1483 – High Renaissance Artist Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino – known as simply ‘Rafael’ – is born.
Raphael was enormously productive, running an unusually large workshop and, despite his death at 37, leaving a large body of work. Many of his works are found in the Vatican Palace, where the frescoed Raphael Rooms were the central, and the largest, work of his career. The best known work is The School of Athens in the Vatican Stanza della Segnatura. After his early years in Rome much of his work was executed by his workshop from his drawings, with considerable loss of quality. He was extremely influential in his lifetime, though outside Rome his work was mostly known from his collaborative printmaking.
After his death, the influence of his great rival Michelangelo was more widespread until the 18th and 19th centuries, when Raphael’s more serene and harmonious qualities were again regarded as the highest models. His career falls naturally into three phases and three styles, first described by Giorgio Vasari: his early years in Umbria, then a period of about four years (1504–1508) absorbing the artistic traditions of Florence, followed by his last hectic and triumphant twelve years in Rome, working for two Popes and their close associates.[
1895 – Spanish Educator and Inventor Angela Ruiz Robles is born.
Angela Ruiz Robles was a Spanish teacher, writer, pioneer and inventor of the mechanical precursor to the electronic book. In 1949, Ruiz was awarded Spanish patent 190,698 for the “Mechanical Encyclopedia” (Spanish: la Enciclopedia Mecánica).
Ruiz Robles wanted to lighten the weight of the books carried by her students, so her devised a device consisting of a series of text and illustrations on reels, all under a sheet of magnifying glass with a light for reading in the dark, and was to incorporate spoken descriptions of each topic. Her device was never put into production but a prototype is kept in A Coruña National Science and Technology Museum.
1910 – Henri Fabre becomes the first person to fly a seaplaneafter taking off from a water runway near Martigues, France.
Henri Fabre was born into a prominent family of shipowners in the city of Marseille. He was educated in the Jesuit College of Marseilles where he undertook advanced studies in sciences. He then intensively studied aeroplane and propeller designs. He patented a system of flotation devices which he used when he succeeded in taking off from the surface of the Etang de Berre on March 28, 1910. On that day, he completed four consecutive flights, the longest about 600 meters. the Hydravion has survived and is displayed in the Musée de l’Air in Paris. Henri Fabre was soon contacted by Glenn Curtiss and Gabriel Voisin who used his invention to develop their own seaplanes.
1930 – American Physicist Jerome Isaac Friedman is born.
He is Institute Professor and Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He won the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Henry Kendall and Richard Taylor, for work showing an internal structure for protons later known to be quarks. Dr. Friedman currently sits on the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
1963 – Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds Premieres in New York.
The Birds is a 1963 American psychological horror-thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, loosely based on the 1952 story of the same name by Daphne du Maurier. It focuses on a series of sudden, unexplained violent bird attacks on the people of Bodega Bay, California over the course of a few days.
The film stars Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren, in her screen debut, supported by Jessica Tandy, Suzanne Pleshette and Veronica Cartwright. The screenplay is by Evan Hunter, who was told by Hitchcock to develop new characters and a more elaborate plot while keeping du Maurier’s title and concept of unexplained bird attacks.
In 2016, The Birds was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States Library of Congress, and selected for preservation in its National Film Registry.
