Curated playlist
1988 deaths
- Kenzō MasaokaKenzo Masaoka was the first in Japan to put recorded sound into animation. Before him, film sound was live.
- Henry J. KelleyA 1960 flight-path paper by Henry J. Kelley derived the basic mathematics behind backpropagation.
- Richard FeynmanRichard Feynman's last words, spoken after a long coma, were "This dying is boring." The remark suited an American theoretical physicist who never lost his taste for blunt, irreverent honesty. He was a man who treated authority, ceremony…
- Kim PhilbyKim Philby lunched weekly with the CIA's counterintelligence chief while passing secrets to Moscow.
- Roy OrbisonRoy Orbison died weeks after finishing the best-selling album of his career. He never heard Mystery Girl released.
- Lin CarterLin Carter printed about 3,000 copies of his fanzine Kadath, and most were thrown away.
- Klaus FuchsKlaus Fuchs, a German-born theoretical physicist, gave a plain reason for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Rudolf Peierls, a fellow scientist, visited him in detention shortly after the news of his arrest broke and asked him…
- Raymond WilliamsA teenage visit to a Soviet pavilion in Paris led Raymond Williams to read Karl Marx.
- Valery LegasovIn August 1986, Valery Legasov stood before the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and spoke for five hours. The report he carried for the Soviet delegation ran to 388 pages. Legasov was a Soviet inorganic chemist, not a reactor…
- Pete MaravichPete Maravich played 658 NBA games with no left coronary artery. An autopsy found it missing from birth.