Calendar: March 7

Year: Day to Day Men: March 7

Gold Pinstripes

The seventh of March in the year 1837 marks the birth date of American physician and amateur astronomer Henry Draper. Both a professor and Dean of Medicine at City University of New York, he was one of the pioneers in the field of astrophotography.

Born to John William Draper, a professor at New York University, and Antonia Caetana de Paiva Pereira Gardner, daughter of the royal physician to the Emperor of Brazil, Henry Draper completed all his medical courses at the City University of New York’s School of Medicine by the age of twenty. Too young to graduate, he toured Europe for a year and became acquainted with the work of Irish astronomer William Parsons, Third Earl of Rosse. Draper’s interest in photography and the Earl of Rosse’s observatory would later become the basis of his career.

On his return from Europe, Draper received his Medical Degree and began working as a physician at Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital. In 1860, he received appointment at the City University of New York as Professor of Natural Science. Draper joined the Twelfth New York Infantry Regiment’s S Company in May of 1862 as a surgeon during the Civil War. His brother, John Christopher Draper, joined him as an assistant surgeon; they served together as surgeons until October in 1862. Draper became Chairman of the Department of Physiology at City University in 1866.

Henry Draper met Mary Anna Palmer, the daughter of Connecticut merchant and real estate investor Courtlandt Palmer, and married her in 1867. A well-educated woman, Mary Anna Draper collaborated with her husband in his expeditions, research and photography. Upon her father’s death in 1872, she became heir, along with her three brothers, to her father’s fortune. Henry and Mary Anna Draper relocated to their summer home in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, where they constructed an observatory with a 71 cm (28 inch) reflecting telescope and began a fifteen-year research partnership.

Interested in the application of photography to astronomy, Draper started making daguerrotypes of the sun and moon; however in 1872, he succeeded for the first time in photographing the stellar spectrum of the star Vega. Draper discovered in 1879 that the newly developed dry-photographic plates were more sensitive and convenient than the older wet-collodion ones. By 1882 with the use of the newer photographic plates, he was able to obtain over a hundred stellar spectra images, including those of the Moon, Mars, Jupiter (1880) and the Orion Nebula. Draper also succeeded in directly photographing the Orion Nebula, first in September of 1880 with a fifty-minute exposure and later with a one hundred-forty minute exposure though the use of a more accurate clock-driven telescope.

In 1882, Henry Draper resigned from City University to concentrate on his astrophotographic work for which he hoped to obtain higher resolution images. On the twentieth of November in 1882, Draper suffered an untimely death at the age of forty-five from double pleurisy, an inflammation of the membranes that surround the lungs and line the chest cavity.

After his death, Mary Anna Draper funded the Henry Draper Award of the National Academy of Sciences for outstanding contributions to astrophysics. She founded the Henry Draper Memorial Fund which financed the famous Henry Draper Catalogue, a nine-volume collection published between 1918 and 1924 that contains spectra details of two hundred twenty-five thousand stars. Draper’s donations enabled astronomer Edward Charles Pickering to continue his classification of stars based on their spectra. She also funded the construction of the Mount Wilson Observatory as well as ongoing research at the Harvard Observatory.

Calendar: March 6

Year: Day to Day Men: March 6

Embossed in Every Song

The sixth of March in 1665 marks the publishing of the first journal in the world exclusively devoted to science. Published under the name “Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society”, this journal of natural philosophy, the equivalent of what is today science, is also the world’s longest published scientific journal.

The first issue of “Transactions”, printed in London, was edited and published by the Royal Society’s first secretary Henry Oldenberg. The Society had resolved that the council’s minutes be composed by the secretary and printed on the first Monday of every month; any tracts published were to be revised before publication and became the property of the Royal Society. Oldenberg printed the journal at his own personal expense and was allowed by the society to retain any resulting profits. He published one hundred-thirty six issues of the “Transactions” with no financial gain except the cost of rent on his house.

The “Transactions” was a well-regulated scientific journal. At its inception, regulation in the form of registering the author and date, peer review, dissemination and archiving published articles were all implemented. Oldenberg envisioned the published journal as a collective notebook between scientists to examine new ideas and discoveries. Issue number one contained articles on the improvement of optic glasses, the first report on Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, new whale fishing in the Bermudas, and chemist Robert Boyle’s article “Experimental History of Cold”.

Although many readers saw the journal as the official periodical of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenberg always claimed that “Transactions” was entirely his sole enterprise. From this understanding, Oldenberg retained the prospect of financial gain and credibility by association, and the Royal Society enjoyed communicating advances in science without being directly responsible for its content. It should be understood that at this time in England, publications were heavily regulated and the idea of a free press did not exist. The first English newspaper, The London Gazette, at its appearance in November of 1665 was still an official organ of the government.

In 1752, the Royal Society took control of the “Philosophical Transactions” and, as such, published it for the sole use and benefit of the society. The journal was financed through membership’s subscriptions and was edited by the society’s Committee of Papers. Although the society’s secretaries were responsible for management decisions such as printing and distribution, editorial control was done through the Committee of Papers’s weekly meetings. Records were kept regarding the authors, the source of the work, and the date the scientific paper was presented to the committee.

Over the years, controls on membership to the Royal Society as well as the articles published in its journal became stricter. Both a more limited membership to protect the society’s reputation and a stricter peer review of articles were established. In 1887, the “Transactions” journal was separated into two categories, physical science and biological science. Sectional committees were established to cover mathematics, botany, zoology, physiology, geology as well as chemistry and physics. From 1896, authors were expected to present manuscripts in a standardized format and style; typed papers were later required to reduce errors in and speed up the process of printing.

Today “Transactions” is an established, world-wide scientific journal with about eighty-per cent of its peer-reviewed articles coming from non-United Kingdom authors. The editing is accomplished through a large professional in-house staff with a group of research Fellows assigned for each category of science. The role of the Committee of Papers was abolished and two Fellows now act as journal editors assisted by associate editors from each category. In 1997, the “Transactions” began to be published online. Articles throughout its history have included Isaac Newton’s “New Theory about Light and Colors”, Michael Faraday’s “Experimental Relations of Gold and Other Metals to Light” and Alan Turing’s 1952 “On the Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis”, among others.

Calendar: March 3

Year: Day to Day Men: March 3

Warmth of the Sun

The third of March in 1585 marks the inauguration of the Teatro Olimpico designed by Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio. Since 1994, the Olympic Theater, along with other Palladian-styled buildings in and around the city of Vicenza, have been listed together as a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site.

Born Andrea di Pietro della Gondola in Padua, Republic of Venice in November of 1508, Andrea Palladio was influenced by Roman and Greek architecture and is considered one of those individuals who most influenced the history of architecture. He trained under noted sculptor Bartolomeo Cavazza de Sossano as an apprentice stonecutter for six years. When his contract was finished, Palladio permanently relocated to Vicenza where his career was unexceptional until 1538.

Between 1538 and 1539, Palladio rebuilt the Villa Trissino, the Cricoli residence of poet and scholar Gian Giorgio Trissino who was engaged in a lifetime study of ancient Roman architecture. Due to his work, Palladio received the formal title of architect in 1541. He took several trips, accompanied by Gian Trissino, between 1541 and 1547 to study classical monuments in Rome, Tivoli, Paletrina, and Albano. As a mentor, Trissino introduced Palladio to the history and arts of Rome as well as bestowed on him the name ‘Palladio’ which means the Wise One.

Throughout his career in Vicenza, Andrea Palladio designed many villas and governmental palaces. His first construction project involving a large town house was the Palazzo Thiene in Vicenza. After the death of its architect Giulio Romano, Palladio finished its construction. He used Romano’s design for the villa’s windows but altered the facade to express a new lightness and grace. Among the villas attributed to Palladio’s architectural designs are the Villa Pisani, his first patrician villa for a Venetian family, and Villa Cornaro, a villa at Piombino Dese that was a mixture of villa rusticate (country house) and suburban villa with a grand salon designed for entertaining.

In 1550, Palladio began construction on the Palazzo del Chiericati, an urban palace built on a city square near Vicenza’s port. It was designed with a two-story facade with a double loggia divided by rows of Doric columns. Paladio’s Palazzo del Capitaniato, the offices of the regional Venetian governor, was a contrasting design of red brick and white stone. The four brick half-columns of its facade formed a strong vertical element that balanced the horizontal balustrades and projecting cornice at the top. Designed in 1565, the Palazzo del Capitaniato was built between 1571 and 1572.

Ranked among his highest masterworks, the Teatro Olimpico was Palladio’s final architectural design and was not completed until after his death. In 1579, the Olympic Academy obtained the rights to build a permanent theater in the old fortress, Castello del Territorio, which had been both a prison and storage depot for gun powder before falling in disuse. Asked to produce a design, Palladio used the space to recreate an academic reconstruction of the Roman theaters he had closely studied. In order to fit a stage and seating area into the building’s wide and shallow space, Palladio had to flatten the semicircular seating area of a Roman theater into an ellipse.

Andrea Palladio died in August of 1580, only six months after the construction on the theater had started. His sketches and drawings were used as a guide; Palladio’s yongest son, Silla Palladio, and Vicenza architect Vincenzo Scamozzi oversaw the final construction work. Scamozzi contributed several rooms to the design and built the rusticated entrance archway that was fitted into the rough, well-worn walls. As Palladio had not left any plans for the onstage scenery, Scamozzi created trompe l’oeil scenery with oil-lamp lighting to give the appearance of long streets receding into the distance. The full Roman-style wood and stucco backscreen is the oldest surviving stage set still in existence.

The Teatro Olimpico was inaugurated on the third of March in 1585 by a production of Sophocles’s “Oedipus Rex” with music by composer and organist Andrea Gabrieli. After only a few productions, the theater was essentially abandoned. The scenes created for the production were never removed and still exist in place. The original lighting system of glass oil lamps has been used only a few times over the years due to the risk of fire; they were lit in 1997 for a production of “Oedipus Rex”.

Due to conservation issues, current performances in the Teatro Olimpico are limited to four hundred attendees. As heating and air conditioning could damage the delicate wooden structure of the stage sets, performances are held only in the spring and autumn. The theater was a film location for the 1979 film “Don Giovanni” and the 2005 “Casanova”.

Calendar: March 2

Year: Day to Day Men: March 2

Windows to the City

The second of March in 1842 marks the birth date of Carl Christian Hillman Jacobsen, a Danish brewer, art collector and philanthropist. He was the founder of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, regarded as one of the preeminent museums in Denmark.

Born in Copenhagen, Carl Jacobsen was the son of Danish industrialist Jacob Christian Jacobsen who, in addition to serving a period as Member of Parliament, founded the Carlsberg Laboratory, a biochemical research center that examined the process of brewing. Carl Jacobsen’s initial education was at the Borgerdyd School in the Christianshavn neighborhood of Copenhagen. Beginning in 1866, he began a four-year study abroad of Europe’s leading breweries.

Upon his return to Denmark, Jacobsen was employed at a brewing annex of his father’s Carlsberg brewery; however, bitter conflicts developed between father and son. His father, due to the family tensions, founded the Carlsbergfondef (Carlsberg Foundation) which he endowed with the controlling shares of the business. In 1882, Carl Jacobsen founded his own brewery, the Valby Brewery, and later changed its name to Ny Carlsberg (New Carlsberg). Jacob Jacobsen changed the name of the original brewery to Gammel Carlsberg (Old Carlsberg).

A reconciliation between Carl Jacobsen and his father was eventually achieved in 1886. Upon the death of his father in April of 1887, Carl did not obtain control of the Gammel Carlsberg brewery. It was not until 1906 that the two Carlsberg breweries merged into one entity with Carl Jacobsen chosen as Chief Executive Officer by the Carlsberg Foundation, the majority owner. Jacobsen would remain as CEO of the newly established Carlsberg Group until his death in 1914.

Carlsberg Brewery finished its first brew in November of 1847; the exportation of Carlsberg beer began in 1868 with one barrel shipped to Edinburgh, Scotland. Since then, the Carlsberg Group has become a multinational brewer whose flagship brand is Carlsberg beer. Currently it is the sixth largest brewery in the world based on revenue. The Carlsberg Group has facilities throughout European and Asian countries; it is the brewer of such beers as Tuborg, Kronenbourg, Somersby Cider, Holsten and more than five hundred local beers.

Carl Jacobsen was not a political individual as was his father, but rather a cultural enthusiast. Known for his interest in Greek and classical art, he was an avid antique collector. His collecting led to the 1897 founding of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek to which he donated his entire collection of antiques. Jacobsen was also interested in architecture and employed the leading Danish architects of the time, including historical architect Jens Vilheim Dahlerup, to design his brewery sites. He was responsible for the restoration work done on several public buildings and churches in Copenhagen as well as financing the city’s 1913 iconic harbor sculpture “The Little Mermaid”.

Jacobsen was a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and Académie des Beaux-Arts as well as honorary member of the Société des Artistes Français. He was awarded a Knighthood in the Order of Dannebrog in 1888 and received in 1912 the Grand Cross, a reward for meritorious service to Denmark. Carl Jacobsen died in January of 1914 and was buried in the family’s mausoleum at Jesus Church in Copenhagen.

Calendar: March 1

A Year: Day to Day Men: March 1

On the Edge of His Seat

The first day of March in 1932 marks the kidnapping of Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., the twenty month-old son of aviator Colonel Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, from his crib on the upper floor of the family home in East Amwell, New Jersey.

On the evening at nine o’clock, the Lindbergh’s nurse Betty Gow discovered that the child was not with his mother who had just come out of the bath. She alerted Charles Lindbergh who went to the child’s room and discovered a ransom note on the windowsill. Armed with a gun, Lindbergh and the family butler, Olly Whateley, searched the grounds and, under the window of the child’s room, found impressions of a ladder and the child’s blanket. Whateley telephoned the Hopewell police department while Lindbergh contacted the New Jersey State Police as well as his attorney and friend Henry Breckinridge.

Both police departments conducted an extensive search of the home and its surrounding area. A fingerprint expert examined both the note and ladder; however, no usable footprints or fingerprints were discovered. No adult fingerprints, outside of the inhabitants of the house, were found in the child’s room. The examined ladder was built incorrectly, but by someone who had prior experience in construction. It was categorized as to type of wood, pattern of nail holes, and as to whether it was made indoors or outdoors.

The handwriting of the $50,000 ransom note contained many spelling and grammatical errors; the note was determined to have been written by one person. The bottom of the note contained two blue, interlocked circular lines surrounding a red circle; a hole was punched through the center of the red circle. Two more holes were punched to the left and right of the blue circular lines.

In an effort to get the public involved, the New Jersey State police offered a reward to anyone who could provide information. The Federal Bureau of Investigation did not have federal jurisdiction in the case until the thirteenth of May in 1932 when the President declared that the bureau was available to the New Jersey State Police. Full federal jurisdiction over the kidnapping case did not occur until October of 1932. Many theories were advanced and examined by the authorities. The reward for information on the kidnapping kept increasing until it eventually reached a total of $75,000 US dollars ( approximately $1,317,000 US dollars in 2022).

On the sixth of March, a ransom letter for $70,000 arrived at the Lindbergh home. The envelope was postmarked from Brooklyn, New York; the letter contained the same strange marks and holes as the original ransom note. Ten days later, a package containing a note and young Lindbergh’s sleeping suit arrived at the home. The ransom money was placed in a wooden box and delivered on the second of April to a man who claimed to be part of the kidnapping team. In exchange, a note was presented saying the Lindbergh child was in the care of two innocent women.

On the twelfth of May, delivery truck driver Orville Wilson and his assistant William Allen pulled over to the side of the road about 4.5 miles (7.2 km) south of the Lindbergh home. In a grove of trees, they found the body of a child. The child’s skull was fractured and the hastily buried body was badly decomposed. Nurse Betty Gow identified the child’s body as being Charles Lindbergh Jr. Due to the state of the body, the family insisted on cremation.

Two and a half years later, gold-certificate bills from the ransom money was traced back to a Bronx, New York, man named Richard Hauptmann. When arrested, he was found carrying one of the bills from the ransom. A search of his residence revealed over $14,000 of the ransom money in his garage. Hauptmann denied any part in the crime; however, the search of his residence revealed a construction sketch of a ladder similar to that found at the Lindbergh home. A section of wood discovered in the attic was tested and found a match to the wood of the ladder.

Richard Hauptmann was indicted in New York for extortion on the twenty-fourth of September in 1934. On the eighth of October in New Jersey, he was indicted for murder and transferred to New Jersey authorities two days later to face kidnapping and murder charges for Charles Lindbergh Jr.

At the end of the long trial, Hauptmann was found guilty of the kidnapping and murder charges; the sentence for the crimes was death. His sentence was appealed two times by his lawyers; both appeals failed. Hauptmann was given a last minute offer to commute his death sentence to life without parole in exchange for a confession to the crimes; he refused the offer. Richard Hauptmann was executed in the state of New Jersey on the third of April in 1936.

Calendar: February 29

Year: Day to Day Men: February 29

Mediterranean Adventure

The twenty-ninth day of February in 1912 marks the falling of the Piedra Movediza, a balancing rock that was located near the city of Tandil in the Buenos Aires Province of Argentina. A balancing rock, or precarious boulder, is a naturally occurring geological formation that features a large rock of substantial size which is resting on other rocks, glacial fill, or bedrock. No single scientific term for the phenomenon exists.

There are several types of geological features that are included under the term balancing rock: glacial erratic that are transported and deposited by glaciers or ice rafts to their resting place; perched blocks deposited due to glaciers, avalanches or landslides often on a slope or hillside; erosional remnants that are carved from local bedrock through extensive wind, water, or chemical erosion; and pedestal rock, a single continuous rock form with a very small base and a much larger crown. Although not a true balancing rock, a pedestal rock has the appearance of one. These rocks are now believed to have been formed through years of wind and chemical weathering of its base.

The Piedra Movediza was most likely a deposited boulder; it was situated balanced at the edge of a formation of bedrock. Its weight was approximately three-hundred tons, or 272.2 metric tons, and its pedestal was so thin that the boulder was balanced with the wind. The boulder rocked, imperceptible to the eye, from morning to evening in a extremely slow fashion. Visitors to the site would place bottles under the bottom of the rock only to see them broken later in the day.

The Piedra Movediza fell and broke on the twenty-ninth of February in 1912, some time between five o’clock and six o’clock in the evening. There were no witnesses to the event so the true time and cause of the fall are unknown. Several theories regarding its fall were presented among which were vibrations from a nearby quarry blast, people rocking the stone during the day, and disgruntled quarrymen weary of the tourists. No official reason for the fall, however, was ever issued.

Proposals were made to move the three segments of the broken boulder back to its original site on the hill and cement them into position; however nothing was done, most likely due to the mass of each segment. In 2007, a replica of the Piedra Movediza was placed in the original site, now considered a historical symbol of the city of Tandil. The replica does not move as it is securely fastened to the supporting bedrock. This original bouder site is now named Parque Litico La Movediza (La Movediza Lithic Park).

Balancing rocks are found world-wide on all continents. Among these are Finland’s seven-meter long Kummakivi in Ruokolahti, Zimbawe’s Balancing Rocks, a large-scale formation of igneous rocks perfectly balanced; the nine-meter tall Pinnacle Balanced Rock at the Chiricahua National Monument in Arizona, United States; and the Pena do Equilibrio, a giant granite balancing rock in Ponteareas, Spain.

Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “The Piedra Movediza”, circa 1890, Vintage Print

Calendar: February 26

Year: Day to Day Men: February 26

Moment of Rest

The twenty-sixth of February in 1870 marks the opening day of New York City’s Beach Pneumatic Transit, the first attempt to build an underground public transit system in the city. This system was a prototype developed by Alfred Ely Beach in 1869 to demonstrate a subway line running on air pressure.

At New York’s 1867 American Institute Exhibition, inventor and patent lawyer Alfred Ely Beach demonstrated a basic subway model in which air pressure pushed cars through a tubular tunnel. After a successful demonstration, Beach founded the Beach Pneumatic Transit Company in 1869 for the construction of a pneumatically powered subway line beneath Broadway, one of the main commercial arteries in New York City. He financed the full-scale test project himself in the amount of three hundred-fifty thousand dollars.

Alfred Beach, however had no political support for the project as William Magear Tweed, the political boss of Tammany Hall and third largest land owner in New York City, refused to give his approval. In order to start the project, Beach claimed he was building a postal tube system. This was a pneumatic system, already established in London and Paris, that quickly transported tubular cylinders containing small packages, mail, paperwork, and currency. Beach was granted an initial permit to install a pair of postal tubes beneath Broadway; it was later amended by Tweed to allow a single large tunnel in which a system of tubes would reside.

Construction on the Beach tunnel was completed in fifty-eight days. It extended for approximately three-hundred feet from the intersection of Warren Street and Broadway, directly across from City Hall, and ended at Murray Street and Broadway. Built through the use of a tunneling shield, a temporary structure that shields workers from falling materials or cave-ins, the subway opened to the public on the twenty-sixth of February in 1870 and operated as a demonstration until 1873.

The Beach Pneumatic Transit ran only a single car on its track from the Warren Street to Murray Street, the distance of one city block. Riders paid a fare of twenty-five cents for the experience, with proceeds given to the Union Home and School for Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Orphans. The Warren Street station was elaborately designed with frescoes on the walls lit by zirconia lamps; the interior held statues and a goldfish pond to view while passengers waited for the car. The ride was controlled by a forty-four short-ton (39,915 kilogram) generator built by Roots Patent Force Rotary Blowers. The air pressure would propel the car forward and, by reversing the baffles on the blower system, the car would return to the original station. The public approved of the system with over four-hundred thousand rides in its operation.

Alfred Beach had problems in getting official permission to expand the system. In 1873, he succeeded in getting permission to expand the system to Central Park, a distance of five miles. However; both public and financial support had waned, mainly from a stock market crash that became known as the Panic of 1873. With the project shut down, the tunnel entrance was sealed and the station reclaimed for other uses. Although the Beach Pneumatic Transit only existed for three years, the project inspired the New York pneumatic tube postal system that Beach had previously, albeit falsely, suggested to William Tweed. Opening in October of 1897, the pneumatic postal system operated continuously in New York City until 1953, except for a suspension of service during World War I to conserve funding for the war effort.

Calendar: February 25

Year: Day to Day Men: February 25

Falling Water

The twenty-fifth of February in 1846 marks the birthdate of Italian painter Giuseppe De Nittis, a central figure in Paris during the aesthetic and institutional upheavals of 1870s. His work integrated the style of the Academic salons with the newly emerged Impressionists.

Giuseppe De Nittis was born into a wealthy family who resided in the coastal city of Barletta in Italy’s region of Apulia. Barletta, particularly during the reign of Ferdinand II, was an extremely class-oriented city. Those who could afford it gathered regularly at the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher which was located near the De Nittis residence. The city’s port was a point of embarkation for the privileged class’s travels to and from the East.

In 1860 at the age of fourteen, De Nittis relocated to Naples where he gained admittance to the Reale Instituto de Belle Arti, a university-level fine arts school founded in 1752 by King Charles VII of Naples. Outspoken in his criticism, he was was expelled from the institute in 1863 for insubordination. De Nittis began his career with the 1864 entry of two paintings at the Neapolitan Promotrice, an exhibition space similar to the salons of Paris. He became acquainted with a group of artists, known as the Macchiaioli, and became friends with one of its most prominent members, Telemaco Signorini. The Macchiaioli were a group of Neapolitan and Florentine painters who reacted against the rule-oriented Italian art academies and painted plein-air to capture both the light and color of nature.

In 1867, Giuseppe De Nittis began exhibiting his works in Florence. During this time in Italy, De Nittis met and renewed his acquaintance with painter, Geremia Discanno, also born in Barletta but seven years earlier. Together, they exhibited and sold work in the city of Turin during 1867. De Nittis traveled to Paris later in the year and became represented by Jean-Baptiste Adolphe Goupil, one of the city’s leading art dealers. After exhibiting at the Salon, he returned to Italy where he produced several views of Mount Vesuvius.

In 1868 at the age of twenty-two, De Nittis returned to Paris and became a permanent resident of the city. His affection for Paris was expressed through images of the French capital’s urban renovation overseen by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. Haussmann had been chosen by Emperor Napoleon III to carry out a massive renewal program of the boulevards, parks and public works in Paris. Through his close association with members of the Impressionist movement, De Nittis often visited the horse races at Auteuil with Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas. The love of the French for horse racing as well as the well-groomed crowds promenading on the wide boulevards became recurring themes for his work.

Giuseppe De Nittis was invited by Edgar Degas in 1873 to exhibit in the First Impressionist Exhibition held at photographer Nader’s studio in 1874. De Nittis, who submitted five works despite protests by Adolphe Goupil, was the only Italian artist at that exhibition; it was also the only one of the group’s exhibitions he attended. In 1875, De Nittis broke his contract with Goupil and started working in pastels. He executed a series of portraits of sitters which included the authors Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, playwright Émile Édouard Zola, Édouard Manet, and novelist Louis Edmond Duranty. Pastels became an important medium for De Nittis’s later work; he preferred patels as the medium for his largest works such as the 1881 triptych “Races at Auteuil”.

De Nittis exhibited twelve works at the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris. He was, in the same year, also awarded the Légion d’Honneur, the highest French order of merit, both military and civil. In 1884, Giuseppe De Nittis died suddenly at the age of thirty-eight of a stroke at the commune of Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the western suburbs of Paris. His wife, Léontine Lucile Gruvelle, donated the studio’s paintings to his hometown of Barletta where they are housed in the Palace of the Marra.

Giuseppe De Nittis’ works are in many public collections, including the Musée d’Orsay, London’s British Museum and New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Philadelphia Museum of Art houses his 1875 “Return from the Races” and 1869 “The Connoisseurs”. In September of 2022, the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. held the first exhibition devoted to the work of Giuseppe De Nittis in the United States.

Calendar: February 23

Year: Day to Day Men: February 23

Brown Cable Knit Sweater

The twenty-third of February in 1940 marks the theatrical release date of the American animated musical fantasy film “Pinocchio”. Based on Italian author Carlo Collodi’s 1883 children’s novel “The Adventures of Pinocchio”, it was Walt Disney Production’s second animated feature film. preceded by the 1937 “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”.

A translated version of Collodi’s novel was brought by animator Norman Ferguson to the attention of Walt Disney in September of 1937 during the studio’s production of “Snow White”. After reading the book, Disney commissioned storyboard artist Bianca Majolie to write a new story outline for the book; however, he found the outline too faithful to the original story. As “Pinocchio” was based on a novel with a very fixed, episodic story, the storyboard outline underwent major changes before its final form.

In the original novel, Pinocchio was presented as a cold, rude and ungrateful personality. The Disney writers modernized the character for the film and depicted him similar to ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s dummy Charlie McCarthy, a mischievous figure who made snide remarks and misbehaved. Originally drawn exactly like a real wooden puppet with pointed nose and bare wooden hands, animators slightly redesigned the figure of Pinocchio to make him more appealing. An animated test scene refined the final adjustments to Pinocchio’s appearance; he became a more innocent, naive, somewhat coy personality with a child’s Tyrolean hat and standard four fingered (three fingers and a thumb) gloved hands similar to those of Mickey Mouse.

In the summer of 1938, Walt Disney and the story team established the character of the cricket whom Disney named Jiminy. At first only a minor figure in the film outline, the cricket became the character who would guide Pinocchio into making the right decisions. Animator Ward Kimball, who had spent two months animating two unused sequences for “Snow White”, was promoted by Disney to the position of supervising animator for Jiminy Cricket. For the final design of the character, Kimball did not use the characteristic toothed-legs and waving antennae of a cricket. He instead designed a well-dressed little man who had an egg-shaped head with no ears, essentially a cricket in name only.

“Pinocchio” marks the first time an animated film used celebrities as voice actors. Due to the huge success of the 1937 “Snow White”, Disney wanted more famous voices for the second animated Disney production. Popular 1930s musician and singer Clifton Avon “Cliff” Edwards was cast as the voice of Jiminy Cricket. Clifton had in 1929 a number one hit with his “Singin’ in the Rain”. Disney did not want an adult actor for the voice of Pinocchio. He chose eleven-year old child-actor Richard “Dickie” Jones, a B-movie Western star who had just appeared in the 1939 “Nancy Drew..Reporter”.

Austrian-born character actor Christian Rub was chosen for the voice of Geppetto the wood-carver. Comedian and character actor Walter Catlett played the con artist Honest John the Fox and Honest John’s mute, dimwitted feline partner Gideon. Gideon’s hiccups were separately provided by veteran voice actor Mel Blanc. Actor Charles Judels voiced both the villainous Stromboli and The Coachman who takes all disobedient boys to Pleasure Island. The Blue Fairy who brings Pinocchio to life and transforms him into a real boy was played by actress Evelyn Venable.

Animation on “Pinocchio” began in January of 1938; supporting character animation began in April. After a brief hiatus on the project, revisions on Pinocchio’s character and the film’s narrative structure were completed in September and work resumed. “Pinocchio” took two years and required more than seven hundred and fifty artists and technicians to bring the animated characters to life. The film was a groundbreaker in animation effects. The team of artists gave realistic movement to vehicles and machinery as well as rain, water, lightning, smoke and shadows.

“Pinocchio” was initially premiered on the seventh of February in 1940 at New York City’s Center Theater on Sixth Avenue. The theatrical release through the nation occurred on the twenty-third of February. Though not initially a box-office success, “Pinocchio” won two Academy Awards in 1941: Best Original Score and Best Original Song for “When You Wish Upon a Star”. Many film historians consider “Pinocchio” to be the film of all the Disney animated features that most closely approaches technical perfection. In 1994, the film was added to the National Film Registry and the American Film Institute, in 2008, selected it the second best film in the medium of animation, after Disney’s “Snow White”.

Insert Images: Directors Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Luske, “Pinocchio”, 1940, Film Scenes, Producer Walt Disney, Walt Disney Productions, RKO Radio Pictures

Calendar: February 22

Year: Day to Day Men: February 22

White Cloth

The twenty-second of February in 1925 marks the birth date of American writer and illustrator Edward St. John Gorey. A Tony Award winner for his costume design, he is noted for his distinctive pen and ink drawings that depicted unsettling narrative scenes in Victorian and Edwardian settings.

Born in Chicago, Illinois to Edward Leo Gorey and Helen Dunham Garvery, Edward Gorey began drawing at an early age and had taught himself to read by the age of three. After skipping several grades, he entered the progressive Francis W. Parker School in the ninth grade. An exceptional student, Gorey had the highest regional scores on college boards and, upon graduation, had scholarships to Harvard, Yale and other institutions. After graduation at the age of seventeen, he enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago for art courses. During World War II, Gorey entered the U.S. Army in 1943 and served primarily at Utah’s Dugway Proving Grounds until the end of the war.

Gorey enrolled at Harvard University in 1946, majoring in French literature, and became a co-founder of the influential Poets Theatre with friends Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Violet Lang and Alison Lurie. In 1953, he was offered a position with Doubleday’s imprint, Doubleday Anchor, in New York City. Gorey quickly became a significant figure in New York’s design circles. He designed over fifty covers for the imprint and gained recognition as a major commercial illustrator. Duting his career, the number of published works illustrated by Gorey, not including his own, exceeded five hundred. In the early 1960s, he became a life-long freelancer who both illustrated others’ work as well as his own. The first of these was the well-received 1953 “The Unstrung Harp”, one of the early examples of the graphic novel movement.

In the early 1940s while in the Army, Gorey established an early association with New York City’s mid-town Gotham Book Mart. A voracious reader, he started accumulating a unique library which at the time of his death number some twenty-five thousand books. Over the years, he developed friendships with both Frances Steloff, the bookshop’s founder, and Andreas Brown, who later eventually became the bookshop’s owner. When Gorey founded his own private press imprint, Fantod Press, the Gotham Book Mart became a major seller of Gorey’s books and, at the end of 1967, an exhibition space for his drawings. Gorey would exhibit his work there for the next thirty-two years; Andreas Brown would become one of the coexecutors of Gorey’s estate.

Edward Gorey was always interested in the theater and became involved with off-Broadway productions. In his later years living on Cape Cod, he wrote and directed many evening productions, some of which featured his own paper-mâché puppet ensemble called Le Theatricule Stoique. The first of his productions was “Lost Shoelaces” which premiered in the small village of Woods Hole near Martha’s Vineyard in August of 1987. His last production was “The White Canoe: An Opera Seria for Hand Puppets”, with a libretto by Gorey and score by composer Daniel James Wolf. Performed posthumously under the direction of Carol Verburg, the opera’s puppet stage was created by renowned set designers Helen Pond and Herbert Senn.

Gorey wrote and illustrated one hundred-sixteen of his own works. Beginning in 1961 with the publisher Diogenes Verlag, his works have been translated into fifteen languages. In 1972, Gorey published his first anthology, “Amphigorey”, which contained fifteen of his early works; three more anthologies followed and have become the cornerstones of his body of work. Gorey’s interest in book design expanded his work into other forms including miniature books, pop-up books and books with movable parts. In 1975, he became interested in printmaking and explored this medium for the next twenty-five years through a collaboration with printmaker Emily Trevor for the production of both etchings and holographs. In 1979, Gorey relocated to a house he purchased on the Yarmouth Port Common of Cape Cod where he continued his publications, theater plays and commercial projects.

Edward St. John Gorey passed away at the age of seventy-five at the Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Massachusetts on the fifteen of April in 2000. After his death, friend and coexecutor Andreas Brown discovered a cache of unpublished work, both complete and incomplete. Gorey’s Yarmouth house is now the Edward Gorey House Museum. The bulk of his estate was given to a charitable trust benefitting cats and dogs, as well asl, other species, including insects and bats.

Notes: After his arrival in New York City in 1953, Edward Gorey became a frequent attendee and admirer of Russian ballet choreographer George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet. He attended every performance of every production that Balanchine had choreographed and considered Balanchine a major influence on his work.

In February of 1980, Edward Gorey was asked to design an animated introduction for Boston Public Television’s “Mystery” series. His work with animator Derek Lamb and team produced what, almost forty-five years later, is considered by many to be Gorey’s most iconic work.

The Edward Gorey House and Museum in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts is open for visits. Its online site, with information on exhibitions and its store, can be found at: https://www.edwardgoreyhouse.org

Top Insert Image: Richard Avedon, “Edward Gorey, Cape Cod, Massachusetts”, October 18, 1992, Gelatin Silver Print, Richard Avedon Foundation

Second and Third Insert Images: Edward Gorey, “Mystery”, Intro for Boston Public Television Series, 1980, Film Gifs

Bottom Insert Image: Edward Gorey, Cover Illustration for John Bellairs’s “The Chessmen of Doom”, Johnny Dixon Mystery Series, 1989, Dial Books

Calendar: February 20

Year: Day to Day Men: February 20

This Old House

The twentieth of February in 1906 marks the birth date of American character actor Gale Gordon. He had a long and prolific career in both radio and television series. Gordon’s portrayal of grumpy and arrogant characters made him the comic foil on “Our Miss Brooks” and three Lucille Ball series.

Born Charles Thomas Aldrich Jr. in New York City, Gale Gordon was the son of vaudevillian Charles Thomas Aldrich and English actress Gloria Gordon. His first appearance on radio broadcast was the roles of Mayor La Trivia and Foggy Williams on the 1935 “Fibber McGee and Molly”. Gordon was the first actor to play the role of Flash Gordon on the 1935 radio serial “The Amazing Interplanetary Adventures of Flash Gordon”.

From 1937 to 1939, Gordon starred as The Octopus in the “Speed Gibson” radio series. During the years of World War II, he enlisted in the United States Coast Guard where he served for four years. At the end of the war, Gordon returned to radio and played the role of Rumson Bullard on “The Great Gildersleeve”, one of the earliest spin-offs in the entertainment industry. In 1946, he had one of his most dramatic roles on radio, the bachelor amateur detective Gregory Hood on the popular 1946-1947 “The Casebook of Gregory Hood”. The series was originally just a summer replacement for the canceled “The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes”; the network had failed to reach a contractual agreement with the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle estate.

In 1950, Gale Gordon played John Granby, a former city dweller turned farmer, in the radio series “Granby’s Green Acres”, which was the model for the 1960s television series “Green Acres”. He created the role of principle Osgood Conklin on the 1948 radio series “Our Miss Brooks” and later carried the role to the 1952 television series. Gordon also worked at this time on the radio show “My Favorite Husband” in which he played Rudolph Atterbury opposite Lucille Ball as Liz Cugat. He and Ball had previously worked together from 1938 to 1939 on “The Wonder Show” with actor and singer Jack Haley, later known as the Tin-Man in “The Wizard of Oz”

Gordon was the first choice for the role of Fred Mertz on the 1951 television situation comedy “I Love Lucy”. However, he had made a commitment to his role in “Our Miss Brooks”, in addition to his other concurrent radio shows. Gordon did appear in two guest roles on “I Love Lucy” as Ricky Ricardo’s boss, Alvin Littlefield, the owner of the Tropicana Club. In the late 1950s, he was a regular on the 1957 NBC sitcom “Sally” and also appeared on ABC’s “The Real McCoys” with Walter Brennan and Richard Crenna. Other appearances included a guest role on the 1960 ABC “Harrigan and Son” and roles in two episodes of “The Donna Reed Show” and seven episodes of “The Danny Thomas Show”.

Lucille Ball created “The Lucy Show” in 1952 and planned to hire Gale Gordon for the role of the banker Theodore J. Mooney. However, after the death of actor Joseph Kearns who played George Wilson on “Dennis the Menace”, Gordon had signed a contract to play John Wilson on the show. When “Dennis the Menace” ended its run in the spring of 1963, Gordon joined “The Lucy Show” for the 1963-1964 season. After the sale of Desilu Studios in 1968, Lucille Ball discontinued the show and remade it into “Here’s Lucy” with herself as producer and distributor. Gordon took on the role of her boss, Harrison Otis.

When “Here’s Lucy” ended in 1974, Gordon basically retired from acting. His friend and acting cohort, Lucille Ball persuaded him to take a role in her new series “Life with Lucy”, which ran for three months. Gordon’s final acting appearance was a 1991 reprise of Mr. Mooney for the first episode of”Hi Honey, I’m Home”, a thirteen episode television comedy.

Gale Gordon and his wife Virginia Curley lived on a 150 acre ranch he had helped construct in Borrego Springs, California. Gordon wrote two books in the 1940s: “Leaves from the Story Trees” and “Nursery Rhymes for Hollywood Babies” and two one-act plays. He was also one of the few carob growers in the United States. Gordon’s wife of nearly sixty years died in May of 1995; he died of lung cancer one month later on the thirtieth of June. Gordon was inducted posthumously into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1999 and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Second Insert Image: Publicity Photo, Gale Gordon and Eve Arden, “Our Miss Brooks”, September 1955

Third Insert Image: Publicity Photo, Gale Gordon and Jay North, “Dennis the Menace”, circa 1962-1963

Calendar: February 19

Year: Day to Day Men: February 19

The Coffee Table Book

The nineteenth of February in 1913 marks the birth date of Francis Frederick von Taschlein who was an American animator and filmmaker. Best known as Frank Tashlin, he worked on the Warner Brothers Studio’s series of animated shorts, “Looney Tunes” and “Merrie Melodies”, as well as many successful comedy feature films.

Born in Weehawken, New Jersey, Frank Tashlin left high school at the age of thirteen and began working through a series of various jobs. In 1930, he started working as a animator for film director John Foster on the “Aesop’s Fables” cartoon series. Tashlin joined producer Leon Schlesinger’s cartoon studio at Warner Brothers in 1933 as an animator; the studio had achieved its success with the production of the “Looney Tunes” and later “Merry Melodies” series of shorts.

Tashlin worked with Schlesinger for one year before he joined the Ub Iwerks studio in 1934. Iwerks had worked as a character designer for Walt Disney and refined Disney’s sketch for Mickey Mouse; he would do much of the animation on Disney’s “Silly Symphony” cartoons which included “Steamboat Willie” and “The Skeleton Dance”. Tashlin stayed with Iwerks until 1934 and then worked for one year with Hal Roach’s studio.

In 1936, Frank Tashlin returned to Schlesinger as the head director for the animation department at Warner Brothers. With his knowledge of the industry and his diverse interest in animation, he brought a new understanding of camera techniques to the department. Animated shorts began to use montages, vertical and horizontal pan shots, and shots taken from different camera angles. From 1936 to 1938, Tashlin directed almost twenty shorts. After an argument with studio manager Henry Binder, he resigned and worked for a few years in Disney’s story department.

Tashlin joined Columbia Pictures’s Screen Gems animation studio as production manager in 1941. He was effectively in charge of the studio and hired many former Disney artists who had left as a result of the Disney animators’ strike over pay inequities and unionization efforts. Tashlin launched one of the better products of the studio, “The Fox and Crow” series which ran until the studio closed in 1946. His stay at Columbia lasted only one year as he was fired after an argument with Columbia executives.

In 1942, Frank Tashlin rejoined the Warner Brothers animation studio as a director. Among the cartoon shorts he directed were “Porky Pig’s Feat” in 1943 and two Bugs Bunny features, the 1945 “Unruly Hare” and 1946 “Hare Remover” which was Tashlin’s last credited film at Warner Brothers. Tashlin worked on the studio’s wartime shorts during the years of World War II. Before he left Warner Brothers, he directed some stop-motion puppet films for producer John Sutherland. Tashlin’s 1947 puppet animation film “The Way of Peace” was selected in 2014 for entry into National Film Registry.

From 1946 until 1951, Tashlin became a gag writer for such comedians as Lucille Ball and the Marx Brothers; he also worked as a screenwriter for Bob Hope and comedian Red Skelton. Tashlin began his career as a director of feature films when he was asked to finish directing Bob Hope’s 1951 “The Lemon Drop Kid”. His successful streak of box-office successes began in 1956 with “The Girl Can’t Help It” starring Jane Mansfield and Tom Ewell. This was followed by the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis 1956 “Hollywood or Bust” and the 1957 “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter” that starred Jane Mansfield, Tony Randall, Betsy Drake and Joan Blondell. Tony Randall received a Golden Globe nomination for his role and the film was selected in 2000 for entry into the National Film Registry.

Frank Tashlin was the director for six of Jerry Lewis’s early solo films, among which were the 1958 “The Geisha Boy”, the 1960 “Cinderfella”, and “The Disorderly Orderly” in 1964. He also directed the 1965 “The Alphabet Murders” and the 1966 “The Glass Bottom Boat’ with Doris Day, Rod Taylor, Arthur Godfrey, Paul Lynde, and Dom DeLuise. Tashlin’s last directorial work was the 1968 comedy “The Private Navy of Sgt. O’Farrell” with Bob Hope, Phyllis Diller and Jeffery Hunter.

Over the course of his career, Tashlin worked on four dozen animated shorts, including a dozen of Porky Pig’s earliest appearances, and forty-four feature films, either as director, writer, or producer. Frank Tashlin was stricken with a coronary thrombosis in his Beverly Hills home on the second of May in 1972. He died three days later on the fifth of May at Los Angeles’s Cedar-Sinai Medical Center at the age of fifty-nine. Tashlin is interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.

Calendar: February 18

Year: Day to Day Men: February 18

The Pose

The eighteenth of February in 1838 marks the birth date of Austrian-Czech physicist and philosopher Ernst Waldfried Josef Wenzel Mach. Due to his contributions to the physics of shock waves, the ratio of the speed of flow or object to the speed of sound is named the Mach number in his honor.

Born at the village of Brno-Chrlice in South Moravia, a part of the Austrian Empire, Ernst Mach was educated at home by his parents until the age of fourteen. He studied for three years at a secondary school in the city of Kroměříž. In 1855, Mach enrolled at the University of Vienna where he studied physics and medical physiology. In 1860, he received his doctorate in physics under Austrian physicist and mathematician Andreas von Ettingshausen, the first to design an electromagnetic machine which used its electrical induction for power generation.

In 1864, Mach turned down the chairman of surgery position at the University of Salzburg to accept a professorship of mathematics at the University of Graz, the second largest and oldest university in Austria. Two years later, Mach was appointed Professor of Physics at the university. In that position, he continued his work in psychophysics, a field that investigates the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they produce. In 1867, Mach became the chair of experimental physics at Prague’s Charles-Ferdinand University, a position he held for twenty-eight years before returning to Vienna.

Ernst Mach’s primary contribution to the science of physics were his photographs and descriptions of spark shock waves as well as the later studies of ballistic shock waves. Using the technique of schlieren photography, Mach and his son Ludwig photographed the shadows of the invisible shock waves. Invented in 1864 by German physicist August Toepler, schlieren photography is, essentially, a process of photographing fluid flows by measuring the spatial variations in the intensity of a light source shining on or from behind the target object.

Mach’s initial studies in experimental physics was primarily on the refraction, polarization, diffraction and interference of light in different media and under external influences. Further explorations dealt with supersonic fluid mechanics. In a collaboration with photographer Peter Salcher, Mach presented a 1887 paper on his research that correctly described the sound effects observed during the supersonic motion of a projectile. They confirmed the existence of a shock wave of conical shape with the projectile at the apex. The ratio of the speed of a fluid to the local speed of sound (Vp/Vs) is called the Mach number in honor of his work in the field. This ratio is a critical parameter in the description of high-speed fluid movement in the fields of aerodynamics and hydrodynamics.

Ernst Mach also made many contributions to the fields of psychology and physiology. Among these are his discovery of the oblique effect, the relative deficiency in the perception of oblique contours as compared to vertical or horizontal contours. Mach formed an experiment in which he placed a line to make it appear parallel to an adjoining one. Errors in the observer’s perception occurred least for horizontal or vertical orientations and largest when the lines were set at an incline of forty-five degrees. Mach’s experiment showed a perceptible change in the appearance of an object occurs with a forty-five degree rotation.

Another contribution by Mach to the field of sensory perception was the study of effects caused by the optical illusion known as Mach bands. Through this illusion, he explored the edge detection ability of the human visual system. The Mach bands exaggerate the contrast between edges of slightly differing shades of gray as soon as they touch. From this study, Mach made a distinction between what he called the physiological space, specifically visual, and geometrical space.

Ernst Mach survived a paralytic stroke in 1898. He retired form the University of Vienna three years later and received an appointment to the upper chamber of the Austrian Parliament. In 1913, Mach left Vienna and moved to his son Ludwig’s home in Vaterstetten in Upper Bavaria near Münich. Ernst Mach continued his writing and correspondence until his death in February of 1916 at the age of seventy-eight.

Calendar: February 17

Year: Day to Day Men: February 17

Attention Caught

The seventeenth of February in 1674 marks the date of the Ambon earthquake in the Maluku Islands, the first detailed documentation of a tsunami in Indonesia and the largest ever recorded in that country.

The geological area of the Indonesian North Maluku Islands is located in the zone of convergence between the Eurasian, Indo-Australian and Pacific tectonic plates. This area is dominated by a complex mixture of tectonic elements, including collision, subduction and vertical fractures which shift horizontally. In the search for the cause of the Ambon earthquake, immediate to deep-focus earthquakes with a depth of sixty kilometers or more were ruled out as the source.

Known historical events of that type did not generate the scale of tsunami that struck the islands. The 1938 Banda Sea earthquake, which had a magnitude of 8.5 and Rossi-Forel intensity of VII (very strong tremors), generated a minor tsunami of only 1.5 meters (5 feet). Researchers ruled out faulting as a source because the Ambon earthquake had an extreme run-up height of at least 100 meters on the northern shore of Ambon,

The likely source of the tsunami appears to have been an earthquake generated undersea-landslide. Although never confirmed, two faults are seen as likely sources of that landslide; the South Seram Thrust and an unnamed fault found on the island of Ambon. Published research journals have not assigned a magnitude to the event; however, from collected databases, it has been estimated as an earthquake with the magnitude of 6.8 at a depth of 40 kilometers (25 miles).

A German botanist employed by the Dutch East India Company in 1652, Georg Eberhard Rumphius was assigned in 1654 to the Ambon archipelago. Accompanied by his wife and two daughters, he assumed the position of merchant in 1662 and, on his own time, undertook a study of the Spice Islands’ flora and fauna. Rumphius and his family were present on the island at the time of the 1674 earthquake; his account of the earthquake is the first detailed documentation of a tsunami in Indonesia.

The Ambon earthquake occurred on Saturday evening, between 19:30 and 20:00 Eastern Indonesian Time, when the island inhabitants were celebrating the Chinese Lunar New Year. The shaking earth rang the large bells on the local Victoria Castle and knocked people off their feet.

The collapse of seventy-five stone buildings killed eighty-four people and injured another thirty-five. Water spurted into the air from wells and the ground, some upwards to 6 meters (20 feet). Clay and sand also erupted from the ground. Among the dead from the earthquake were Rumphius’s wife and two daughters, killed by a collapsing stone wall.

Immediately after the earthquake, a mega-tsunami swept through the coastal areas of Ambon Island. The earthquake produced a tsunami which reached heights as much as 100 meters (330 feet) and nearly crested the coastal hill areas. This tsunami resulted in the additional deaths of over two thousand individuals.

Notes: The translated summary notes of Georg Everhard Rumphius on the 1674 Ambon and Seram earthquake are recorded in the files of UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. These notes are located at: https://iotic.ioc-unesco.org/1950-ambon-tsunami/1674-tsunami-in-ambon-and-seram/

Calendar: February 16

Year: Day to Day Men: February 16

A Daydream Moment

The sixteenth of February in 1923 marks the opening of the sealed door to the burial chamber of the Eighteenth Dynasty Pharaoh, Tutankhamun. During his reign of ten years, Tutankhamun restored the traditional polytheistic form of the ancient Egyptian religion from the religious-political changes enacted by the former pharaoh Akhenaten.

Born in May of 1874, British archaeologist and Egyptologist Howard Carter was from an early age interested in Egyptian artifacts; he would often visit and draw illustrations of specimens in the collection owned by the Amherst family. Impressed by his skills, Lady Amherst made arrangements for seventeen year-old Carter to assist British Egyptologist Percy Newberry in an excavation at Middle Kingdom tombs on the Lower Nile River.

After training under Egyptologists Flinders Petrie and Édouard Naville, Carter was appointed in 1899 as Inspector of Monuments for Upper Egypt by the Egyptian Antiquities Service. Based at Luxor, he oversaw excavations at nearby Thebes and supervised American archaeologist Theodore Davis’s systematic exploration of the Valley of the Kings. During his service, Carter improved the protection and accessibility to existing excavations and developed a grid-block system for tomb searching.

In 1907, Carter began his employment with George Edward Herbert, 5th Lord of Carnarvon, a financial backer for Egyptian antiquities research. Lord Carnarvon received in 1914 the concession to dig in the Valley of the Kings. Carter led a systematic search for any tombs that were missed in previous expeditions, including that of Tutankhamun. The search was halted during the years of the First World War and resumed in 1917. After five years with no major finds, Carnarvon became dissatisfied with the project; howver, after a discussion with Carter, he agreed to fund one more season of work in the Valley of the Kings.

On the fourth of November in 1922, a water boy discovered a buried flight of stairs cut into the bedrock. After partially digging out the steps, a mud-plastered doorway was found stamped with indistinct cartouches. Howard Carter had the staircase refilled and notified Lord Carnarvon of the find by telegram. On November twenty-third, Carnarvon arrived accompanied by his daughter Lady Evelyn Herbert. The full extent of the stairway was cleared on the next day; it revealed Tutankhamun’s cartouche on the outer doorway. The doorway was removed and the corridor behind it was cleared of rubble.

With Lord Carnarvon, Lady Evelyn and Carter’s assistant Arthur Callender present, Howard Carter opened a tiny breach in the door of the tomb and was able to see the many gold and ebony treasures within. Carter had in fact discovered the burial tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. The site was secured until the morning of the twenty-seventh of November, at which time the tomb was officially opened in the presence of a member of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities.

Tutankhamun’s tomb was virtually intact with all its furnishings and shrines, in spite of previous ancient break-ins. Two life-sized statues of Tutankhamun guarded the sealed doorway to the inner burial chamber. Assisted by staff members of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art which included archeologist Arthur Mace and photographer Harry Burton, Howard Carter over the next several months catalogued and preserved the contents of the chambers.

On the sixteenth of February in 1923, Howard Carter opened the sealed inner doorway and confirmed it led to a burial chamber that contained the sarcophagus of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. His tomb was considered the best preserved and most intact pharaonic tomb ever found in the Valley of the Kings. Carter’s meticulous assessing and cataloguing the thousands of objects in the tomb took nearly ten years; the final work was completed in February of 1932.

Despite the significance of the find, Howard Carter received no honors from the British government. In 1926, he received the Order of the Nile, third class, from Egypt’s King Fuad I. Carter was also award an honorary Doctor of Science from Yale University and a honorary membership in Madrid’s Real Academia de la Historia.