Curated playlist
1909 births
- Eugène IonescoEugène Ionesco sat down at age 40 to learn English from a textbook, and what came out of that exercise was not a language skill but a theatrical revolution. The Assimil method asked him to copy whole sentences and memorize them. When he…
- Elia KazanElia Kazan was born Elias Kazantzoglou in Constantinople on the 7th of September, 1909, to Cappadocian Greek parents whose surname derived from the Turkish word for "pot maker". His family arrived in the United States on the 8th of July,…
- Nathan RosenNathan Rosen published a paper on the structure of the atomic nucleus in Physical Review in 1931. James Chadwick wouldn't formally discover the neutron until the following year. That gap is a signature of how Rosen worked. He was…
- Oldřich NejedlýOn the 11th of June 1990, Oldřich Nejedlý died at the age of 80, just as that year's World Cup kicked off in Italy. Italy had also hosted the World Cup back in 1934, a tournament that made Nejedlý's name in the first place. What actually…
- Francis Bacon (artist)Francis Bacon was born on the 28th of October 1909 at 63 Lower Baggot Street in Dublin, into a world of racehorses, Sheffield steel money, and a father who would have him horsewhipped. He died on the 28th of April 1992, in a private clinic…
- Hans SuessDuring the Second World War, a chemist named Hans Suess advised the production of heavy water at a plant in Norway. Allied commandos would later target that exact facility in Operation Gunnerside. Suess was born on the 16th of December…
- Alex RaymondAlexander Gillespie Raymond Jr. was born on the 2nd of October 1909 in New Rochelle, New York. His father worked as a civil engineer and road builder who encouraged his son's love of drawing from an early age. The elder Raymond covered one…
- Rollo MayRollo Reece May was born in Ada, Ohio, on the 21st of April, 1909, and he spent the next eight and a half decades asking questions that most people spend their lives avoiding: What is anxiety, really? What does love require of us? And why…
- Adam RapackiAdam Rapacki stood before the United Nations General Assembly on the 2nd of October 1957 and proposed something that no major power had yet attempted: a nuclear-free zone carved out of the heart of Europe. He was the foreign minister of…
- Roger RevelleRoger Randall Dougan Revelle was, by his own account, the grandfather of the greenhouse effect. That was how he described himself to a reporter after receiving the National Medal of Science in 1991, just months before his death. The phrase…