Curated playlist
1943 deaths
- Nikola TeslaNikola Tesla spent his last decades claiming he had built a death beam. He said it could stop an army 200 miles away.
- Andrew Fleming WestA stranger's 1910 death left Princeton $800,000 for a graduate college. Andrew Fleming West had long fought for one.
- John Harvey KelloggJohn Harvey Kellogg built a chair that shakes its sitter twenty times every second, and visitors to the Kellogg Discovery Center in Battle Creek, Michigan, can still sit in it today. The physician who designed it lived from 1852 to 1943.…
- Sergei RachmaninoffRachmaninoff left Russia in 1917 with one small suitcase of sketches and scores.
- Frank NittiFrank Nitti, born Francesco Raffaele Nitto, rests in Mount Carmel Cemetery in Hillside, Illinois. His grave lies to the left of the main Roosevelt Road entrance, about 50 ft from the gate. To the right of that gate is the family plot of Al…
- Czesława KwokaCzesława Kwoka's Auschwitz photo survives though camp policy required such images destroyed.
- Nikolai VavilovBotanist Nikolai Vavilov set out to end famine but was arrested in 1940 and died in a Soviet prison.
- Max ReinhardtMax Reinhardt once won an acting school's building in a poker game. The director later taught Shirley Temple there.
- Wilfrid IsraelWilfrid Israel, an Anglo-German businessman, was the subject of a letter that Albert Einstein wrote in June 1943 to Israel's mother. Einstein knew she was gravely anxious about her son's fate. He told her he had never met a being so noble,…
- Isoroku YamamotoIsoroku Yamamoto, the admiral who commanded Japan's Combined Fleet through the opening years of World War II, once gave his prime minister a forecast that sounded like a boast and read like a warning. In mid-1941, Prime Minister Fumimaro…
- A. MerrittAuthor A. Merritt was a major influence on H. P. Lovecraft. His day job was editing a Sunday magazine.