Curated playlist
1906 births
- Leonid BrezhnevLeonid Ilyich Brezhnev died on the 10th of November 1982, and within days, leaders from Cuba, Nicaragua, Mozambique, Afghanistan, and India had declared national mourning. He was buried in his Marshal's uniform, medals pinned to his chest,…
- Yin ShunYin Shun was born on the 5th of April 1906 in a village in Zhejiang Province, China, and he would live for nearly a century, dying on the 4th of June 2005. Eleven days after his birth, the infant who would become one of the most…
- Samuel BeckettSamuel Beckett once described his own method as "impoverishment" - as taking away rather than adding, subtracting rather than building. That single word unlocks one of the strangest and most enduring careers in modern literature. Born in…
- Lew GradeLew Grade won the Charleston Championship of the World in 1926 at the Royal Albert Hall. Fred Astaire was one of the judges. The teenage competitor had been born Lev Winogradsky in the Russian Empire. His family had settled in the East End…
- Dmitri ShostakovichDmitri Shostakovich stood backstage at the Leningrad opera house on the 26th of January 1936, white as a sheet, waiting to take his bow. Joseph Stalin had just walked out of the auditorium without speaking to anyone. The next morning,…
- Robert E. HowardRobert E. Howard died on the morning of the 11th of June 1936 at age thirty, having first asked a nurse whether his mother would ever wake from her coma. When she told him no, he walked to his car in the driveway, retrieved a .380 Colt…
- Philo FarnsworthPhilo Farnsworth spent much of his life as the most famous inventor nobody could name. On the 3rd of July 1957, he appeared on the CBS quiz show I've Got A Secret. He sat behind a curtain, billed only as the mystery guest, "Doctor X." A…
- Kurt GödelKurt Friedrich Gödel, born on the 28th of April 1906 in Brünn, Austria-Hungary, died in Princeton Hospital on the 14th of January 1978, weighing so little that his death certificate listed the cause as "malnutrition and inanition caused by…
- Delano AmesDelano Ames was born on the 29th of May 1906 in Mt. Vernon, Ohio. His grandfather, Columbus Delano, had served as Secretary of the Interior under President Ulysses S. Grant. That heritage suggested a life of public distinction. Ames chose…
- James E. WebbJames Edwin Webb walked out of NASA headquarters for the last time on the 7th of October 1968. It was his sixty-second birthday. He was leaving the agency just days before the first crewed flight of the Apollo program got underway. He had…
- Ike DuffeyIsaac Walker Duffey built something that no professional basketball league had ever seen in the small city of Anderson, Indiana. Born on the 31st of May, 1906, he would go on to own the team that won the very last championship the National…
- Grace HopperGrace Hopper hung a clock on her office wall that ran counterclockwise, ticking backward through every meeting. "Humans are allergic to change," she once said. "They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.' I try to fight that. That's…