If you fly in a commercial airplane, it might have been manufactured by Airbus, Boeing, or a few others. But if you fly in a private plane, particularly in the US, it’s pretty likely to have been made by Cessna.  Cessna Aircraft was founded in 1927 by Clyde Cessna, who was born December 5, 1879… Continue reading

Agnes Blackadder was born on December 4, 1875 in Dundee, Scotland. She was a spectacular student, earning her MA degree when she was 20 and continuing on to become a medical doctor. She won first prizes in six different subjects along the way.  Once she earned her medical degree, Blackadder moved to London in 1901,… Continue reading

Our birthday celebrant today is an odd character; he entered into countless projects without the resources or abilities to see them through, and endured equally countless failures. He was a prolific writer, but his work (even at the time) has been criticized as mostly incoherent. He didn’t have any single accomplishment of particular note, but… Continue reading

Clouds, technically speaking, are aerosols consisting of a visible mass of liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles suspended in an atmosphere. There is a whole science of clouds, called “nephology.” And in addition to the “stratus,” cumulus,” and other common types of clouds, there’s an extensive nomenclature system identifying types of clouds based on… Continue reading

One of the odder details about the automobile business in the US during the 20th Century was that as soon as television arrived, car dealers began using the medium for advertising. Most of their ads were typical “buy your car from our dealership” appeals. But a variant arose sometime in the 1950s that was just… Continue reading

November 22 is a day that may be remembered in some future societies as a black mark on history, and the point at which our current society embraced propaganda and deception as industrial-class tools to be freely used at a vast scale. It all started in 1891 and 1893, when, two years apart, two men… Continue reading

Most business leaders are men. This was even more pronounced over a century ago during another period when great fortunes were amassed: the Gilded Age. It lasted from about 1877 to about 1900, and enormous fortunes were made in railroads, banking, and more. The “captains of industry” or “robber barons” of the day were all… Continue reading

Sometimes history sort of whitewashes a person’s reputation, rendering them a serious figure in their given field even though during their lifetime they would never have been thought of that way. And sometimes it happens fast! That’s the case with Miroslav Tichy, who was born November 20, 1926 in Czechoslovakia, and lived to be 84.… Continue reading

English has Shakespeare, Russian has Tolstoy, and Dutch has Joost van den Vondel. He was born November 17, 1587 in Cologne to Flemish-speaking parents who were refugees of a sort. They were faced with religious persecution in their original Antwerp and fled to Cologne, then had to escape again, to Amsterdam. At the time the… Continue reading

How many things can be named after one person? In some cases, a huge number of physical things like roads, bridges, and monuments, but let’s instead concentrate on cases where each thing is different. I think a good candidate for the champion of that category is Jean le Rond d’Alembert, who was born November 16,… Continue reading