May 31

On the 31st in 1669, inveterate gossip Samuel Pepys reluctantly announced that he would no longer write in his diary. He cited poor eyesight as his reason for stopping but I think he simply got tired of people sending him notes saying “Sorry, not for us at this time, good luck elsewhere.”
Pepys would continue maintaining his 17th century version of People magazine, or National Enquirer if you prefer, but would do so with the aid of scribes. At the end of his last entry, he also had the decency to say goodbye as well as offer an apology for his having to censor his work: “And thus ends all that I doubt I shall ever be able to do with my own eyes in the keeping of my journal, I being not able to do it any longer, having done now so long as to undo my eyes almost every time that I take a pen in my hand; and, therefore, whatever comes of it, I must forbear: and, therefore, resolve, from this time forward, to have it kept by my people in long-hand, and must therefore be contented to set down no more than is fit for them and all the world to know; or, if there be any thing, which cannot be much, now my amours to Deb. are past, and my eyes hindering me in almost all other pleasures, I must endeavour to keep a margin in my book open, to add, here and there, a note in short-hand with my own hand. And so I betake myself to that course, which is almost as much as to see myself go into my grave: for which, and all the discomforts that will accompany my being blind, the good God prepare me!”

May 30

Amelia Earhart[i] by virtue of her many long-distance airplane flights is well known. Well because of that and because she disappeared over the Pacific and was never seen again. On December 28, 1920,[ii] Amelia went on her first airplane ride as a passenger. Earhart’s days as a serious flier began in October 1922 when she set a record for altitude achieved[iii]. She followed this with the impressive string of firsts for which she is rightfully well known. However, she was not the only woman to engage in feats of such derring-do. Born on the 30th in 1907, Elly Beinhorn Rosemeyer was almost ten years younger that Amelia, but she managed to offer some stiff competition in the girl-flier game. In 1931, she began long-distance flights between her home in Germany and West Africa. In March 1932, Elly became the second woman to fly solo, non-stop, from Europe to Australia. No, the first woman to do that was not Earhart; it was England’s Amy Johnson[iv], when she landed in Darwin, Northern Territory, Australia on May 24, 1930.
[i] Amelia was taught how to fly by Anita ‘Neta’ Snook Southern, the first female aviator in Iowa and the first female student accepted to the Curtiss Flying School in Virginia. She taught Amelia to fly using a surplus Curtiss JN-4, an open cockpit bi-plane.
[ii] She attended a fair in Long Beach, California and from the moment the airplane, piloted by Frank Monroe Hawks, lifted off the field, Amelia was convinced that she had to fly. On June 2, 1933, Hawks would set the west-east transcontinental airspeed record. He flew from Los Angeles, California to Brooklyn, New York in 13 hours, 26 minutes and 15 seconds.
[iii] Earhart reached an altitude of 14,000 feet.
[iv] Amy Johnson left Croydon, England on her flight to Australia on May 5, 1930 and landed in Darwin, Australia on May 24. I realize that I could have put her in the main body of this thing. I could probably have made the whole issue about her, but I found Rosemeyer first, so I consigned Amy to the notes section. So sue me. In the Second World War, Johnson served as a pilot in Britain’s Air Transport Auxiliary, ferrying warplanes and military personnel from the UK to pretty much anywhere in the world except to aircraft carriers.

May 29

Rhode Island may have been the first of the United States to outlaw slavery but it was the last of them to ratify the Constitution and became the last of the original 13 colonies to join the United States. It didn’t do that until the 29th in 1790.
I know that the USA didn’t exist until 1776. I also know that I’m pushing it here. On May 18, 1652, the governing body of the area that was destined to be Rhode Island passed a law abolishing slavery.

May 28

The Hippocratic Oath, taken by all physicians, reads in part, [n]ever to do deliberate harm to anyone for anyone else's interest. I wonder how a certain physician, born on the 28th in 1738 was able to reconcile his advocacy of a form of capital punishment to which his name would be given. I speak of course of Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. Guillotin was very strongly opposed to the very idea of capital punishment but felt it necessary for France to develop a more humane manner in which the sentence of death could be carried out. On October 10, 1789, the good doctor strongly advocated the development of a machine to carry out the death sentence. His intentions were undeniably honorable but when the French Revolution morphed into the Terror, and people were being beheaded with the Guillotine at the rate of 35,000 a month, I am certain that he must have regretted not keeping his big mouth shut.

May 27

If the planet, yes our planet, is ever consumed by a mushroom cloud, you can thank John Douglas Cockcroft (pictured). He was born on the 27th in 1897. He was a very bright and talented English physicist. In 1928 be began working with a similarly gifted Irish physicist, Ernest Walton. Isn’t it nice that these smart guys had someone to hang around with? The pair began fooling around, trying to see how they could annoy protons. Sometimes when people hang out with the wrong crowd they get into all kinds of trouble that they had not thought about. It’s the same old story, you try marijuana because all the other kids in school are and you want to hang out with the cool kids. The next thing you know, you are addicted to heroin and chopping people into little bits. That sort of the way it works with physicists. Some guy in the lab starts bombarding inert gases with protons and you want to try it too. Before you know it, you are bombarding lithium with protons and you’re splitting the atom, ultimately giving the world the atomic bomb. Were these guys grounded for a whole week? Nope. Were they even sent to bed without dinner? No! For some reason they were both given the Nobel Prize for physics.

May 26

Darwin’s place in history is undeniably secure. His Origin of Species turned the world upside down. While today his theories seem a commonplace, when he published his work the effect was truly astounding. Did Darwin’s work spring fully formed from his pen on to the written page? I think not. In the late 1700s Scotsman James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, proposed the theory that humans were evolved from primates, specifically the orangutan. Monboddo also believed that humans were born with tails but that midwives removed the appendages at birth. While in his sunset years he would disavow this theory, you have to give him credit for at least thinking it all through. Lord Monboddo died on the 26th in 1799.

John Edmonstone taught Darwin taxidermy and ignited Darwin’s interest of the diversity of life in the rainforests of South America. Edmonstone was a freed black slave from Guyana, South America. John had learned taxidermy under the tutelage of Charles Waterton, a very wealthy, very eccentric, aristocrat and explorer.
In his foreword to Origin of Species, Darwin credits Aristotle not, as many in Scotland did, Moboddo, with hinting at the idea of natural selection
Moboddo was no slacker in the smarts department. He graduated from Marischal College, Aberdeen in 1729. He continued his studies at both Edinburgh University and the University of Groningen. At Edinburgh University, he was given a law degree and was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1737.

May 25

On the 25th in 1961, President Kennedy convened a joint session of Congress. By itself, this would hardly be a remarkable event because for the most part, what Presidents have to say is generally neither terribly helpful nor interesting. His reason for holding the session however assured JFK’s place in the pantheon of truly great visionary presidents. During the session, he revealed his belief “that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” In documents from his administration that have only recently been de-classified, it has been revealed that the man Kennedy had in mind was none other than Lyndon Baines Johnson.
Johnson’s father Samuel Ealy Johnson, Jr. served 5 terms in the Texas legislature and ruffled a lot of feathers by his constant attacks, made on the floor of the legislature, on the Ku Klux Klan in Texas