Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties – all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion – these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.
Among my most prized possessions are the words that I have never spoken.
1602
The Bodleian Library is established at the University of Oxford in Oxford, England.
1804
The first US patent for a separable electric attachment plug is issued to Harvey Hubbell of Bridgeport, Connecticut. (US No. 774,250) It screws into a light socket so that homes with the new electric lighting technology could also make use of other useful appliances.
1895
While experimenting with electricity, Wilhelm Röntgen discovers the X-ray at Würzburg University.
1919
The first large machine switching exchange in the Bell system is brought into service in Norfolk, Virginia. This exchange uses the step-by-step system and is installed by the Automatic Electric Company of Chicago for the Bell System.
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I cannot live without books: but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.
1492
The Ensisheim Meteorite, the first meteorite with a known date of impact, strikes the Earth in a wheat field outside the village of Ensisheim, Alsace, France at near noon.
1631
Pierre Gassendi first observes the transit of a planet. Johannes Kepler had predicted a transit of Mercury would occur in 1631. When Gassendi observed the dot of Mercury passing across the face of the Sun with a Galilean telescope by projecting the sun’s image on a screen of paper. He will recount the observation in Mercurius in sole visus (“Mercury in the Face of the Sun”) in 1632.
1903
Léon Gaumont screens his first sound film for the Société de Photographie in Paris, France.
1908
Professor Ernest Rutherford announces in London that he had isolated a single atom of matter.
1911
Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton, in his presidential address to the Röntgen Society in London, suggests that high-definition television is possible with cathode ray tubes. The paper won’t be published until April 1924 in the magazine Wireless World.
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In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.
1572
A supernova is observed in the constellation known as Cassiopeia by Wolfgang Schüler. It appears as a new star, adjacent to the fainter star seen in the middle of the constellation. Although Schüler isn’t the first one to see it, he will later gain a measure of fame when he publishes Stella Nova (Latin: “New Star”). However, it will ultimately be dubbed “Tycho’s Nova” after the better known Tycho Brahe, though he didn’t notice the new star until November 11. For about two weeks, the supernova will be brighter than any other star in the sky and visible during the day, and it will remain faintly visible to the naked eye for about sixteen months, until March 1574.
1862
A direct telegraphic link between New York and San Francisco is established.
1935
Edwin Armstrong presents his paper “A Method of Reducing Disturbances in Radio Signaling by a System of Frequency Modulation,” in which he first proposes FM radio to the New York chapter of the Institute of Radio Engineers,
1944
The Hanford Atomic Facility first produces plutonium. The facility will eventually produce the plutonium used in construction of Fat Man, the atomic bomb that will be detonated over Nagasaki, Japan on August 9, 1945.
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For four minutes, I wanted to shut this video off. I just couldn’t. It was too bad – like a car accident you can’t stop staring at. It’s absolutely mind-blowing how bad this video is.
Enjoy.
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