Today in history @ 18 Jun

Birth Anniversaries

a. English mountaineer George Mallory (b. 1886). He took part in the first three British expeditions to Mount Everest, in the early 1920s. During the 1924 British Mount Everest expedition, Mallory and his climbing partner, Andrew "Sandy" Irvine, disappeared on the North-East ridge during their attempt to make the first ascent of the world's highest mountain. Mallory's ultimate fate was unknown for 75 years, until his body was discovered on 1 May 1999 by an expedition that had set out to search for the climbers' remains. Whether Mallory and Irvine had reached the summit before they died remains a subject of speculation and continuing research.

b. English singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and composer Sir Paul Mccartney (b. 1942). He gained worldwide fame as the bass guitarist and singer for the rock band the Beatles, widely considered the most popular and influential group in the history of pop music.

c. Acclaimed Hindi writer, Devaki Nandan Khatri (b. 1861). He started a new trail in the field of novel writing in Hindi, that too at a time when Hindi novel was in its infancy.?Infact, a sizeable number of South Indians learnt Hindi because they wanted to read his wonderful?“tilismi”?novels.?“Tilism”?is a magical world full of optical illusion, a kind of phantasmagoria, where unbelievable things keep happening and deception plays a pivotal role.?

d. German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929). His work focuses on the foundations of?epistemology?and?social theory, the analysis of?advanced capitalism?and democracy, the?rule of law?in a critical?social-evolutionary context, albeit within the confines of the?natural law?tradition?and contemporary politics.

Death anniversaries

a. Norwegian explorer Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen (b. 1872). He led the Antarctic expedition of 1910–12 which was the first to reach the South Pole, on 14 December 1911. In 1926, he was the first expedition leader for the air expedition to the North Pole.

b. Russian and Soviet writer Maxim Gorky (d. 1936). He was said to have been a five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He publicly opposed the Tsarist regime, and for a time closely associated himself with Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov's Bolshevik wing of the party, but later became a bitter critic of Lenin as an overly ambitious, cruel and power-hungry potentate who brooked no challenge to his authority. For a significant part of his life, he was exiled from Russia and later the Soviet Union. In 1932, he returned to USSR on Joseph Stalin's personal invitation and died there in June 1936.?

c. Indian sarod player and musician, Ali Akbar Khan (d. 2009).?

d. Polish logician, Kasimierz Kuratowski (d. 1980). He is best known for his theorem giving a necessary and sufficient condition for a graph to be planar.?

e. Political economist and historian of?global?capitalism, Giovanni Arrighi (d. 2009). He will be best remembered for his trilogy of works analysing global capitalism. In these works, he identified four systemic cycles of accumulation in the history of global capitalism.??

f. American astronomical technician, Milton Lasell Humason (d. 1972). He worked with Edwin Hubble on the survey of galactic redshifts that led to the discovery of the expanding universe. Between 1930 until his retirement in 1957, Humason measured the redshifts of 620 galaxies. There is a crater on the moon named after him.?

Other events

a. In 1583, Richard Martin of London took out first life insurance policy, on William Gibbons; premium was ￡383.?

b. In 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated by the British under the leadership of Duke of Wellington.

c. In 1837, 1837?Spain got its new Constitution

d. In 1847, 1847?American photographer Thomas Martin Easterly took the earliest known photograph of lightning using the daguerreotype process in St. Louis, Missouri, USA.

e. In 1927, Flying Finn: Paavo Nurmi ran world record 2000 m: 5:24.6.

f. In 1928, American aviator Amelia Earhart became the 1st woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean landing at Burry Port, Wales.

g. In 2001, "The Fast and the Furious" film directed by Rob Cohen starring?Paul Walker,?Vin Diesel?and Michelle Rodriguez was premiered.