December 15

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, died on the 15th in 1673. Really now, just what is the story with rich, aristocratic, British writers anyway? Margaret’s writing aroused a great deal of controversy in her day. She wrote and published using her own name, at a time when women’s work was generally published anonymously or pseudonyms were used. That fact alone was enough to raise eyebrows as well as objections. Professional busybody Samuel Pepys referred to Cavendish as ‘mad, conceited and ridiculous.’ More than a century later, Lady Caroline Lamb would describe George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron as being ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know.’ Weren’t there any members of the ruling class who wrote and were merely ordinary and boring? It would seem not.

December 14

Roald Amundsen[i] and his team won the race to the South Pole when the expedition arrived there on the 14th in 1911. The team consisted of Olav Bjaaland[ii], Helmer Hanssen[iii], Sverre Hassel, and Oscar Wisting[iv]. Wisting had been part of Amundsen’s team that went to the North Pole. Amundsen and Wisting were the first people to reach both the North and South Poles.
[i] On the 18th of June, in 1928 while on a mission to rescue aviator Umberto Nobile and his team whose airplane had crashed near the North Pole. Amundsen disappeared when the airplane he was in together with Leif Dietrichson, Rene Guilbaud, and three others , while searching for Nobile's crew, whose semi-rigid airship, the Italia, had crashed near the North Pole.
[ii] Bjaaland would light the torch for the 1952 Winter Olympics.
[iii] Hanssen’s autobiography, which was published in London in 1936 was entitled The Voyages of a Modern Viking.
[iv] Wisting had also been with Amundsen onboard the vessel Fram, which was used in their hunt for the elusive Northwest Passage. On the 5th of December in1936, shortly before the 25th anniversary of the South Pole expedition, Wisting was discovered, dead from a heart attack, in his bunk on the Fram, which was had been converted into a museum.

December 13

Thomas Augustus Watson as born on the 13th in 1854. He is best known for his role as Thomas Edison’s assistant in the development of the telephone. It is has been widely stated that the first telephone conversation consisted of Edison’s saying “Mr. Watson, come here I want to see you.” On occasion, the sentence’s ending is rendered as ‘I want you’ or ‘I need you’. It was Watson’s personal recollection that the first sentence ended with ‘I want you’. Neither Watson nor any other source however has been able to confirm that the second sentence ever spoken over the telephone was also Edison’s, who continued with “I’ve always wanted you.”

With the money he earned from his work with Edison on the telephone, Watson would found the Fore River Ship and Engine Company a shipbuilding company which he would sell to the Bethlehem Steel Company after World War II. He also wrote and staged numerous plays, drawing chiefly from the works of Charles Dickens.

December 11

Do you ever get bored? I do. A lot! Boredom can be oppressive at times, if you let it. However, there is a bright side to boredom, though at times it can be extremely difficult to find that aspect of it. There is a small, unassuming crater on the Moon that is called the Cannon Crater. This crater was named after Annie Jump Cannon who was born on the 11th in 1863 in Dover, Delaware. While attending school at Wellesley College in Massachusetts she caught scarlet fever during one particularly harsh winter. The effects of this illness left Cannon almost completely deaf. Upon graduating in 1884, with a degree in physics, she returned home to Delaware. She found herself adrift socially and personally because she was virtually without hearing, and was older and better educated than the other women she encountered in Dover. She became both bored and restless. In 1893, Cannon wrote to one of her professors at Wellesley, to find out if there were any openings at the school. The result of this letter, written out of sheer boredom, was that Sarah Frances Whiting, a professor of physics and astronomy hired Cannon to be her assistant. The position allowed her to pursue graduate courses and Whiting nudged her into studying spectroscopy and photography. As it developed these were areas for which Annie was particularly well suited. During her career, Annie would discover 300 variable stars, 5 novae and a binary star. In 1925, Oxford University in England awarded her an honorary doctorate, making her the first woman ever accorded such an honor.

December 10

Traffic lights are so common as to be boring. They have always been around and most people do not consider them a big deal. Certainly, I don’t. I had always assumed that these lights started appearing at roughly the same time that cars began appearing – the early 20th century. That wasn’t the case, however. The very first traffic light began operation on the 10th in 1868, when J. P. Knight installed a gas-powered, manually operated, traffic light outside the British Houses of Parliament in London, England.

On January 2, 1869, the traffic light exploded gravely injuring the police constable operating it.

December 9

Ever since the advent of printing presses with movable type in the 15th century, newspapers have been offered to the reading public. Not newspapers as we know them today. It would be a bit more accurate to say that since the introduction of these presses in the middle of the 1400s papers featuring news have been offered to the literate members of many communities. These were broadsheets with no fixed schedule of publication and circulation was limited for the most part to bulletin boards, walls of taverns and other locations where a sheet of paper could be tacked up. It was inevitable that the idea of publishing a proper newspaper would eventually strike someone. I mean, they had all these words just lying around cluttering things up and somebody had to come up with some way to get rid of at least some of them. On the 9th in 1793, Noah Webster began publication of the American Minerva, the City of New York’s first daily newspaper.

Webster would achieve lasting fame on January 15, 1806 when he published his book “A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language” which remains in print today as Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary.