German-born British astronomer and composer William Herschel was born on November 15, 1738, in Hanover Germany. At age 19 he sought refuge from the Seven Years’ War in England, where his musical ability (he composed 24 symphonies) led to interests in mathematics and lenses. He began building reflecting telescopes and later became famous for their manufacture. In 1781, he identified a planet beyond Saturn he called the “Georgian star” (Georgium sidus) after King George III, but it became known as Uranus to conform to other known planets’ classical mythology-derived names. In 1800, while testing filters to observe sun spots, he accidentally discovered infrared radiation by holding a thermometer beyond the red end of the visible spectrum. Pictured: rings of Uranus, which is tipped on its side, from Voyager 2.
American composer Aaron Copland was born on November 14, 1900. He had his musical start in France in his 20’s but focused on jazz as the first genuinely American music, from which he was inspired to create a new symphonic music distinct from that of Europe. He composed in different styles in different time periods, but he became the “Dean of American Composers” by developing a uniquely American style marked by open, changing harmonies and folk melodies that evoke the vastness and beauty of America and its resourceful spirit. Works he composed in the 1930s and 1940s made him famous, including the ballets “Billy the Kid” (1939), “Rodeo” (1942) and “Appalachian Spring” (1944), which he wrote for Martha Graham without knowing the ballet’s subject. The title, supplied later, actually refers to “spring” as a water source, not the season.
Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer Robert Louis Stevenson was born on November 13, 1850, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Recurrent lung disease affected the course of his life and was the impetus for his many travels, seeking a healthy climate. His decision to pursue writing alienated him from his parents, who expected him to follow the family profession of lighthouse engineering. In 1880 he married an American, Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne, in San Francisco. One of his most popular books was the adventure novel Treasure Island (1883), followed by the popular A Child's Garden of Verse (1885) and the “boys’ novel” Kidnapped (1886). His novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) has been viewed as a guidebook to Victorian social hypocrisy, exposing the era’s outward respectability and inward lust.
Russian composer and chemist Alexander Borodin was born on November 12, 1833. He was the illegitimate son of a Georgian noble who registered him as the son of one of his serfs. Astonishingly, his music was a secondary vocation to his career as a chemist and physician. With Mily Balakirev, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin was one of “The Five,” composers devoted to a specifically Russian kind of art music. He is best known for three symphonies, two string quartets, the tone poem “In the Steppes of Central Asia” and his opera Prince Igor. His romantic, lyrically beautiful music was adapted for the Broadway musical “Kismet” (1953), famously in the song, "Stranger in Paradise." Borodin suffered poor health and died suddenly at an academic gala in St. Petersburg at age 53.
U.S. Highway 66 was designated on November 11, 1926, by the Joint Board on Interstate Highways, a group of state officials that established roadway standards. Road signs were erected the following year. Route 66 ran from Chicago through Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, ending at Los Angeles, covering nearly 2,500 miles. It connected the main streets of rural and urban communities along its route, for which it was an economic lifeline, and it was a thoroughfare for western migration, especially during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Roadside attractions proliferated. In 1938 it became the first highway to be completely paved. Piece by piece, the “Mother Road” was replaced by the Interstate Highway System. It was decommissioned as a U.S. Highway in 1985, and road signs were removed.
On November 10, 1958, New York jeweler Harry Winston donated the Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian Institution. Also known as "Le bleu de France," the gem is very large at 45.52-carats and deeply blue to the naked eye because of trace amounts of boron in its crystal structure. (It exhibits red phosphorescence after exposure to ultraviolet light.) It was cut from a massive, crude precursor stone (the Tavernier Blue, 115 carats) from India, and sold around 1668 to King Louis XVI. Notorious for supposedly being cursed, the "most famous diamond in the world" passed through multiple owners in France, Britain and the U.S. Harry Winston bought it in 1949. He delivered it to the Smithsonian by sending it via registered U.S. Mail in a box wrapped in brown paper, insured at a cost of $145.29. Its value now exceeds $250 million.
After a set of remarkable communications blunders by East German apparatchiks, the Berlin Wall was flung open on the evening of November 9, 1989, allowing citizens free access between East and West Germany. It was the single most significant event in the end of the Cold War and the eventual collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In August of that year, Hungary had opened its border to Austria, allowing waves of East Germans to circumvent the Wall by traveling through those nations into West Germany. Massive demonstrations had also given birth to the “Peaceful Revolution” for civil and human rights. This marked the start of Die Wende (The Turn), which led to the reunification of Germany in October 1990. Pictured: The Berlin Wall and Brandenburg Gate on November 10, 1989.
November 8 is the birthdate of Edmond Halley, English astronomer, geophysicist, mathematician, meteorologist and physicist. Son of a wealthy soap-maker, he published papers on the Solar System and sunspots as an undergraduate at Oxford and financed the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica. In 1705, he published a work showing that comet sightings in 1456, 1531, 1607 and 1682 were the same comet, which he predicted would return in 1758. He did not live to see the return of what became known as Halley's Comet, which is visible to the naked eye every 75–76 years. Known sightings have occurred since at least 240 BCE. It last appeared in the inner Solar System in 1986 and will next appear in mid-2061. Pictured: The comet’s appearance in 1066, shown in the Bayeux Tapestry (1077).
French author and philosopher Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in French Algeria. Though often regarded as an existentialist, Camus’ works, including L’Étranger (1942) and La Peste (1947), are landmarks in absurdism, which holds that the efforts of human beings to find inherent meaning will ultimately fail because certainty is impossible in the face of the unknown. He argued that man must find his own clarity and meaning in a world that offers neither, and must endure his struggles in spite of their ultimate lack of significance. It is the individual who gives meaning to circumstance. He received the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature for work which, “with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times." He was killed in 1960 in an auto accident in France at age 46.
Belgian musical instrument designer and musician Antoine-Joseph "Adolphe" Sax was born on November 6, 1814. In Paris in the 1840s, he successfully worked on a new type of valved bugles that became known as saxhorns. In 1846 he patented his namesake instrument, the saxophone, with its single reed mouthpiece like a clarinet, conical brass body like an ophicleide (bugle) and acoustic properties of the French horn and clarinet. Most saxophones are made from brass but are categorized as woodwind instruments, since an oscillating reed produces the sound waves (not the player's lips against a mouthpiece) and pitches are produced by opening and closing keys. Pictured: President Bill Clinton accepting a Limited Edition Presidential Model Tenor Saxophone by the L.A. Sax Co., 1994.
