Today is December 10, although if you write it “Dec 10” you might mean the PDP-10 computer from Digital Equipment Corp (“DEC”) back in the 70s. Like most of the computers back then, the DEC 10 was a mainframe that lived in its own (large) room that probably had its own air conditioning system. As Steve Wozniak once said, “never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window.”
It’s just a coincidence that the date shares a name (sort of) with a computer, but it’s particularly appropriate today, because it’s also Ada Lovelace’s birthday. In spite of being born in 1815, Lovelace was the first computer programmer. She worked on theoretical programs for the “Analytical Engine” designed (but never built) by Charles Babbage. It was a mechanical device that was designed to be a general purpose computer. Since then, various portions of the Analytical Engine have been built, but nobody has tried to create a whole unit. It’s not entirely clear that it would work the way Babbage intended, since his design didn’t specify some of the finer details.
If Babbage and Lovelace had been born a century later, at least one of them would probably have won a Nobel Prize — and they would have won it on December 10; today is Alfred Nobel’s birthday, and the day Nobel Prizes are awarded. The first prize ceremony was held in 1901, and five years later Theodore Roosevelt was the first American to win one, also on December 10. He won the Nobel Peace Prize for helping end the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05. It was ended, by the way, by the Treaty of Portsmouth, where “Portsmouth” means Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The negotiations were held at the Wentworth Hotel just outside the city. The hotel is still there and still open, although now it’s a Marriott and quite a bit smaller than it was in 1905.
Three years later, in 1909, Selma Lagerlöf became the first female to win a Nobel Prize for literature. Decades later, in 1953 Winston Churchill won a Nobel Prize too, and although you might think he would have been in the Peace Prize list (being a politician), his prize was also for literature. There was another Winston Churchill writing bestselling novels around the same time, so the British Churchill (the novelist was American) always used his middle name (Spencer) or middle initial on his published books and articles. He was pretty prolific, too; in 1937 alone he published 64 articles in various journals.
Being prolific seems to be associated with December 10; Emily Dickinson was born on this day in 1830, and wrote somewhere around 1,800 poems. But even that output can’t compete with the Encyclopedia Britannica, which was first published on December 10, 1768. Technically it’s the “Encyclopædia” Britannica, but that “æ” ligature is a bother to enter on a computer, so it’s often ignored. December 10 is also the day the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was first published, in 1884. The book was published in Canada and the UK a couple of months before it was available in the US because of a problem at the printer. The book was illustrated, and one of the engravers at the US printer (nobody knows who) added an obscene detail to the picture on page 238. They had to reprint 30,000 copies.
Huckleberry Finn had a taste for adventure and not a high regard for the law, but he probably wouldn’t have participated in what happened in Tokyo on December 10, 1968. It was the 300 Million Yen Robbery — the biggest robbery in the history of Japan (up to that point, at least). It’s a true story, but sounds like something out of Huck Finn. Four employees of a bank loaded about 300 million yen, in cash (it was over $800,000) into the trunk of a company car. But that was what they were supposed to do; they were driving the cash to a Toshiba factory to be handed out as bonuses to employees. They were stopped on the way by a motorcycle police officer who told them the bank manager’s house had been blown up, and there was probably dynamite planted in the very car they were driving.
They got out in a hurry, and the officer crawled under the car to investigate. Sure enough, smoke and flame started spurting out from under the car, and the officer rolled out shouting for the bank guys to run; it was about to blow! They ran behind a wall — in fact, they ran behind a prison wall; they’d been stopped right outside the jail. The “officer” calmly got in the car and drove away with the money. He got clean away, and has never been found, even though 170,000 officers (real ones) were involved in the investigation and the list of suspects eventually included 110,000 people.
The statute of limitations expired in 1975, and in 1988 the thief was absolved of any civil liabilities as well in the hope that he would come forward, but nobody has. Maybe the affair mirrors the events in the novel Richard Carvel. The shady tutor is the bad guy there. That novel, by the way, sold millions of copies around the beginning of the 20th century, and was by Winston Churchill — but not Winston S. Churchill. Despite its popularity, the book was completely ignored by the Nobel committee.
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