October 10

October 10 is the birthdate of Jean-Antoine Watteau, one of the most brilliant and original painters of the 18th century. He lived only 36 years but affected the development of Rococo art in France and all of Europe, even sowing seeds of what became Impressionism. Rising from the provinces to fame in Paris during the Régence of the duc d'Orléans, he often painted aristocratic figures in lush, idyllic scenes (the term “fête galante” was coined to describe them) that betrayed a modern sense of sober melancholy and the ultimate futility of life. Curiously, Watteau’s art appears prominently in Stanley Kubrick's “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Barry Lyndon.” Pictured: detail, “Mezzetin” (1718-20), a commedia dell'arte character. This painting was once owned by Catherine the Great.

October 9

October 9 is the birthdate of British musician and composer John Lennon. Art was one of Lennon's first loves. He began drawing long before he had a guitar, often sketching comical cartoons he included in his self-made school magazine, “The Daily Howl.” When he failed all his school exams, he managed to get accepted at the Liverpool College of Art, where he disrupted classes and ridiculed teachers. He was thrown out of the college before his final (third) year. In 1969 he created an infamous portfolio of erotic drawings, entitled "Bag One," which he gave to Yoko Ono as a wedding gift. He continued to draw, usually in a quasi-calligraphic style, until his assassination in 1980 at age 40. Pictured: a well-known self-portrait.

October 8

30 years ago – On October 8, 1982, the musical Cats made its debut on Broadway. It had first premiered in London in May 1981. Composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Cats is based on T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939), a collection of poems he wrote for his godchildren. The show, which featured the wildly popular song “Memory,” tells the story of the Jellicle tribe of cats and their process of identifying one cat for a new life (via something called the “Heaviside Layer”). In 1997, after 18 years, Cats became the longest-running musical in Broadway history (6,138 performances), and closed in September 2000 (after 7,485 performances). Its record was surpassed in 2006 by The Phantom of the Opera, also by Lloyd Webber, but it remains Broadway's second longest-running show.

October 7

On October 7, 1868, Cornell University was inaugurated and a class of 412 men was enrolled the next day. The university was formally founded in April of the next year as New York State’s land grant institution, resulting from the Morrill Act (1862) that granted federally controlled land to the states to establish colleges for teaching practical skills ("without excluding ... classical studies"). This was a response to the industrial revolution and changing social class. State Senator Ezra Cornell offered his farm in Ithaca as a site and a $500,000 endowment from his personal fortune (he had founded Western Union). Cornell and Andrew Dickson White focused on all fields of knowledge, from the classics to the sciences and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are embodied in Cornell's motto: "I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study."

October 6

October 6 is the birthdate of Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl, who gained fame in 1947 for his expedition in Kon-Tiki, a raft he built and sailed on an 8,000-mile journey in the Pacific from South America to the Tuamotu Islands (French Polynesia). His journey was part of an effort to reinforce the concept of “cultural diffusion” whereby elements of culture (e.g., ideas, styles, religions, technologies, languages) are spread within a single culture or from one culture to another. Heyerdahl proposed that similarities between the culture of Polynesia and pre-Columbian civilizations in the Andes resulted from diffusion from the latter to the former. This theory has been disputed and currently has few supporters among professional anthropologists.

October 5

October 5 is the birthdate of Robert H. Goddard, physicist and inventor credited with creating the world's first liquid-fueled (gasoline and liquid oxygen) rocket, which he launched in March 1926 in Auburn, Massachusetts. Though the rocket (named "Nell") rose a mere 41 feet during a 2.5-second flight that covered 184 feet, it established the viability of liquid propellants. Goddard’s work and his patents, including one for multi-stage rocket design (1914), are considered key milestones in the scientific potential of missiles and spaceflight. He continued to develop rockets using gyroscopes and other devices, sometimes was ridiculed in the press, and died (in 1945) prior to the Space Age. Pictured: Goddard and the first liquid-fueled rocket (at top), fuel tank situated below.

October 4

On October 4, 1927, Danish-American sculptor Gutzon Borglum and 400 workers began sculpting four presidents – Washington, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt and Lincoln – on the granite face of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. The idea was conceived to promote tourism in the region, and the presidents were chosen because of their role in preserving the Republic and expanding its territory. The images were completed and dedicated successively between 1934 and 1939. The project, which cost $1 million, was funded primarily by the U.S. government. Borglum continued his work at Mount Rushmore until he died suddenly in 1941. He had also hoped to carve inscriptions into the mountain outlining the history of the United States.

October 3

Chieftain Vercingetorix, who had united the tribes of Gaul, surrendered to Julius Caesar on October 3, 52 BCE, after the Battle of Alesia in what is now east-central France. He had commanded the Gauls’ last major uprising against the Romans, and his defeat marked the end of Celtic domination of what became Rome’s vast province of Gaul. Caesar’s siege of Alesia was one of his greatest military achievements and a classic example of siege warfare. Plutarch notes that Vercingetorix surrendered dramatically by riding his adorned horse around Caesar's camp before dismounting before the Roman. Caesar somehow omits this from his Gallic Wars commentaries. In 46 BCE the chieftain was paraded in Caesar’s long-delayed triumph in Rome, then executed. Pictured: Celtic gold stater (ancient coin) showing Vercingetorix.

October 2

On October 2, 1836, Charles Darwin returned to Falmouth, Cornwall, in far southwest England, aboard the HMS Beagle, ending a five-year surveying expedition of lands in the south Atlantic and Pacific. It was the ship’s second survey voyage under Robert FitzRoy. Darwin went ashore all along the South American coast, spending thousands of hours making observations and collecting specimens and data, later visiting the Galapagos Archipelago where, famously, he focused on multiple species of finches, mockingbirds and tortoises that figured in his historic work, On the Origin of Species (1859). After his return, Darwin published his “journal and remarks,” later known as The Voyage of the Beagle (1839, pictured). In the second edition he hinted at a theory of evolution – “the first appearance of new beings on this earth.”

October 1

On October 1, 1890, Congress created Yosemite National Park, spectacular home of the Half Dome and El Capitan granite formations, three giant sequoia groves and Yosemite Falls, one of the world’s tallest. This marked the first time the U.S. government protected land for public enjoyment. Although Yellowstone became the first national park (1872), Yosemite was the foundation for the national park system, largely through the work of Galen Clark, who discovered the Mariposa Grove of sequoias, and the persistence of preservationist John Muir. Spanning the western Sierra Nevada, parts of the landscape once were overrun by commercial interests; now almost 95% of the park is designated wilderness. Pictured: “Yosemite Valley, Clearing Winter Storm” (1935) by Ansel Adams. A mural print of this photo sold at auction in 2010 for a record $722,000.