Calendar: January 7

Year: Day to Day Men: January 7

Sending a Message

The seventh of January in 1927 marks the placement of the first official transatlantic telephone call. The call, transmitted by radio waves, was held between Walter S. Gifford, the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), and Sir Evelyn P. Murray, the head of the British General Post Office.

The telephone call between Walter S. Gifford in New York City and Sir Evelyn P. Murray in London was a shared communication of prepared statements on the significance of the new technology with regards to facilitating business and fostering better understanding. The line was then opened for personal and business-related calls. By the day’s end, a news dispatch had been sent from Europe to America and over six million dollars worth of business had been transacted. The Gifford-Murray call was recorded for its historical significance and resides in the collection of the Library of Congress, Washington DC.

Before the telephone, long distance communication was conducted through letters, early models of fax machines, and telegraphs. Over a period of several years, the telephone was developed by inventors and businessmen; however, the definitive inventor of the telephone is still a matter of controversy. In 1840, American electrical experimenter and professor Charles Grafton Page discovered a way to use electricity passing through a wire to make sound. During the 1850s, Italian inventor Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci developed a voice-communication apparatus that connected his Staten Island, New York, laboratory to his second-floor bedroom.

In 1871, Antonio Meucci submitted a patent caveat, the required legal document, for his telephonic device to the United States Patent Office; however, there was no mention of electromagnetic transmission of voice sound in his granted patent request. In 1876, Scottish-born Canadian-American inventor Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for the electromagnetic transmission by vocal sound through undulatory electric current. Elisha Gray, an American electrical engineer who co-founded the Western Electric Manufacturing Company, also played an important part in the development of the telephone with his creation of the liquid transmitter, an important component of Alexander Graham Bell’s patent.

On the morning 14th of February in 1876, Elisha Gray’s lawyer submitted to the U.S. Patent Office a signed and notarized patent caveat that described a telephone using a liquid transmitter. In the same morning, a lawyer for Alexander Graham Bell submitted Bell’s application. The question of whose patent application had precedence became controversial. When proof of Bell’s invention of the liquid transmitter idea was required, Bell pointed to an earlier application which used mercury as a circuit breaker. This argument was accepted as proof even though mercury would not have worked in a telephone transmitter. Bell’s amendment to his claim enabled him to acquire U. S. patent 174, 465 on the 7th of March in 1876 for the invention of the telephone.

Calendar: January 6

Year: Day to Day Men: January 6

Just Slightly Peeking

On the sixth of January in 1501, construction began on Portugal’s Jerónimos Monastery in the parish of Belém of the Lisbon Municipality. This monastery became the necropolis of the Portuguese royal dynasty, the House of Aviz, in the sixteenth-century until its secularization in December of 1833 by state decree. Its ownership was then transferred to the Real Casa Pia de Lisboa, a charitable institution.

The Jerónimos Monastery was designed by architect Diogo de Boitaca, an influential architect and engineer of some of the most important buildings in Portugal. In this church, he continued his concept of a nave, the central part of the church, and two side aisles of equal height which unified the inner space as in a hall church. The richly ornate vaulting in the main chapel shows ribs with the shape of a twisted rope, a common theme of the Manueline style which incorporated maritime elements. The Jerónimos Monasteryis considered the most prominent of the late Portuguese Gothic Manueline style of Lisbon architecture.

The Jerónimos Monastery was erected near the Tagus River launch point of Vasco de Gama’s first journey; its construction was funded by a five percent tax on the profits of the yearly Portuguese India Armadas. With the influx of such riches as imported spices and the redirection of funds from other proposed monasteries, Diogo de Boitaca was not limited to small-scale plans. He chose calcário de lioz, a gold-colored limestone for its construction. During his span of overseeing the construction, De Boitaca was responsible for drawing the plans and contracting work on the monastery, the sacristy and the refectory.

Architect Juan de Castillo succeeded Diogo de Boitaca in 1517. He moved from the Manueline to the Spanish Plateesque style, an ornamentation that included decorative features constructed of silverware, plata. With the death of King Manuel I, construction halted until 1550, at which time architect Diogo de Torralva was in charge. He was followed by Jérôme de Rouen who added some classical elements. Throughout the following years, construction was halted several more times before the monastery’s completion, a span of work that lasted over one hundred years.

The Jerónimos Monastery became in 1640 a burial place for the Portuguese royal families. Among those entombed within the monastery were four of the eight children of John IV, King Alfonso VI, the Infanta Joana, and Catarina de Bragança. In 1880, Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama’s remains and those of poet Luís de Camões, who wrote “The Lusiad, a celebration of da Gama’s first voyage, were moved to newly carved tombs in the monastery’s nave, just a few feet from the tombs of Kings Manuel I and John III, who da Gama served. The monastery is classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Calendar: January 5

A Year: Day to Day Men: 5th of January

A Cyclist in Blue

On January 5, 1903, the general public could use the Pacific cable for the very first time.

The Commercial Pacific Cable Company was founded in 1901, and ceased operations in October 1951. It provided the first direct telegraph route from America to the Philippines, China, and Japan.

The company was established as a joint venture of three companies: the Commercial Cable Company (25%), the Great Northern Telegraph Company (25%), and the Eastern Telegraph Company (50%). Though the Eastern (a British firm) was the majority shareholder, the CPCC was registered in the United States.

The company used cable ships to lay its undersea cable across the Pacific Ocean from America’s west coast. The cables extended a length of 6,912 miles (11,124 km) and the project cost about $12 million. Before this, messages had to travel across the Atlantic to the Far East via Cape Town, South Africa, and the Indian Ocean, or by way of London to Russia, then across the Russian landline to Vladivostok, then by submarine cable to Japan and the Philippines.

The first section of cable was laid in 1902 by the cable ship CS Silvertown from Ocean Beach, adjacent to the famous Cliff House in San Francisco to Honolulu. It began operating on January 1, 1903. Later that year, cables were laid from Honolulu to Midway Atoll, thence to Guam, thence to Manila. The cables carried the first message to ever travel around the globe from US President Theodore Roosevelt on July 4, 1903. He wished “a happy Independence Day to the US, its territories and properties…” It took only nine minutes for the message to travel worldwide, an incredibly short time compared to past history.

Calendar: January 4

Year: Day to Day Men: January 4th

Red and White Squares

Born on January 4th of 1809, Louis Braille was a French educator and inventor. He was the youngest of four siblings bor to Simon-René and Monique Braille who maintained a successful enterprise for leather goods and horse tack. At the age of three, Louis Braille was playing with his father’s tools in the workshop; an awl that he was using slipped and penetrated one of his eyes. No treatment was able to save the damaged organ and eventually lost sight in the other eye by the age of five, most likely due to sympathetic ophthalmia.

Braille was raised by his parents in a normal fashion and prospered in their care. He navigated the village and paths with canes fashioned by his father. Braille’s intelligence and creative mind impress the local teachers and priests who assisted him with higher education. In February 1819 at the age of ten, he entered Paris’s Royal Institute for Blind Youth which provided a stable environment for blind children to associate and learn. There the students were taught to read by a system devised by the school’s founder Valentin Haüy. The books in the small library used embossed heavy paper with raised imprints of Latin letters which could be traced with fingers.

These books however were in uncomfortable sizes and weights, fragile and expensive to obtain. While the blind children could read the letters by touch, there was no process by which the children could write by themselves. Louis Braille read Haüy’s books repeatedly and was attentive to the oral instructions offered by the school. After he exhausted the school’s curriculum, he was asked to remain as a teacher’s aide and, by 1833, was elevated to a full professorship. For the rest of his life, Braille stayed at the Institute and taught history, geometry and algebra.

In 1821, Braille discovered a system devised by Charles Barbier, a code of up to twelve dots in two columns, impressed into thick paper. These impressions could be read entirely by the fingers. Inspired, Braille developed a system of his own, a system of reading and writing that could bridge the gap in communication between the sighted and the blind. His system was largely completed in 1824, when he was fifteen years old. Braille’s first version, published in 1829, used both dots and dashes in uniform columns of six dots for each letter. In 1837, he discarded the dashes as too difficult to read; the resulting small cells were capable of being recognized as letters with a single touch of a finger. Braille’s system was later extended to include braille musical notation.

Louis Braille published several written books on braille and educational books for the blind. In 1939, he created the decapoint, a systematic method of dot-punching with a specialized grill which overlaid the paper. With the use of an associated number table, which he devised, the grill permitted a blind writer to faithfully reproduce the standard alphabet. With the assistance of his friend Pierre-François-Victor Foucault, Braille helped develop the Raphigraphe, a device that could emboss letters in the manner of a typewriter.

Although respected by his pupils, Braille’s writing system was not taught at the Institute during his lifetime. The successors of Haüy who died in 1822 were hostile to its use. Suffering through sixteen years with a persistent respiratory illness believed now to be tuberculosis, Braille relinquished his teacher position at the age of forty. He was eventually admitted to the infirmary at the Royal Institution when his condition reached mortal danger. He died in January of 1852, two days after he reached forty-three years. Due to the insistence of the blind students, Braille’s system was finally adopted by the Institute in 1854, two years after his death.

Calendar: January 3

A Year: Day to Day Men: 3rd of January

A Spread on the Wood Floor

On January 3, 1927, the first Laurel and Hardy film, “Putting Pants on Philip”, is released.

The team was composed of the English thin man, Stan Laurel, and the American fat man, Oliver Hardy. Laurel played the clumsy and childlike friend of the pompous bully Hardy in their slapstick comedy routines, well known during the late 1920’s through the mid- 1940’s.

Prior to emerging as a team, both actors had well-established film careers. Laurel had appeared in over 50 films while Hardy had been in more than 250 productions. They were not a comedy team during that time; and it was not until 1926 that they appeared in a movie short together, when both separately signed contracts with the Hal Roach film studio. Laurel and Hardy officially became a team in 1927 when they appeared together in their first silent short film “Putting Pants on Philip”.

They appeared as a team in 107 films, starring in 32 short silent films, 40 short sound films, and 23 full-length feature films. They also made 12 guest or cameo appearances that included the “Galaxy of Stars” promotional film of 1936. Since the 1930s, the works of Laurel and Hardy have been released in numerous theatrical reissues, television revivals, 8-mm and 16-mm home movies, feature-film compilations, and home videos.

In 2005, they were voted the seventh-greatest comedy act of all time by a UK poll of fellow comedians. The official Laurel and Hardy appreciation society is known as ‘Sons of the Desert’ which was named after a fictitious fraternal society featured in the Laurel and Hardy film of the same name. While much of their comedy remained visual, various lines of humorous dialogue appeared in Laurel and Hardy’s talking films. Some examples include:

“You can lead a horse to water but a pencil must be led.” (Laurel, “Brats”, 1930)

“I was dreaming I was awake but I woke up and found meself asleep.” (Laurel, “Oliver the Eighth”, 1934)

“A lot of weather we’ve been having lately.” (Hardy, “Way Out West”, 1937).

Calendar: January 2

A Year: Day to Day Men: 2nd of January

Morning Cup of Joe

On January 2, 1870, construction of the Brooklynn Bridge begins with Washington Roebling as project manager.

In the summer of 1869, John Roebling, noted bridge-builder and chief engineer of the construction, severely injured his foot in a freak accident as he was surveying the site. He died of lockjaw not long after, and his son Washington Roebling, became chief engineer of the bridge project.

Construction on the Brooklynn-side wooden caisson began on January 2, 1870. To dig the foundations for the bridge’s enormous stone towers, caissons, enormous wooden boxes with no bottoms, were sunk in the river. Compressed air was pumped into them, and men inside would dig away at the sand and rock on the river bottom. The stone towers were built atop the caissons, which sank deeper into the river bottom.

After the caissons had been sunk to the river bottom, they were filled with concrete, and the construction of the granite stone towers continued above. When these anchorage towers reached their ultimate height, 278 feet above high water, work began on the four enormous cables that would support the roadway. Spinning the cables between the towers began in the summer of 1877, and was finished a year and four months later. But it would take nearly another five years to suspend the roadway from the cables and have the bridge ready for traffic.

The bridge was built with numerous passageways and compartments in its anchorage towers. New York City rented out the large vaults under the bridge’s Manhattan anchorage in order to fund the bridge. Opened in 1876, the vaults were used to store wine, as they were always at 60 °F (16 °C). This was called the “Blue Grotto” because of a shrine to the Virgin Mary next to an opening at the entrance.

Over the course of the next 40 years, several different liquor vendors would utilize the cellars below the bridge. City records indicate, for example, that in 1901, the “Luyties Brothers paid $5,000 for a vault on the Manhattan side of the bridge,” located at 204 Williams St., while in Brooklyn, “A. Smith & Company” forked over $500 a year to rent a wine cellar from 1901 until 1909.

By the late 1910s, as America debated the vices of liquor, the wine was moved out and the cellars were converted into newspaper storage. But the end of Prohibition in 1933 enticed new wine distributors. A celebration on July 11, 1934 was held in honor of Anthony Oechs & Co.’s move into the bridge’s blue-black caverns. After World War II, for logistical reasons, the city of New York took over permanent management of the cellars. To the despair of modern wine drinkers, adventurers, and those in pursuit of a good Instagram, the cellars have been closed and shuttered for years with only the occasional few gaining access.

Calendar: January 1

A Year: Day to Day Men: 1st of January

Being Yourself

Born on January 1st in 1735 (modern calendar) in the city of Boston, Paul Revere was an American silversmith, engraver, early industrialist, and a member of the Sons of Liberty. He is best known for his April 1775 midnight ride to alert the local colonial militia to the approach of the British forces. This event later became popularized by the publication of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1861 “Paul Revere’s Ride”.

The second of eleven children, Paul Revere left school at the age of thirteen and became an silversmith apprentice at the workshop of his father, Apollos Riveire whose work is now housed in the collections of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and the De Young Museum. Through the silversmith trade, Paul Revere made many connections across British society, which aided him when he became active in the American Revolution. Too young to officially be the master of the family silver shop after his father’s death in 1754, Revere enlisted in the provincial army in February of 1756.

Commissioned a second lieutenant in the artillery regiment, Revere spent the summer of 1756 at Fort William Henry at New York’s Lake George. He did not stay long in the army; he returned to Boston and took control of the silver shop in his own name. Revere married Sarah Orne on the fourth of August in 1757. Together they had eight children of whom two died young. Revere’s business started to suffer when the British economy entered a recession due to the Seven Year’s War, a global conflict that involved most of Europe’s great powers. With the enactment of the Stamp Act of 1785 by the British government, the Massachusetts economy made a further downturn.

Paul Revere did not participate in the more raucous protests against the policies of the British government; but he did become in 1765 a member of the Sons of Liberty, a loose organization active in the American colonies to advance the rights of colonists and fight taxation by the British government. From 1765 onwards, Revere produced engravinga and other artifacts with political theme, among which was one depicting the Boston Massacre in March of 1770. From 1773, the year of the Boston Tea Party, to November of 1775, he served as a courier for the Boston Committee of Public Service, a service in which he reported to New York and Philadelphia on the political unrest in Boston.

In 1774, General Thomas Gage, the military governor of Massachusetts, dissolved the provincial assembly, closed the port of Boston, and forced private citizens to provide lodging in their homes for British soldiers. At this time, Revere began meeting with others to coordinate the gathering and dissemination of intelligence on the movements of British soldiers. In December of 1774, a false alert prompted him to ride to Portsmouth, New Hampshire to warn its citizens of a British troop landing. This ride later sparked a rebel success with a gunpowder supply raid at Fort William and Mary in Portsmouth.

Paul Revers’s famous midnight ride was an alert to the American colonial militia in April of 1775 as to the approach of British forces. The ride occurred on the night of April 18th immediately before the first engagements of the American Revolutionary War. When activity by the British Army indicate a crackdown on the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, Rever and William Dawes prepared the alert. Robert Newman used a lantern to alert colonist in Charlestown to the Army’s advance of the Charles River.

Revere and Dawes rode ten miles to meet John Hancock and Samuel Adams in Lexington, a ride which alerted forty other riders along the way. Revere and Dawes, along with Samuel Prescott rode on to Concord. The three riders were captured by the British in Lincoln. Dawes and Prescott escaped but Revere was returned to Lexington and eventually freed after questioning. By giving the colonists advance waring of the British Army’s movement, the ride played a crucial role in the colonists’ victories in subsequent battles.

Calendar: November 24

A Year: Day to Day Men: 24th of November

Lion King

Mont Granier is a limestone mountain located between the departements of Savoie and Isere in France. It lies in the Charteuse Mountains range of the French Prealps. At 900 meters tall, Mont Granier has one of the highest cliffs in France.

In the year 1248, in the evening of November 24, a mass of limestone resting on marls slid into the valley, causing a massive landslide that destroyed many villages. This event created the sheer 700 meter north face of the mountain. Five villages were partly or completely destroyed by the avalanche: Cognin, Vourey, Saint-Andre, Granier, and Saint-Perange. Modern estimates calculate about 1000 local residents died due to this night time landslide, making it one of the biggest and deadliest landslides in Europe.