Curated playlist
1901 births
- Louis ArmstrongAmerican jazz trumpeter and singer (1901–1971)
- Clark GableClark Gable arrived in Hollywood as an extra in 1924, barely able to afford a meal, and left it more than three decades later as the man the American Film Institute ranked seventh among the greatest male screen legends of classical…
- Langston HughesLangston Hughes died on the 22nd of May 1967, and beneath the floor of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, his ashes rest under an African cosmogram titled Rivers. At the center of that design is a single line…
- Enrico FermiEnrico Fermi paced off the distance that strips of paper were blown by a blast wave on the 16th of July 1945, and from that simple measurement he calculated the yield of the first nuclear bomb explosion. He estimated ten kilotons of TNT.…
- Walt DisneyWalt Disney holds the record for most Academy Awards won by an individual, with 22 wins from 59 nominations. Yet the man behind that record was, in private, shy, self-deprecating, and insecure. He once told a friend, "I'm not Walt Disney.…
- Alfred CobbanAlfred Cobban walked into his inaugural lecture as Professor of French History at University College London in 1954 and proceeded to dismantle one of the most entrenched interpretations in modern historical scholarship. His target was what…
- Werner HeisenbergWerner Heisenberg was born on the 5th of December 1901 in Würzburg, Germany, the son of a secondary school teacher who would become Germany's only ordinarius professor of medieval and modern Greek studies. That background in language and…
- C. L. R. JamesC. L. R. James was born on the 4th of January 1901 in Tunapuna, a small town in Trinidad and Tobago, then a British Crown colony. He died in London on the 19th of May 1989, and his body was carried home to be buried at Tunapuna Cemetery,…
- Arthur Samuel (computer scientist)Arthur Lee Samuel coined the term "machine learning" in 1959, and the computers of his era had almost no memory to spare. Working at IBM in Poughkeepsie, New York, Samuel faced a problem that would define the rest of the century: how do…
- HirohitoHirohito reigned over Japan for 63 years, from 1926 until his death in 1989, the longest reign of any emperor in Japanese history. He sat on the Chrysanthemum Throne as the 124th emperor in the traditional order of succession. During those…
- Robert BressonJean-Luc Godard once wrote of one man, "He is the French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is German music." The man Godard meant was Robert Bresson, a French filmmaker born on the 25th of September 1901 and dead on the…
- Jacques LacanJacques Marie Émile Lacan, born on the 13th of April 1901 in Paris, became the most controversial psychoanalyst since Freud. He held seminars in Paris nearly every year from 1952 until 1980, attracting philosophers, artists, and clinical…
- SukarnoSukarno was born Koesno Sosrodihardjo on the 6th of June 1901, in Surabaya, East Java, the son of a Muslim Javanese primary school teacher and a Hindu Balinese mother from the Brahmin caste. By the time he died on the 21st of June 1970, he…
- Edwina Mountbatten, Countess Mountbatten of BurmaEdwina Cynthia Annette Ashley entered the world on the 28th of November 1901 in London. Her father Wilfrid Ashley served as a Conservative member of Parliament while her mother Amalia Mary Maud Cassel was the sole child of Sir Ernest…
- Linus PaulingLinus Carl Pauling stands alone in the history of Nobel Prizes. He is the only person ever to have been awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes, one for Chemistry in 1954 and one for Peace in 1962. Scientific American named him one of the twenty…