Tintoretto

Italian artist Tintoretto was born 29 September 1518 in Venice. His real name was Jacopo Comin, and he was a notable exponent of theRenaissance school. For his phenomenal energy in painting he was termed Il Fuioso. His work is characterized by its musculr figures, dramatic gestures, and bold use of perspective in the Mannerist style, while maintaining color and light typical of the Venetian School. In his youth, Tintoretto was also known as Jacopo Robusti as his father had defended the gates of Padua in a way that others called robust, against the imperial troops during the War of the League of Cambrai (1509–1516). Tintoretto was the eldest of 21 children. His father, Giovanni, was a dyer, or tintore; hence the son got the nickname of Tintoretto, little dyer, or dyer’s boy, which is anglicized as Tintoret. The family originated from Brescia, in Lombardy, then part of theRepublic of Venice. In childhood Jacopo, a born painter, began daubing on the dyer’s walls; his father, noticing his talent took him to the studio of Titian to see how far he could be trained as an artist. Tintoretto had only been ten days in the studio when Titian sent him home once and for all, Titian mayhave judged that young Jacopo, although he might become a painter, would never be properly a pupil.From this time forward the two always remained upon distant terms, Tintoretto being indeed a professed and ardent admirer of Titian, but never a friend, and Titian and his adherents turning the cold shoulder to him. His noble conception of art and his high personal ambition were evidenced in the inscription which he placed over his studio Il disegno di Michelangelo ed il colorito di Tiziano (“Michelangelo’s design and Titian’s color”).

He also studied from models of Michelangelo’s Dawn, Noon, Twilight and Night, and became expert in modelling in wax and clay method. The models were sometimes taken from dead subjects dissected or studied in anatomy schools; some were draped, others nude, and Tintoretto was to suspend them in a wooden or cardboard box, with an aperture for a candle. Now and afterwards he very frequently worked by night as well as by day. Tintoretto also helped the young painter Andrea Schiavone, in wall-paintings; . The two earliest mural paintings of Tintoretto are said to have been Belshazzar’s Feast and a Cavalry Fight. . The first work of his to attract some considerable notice was a portrait-group of himself and his brother playing a guitar. Another of Tintoretto’s early pictures is in the church of the Carmine in Venice, thePresentation of Jesus in the Temple. In the S. Benedetto is the painting Annunciation and Christ with the Woman of Samaria. Tintoretto also painted four subjects from Genesis For the Scuola della Trinity (the scuole or schools of Venice were more in the nature of hospitals or charitable foundations than of educational institutions). Two of these, now in the Venetian Academy, are Adam and Eve and the Death of Abel.

The Embarkation of St Helena in the Holy Land was attributed to his contemporary Andrea Schiavone. But new analysis of the work has revealed it as one of a series of three paintings by Tintoretto, depicting the legend of St Helena And The Holy Cross. The Embarkation of St Helena was acquired by the V&A in 1865. Its sister paintings, The Discovery Of The True Cross and St Helen Testing The True Cross, are held in galleries in the USA.Towards 1546 Tintoretto painted three of his best known works – the Worship of the Golden Calf, thePresentation of the Virgin in the Temple, and the Last Judgment for the church of the Madonna dell’Orto, and settled down in a house by the church overlooking the Fondamenta de Mori, which is still standing. In 1548 he was commissioned for four pictures in the Scuola di S. Marco: the Finding of the body of St Mark, the St Mark’s Body Brought to Venice, a St Mark Rescuing a Saracen from Shipwreck and the Miracle of the Slave. (these three are in Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice). .St Mark’s Body Brought to Venice(1548). Having painted these He was financially secure and was able to marry Faustina de Vescovi , daughter of a Venetian nobleman who was the guardian grande of the Scuola Grande di San Marco, who bore him several children. Between 1565 and 1567, and again from 1575 to 1588, Tintoretto produced a large number of paintings for the walls and ceilings of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco .

In 1560 five painters, including Tintoretto and Paolo Veronese, were invited to send in trial-designs for the centre-piece in the smaller hall named Sala dell’Albergo, In 1565 he resumed work at the scuola, painting the magnificent Crucifixion, In 1576 he presented another centre-piece—that for the ceiling of the great hall, representing the Plague of Serpents; and completed this ceiling with pictures of the Paschal Feast and Moses striking the Rock . Next Tintoretto paintedthe entire scuola and of the adjacent church of San Rocco. In total the scuola and church contain fifty-two memorable paintings, such as Adam and Eve, the Visitation, the Adoration of the Magi, the Massacre of the Innocents, the Agony in the Garden, Christ before Pilate, Christ carrying His Cross, the Assumption of the Virgin. Tintoretto also did numerous paintings in the Doge’s Palace; including a portrait of the doge, Girolamo Priuli, the Excommunication of Frederick Barbarossa by Pope Alexander III, the Victory of Lepanto and The Deliverance of Arsenoe.

Sadly though most were destroyed by a fire. With help from Paolo Veronese, his colleague at the Sala dell Anticollegio, Tintoretto painted four masterpieces – Bacchus, with Ariadne crowned by Venus, the Three Graces and Mercury. He also painted, Minerva discarding Mars,(what a waste of chocolate), the Forge of Vulcan, Queen of the Sea , theEspousal of St Catherine to Jesus , St George and St Nicholas, with St Margaret and St Jerome and St Andrew and nine large compositions, chiefly battle-pieces including the Capture of Zara from the Hungarians in 1346 amid a Hurricane of Missiles and arguably the crowning production of Tintoretto’s life, “Paradise” which is reputed to be the largest painting ever done upon canvas. A fter the completion of the Paradise Tintoretto rested for a while, and he never undertook any other work of importance. In 1592 he became a member of the Scuola dei Mercanti. In 1594, he developed severe stomach pains, and a fever, that prevented him from sleeping and eating much. He died on May 31, 1594. He was buried in the church of the Madonna dell’Orto by the side of his favorite daughter Marietta, who had died in 1590 at the age of thirty. Tradition suggests that as she lay in her final repose, her heart-stricken father had painted her final portrait.

Carravaggio

Italian artist Michelangelo Merisi or Amerighi da Caravaggio; was born 29 September 1571. He was active in Rome, Naples, Malta, and Sicily between 1592 and 1610. And his paintings, which combine a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, had a formative influence on the Baroque school of painting. Caravaggio trained as a painter in Milan under Simone Peterzano who had himself trained under Titian. In his twenties Caravaggio moved to Rome where, during the late 16th and early 17th centuries, many huge new churches and palazzi were being built and paintings were needed to fill them. During the Counter-Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church searched for religious art with which to counter the threat of Protestantism,

Caravaggio’s paintings combined close physical observation with a dramatic, even theatrical, use of chiaroscuro (That is the use of strong contrasts between light and dark, usually bold contrasts affecting a whole composition.) and this came to be known as Tenebrism, the shift from light to dark with little intermediate value. He burst upon the Rome art scene in 1600 with the success of his first public commissions, the Martyrdom of Saint Matthewand Calling of Saint Matthew. Thereafter he never lacked commissions or patrons, yet he handled his success poorly. He was jailed on several occasions, vandalized his own apartment, and ultimately had a death warrant issued for him by the Pope. An early published notice on him, dating from 1604 and describing his lifestyle three years previously, tells how “after a fortnight’s work he will swagger about for a month or two with a sword at his side and a servant following him, from one ball-court to the next, ever ready to engage in a fight or an argument, so that it is most awkward to get along with him.” In 1606 he killed a young man in a brawl and fled from Rome with a price on his head.

He was involved in a brawl in Malta in 1608, and another in Naples in 1609, possibly a deliberate attempt on his life by unidentified enemies. This encounter left him severely injured. A year later, at the age of 38, he died under mysterious circumstances in Porto Ercole, reportedly from a fever while on his way to Rome to receive a pardon. Famous while he lived, Caravaggio was forgotten almost immediately after his death, and it was only in the 20th century that his importance to the development of Western art was rediscovered. Despite this, his influence on the new Baroque style that eventually emerged from the ruins of Mannerism was profound. It can be seen directly or indirectly in the work of Rubens, Jusepe de Ribera,Bernini, and Rembrandt, and artists in the following generation heavily under his influence were called the “Caravaggisti” or “Caravagesques”, as well as Tenebrists or “Tenebrosi” (“shadowists”). Art historian Andre Berne-Joffroy said of him: “What begins in the work of Caravaggio is, quite simply, modern painting.

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Charles Addams

Best remembered as an American cartoonist who created the Addams Family and known for his particularly black humour and macabre characters, Charles “Chas” Addams, sadly Passed Away on September 29, 1988 at St. Clare’s Hospital and Health Center in New York City. Born 7 January 1912 in Westfield New Jersey, His father encouraged him to draw from an early age, and Addams did cartoons for the Westfield High School student literary magazine, Weathervane. He attended Colgate University in 1929 and 1930, and the University of Pennsylvania, where a fine-arts building on campus is named after him, in 1930 and 1931. In front of the building there is also a sculpture of the silhouettes of Addams Family characters.

After attending Colgate University, Addams then studied at the Grand Central School of Art in New York City in 1931 and 1932. In 1933 he joined the layout department of True Detective magazine, where he had to retouch photos of corpses that appeared in the magazine’s stories to remove the blood from them. Addams complained that “A lot of those corpses were more interesting the way they were.” His first drawing in The New Yorker ran on February 6, 1932 (a sketch of a window washer), and his cartoons ran regularly in the magazine from 1938, when he drew the first instance of what came to be called the Addams Family, He remained a freelancer throughout that time.

Some of his best known recurring characters, became known as The Addams Family, and The Addams Family television series began after David Levy, a television producer, approached Addams with an offer to create it with a little help from the humorist. All Addams had to do was give his characters names and more characteristics for the actors to use in portrayals. The series ran on ABC for two seasons, from 1964 to 1966. and also became the basis for two two animated TV series, three motion pictures, and a Broadway musical. Addams was “sociable and debonair,” and was described by a biographer as “A well-dressed, courtly man with silvery back-combed hair and a gentle manner, he bore no resemblance to a fiend.” Figuratively a ladykiller, Addams squired celebrities such as Greta Garbo, Joan Fontaine, and Jacqueline Kennedy on social occasions

Addams sadly Passed Away on September 29, 1988 after having suffered a heart attack after parking his car. An ambulance took him from his apartment to the hospital, where he died in the emergency room. As he had requested, a wake was held rather than a funeral; he had wished to be remembered as a “good cartoonist”. He was cremated and his ashes were buried in the pet cemetery of his estate “The Swamp”.

Michaelmas

Michaelmas is celebrated annually on 29 September. Michaelmas is the feast of Saint Michael the Archangel (also the Feast of Saints Michael, Gabriel, Uriel and Raphael, the Feast of the Archangels, or the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels). In medieval England, Michaelmas marked the ending and beginning of the husbandman’s year, George C. Homans observes: “at that time harvest was over, and the bailiff or reeve of the manor would be making out the accounts for the year.”

In Christianity, the Archangel Michael is the greatest of all the Archangels and is honored for defeating Lucifer in the war in heaven. He is one of the principal angelic warriors, seen as a protector against the dark of night, and the administrator of cosmic intelligence. Michaelmas has also delineated time and seasons for secular purposes as well, particularly in Britain and Ireland as one of the quarter days. The Eastern Orthodox Churches do not observe Michaelmas, except the Serbian Orthodox Church. The Greek Orthodox honor the archangels on 8 November instead.

In the fifth century a basilica near Rome was dedicated in honour of Michael on 30 September, beginning with celebrations on the eve of that day, and 29 September is now kept in honour of Michael and all Angels throughout the western Church.During the Middle Ages, Michaelmas, or the Feast of St. Michael, was celebrated as a Holy Day of Obligation, but this tradition was abolished in the 18th century. Lutheran Christians consider it a principal feast of Christ, and the Lutheran Confessor, Philip Melanchthon, wrote a hymn for the day that is still sung in Lutheran Churches: “Lord God to Thee We Give”.

Because Michaelmas falls near the equinox, it is associated in the northern hemisphere with the beginning of autumn and the shortening of days. It was also one of the English, Welsh and Irish quarter days when accounts had to be settled. On manors, it was the day when a reeve was elected from the peasants. Michaelmas hiring fairs were held at the end of September or beginning of October. On the Isle of Skye, Scotland, a procession was held. One of the few flowers left around at this time of year is the Michaelmas daisy. Hence the rhyme: “The Michaelmas daisies, among dead weeds, Bloom for St Michael’s valorous deeds …”

There is also a custom of baking a special bread, called Struan Micheil, on the eve of the Feast of Saint Michael the Archangel which probably originated in the Hebrides. The bread was made from equal parts of barley, oats, and rye. In remembrance of absent friends or those who had died, special Struans, blessed at an early morning Mass, were given to the poor in their names. Nuts were traditionally cracked on Michaelmas Eve. In northern Scotland and Ireland, a special cake called St Michael’s bannock, or Michaelmas Bannock (also known as a Struan) was baked without using any metal implements.

Saint Michael is also the patron of some North American police officers, and Michaelmas may also be a Blue Mass. Michaelmas is still celebrated in the Waldorf schools, which celebrate it as the “festival of strong will” during the autumnal equinox. Folklore in the British Isles also suggests that Michaelmas day is the last day that Blackberries can be picked. It is said that when St. Michael expelled Lucifer, the devil, from heaven, he fell from the skies and landed in a prickly blackberry bush. Satan cursed the fruit, scorched them with his fiery breath, and stamped and spat on them, so that they would be unfit for eating. Hence it is considered ill-advised to eat them after 29 September, a Michaelmas pie is made from the last of the season.

World Rabies Day

World Rabies day takes place annually on 28 September, to mark the anniversary of the death of scientist Louis Pasteur who, with the collaboration of his colleagues, developed the first efficacious rabies vaccine. World Rabies Day is an international campaign coordinated by the Global Alliance for Rabies Control, a non-profit organization with headquarters in the United States and the United Kingdom, which is held to raise awareness about the impact of rabies on humans and animals, provide information and advice on how to prevent the disease, and how individuals and organizations can help eliminate the main global sources

World Rabies Day is also observed by the United Nations and has been endorsed by international human and veterinary health organizations such as the World Health Organization the Pan American Health Organization, the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the World Veterinary Association.

French Chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur was born December 27, 1822 and became renowned for his discoveries of the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation and pasteurization. He is remembered for his remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and preventions of diseases, and his discoveries have saved countless lives ever since. He reduced mortality from puerperal fever, and created the first vaccines for rabies and anthrax. His medical discoveries provided direct support for the germ theory of disease and its application in clinical medicine. He is best known to the general public for his invention of the technique of treating milk and wine to stop bacterial contamination, a process now called pasteurization. He is regarded as one of the three main founders of bacteriology, together with Ferdinand Cohn and Robert Koch, and is popularly known as the “father of microbiology”.

Pasteur also made significant discoveries in chemistry, most notably on the molecular basis for the asymmetry of certain crystals and racemization. He was the Director of the Pasteur Institute, established in 1887, till his death on 28 September 1895, and his body lies beneath the institute in a vault covered in depictions of his accomplishments in Byzantine mosaics.

Bell X-2

On 28 September 1956 USAF Captain Milburn G. Apt becomes the first man to exceed Mach 3 while flying the Bell X-2. The Bell X-2 was a research aircraft built to investigate flight characteristics in the Mach 2–3 range. The X-2 was a rocket-powered, swept-wing research aircraft developed jointly in 1945 by Bell Aircraft Corporation, the U.S. Air Force and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) to explore aerodynamic problems of supersonic flight and to expand the speed and altitude regimes obtained with the earlier X-1 series of research aircraft.The Bell X-2 was developed to provide a vehicle for researching flight characteristics in excess of the limits of the Bell X-1 and D-558 II, while investigating aerodynamic heating problems in what was then called the “thermal thicket”.The Bell X-2 had a prolonged development period due to the advances needed in aerodynamic design, control systems, high-temperature resistant materials to be used, and other technologies that had to be developed.

Not only did the X-2 push the envelope of manned flight to speeds, altitudes and temperatures beyond any other aircraft at the time, it pioneered throttleable rocket motors in U.S. aircraft (previously demonstrated on the Me 163B during World War II) and digital flight simulation. The XLR25 rocket engine, built by Curtiss-Wright, was based on the smoothly variable-thrust JATO engine built by Robert Goddard in 1942 for the Navy. Providing adequate stability and control for aircraft flying at high supersonic speeds was only one of the major difficulties facing flight researchers as they approached Mach 3. For, at speeds in that region, they knew they would also begin to encounter a “thermal barrier”, severe heating effects caused by aerodynamic friction. Constructed of stainless steel and a copper-nickel alloy, K-Monel, and powered by a liquid propellant (alcohol and oxygen) two-chamber XLR25 2,500 to 15,000 lbf (11 to 67 kN) sea level thrust, continuouslythrottleable rocket engine, the swept-wing Bell X-2 was designed to probe the supersonic region.

Following a drop launch from a modified B-50 bomber, Bell test pilot Jean “Skip” Ziegler completed the first unpowered glide flight of an X-2 at Edwards Air Force Base on 27 June 1952. Ziegler and aircraft #2 (46-675) were subsequently lost on 12 May 1953, in an inflight explosion during a captive flight intended to check the aircraft’s liquid oxygen system. X-2, crew, and support equipmentLt. Col. Frank K. “Pete” Everest completed the first powered flight in the #1 airplane (46-674) on 18 November 1955. By the time of his ninth and final flight in late July 1956 the project was years behind schedule, but he had established a new speed record of Mach 2.87 (1,900 mph, 3050 km/h). About this time, the YF-104A was demonstrating speeds of M = 2.2 or 2.3 in a fighter configuration. The X-2 was living up to its promise, but not without difficulties. At high speeds, Everest reported its flight controls were only marginally effective. High speed center of pressure shifts along with fin aeroelasticity were major factors. Moreover, simulation and wind tunnel studies, combined with data from his flights, suggested the airplane would encounter very severe stability problems as it approached Mach 3

A pair of less experienced but excellent pilots, Captains Iven C. Kincheloe and Milburn G. “Mel” Apt, were assigned the job of further expanding the envelope and, on 7 September 1956, Kincheloe became the first pilot ever to climb above 100,000 ft (30,500 m) as he flew the X-2 to a peak altitude of 126,200 ft (38,466 m). Just 20 days later, on the morning of 27 September, Apt was launched from the B-50 for his first flight in a rocket airplane. He had been instructed to follow the “optimum maximum energy flight path” and to avoid any rapid control movements beyond Mach 2.7. With nozzle extenders and a longer than normal motor run, Apt flew an extraordinarily precise profile; he became the first man to exceed Mach 3, reaching Mach 3.2 (2,094 mph, 3,370 km/h) at 65,500 ft (19,960 m). The flight had been flawless to this point, but, for some reason, shortly after attaining top speed, Apt attempted a banking turn while the aircraft was still above Mach 3 (lagging instrumentation may have indicated he was flying at a slower speed or perhaps he feared he was straying too far from the safety of his landing site on Rogers Dry Lake). The X-2 tumbled violently out of control and he found himself struggling with the same problem of “inertia coupling” which had overtaken Chuck Yeager in the X-1A nearly three years before.

Yeager, although exposed to much higher vehicle inertial forces, as a result of extensive experience flying the X-1 was very familiar with its character, was able to recover. Apt attempted to recover from a spin, but could not, and fired the ejection capsule, which was itself only equipped with a relatively small drogue parachute. Apt was probably disabled by the severe release forces. As the capsule fell for several minutes to the desert floor, he did not emerge so that he could use his personal parachute. While the X-2 had delivered valuable research data on high-speed aerodynamic heat build-up and extreme high-altitude flight conditions, this tragic event terminated the program before the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics could commence detailed flight research with the aircraft. The search for answers to many of the riddles of high-Mach flight had to be postponed until the arrival three years later of the most advanced of all the experimental rocket aircraft, the North American X-15.

Ben E.King

American Soul singer Ben E. King (Benjamin Earl King) was born September 28, 1938). He is perhaps best known as the singer and co-composer of “Stand by Me”, a US Top 10 hit in both 1961 and later in 1986 (when it was used as the theme to the film of the same name) and a number one hit in the UK in 1987, and as one of the principal lead singers of the R&B vocal group The Drifters. In 1958, King (still using his birth name) joined a doo wop group called The Five Crowns. Later in 1958, The Drifters’ manager George Treadwell fired the members of the original Drifters, and replaced them with The Five Crowns. King had a string of R&B hits with the group on Atlantic Records. He co-wrote and sang lead on the first Atlantic hit by the new version of the Drifters, “There Goes My Baby” (1959). He also sang lead on a succession of hits by the team of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, including “Save the Last Dance for Me”, “This Magic Moment”, and “I Count the Tears”. King only recorded thirteen songs with The Drifters— two backing other lead singers and eleven lead vocal performances —including a non-single called “Temptation” (later redone by Drifters vocalist Johnny Moore).Due to a contract dispute with Treadwell in which King and his manager, Lover Patterson, demanded that King be given a salary increase and a fair share of royalties, King never again performed with the Drifters on tour or on television; he would only record with the group until a suitable replacement could be found. On television, fellow Drifters member Charlie Thomas usually lip synched the songs that King had recorded with the Drifters. This end gave rise to a new beginning.

In May 1960, King left the Drifters, assuming the more memorable stage name Ben E. King in preparation for a successful solo career. Remaining on Atlantic Records on its Atco imprint, King scored his first solo hit with the ballad “Spanish Harlem” (1961). His next single, “Stand by Me”, written with Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, ultimately would be voted as one of the Songs of the Century by theRecording Industry Association of America. “Stand by Me”, “There Goes My Baby”, and “Spanish Harlem” were named as three of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll; and each of those records plus “Save The Last Dance For Me” has earned a Grammy Hall of Fame Award. King’s other well-known songs include “Don’t Play That Song (You Lied)”, “Amor”, “Seven Letters”, “How Can I Forget”, “On the Horizon”, “Young Boy Blues”, “First Taste of Love”, “Here Comes the Night”, “Ecstasy”, and “That’s When It Hurts”. In the summer of 1963, King had a Top 30 hit with “I (Who Have Nothing)”, which reached the Top 10 on New York’s radio station, WMCA.King’s records continued to place well on the Billboard Hot 100 chart until 1965. British pop bands began to dominate the pop music scene, but King still continued to make R&B hits, including “What is Soul?” (1966), “Tears, Tears, Tears” (1967), and “Supernatural Thing” (1975). A 1986 re-issue of “Stand by Me” followed the song’s use as the theme song to the movie Stand By Me and re-entered the Billboard Top Ten after a 25-year absence.

In 1990, King and Bo Diddley, along with Doug Lazy, recorded a revamped Hip Hop version of The Monotones’ 1958 hit song “Book of Love” for the soundtrack of the movie Book of Love. He also recorded a children’s album, I Have Songs In My Pocket, written and produced by children’s music artist Bobby Susser in 1998, which won the “Early Childhood News’ Directors’ Choice Award” and “Dr. Toy’s/The Institute For Childhood Resources Award.” King performed “Stand by Me” on the Late Show with David Letterman in 2007.Ahmet Ertegun said, “King is one of the greatest singers in the history of rock and roll and rhythm and blues.” As a Drifter and as a solo artist, King had achieved five number one hits: “There Goes My Baby”, “Save The Last Dance For Me”, “Stand By Me”, “Supernatural Thing”, and the 1986 re-issue of “Stand By Me”. He also earned 12 Top 10 hits and 25 Top 40 hits from 1959 to 1986. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a Drifter; he has also been nominated as a solo artist.King performing at Scullers Jazz Club in Boston, Mass. on March 31, 2012King’s “I (Who Have Nothing)” was selected for the The Sopranos Peppers and Eggs Soundtrack CD (2001).King was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2009. On March 27, 2012, the Songwriters Hall of Fame announced that “Stand By Me” would receive its 2012 Towering Song Award and that King would be honored with the 2012 Towering Performance Award for his recording of the song

Seymour Cray

American electrical engineer and supercomputer architect Seymour Cray was born September 28, 1925 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin . His father was a civil engineer who fostered Cray’s interest in science and engineering. As early as the age of ten he was able to build a device out of Erector Set components that converted punched paper tape into Morse code signals. The basement of the family home was given over to the young Cray as a “laboratory”. Cray graduated from Chippewa Falls High School in 1943 before being drafted for World War II as a radio operator. He saw action in Europe, and then moved to the Pacific theatre where he worked on breaking Japanese naval codes. On his return to the United States he received a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Minnesota, graduating in 1949. He also was awarded a M.Sc. in applied mathematics in 1951.In 1951, Cray joined Engineering Research Associates (ERA) in Saint Paul, Minnesota. ERA worked with computer technology and a wide variety of basic engineering too and became an expert on digital computer technology, following his design work on the ERA 1103, the first commercially successful scientific computer.

He remained at ERA when it was bought by Remington Rand and then Sperry Corporation in the early 1950s At the newly formed Sperry-Rand, ERA became the “scientific computing” arm of their UNIVAC division.. By 1960 he had completed the design of the CDC 1604, an improved low-cost ERA 1103 that had impressive performance for its price range. Cray also designed its “replacement”, the CDC 6600, which was the first commercial supercomputer,to outperform everything then available by a wide margin, and later released the 5-fold faster CDC 7600in the middle of the 7600 project, A new Chippewa Lab was set up in his hometown although it does not seem to have delayed the project. After the 7600 shipped, he started development of its replacement, the CDC 8600. It was this project that finally ended his run of successes at CDC in 1972 and Although the 6600 and 7600 had been huge successes in the end, both projects had almost bankrupted the company, and Cray decided to start over fresh with the CDC STAR-100.

After an ammicable split Cray he started Cray Research in a new laboratory on the same Chippewa property. After several years of development their first product was released in 1976 as the Cray-1 which easily beat almost every machine in terms of speed, including the STAR-100. In 1976 the first full system was sold to the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Eventually, well over 80 Cray-1s were sold, and the company was a huge success financially.

Next he worked on the Cray-2, while other teams delivered the two-processor Cray X-MP, which was another huge success and later the four-processor X-MP. When the Cray-2 was finally released after six years of development it was only marginally faster than the X-MP. In 1980 he started development on the Cray 3 which was fraught with difficulty, and Cray decided to spin off the Colorado Springs laboratory to form Cray Computer Corporation, taking the Cray-3 project with them, sadly The 500 MHz Cray-3 proved to be Cray’s second major failure. So Cray starting design of the Cray-4 which would run at 1 GHz and outpower other machines. Sadly In 1995 there had been no further sales of the Cray-3, and the ending of the Cold War made it unlikely anyone would buy enough Cray-4s to offer a return on the development funds. The company ran out of money and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy March 24, 1995.Cray then set up a new company, SRC Computers, and started the design of his own massively parallel machine. The new design concentrated on communications and memory performance, the bottleneck that hampered many parallel designs. Design had just started when Cray sadly passed away on October 5, 1996 (age 71) of head and neck injuries suffered in a traffic collision on September 22, 1996. Cray underwent emergency surgery and had been hospitalized since the accident two weeks earlier. SRC Computers carried on development and now specializes in reconfigurable computing.

Herman Melville

Most famou for writing the seafaring novel Moby Dick, American novelist, short story writer And Poet, Herman Melville sadly died 28 September 1891. Born 1st August 1819, in New York City. He wrote mainly during the American Rennaissance Period and His first three books, including Typee and Moby Dick, gained much contemporary attention, with Typee, becoming a bestseller). He was the third child of a merchant in French dry-goods, with Revolutionary War heroes for grandfathers. Not long after the death of his father in 1832, his schooling stopped abruptly. After having been a schoolteacher for a short time, he signed up for a merchant voyage to Liverpool in 1839. A year and a half into his first whaling voyage, in 1842 he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands, where he lived among the natives for a month. His first book, Typee (1846) became a huge bestseller which called for a sequel, Omoo (1847). The same year Melville married Elizabeth Knapp Shaw; their four children were all born between 1849 and 1855.

The bulk of his writings was published between 1846 and 1857. Best known for his whaling novel Moby-Dick (1851), he is also legendary for having been forgotten during the last thirty years of his life. Melville’s writing is characteristic for its allusivity. “In Melville’s manipulation of his reading,” scholar Stanley T. Williams wrote, “was a transforming power comparable to Shakespeare’s.” In August 1850, having moved to Pittsfield, he established a profound friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne, though the relationship lost intensity after the latter moved away. Moby-Dick (1851) did not become a success, and Pierre (1852) put an end to his career as a popular author. From 1853 to 1856 he wrote short fiction for magazines, collected as The Piazza Tales (1856). In 1857, while Melville was on a voyage to England and the Near East, The Confidence-Man appeared, the last prose work published during his lifetime. From then on Melville turned to poetry. Having secured a position of Customs Inspector in New York, his poetic reflection on the Civil War appeared as Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866).

In 1867 his oldest child Malcolm died at home from a self-inflicted gunshot. For the epic Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) he drew upon his experience in Egypt and Palestine from twenty years earlier. In 1886 he retired as Customs Inspector and privately published some volumes of poetry in small editions. During the last years of his life, interest in him was reviving and he was approached to have his biography written, but his death in 1891 from cardiovascular disease subdued the revival before it could gain momentum. Inspired perhaps by the growing interest in him, in his final years he had been working on a prose story one more time and left the manuscript of Billy Budd, Sailor, which was published in 1924.

The novel Moby Dick features the crew of a doomed whaling vessel called the Pequod, sailing from Nantucket and captained by one legged Captain Ahab, who becomes obsessed with the idea of hunting down and killing a White Whale named Moby Dick, who bit off his leg during a previous encounter. Despite dire warnings from a Native American crew member named Queequay, who foresees doom and the efforts of various crew members, who try to prevent the voyage, their efforts come to no avail and Ahab’s obsession has disasterous and tragic consequences and ends up costing many lives and sinking the ship.

Sadly after a fast-blooming literary success in the late 1840s, his popularity declined precipitously in the mid-1850s and never recovered during his lifetime. When he died in 1891, he was almost completely forgotten. It was not until the “Melville Revival” in the early 20th century that his work won recognition, especially Moby-Dick, which was hailed as one of the literary masterpieces of both American and world literature. He was the first writer to have his works collected and published by the Library of America. Melville sadly passed away on September 28, 1891 but has left behind some great literature including Moby Dick and many others. Moby Dick has also been adapted for film many times, once with Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab and once with Patrick Stewart in the same role.

World Heart Day

The World Heart Federation celebrates World Heart Day Annually On 28 September. The World Heart Federation (WHF) is a nongovernmental organization based in Geneva, Switzerland. The World Heart Federation is committed to uniting its members and leads the global fight against heart disease and stroke, with a focus on low-and middle-income countries. The World Heart Federation is the world’s only global body dedicated to leading the fight against heart disease and stroke via a united community of almost 200 member organizations that bring together the strength of medical societies and heart foundations, from more than 100 countries covering the regions of Asia-Pacific, Europe, East Mediterranean, the Americas and Africa.

Each year 17.3 million people die of cardiovascular disease, 80% in the developing world. The World Heart Federation exists to prevent and control these diseases through awareness campaigns and action, promoting the exchange of information, ideas and science among those involved in cardiovascular care, advocating for disease prevention and control by promoting healthy diets, physical activity and tobacco free living at an individual, community and policy maker level.