If you think about a Venn diagram where one circle is “people who use pencils,” another is “people with very nice luggage,” and a third is “nature documentary filmmakers,” right at the intersection you might find today, August 4. That’s because it’s the birthday of Nicolas-Jacques Conté (1755), John Venn (1834), Eugen Schuhmacher (1906), and Louis Vuitton (1821).
You probably see right away that Venn is there because he invented the Venn Diagram around 1880, calling them “Eulerian Circles.” Venn was also a celebrated teacher and pioneer in statistics. It’s probably just as obvious that Louis Vuitton is the founder of the luggage-and-handbag company that’s still a high-style icon (as far as I know). He started out building trunks for the wife of Napoleon III, around the late 1840s, and before long everybody wanted one.
Eugen Schuhmacher was born in Germany and began making short films about wildlife in South America — and from there basically invented the feature-length nature documentary film. He made them about animals, indigenous peoples, and endangered species.
And finally we come to Nicolas-Jacques Conté, who invented something all the others in our list probably used: the modern pencil! When the French Republic was being blockaded by the British, who controlled most of the known graphite deposits, Conté was asked to find an alternative. He came up with a process of mixing some powdered graphite with clay and pressing it between two half-cylinders of wood — which is how pencils are still made today. He patented it in 1795. You might have also heard of the “conté crayon, which is a pastel stick used by artists; he invented that too.
So there you have it — a Venn diagram for August 4. Although to be more complete, we could have included Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and Barack Obama; they were also born on August 4. But this is supposed to be a Venn diagram, not a complex, romantic Percy Bysshe Shelley epic poem (yup, him too).
