On December 28 many years ago (Photo + Video)
Name days – Pavlo, Stepan (Stefan), Tryfon.
International Cinema Day; in Nepal, King’s Day is celebrated.
Main events of December 28
• Birth of cinema, 1895
• The largest earthquake in Europe, 1908
801 – Louis the Pious captured Barcelona after an almost year-long siege. It became the capital of the Spanish March.
1065 – One week before the death of the English king Edward the Confessor, the still unfinished Cathedral of Saint Peter in Westminster (Westminster Abbey) was consecrated in London. It is likely that his successor, Harold II, was crowned here in 1066. The coronation of William the Conqueror in the same year, after he defeated Harold II at the Battle of Hastings, is historically documented.
Modern history
1832 – Citing fundamental disagreements with President Andrew Jackson and wishing to take the vacant Senate seat from South Carolina, Vice President John C. Calhoun resigned. This was the first case in U.S. history when a person voluntarily left such a high state office. In the following period of his political career, Calhoun became an active defender of the preservation of the slaveholding system and in the first half of the 19th century, alongside Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay, was among the most influential politicians in the United States.
1869 – Dentist William Finley Semple from Mount Vernon, Ohio, received patent No. 98,304 for chewing gum: “a combination of rubber with other components in any proportions for creating acceptable chewing gum.”
1895 – At the “Grand Café” on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière held the first commercial screening of a film shot using their invention, a device combining the functions of a camera and a projector and called the cinematograph. That evening, about 30 people watched 10 films with scenes of everyday life lasting up to 50 seconds. The invention immediately became popular, and over the next few years the Lumières shot nearly 2,000 short films.
Brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière were born into the family of an artist and, after receiving secondary education, first worked in their father’s studio, who had become interested in the fashionable art of photography at the time, and later at his factory producing photographic materials. At the beginning of 1894, Auguste accidentally saw in the shop window of one of the Lyon stores a device for viewing moving images known as Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope. Due to its low light efficiency, the device was intended for individual viewing through an eyepiece of 20-second films recorded as a sequence of photographs on celluloid film that cyclically moved inside a closed box. Despite this significant drawback, Edison managed to commercialize the invention by founding a special studio for producing reels, and within a year his kinetoscopes became popular not only in the United States but also in Europe.
Impressed by the kinetoscope, Auguste approached his brother with the idea of improving it so that film viewing could take place collectively. Louis used the inventions known at the time and managed to solve the main problem of Edison’s kinetoscope: thanks to the intermittent movement of the film, implemented through a special claw mechanism based on that of a sewing machine, it turned out that the light flux of the projection lamp was sufficient both for projecting images onto an external screen and for filming with the same device, which Louis Lumière called the cinematograph (“one that records motion”). This name was purchased from the French inventor Léon Bouly, who had patented his own device under this name two years earlier but lacked funds to maintain the patent.
In the Lumière cinematograph, the same width of perforated 35 mm film as in Edison’s devices was used, but the frame rate was reduced by half, and eventually 16 frames per second became the worldwide standard for silent cinema. On February 13, 1895, he patented his invention, and on March 22, at a conference devoted to the development of the French photographic industry in Paris, the first public screening of the film “Workers Leaving the Factory” was held, the first of those shot by the Lumière brothers.
The following year, the Lumière brothers went on tour to Brussels, Bombay, London, Montreal, New York, and Buenos Aires. Their invention immediately became popular, and over the next three years the Lumières shot 1,800 short films, but eventually abandoned filmmaking, unable to compete with new, artistically more professional filmmakers who appeared in France and Europe. Louis Lumière withdrew from film production as early as 1898; in 1902 he sold all his patents and focused on improvements in the field of color photography. In 1919 he became a member of the French Academy of Sciences, and the brothers’ main business became the production of 35-mm motion picture film.
In 1948, two years before the death of Louis Lumière, all the films they had shot were transferred by the brothers to the French film archive “Cinémathèque.”
1908 – The largest documented earthquake in Europe occurred in southern Italy. In the Sicilian city of Messina alone, about 80,000 people died, and the total number of victims of the earthquake, tsunami, and torrential rains is estimated at 160,000–250,000.
Due to periodic seismic activity in the region covering Sicily and Calabria, they have long been called “terra ballerina” – the dancing land – in Italy. In 1693, about 60,000 people died in an earthquake in southern Sicily, and in 1783 on the Tyrrhenian coast of Calabria – no fewer than 50,000. The 1908 earthquake led to significantly greater casualties.
The first shock of magnitude 7.5 on the Richter scale occurred at 5:20 a.m. and triggered a tsunami up to 12 meters high, resulting in the destruction of 90% of buildings in two major cities on both sides of the Strait of Messina – Messina and Reggio di Calabria – as well as in 25 other settlements. Less severe destruction occurred within a radius of 200 kilometers from the epicenter. After the first shock, which lasted about 10 seconds, a series of additional shocks followed a few minutes later, less powerful but longer-lasting, gradually fading and recurring for two more days, and together with torrential rains completed the destruction. In Messina alone, 80,000 of 145,000 residents died, and in Reggio di Calabria, 25,000 of 34,000.
The first assistance to the victims was provided by sailors from British and Russian ships that were near the disaster area. They organized rescue operations, set up a field hospital, and restored public order. On December 30, King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy arrived in Messina aboard the warship “Napoli,” by whose order the reconstruction of the destroyed cities began the following year. For this purpose, part of the local population was resettled to other parts of Italy, and part emigrated to America.
1943 – By decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on the liquidation of the Kalmyk ASSR, NKVD troops carried out an operation to deport the Kalmyks to Siberia and the Far East. In total, more than 90,000 people were deported during the punitive operation “Ulus.”
1973 – In Paris, “The Gulag Archipelago” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was published in Russian, a literary investigation of the police-state system of the Soviet Union from 1918 to 1956. The truthful and uncompromising spirit of the book immediately made it popular, and within a few months it was translated into most European languages. In the writer’s homeland, however, “The Gulag Archipelago” was labeled as slander against the Soviet people and Soviet reality, and on February 12, 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, later stripped of citizenship, and expelled from the USSR. He settled in the United States and returned to his homeland already as a Nobel Prize laureate in literature, having refused, however, in the 1980s to accept Mikhail Gorbachev’s offer to restore Soviet citizenship.
1989 – Alexander Dubček, former Czechoslovak leader and architect of the “Prague Spring,” was elected chairman of the new multiparty parliament of Czechoslovakia – for the first time since 1970, when Dubček had been expelled from the Communist Party for his radical democratic views, he returned to politics and assumed a state office.
Our time
2007 – Nepal was proclaimed a Federal Democratic Republic.
Born on December 28
1856 – February 3, 1924, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States (1913–21), Nobel Peace Prize laureate (1919).
1903 – February 8, 1957, John von Neumann (János von Neumann), American mathematician of Hungarian origin; laid the axiomatic foundations of the theory of high-speed computing.
1903 – March 26, 1973, Mikhail Konstantinovich Kalatozov, Russian film director (“The Cranes Are Flying,” “Faithful Friends,” “The Red Tent”).
1929 – May 31, 1970, Terry Sawchuk, legendary Canadian goaltender of Ukrainian origin, one of the greatest goalkeepers in NHL history, four-time winner of the Vezina Trophy as the league’s best goaltender.
1951 – Natalia Vitrenko, Ukrainian politician, co-founder and leader of the Progressive Socialist Party.
1953 – Richard Clayderman, French pianist, author and performer of numerous piano arrangements of the best rock and pop songs.
1954 – Denzel Washington, American film actor, Academy Award winner (“Glory” [1989]; “The Hurricane,” “Philadelphia,” “The Pelican Brief,” “Malcolm X,” “Cry Freedom”).
1969 – Linus Benedict Torvalds, Finnish programmer, creator of the Linux operating system.
1972 – Patrick Rafter, Australian tennis player; world No. 1 (1999). 45th birthday.
1978 – John Legend (Stephens), American soul singer, winner of 5 Grammy Awards (“Get Lifted,” 2004).
Died on December 28
1503 – Piero Lorenzo de’ Medici (Piero the Unfortunate), lord of the Florentine Republic (1492–94); eldest son of Lorenzo de’ Medici. 514 years ago, at the age of 31 (born February 15, 1472).
1663 – Francesco Maria Grimaldi, Italian physicist and astronomer; compiled the first map of the Moon’s surface. 354 years ago, at the age of 45 (born April 2, 1618).
1734 – Rob (Robert Roy) MacGregor, Highland outlaw nicknamed Rob Roy, national hero of Scotland. 283 years ago, at the age of 63 (born March 7, 1671).
1923 – (Alexandre) Gustave Eiffel, French civil engineer, designer of the Eiffel Tower in Paris (1889). 94 years ago, at the age of 91 (born December 15, 1832).
1937 – Maurice Joseph Ravel, French composer (“L’Enfant et les sortilèges,” “Spanish Rhapsody,” “Boléro”). 80 years ago, at the age of 62 (born March 7, 1875).
1945 – Theodore Dreiser, American writer (“Sister Carrie,” “An American Tragedy,” “The Financier”). 72 years ago, at the age of 74 (born August 27, 1871).
1947 – Victor Emmanuel III (Vittorio Emanuele di Savoia), third king of unified Italy (1900–46) of the House of Savoy. 70 years ago, at the age of 78 (born November 11, 1869).
1988 – (Emil) Klaus Fuchs, German theoretical physicist, participant in the Manhattan Project; passed secret information about the American atomic program, its design and scientific details, as well as all data on the planned hydrogen bomb, to the USSR. 29 years ago, at the age of 77 (born December 29, 1911).