June 14

On the 14th in 1919, John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown, climbed in to the cockpit of a modified Vickers Vimy twin-engine bomber and lifted off from an airfield in St. John's, Newfoundland to begin their journey to Clifden, Ireland. If successful, theirs would be the first nonstop transatlantic flight. They made it, though they crash-landed in a bog in Clifden, Ireland, on June 15.
Alcock was the pilot of the flight. He died on December 18, 1919 when he crashed while delivering the new Vickers Viking amphibious airplane to the Paris air show. Brown lived until October 4, 1948.

June 13

On the 13th in 1965, Truman Capote wrote the final word in his epic novel ‘In Cold Blood’ bringing to an end years of personal turmoil and battle with the English language.
Capote was moved to write the book after reading an article in the November 16, 1959, edition of The New York Times which said in part “A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children were found shot to death today in their home. They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged ... There were no signs of a struggle, and nothing had been stolen. The telephone lines had been cut.”

June 12

John Augustus Roebling was born on the 12th in 1806. He was an engineer, perhaps most famously associated with New York’s Brooklyn Bridge. While he did begin the design for the iconic bridge and developed the process for making the metal wire used in its construction that makes the bridge so beautiful, before completing the design he died. His son Washington Augustus Roebling did the remaining design work. The firm that built the bridge was Joseph A. Roebling Sons.

June 11

On the 11th in 1863, Julia Margaret Cameron celebrated her 48th birthday. As a gift, her daughter gave her the first camera she had ever owned. I can’t be certain but I kind of think that she liked the gift. A lot! In less than a year, she had established herself as one of the foremost photographers in England and was a member in good standing of the Photographic Societies of England and Scotland. The simple gift had fired her imagination and she discovered that she “longed to arrest all the beauty that came before me and at length the longing has been satisfied.” Among many others, she photographed Charles Darwin, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

June 10

Think about it, someone has to be first in any new endeavor, right? In 17th century Massachusetts, it was Sixty-year old Bridget Bishop. She died on the 10th in 1692, at the conclusion of her trial on charges of witchcraft during the infamous Salem Witchcraft Trial she was hanged. There is a widespread belief that the convicted witches were burned at the stake. While that was widely true of European witches, the ones in Salem, Massachusetts were hung. In all, 14 women and 5 men were hanged. Five more died in prison while awaiting trial and one man Giles Corey (pictured) who refused to plead either guilty or not guilty or testify in his trial was, pursuant to English common law, subjected to "peine forte et dure” and simply crushed to death on September 19, 1692. Tell me, can you get ruder than that? Apparently, the plea Nolo contendere had not been invented.

June 9

Bertha Felicitas Sophie Freifrau von Suttner was born on the 9th in 1843 in Prague, then part of the Austrian Empire. For a brief time in 1896, she worked for Alfred Nobel. She had responded to an advertisement seeking a secretary-housekeeper for his home in Paris. Her employment with him was brief but the two maintained a life-long friendship and correspondence. Bertha was a successful novelist as well as a radical pacifist. It was her largely her relationship with Nobel that convinced him to include a Nobel Peace Prize in his yearly awards. In 1905, she would become the first recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize .

Holger Madsen and Carl Theodor Dreyer made a movie about her life, Die Waffen niede, in 1914. She is currently depicted on the Austrian 2 euro coin.
Bertha only worked for Alfred for one week and then left to secretly marry Arthur Gundaccar Freiherr von Suttne, a man whom her family had forbidden her to marry. I guess that showed her parents who’s boss, huh?

June 8

Smith Wigglesworth was born on the 8th in 1859, in Yorkshire, England. He was an influential minister in the early days of Pentecostalism. That faith places great reliance on faith healing. Laying on of hands as a means of achieving a healing is, from what I understand, a significant feature of the faith. At one point, his work took him to Sweden. He ran into a wall with the Swedish authorities when they forbade him to include the laying on of hands as part of his service. He was a flexible kind of guy however and was able to develop a sort of “corporate healing” where an afflicted person would lay their own hands on themselves to achieve the desired result. It seems to me that that takes a lot of the charm out of the whole experience, but you have to play the cards that you are dealt. Smith was a firm believer in faith healing. I mean he would have to be, wouldn’t he? He was a professional after all. He claimed that God had cured him of hemorrhoids, though I don’t want to even consider how his followers may have been able to confirm this. Not surprisingly, Smith also claimed that he could bring people back from the dead. His claims to this skill included bringing one follower back when the fellow was in his coffin at his own funeral. Apparently, Smith loved his wife dearly. He had to bring her back from the dead not once, but three times. Wigglesworth began claiming healing powers when he was eight years old.