On October 22, 1879, Thomas Edison successfully tested the first commercially practical electric incandescent light bulb. To conduct current and create light inside the bulb, he used a filament of carbon, which he had tried previously along with platinum and other metals in many experiments since 1878. The bulb lasted 13.5 hours. Edison did not invent the first electric light bulb. He had been preceded by numerous other inventors, particularly Joseph Swan, a British physicist and chemist who had made early attempts in the 1860s and later lit homes and a London theater with light bulbs. However, Edison overcame key shortcomings that included short life and high cost. He made further improvements on the bulb, filed for a patent in November, and formed the Edison Electric Light Co. in New York with investors that included J. P. Morgan. At the first public demonstration of his incandescent light bulb on December 31, 1879, in Menlo Park, NJ, Edison commented, "We will make electricity so cheap that only the rich will burn candles."
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree” … Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on October 21, 1772, in Devon near the southwest tip of England. His influence on English literature in the Romantic period and beyond was significant not only because of his own poetry but through his friendship with poet William Wordsworth and others, and his literary criticism, which included the concept of willing suspension of disbelief. He suffered from poor health, stemming from rheumatic fever, and was often crippled by anxiety and depression, for which he was treated with laudanum (an opium mixture), resulting in addiction. One of his most famous poems, “Kubla Khan” (1797), was the product of an opium-influenced dream, after reading about Xanadu, the summer palace of the Mongol ruler and Emperor of China. Coleridge maintained he had remembered 200-300 lines of verse, but had written down only 30 lines when he was famously interrupted by “a person from Porlock” (a nearby town). It is believed the interruption was a convenient fiction.
40 years ago: The Sydney Opera House in Australia was formally opened on October 20, 1973, by Queen Elizabeth II. Designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon, the facility is located at the tip of a peninsula in Sydney Harbor. It is comprised of three groups of interlocking vaulted “shells,” housing two main performance halls and a restaurant, set on a huge platform and surrounded by terraces. Utzon won a 1955 competition on the basis of designs that were little more than preliminary drawings. Construction begun in 1958 involved radically new construction approaches that caused repeated delays and difficulties. Work on the soaring shells took eight years, required specially-cast ceramic tiles, and was one of the earliest uses of computers in structural analysis to understand complex design forces. The project was completed 10 years late and more than 14 times over-budget. Utzon, who resigned midway through the work because of hostility from a new, conservative Australian prime minister, was not invited to the opening, nor was his name mentioned.
Filmmaker and inventor Auguste Lumière was born on October 19, 1862, in Besançon, France, near Switzerland. He and his younger brother Louis lived in Lyon, France, where they became the world’s earliest motion picture filmmakers. Antoine manufactured photographic equipment, which Louis improved upon (at age 17) with a “dry plate” process. In 1894 their father saw Edison’s bulky Peephole Kinetoscope (built for a single viewer) in Paris and charged his sons with improving on the phenomenon. By 1895, the brothers had invented their smaller, lightweight Cinématographe, combining a hand-cranked camera with a printer and projector. On March 22, 1895, they held a private screening of a full-fledged motion picture, known by its eponymous title, “Workers leaving the Lumière factory.” History’s first-ever public screening of motion pictures, consisting of 10 short films (each lasting less than 50 seconds), occurred on December 28 at the Grand Café in Paris. They were called actualités (documentaries). In 1896 the Lumières opened movie theaters that became known as cinemas.
The Cardiff Giant was unearthed on October 16, 1869, on the farm of William "Stub" Newell, in Cardiff, NY, near Syracuse, during a well-digging. The 10-foot tall “petrified man” was a hoax carved from gypsum and “aged” by being pounded with steel needles and treated with stains and acids. It was the creation of New York tobacconist George Hull, an atheist who had argued with the Biblical literalism of a Methodist minister who insisted on the truthfulness of Genesis 6:4, which states, "There were giants in the earth in those days." Hull planted the stone giant at the farm of Newell, his cousin, then charged 50 cents a head for vast crowds of eager viewers. It was a sensation. He sold the figure to a syndicate headed by David Hannum, who later refused to sell the Cardiff Giant to P.T. Barnum for $50,000. When Barnum secretly made a plaster replica and exhibited it as the “authentic” oddity, Hannum uttered the immortal sentence, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” referring to Barnum’s double-hoaxed paying customers. Today the infamous giant resides in Cooperstown, NY.
“Audentes fortuna iuvat.” (“Fortune favors the bold.”) … Ancient Roman poet Virgil was born Publius Vergilius Maro on October 15, 70 BCE, in what is now Mantua in Northern Italy. He apparently suffered ill health and lived as an invalid. In the last eleven years of his life, from 29 to 19 BCE, he wrote his sprawling Latin epic poem, the Aeneid, commissioned by Emperor Augustus. The poem tells the story of Rome’s mythical founder, Aeneas, an exiled warrior who fled the Greeks’ sacking of Troy, arrived on Italy’s shores, fought the native Latin tribe and fulfilled his destiny by proclaiming Rome’s mission of civilizing the known world under divine guidance. Composed of nearly 9,900 lines of dactylic hexameter verse, the poem’s first six books are partly based on Homer’s Odyssey and the second six on the Iliad. Aeneas’ devotion to duty (“pietas”) is a key feature of Virgil’s implicit commentary on Rome’s new era of vast, powerful empire that followed its civil wars. As a national epic, it associated Rome with Troy’s greatness and legitimized the rulers of the new Augustan Age.
The cornerstone of the White House in Washington, D.C., was laid on October 13, 1792. Thereafter construction proceeded very slowly for the next eight years. Two years earlier, architects had submitted plans to a design competition for the executive mansion offering a $500 prize. Thomas Jefferson submitted a design anonymously. The winner was James Hoban, a young Irish immigrant who had based his idea on a palace in Dublin. Enslaved and free African-American workers along with employed immigrants built the foundations and parts of the main structure of the White House. Hoban hired Scottish immigrants to erect the sandstone walls and install decorative motifs. The porous sandstone was whitewashed with a mixture of lime and glue-like materials as a sealant. In November 1800, President John Adams and wife Abigail moved into the residence, then President Jefferson became the occupant in 1801. The cornerstone, which is said to have an inscribed brass plate, has never been located, though it is believed to be in the southwest corner. Pictured: Today and in 1800.
English experimental chemist and physicist Henry Cavendish was born on October 10, 1731, in Nice, France, to an aristocratic family. He studied for a time at Cambridge University and then completely absorbed himself in scientific studies. He was the first to discover hydrogen gas, which he called “inflammable air” (forming water upon combustion), and to measure its density. The gas was later named by French scientist Antoine Lavoisier. Cavendish is distinguished for his remarkable accuracy in studies of the composition of atmospheric air, the properties of various gases, the law governing electrical attraction and repulsion, measurement of the force of gravity, and calculations of the density (and, by extension, the weight) of the Earth. Though he was a renowned member of the Royal Society of London, he was notoriously asocial and solitary, and may have had Asperger’s syndrome. He was alarmed by women. Because he avoided publishing his work, others were credited with many of his discoveries, including the principles of electrical conductivity.
Danish physicist Niels Bohr was born on October 7, 1885, in Copenhagen. Two years after earning his doctorate at the University of Copenhagen, he developed the Bohr model of atomic structure, involving his theory that electrons orbit around an atom’s nucleus. An element’s chemical properties are largely determined by the number of electrons in the outer orbits. He also theorized that an electron can drop from a higher-energy orbit to a lower one, thereby releasing a “quantum” of energy. In the 1920s, Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and others devised the “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum physics, which involved ideas of probability, uncertainty and observation. Bohr and Albert Einstein famously debated the complex issues arising from theories of quantum mechanics. The latter declared, "I, at any rate, am convinced that He [God] does not throw dice." Bohr is said to have replied, "Einstein, stop telling God what to do!" Bohr barely escaped arrest by the Nazis in 1943 and went on to consult with the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb.
The Orient Express long-distance passenger train service, originally called the Express d'Orient, began operating on October 4, 1883. It was part of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, owned by a Belgian banker who had been impressed by Pullman cars in the United States. The train’s first route ran from the Gare de l'Est in Paris, via Munich and Vienna, to the Romanian city of Giurgiu on the Danube River, bordering Bulgaria. Passengers were ferried across the Danube to connect with a train to Istanbul (still called Constantinople). In 1885 another route was established through Vienna and Belgrade. Orient Express service reached its height in the 1930s, when its dining cars offering haute cuisine and its sleeping-cars gained a well-deserved reputation for luxury, comfort, sophistication and intrigue. The train ran three parallel services, one of which crossed the Alps via Zürich and Innsbruck to its destination in Athens. Because each Orient Express route included sleeping-cars originating at Calais, service spanned the length of continental Europe.
