August 10 - Musée du Louvre

The Musée du Louvre first opened in Paris on August 10, 1793. The Assembly of the Revolutionary government had previously declared that the 16th-century Palais du Louvre, along the River Seine, would be "a place for bringing together monuments of all the sciences and arts." Its opening occurred on the first anniversary of Louis XVI’s imprisonment and the nationalization of his royal collection, which comprised more than 500 paintings and scores of objets d'art as well as works seized from émigrés and the Church. Other works were subsequently brought in from Northern Europe and the Vatican. Citizens were admitted free, three days a week. Walls were completely filled with paintings, floor to ceiling. The Louvre grew under Napoléon I, who built a northern wing parallel to the Grand Galerie and hauled in more art works. After Waterloo, many owners of the works scrambled to retrieve what Bonaparte had taken. Today’s renovated museum, “Le Grand Louvre,” with its glass pyramid designed by architect I.M. Pei, was completed in 1988-89.

August 9 - Smokey Bear

On August 9, 1944, Smokey Bear first appeared on a public service poster issued by the U.S. Forest Service along with state foresters and the Wartime Advertising Council. It showed a bear pouring a bucket of water on a campfire. Concern about fire prevention had been heightened during World War II because fewer men were available to fight them, but especially because Japan viewed wildfires as a potential weapon against the U.S. West Coast. Starting in 1942, Japan’s military used air raids (mainly in Oregon), incendiary bombs and fire balloons to attempt to start forest fires. Use of Walt Disney’s “Bambi” on wartime educational prevention posters was only temporary. A cooperative prevention program settled on using a bear, whose name “Smokey” was inspired by a heroic New York City firefighter’s nickname. The slogan "Only YOU Can Prevent Forest Fires" was developed in 1947 (altered in 2001 to say “Wildfires”). The heyday of Smokey’s popularity extended largely through the mid-1960s. Pictured: Smokey then and now.

August 8 - Graf Zeppelin

On August 8, 1929, the Graf Zeppelin, a German-built and -operated, hydrogen-filled, rigid airship, began a “Round-the-World” (Weltrundfahrt) demonstration flight that officially began and ended at Lakehurst, NJ. The project was backed by William Randolph Hearst’s media empire, which included the New York Daily Mirror and news services. Hearst paid $200,000 ($2.5 million today) for media rights, though costs were also offset by lucrative carriage of commercial and commemorative mail. Flying east, the airship stopped at Friedrichshafen, Germany (its home), Tokyo and Los Angeles before returning to Lakehurst. The circumnavigation took slightly more than 21 days and covered 20,651 miles. Named after a German count, the Graf Zeppelin was inaugurated in 1928 with the goal of offering regular transatlantic passenger service. In 1932 it began providing passenger, mail and freight service between Germany and Brazil. It ceased operations, however, immediately after the spectacular destruction of the Hindenburg airship at Lakehurst in May 1937.

August 7 - The Duomo, Florence

On August 7, 1420, construction began on the dome (Duomo) of the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore (Basilica of Saint Mary of the Flower) in Florence, Italy. The structure was engineered by architect Filippo Brunelleschi, who had won a competition sponsored by the city’s wool merchants’ guild, which had fears about building a dome above the 140-foot octagonal space already built to support it. No dome that wide then existed except Rome’s Pantheon, which is supported on massive walls. The competition involved great architects attempting to stand an egg upright on a marble slab. Brunelleschi succeeded by striking one end of an egg sharply on the flat marble, leaving it upright. His dome contains two shells, whereby workers sat atop the inner, lightweight shell to build the heavier outer shell. Rings hug both shells of the octagonal dome, and supporting “ribs” run through the rings. The herringbone pattern of the brick structure transfers weight to the supports. The project, structurally completed in 1436, and its crowning lantern occupied most of Brunelleschi’s life.

August 6 - Alfred Tennyson

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” … English poet Alfred Tennyson was born on August 6, 1809, in Lincolnshire, northeast of London. His collection Poems Chiefly Lyrical (1830) became popular and gained him the attention of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others. His Poems of 1842, containing works such as the dramatic monologue “Ulysses” (later called “a perfect poem” by T.S. Eliot), increased his fame, and in 1850 he was named Britain’s Poet Laureate on the death of William Wordsworth. He held that position until his death in 1892, the longest tenure of any laureate before or since. Many lines of Tennyson’s poetry have entered common parlance in English, including: “‘Tis better to have loved and lost/ Than never to have loved at all,” and "Nature, red in tooth and claw"(both from “In Memoriam A.H.H.”); and "Theirs not to reason why,/ Theirs but to do and die" (from “The Charge of the Light Brigade”). Extreme near-sightedness made reading and writing difficult for Tennyson. As a result, he composed entire poems in his head.

August 5 - Neil Armstrong

Engineer, pilot and astronaut Neil Armstrong was born on August 5, 1930, near Wapakoneta, Ohio. He majored in aeronautical engineering on a Navy scholarship at Purdue University, then entered the Navy as a pilot in 1949. After flying combat missions in the Korean War, he joined the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and became an astronaut in 1962. He made his first space flight in 1966 as command pilot of Gemini 8, and was the first civilian astronaut to fly in space. In the early hours of July 21, 1969, after having landed on the Moon on NASA’s Apollo 11 mission, Armstrong uttered the words "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind" after descending from the lunar module and stepping on the Moon’s surface. He revealed in 1983 that he did not did not prepare those words in advance, but only after landing on the Moon, explaining that, since the odds of a successful touchdown were only 50-50, “it didn't seem to me there was much point in thinking of something to say if we'd have to abort landing."

August 4 - Louis Vuitton

Artisan and entrepreneur Louis Vuitton was born on August 4, 1821, in the Jura region of France near Switzerland. He left home at age 14 for Paris, where he apprenticed with a successful box-maker and packer. This craft was respectable and essential in 19th-century Europe, and Vuitton made a name for himself among fashionable Parisians as a maker of boxes (trunks) for garments and fashions. Under the French Empire of Napoleon III in the 1850s, Empress Eugénie hired Vuitton as her personal box-maker and packer. He founded his eponymous company in 1854 and began producing distinctive luggage that could be stacked, differing from trunks with rounded tops (designed for water run-off). It was also stylish, first covered in gray, waterproofed canvas, then in popular brown and beige stripes (pictured), widely imitated by other luggage-makers. Vuitton’s earliest custom trunks were made for storing tennis racquets, hats, silverware, cologne, hairbrushes, wine and even a bed. His son Georges introduced the LV Monogram in 1896.

August 3 - Christopher Columbus set sail

521 years ago: On the evening of August 3, 1492, Italian navigator Christopher Columbus set sail from Palos de la Frontera in southwest Spain, north of Gibraltar, with three ships, seeking a western ocean route to China and India, which offered rare commodities and opiates. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to Ottoman Turks, the land route had become more difficult and risky. Columbus had read widely in astronomy, geography and history, including works of Ptolemy of Alexandria, who had estimated the size and radius of a spherical Earth in the 1st century. Columbus’ plan to sail to the Indies via the “Ocean sea” (the Atlantic) was not radical, since educated Westerners had understood the world to be round since Aristotle’s time (4th century BCE). Columbus had won sponsorship for his expedition from the Crown of Castile, later called Spain, after failing twice in Portugal. The ships he commanded sailed first to the Canary Islands; five weeks later they reached an island in what is now the Bahamas. The natives’ gold ear ornaments interested him greatly.

August 2 - Calvin Coolidge

90 years ago: On August 2, 1923, Calvin Coolidge became President of the United States when Warren Harding died suddenly while on a speaking tour in the West. Coolidge was at his family home in Plymouth Notch, Vermont, in the same house where he was born. It had neither electricity nor a telephone. He received word of Harding’s passing by messenger, and was sworn in by his father, a notary public, by the light of a kerosene lamp in the family parlor at 2:47 a.m. the next morning. He then went back to bed. The oath was readministered the next day in Washington. His speech to Congress in December was the first to be broadcast over the radio. He was elected in 1924 to his only full term and chose not to run again. A Progressive Republican of the Roaring ‘20s, Coolidge supported the civil rights of African Americans and Catholics and refused to appoint known members of the Ku Klux Klan (which lost most of its influence during his term). He is known for laissez-faire policies and his statement, “the chief business of the American people is business.”

August 1 - William Clark

Explorer and public servant William Clark was born on August 1, 1770, on his family’s plantation in eastern Virginia. He grew up in what is now Kentucky and, at age 19, joined a militia to fight Indians in the Ohio Valley. Later he became an officer in an extension of the U.S. Army, but retired in 1796 due to poor health and managed the Clark plantation. He had met Meriwether Lewis while in the army and, in 1803, Lewis asked him to be his co-leader in the Corps of Discovery, the three-year transcontinental expedition across the Louisiana Purchase territory to the Pacific Coast, commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson. Clark was responsible for record-keeping and map-making. The pair returned to St. Louis, whence they had begun, in September 1806, with maps, sketches, journals and artifacts. Jefferson appointed Clark the Indian agent and brigadier general of the militia for the Louisiana Territory, and he became governor of the Missouri Territory in 1813. In 1822 he was appointed Superintendent of Indian Affairs.