On February 18, 1943, Sophie Scholl and her brother Hans brought a suitcase full of leaflets to the University of Munich, calling for passive resistance against the Nazis, and were arrested. Four days later, Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans and their friend Christoph Probst were found guilty of treason and condemned to death.
On February 8, 1819, prominent social thinker and philanthropist John Ruskin was born. He is considered the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman and watercolourist. He was hugely influential in the latter half of the 19th century up to the First World War and today, his ideas and concerns are widely recognised as having anticipated interest in environmentalism, sustainability and craft.
On February 15, 1934, Swiss computer scientist Niklaus Emil Wirth was born. He is best known for designing several programming languages, including Pascal, and for pioneering several classic topics in software engineering.
On March 14, 1879, German theoretical physicist Albert Einstein was born, who has become an iconic figure for physics as well as science of the 20th century. He is best known for his theories on special and general relativity, as well as for the discovery of the photoelectric effect - for which he received the Nobel Prize - and he developed what has been named the most famous equation in history, the mass energy equivalence. Of course our history of science and technology (and art) blog wouldn't be complete without mentioning Albert Einstein's birthday. We already had several articles mentioning Einsteins work (The annus mirabilis 1905) or influence (relativity theory, nuclear fission, quantum physics, etc.). Thus, it is high time to take a closer look at the life of the most prominent scientist ever that has even become a popular icon.
106 years ago today, Kurt Gödel was born, one of the most significant logicians of all time. Gödel made an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when many, such as Bertrand Russell, A. N. Whitehead and David Hilbert, were pioneering the use of logic and set theory to understand the foundations of mathematics.
On April 26, 1564, English poet and playwright William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. Shakespeare's works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, two epitaphs, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.
On April 28, 1947, Norwegian ethnographer and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl and five crew mates set out from Peru on the self-built raft Kon-Tiki to prove that Peruvian natives could have settled Polynesia. With Kon-Tiki, Heyerdahl sailed 8,000 km across the Pacific Ocean in a self-built raft from South America to the Tuamotu Islands to demonstrate that ancient people could have made long sea voyages, creating contacts between apparently separate culture
In early June 1978 - we have not been able to determine the exact date - the famous arcade video game Space Invaders designed by Tomohiro Nishikado was released by the Japanese Taito Corporation. Space Invaders is one of the earliest shooting games and the aim is to defeat waves of attacking aliens with a laser cannon
On May 28, 1807, Swiss paleontologist, glaciologist, and geologist Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz was born, who is considered a prominent innovator in the study of the Earth's natural history. He was the first to scientifically propose that the Earth had been subject to a past ice age.
On June 5, 1883, British economist John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron of Keynes, was born. His work and his ideas have fundamentally affected the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics, and informed the economic policies of governments. He is one of the founders of modern macroeconomics and is widely considered the most influential economist of the 20th century.
On July 1, 1742, German scientist, satirist and Anglophile Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was born. He is remembered best for his posthumously published notebooks, which he himself called Sudelbücher, a description modeled on the English bookkeeping term "scrapbooks", and his aphorisms.
On 5 July 1841, British pioneer of organized tourism Thomas Cook arranged to take a group of 540 temperance campaigners from Leicester Campbell Street station to a rally in Loughborough, eleven miles away. This led him to start his own business founding the world's first and most famous travel agency.
On July 4, 1840, the RMS Britannia started her maiden voyage to Halifax, Nova Scotia from Liverpool, England. With the ocean liner of the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, later known as Cunard Steamship Company, the first regularly operating transatlantic postal service between Europe and America was established.