility began to resent the king’s favouritism, his inability to defend their lands in France, and some of his overall policy decisions.

Partially in the hope of achieving peace, in 1445 Henry married Charles VII’s niece, Margaret of Anjou, an ambitious and strong-willed woman who would come to influence much of the King’s decisions and become an effective power behind the throne and whose scheming would widen the rift among the English aristocracy. The peace policy failed, leading to the murder of William de la Pole, one of Henry’s key advisors. By 1453, Calais was Henry’s only remaining territory on the continent.

Henry VI was deposed from the throne on March 29, 1461 by Richard of York’s son who took the throne as Edward IV and imprisoned Henry in the Tower of London in 1465. Henry was restored to the throne in 1470 only to be imprisoned again in the Tower in 1471 where he died on May 21, 1471, possibly killed on the orders of Edward IV.