Quick Facts

• NAME: Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• OCCUPATION: Poet
• BIRTH DATE: March 06, 1806
• DEATH DATE: June 29, 1861
• PLACE OF BIRTH: Durham, England 
• PLACE OF DEATH: Florence, Italy 

Profile

 

Born in 1806, Elizabeth Barrett Browning published her first major collection, The Seraphim and Other Poems, in 1838. Her Poems (1844) caught the attention of fellow poet Robert Browning, whose admiring letter led to a romance and marriage. The couple moved to Italy, where Elizabeth became interested in spiritualism and Italian politics, and released her popular work Aurora Leigh (1857).

Quick Facts

• NAME: Sir Dirk Bogarde
• OCCUPATION: Film Actor, Journalist
• BIRTH DATE: March 28, 1921
• DEATH DATE: May 08, 1999
• EDUCATION: University College School, Chelsea College of Art and Design 
• PLACE OF BIRTH: West Hampstead, London, England 
• PLACE OF DEATH: Chelsea, London, England 
• AKA: Dirk Bogarde 

Profile

 

Born in England on March 28, 1921, actor Dirk Bogarde made his stage debut in 1939, and won a contract with Rank Studios after World War II. Bogarde won acclaim for his role in the 1954 comedy Doctor in the House. He later found fame playing dark, complicated characters, including ill-fated Gustav von Aschenbach in Death in Venice (1912) and blackmailed gay layer Melville Farr in Victim (1961). Other notable films include The Servant (1963), The Fixer (1968) and The Night Porter (1974). Bogarde was knighted in 1992.

Quick Facts

• NAME: Donald Alan Brinkley
• OCCUPATION: Television Producer, Screenwriter
• BIRTH DATE: March 09, 1921
• DEATH DATE: July 14, 2012
• PLACE OF DEATH: Sag Harbor, New York 
• AKA: Don Brinkley 

Synopsis

 

Television writer, producer and director Don Brinkley was born on March 9, 1921. Brinkley's decades-long career included working on the TV programs Wanted: Dead or Alive (1958-61), The Untouchables (1959-63), The Fugitive (1963-67) and Trapper John, M.D. (1979-86). He also worked a stint as a CBS Radio News journalist. Brinkley later became the legal father of supermodel Christie Brinkley. He died on July 14, 2012,at the age of 91, in Sag Harbor, New York.

Career Highlights

 

Television writer, producer and director Don Brinkley was born on March 9, 1921. Brinkley's decades-long career included working on the TV programs Wanted: Dead or Alive (1958-61), The Untouchables (1959-63), The Fugitive (1963-67) and Trapper John, M.D. (1979-86). He also worked a stint as a CBS Radio News journalist. He received an award from the Museum of Broadcasting in New York in 1988.

Personal Life and Death

 

After divorcing his first wife, Lois, with whom he had son Jeff and daughter Kim, Brinkley married his second wife, Marge. He soon adopted his two stepchildren: supermodel Christie Brinkley and her brother, Greg.

Don Brinkley died on July 14, 2012, at the age of 91, in Sag Harbor, New York. He was survived by his wife, Marge; children Jeff and Kim; stepchildren Greg and Christie; and several grandchildren.

Quick Facts

• NAME: Leigh Bowery
• OCCUPATION: Artist, Fashion Designer
• BIRTH DATE: March 26, 1961
• DEATH DATE: December 31, 1994
• PLACE OF BIRTH: Sunshine, Victoria, Australia 
• PLACE OF DEATH: London, England, United Kingdom 

Synopsis

 

Avant-garde designer and nightclub promoter Leigh Bowery was born on March 26, 1961 in Sunshine, Victoria, Australia. Bowery moved to London at a young age, establishing himself as a fashion designer and flamboyant nightlife fixture. In 1985, Bowery opened the disco and fetish nightclub Taboo. Bowery remained active in art and theater circles until his death from AID-related illness in 1994.

Early Life

 

Leigh Bowery was born in 1961 in Sunshine, Victoria, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. From a young ago, Bowery felt alienated from his conservative surroundings. He first learned about London and the New Romantic scene through British fashion magazines.

Designer and Performance Artist

 

Bowery moved to London for good in 1980, after taking a fashion course in high school. He became a known fixture at local clubs, in part for wearing outlandish outfits of his own design.
In London, Bowery soon befriended fellow clubbers Guy Barnes (known as Trojan) and David Walls. The three men moved in together, and Bowery outfitted his friends in his creative designs. The trio became known on the London club scene as the "Three Kings."

Bowery found some success as a designer, showing several collections at the London Fashion Week show, as well as in New York and Tokyo. He was best known, however, as a club promoter and London nightlife fixture. In 1985, Bowery opened the disco club nightclub Taboo. Originally an underground party, Taboo quickly became London's answer to Studio 54. Taboo was known for its defiance of sexual convention, and its embrace of what Bowery called "polysexual" identities.

In addition to his club activities, Bowery participated in performance art, and was well-connected within the art and theater circles of London. He often performed in face paint, lurex clothing and masks, relishing the opportunity to shock and flout convention whenever possible. Bowery also served as a model, posing nude for some of Lucien Freud's later portraits.

Personal life

 

Leigh Bowery, who had identified as gay for many years, married his friend Nicola Bateman in May 1994. Only a few close friends were aware that Bowery had contracted AIDS before his death, which occurred on New Year's Eve in 1994, seven months after his marriage to Bateman.

Quick Facts

• NAME: William Blount
• OCCUPATION: Governor, U.S. Representative
• BIRTH DATE: March 26, 1749
• DEATH DATE: March 21, 1800
• PLACE OF BIRTH: Bertie Countie, North Carolina 
• PLACE OF DEATH: Knoxville, Tennessee

• Profile

  During the 1780s, William Blount was elected to six terms in the North Carolina legislature and was a member of the North Carolina convention that ratified the Constitution. Blount became territorial governor of the lands west of the Alleghenies ceded to the U.S. in 1789 by North Carolina, and when this territory became the state of Tennessee, Blount was elected one of its first two senators.

Synopsis

 

Joseph Barbera was born March 24, 1911 in New York City. In 1936, he found work at the MGM studios. In 1938, he joined forces with William Hanna. Barbera and Hanna took charge of MGM's animation division from 1955 to 1957. After this, the duo formed H-B Enterprises, which became Hanna-Barbera Productions. By the late 1960s, they dominated the TV animation scene with hits like the Flintstones.

Profile

 

Animator, Cartoon Artist, Director, Producer. Joseph Roland Barbera was born on March 24, 1911 in the Little Italy neighborhood of New York City. He spent his childhood in Flatbush, Brooklyn and when he was old enough, found a job as a tailor's delivery boy.

In 1932, he took a job at the Van Beuren Studio as an animator and scriptwriter. At Van Beuren, he worked on cartoons such as Cubby Bear and Rainbow Parades. When Van Beuren shut its doors in 1936, Barbera found work at the MGM studios. 1937 found him working, in California, for the new MGM cartoon unit. In 1938, he joined forces with William Hanna to direct short cartoons; Barbera was the storyboard and layout artist while Hanna was in charge of timing. Their first collaboration was a Tom and Jerry film titled "Puss Gets the Boot," released in 1940.

Barbera and Hanna took charge of MGM's animation division from 1955 until the unit was shut down in 1957. After this, the duo formed H-B Enterprises, which became Hanna-Barbera Productions. By the late 1960s, Hanna-Barbera dominated the television animation scene, masterminding hit television series such as Scooby-Doo, The Jetsons, Jonny Quest, and The Flintstones.

Hanna-Barbera was part of Taft Broadcasting from 1967 through 1991, when it was sold to Turner Broadcasting. The partners stayed on as consultants and worked on new shows. Their reign in television animation garnered them Academy Award nominations and well as many Emmy Awards. William Hanna died in 2001, but Barbera remained active until his own death on December 18, 2006. Joseph Hanna died of natural causes at his home in Studio City, California. He was 95 years old.

Quick Facts

• NAME: David Baltimore
• OCCUPATION: Scientist
• BIRTH DATE: March 07, 1938 (Age: 75)
• EDUCATION: Swarthmore College, Rockefeller Institute, MIT
• PLACE OF BIRTH: New York, New York 
• ZODIAC SIGN: Pisces 

Profile

 

David Baltimore proved an exception to the 'central dogma' of genetic theory, which states that the information encoded in genes always flows unidirectionally from DNA to RNA and cannot be reversed. Since its discovery, reverse transcriptase has become an invaluable tool in recombinant DNA technology. For his work, Bailey shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1975.

Synopsis

 

Jessica McClure Morales ("Baby Jessica") became famous in 1987 when at 18 months old she fell down a 22 foot well in her aunt's backyard. She remained trapped in the well for 58 hours, while America watched on CNN, before being rescued.

Sudden Fame

 

Remembered worldwide as "Baby Jessica," Jessica McClure Morales was born March 26, 1986 in the oil city of Midland, Texas. She was born to teenage parents, Reba "Cissy" McClure and Lewis "Chip" McClure, who had fallen on hard times in the depths of the Texas oil bust of the mid-1980s.


The first 18 months of Baby Jessica's life passed without the world at large taking much notice. Then, on the morning of Wednesday, October 14, 1987, she suddenly became the most famous child in the country. Jessica's aunt Jamie Moore ran a daycare center out of her home, where that morning Jessica was playing with four other children in the backyard under the supervision of her mother, Cissy, who briefly went inside to answer a phone call, leaving the children momentarily unattended. Minutes later she heard the kids screaming and rushed back outside to find that her daughter had disappeared. She soon discovered that Baby Jessica had fallen into an eight-inch diameter well and become trapped deep down in its shaft. How exactly Baby Jessica fell into the well remains unclear. According to her mother, the opening had been covered up by a heavy rock to prevent just such an accident. "I didn't know what to do," Cissy McClure later recalled. "I just ran in and called the police. They were there within three minutes, but it felt like a lifetime."


Baby Jessica remained trapped in the well, 22 feet below ground, for the next 58 hours, while frantic rescue crews attempted to save her life and the entire nation watched transfixed as the drama played out on television. Because she had fallen so deep into the earth—beneath layers of rock harder than granite—and because the diameter of the well was so narrow, the rescue mission was extraordinarily difficult. Using a large rat-hole rig, a machine normally used to plant telephone poles in the ground, rescue teams drilled a 30-inch wide, 29-foot deep hole parallel to the well. They then began the difficult process of drilling a horizontal tunnel between the two wells about two feet below where Baby Jessica was trapped.


In the meantime, rescue workers pumped oxygen into the well and attempted to maintain constant communication with Baby Jessica, who moaned, wailed and for a while even sang nursery rhymes to pass the time. "After listening to her for so long, I could tell her moods," a detective on the scene recalled. "At one point she was singing. At another point, when a jackhammer started up, she didn't say any words but used kind of a huffy little voice. You could tell it was an angry voice. I would say 80 percent of the time she was either crying or making some kind of noise we could hear. When we weren't calling words of encouragement, we'd tell her to sing for us. I'll never forget her singing 'Winnie-the-Pooh.'"


The entire rescue ordeal was covered live on CNN, the nation's first—and at that time only—24-hour news network. For only the second time in American history (the first being the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger a year earlier) the entire nation watched literally around-the-clock as a dramatic news story unfolded live on television. Dubbed "everybody's baby," Baby Jessica tugged at heartstrings of millions of viewers; thousands of strangers sent her family flowers, toys,cards and money. Donations, totaling in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, were set aside in a trust fund for her to inherit at the age of 25. In fact, many point to CNN's coverage of Baby Jessica's rescue as a turning point in the history of news media, the genesis of the era of the 24-hour news cycle.


Finally, on the evening of Friday, October 16, Baby Jessica was lifted safely out of the well. The Pulitzer prize-winning photograph of her rescue, snapped by Scott Shaw, shows Baby Jessica cradled in the arms of a paramedic, her head wrapped in white gauze, her arms caked in dirt, her bleary eyes just barely open. Over the next few years, Baby Jessica underwent 15 surgeries to treat all of the complications from her three days trapped without food or water inside a dirty, 8-inch wide well. She ultimately did regain full health. Chronic but controllable rheumatoid arthritis, a missing small toe on her right foot and a prominent diagonal scar across her forehead are the only permanent physical signs of her ordeal.

Later Life

 

Once she grew older, Baby Jessica did not remember anything about her three days trapped in a well in her aunt's backyard or her lengthy recovery. She did not even learn her own story until she was five years old and saw an episode of Rescue 911, recounting the story of a baby girl's rescue from a well three years earlier. Moved to tears by the story, she asked her stepmother (her parents had since divorced) what the girl's name was and learned it was her.


Ever since those dramatic three days in 1987, Jessica McClure Morales has lived an extraordinarily ordinary life. She graduated from Greenwood High School outside Midland in 2004, and in 2006 she married a man named Daniel Morales. She has two children, Simon and Sheyenne, and stays home to care for them. On March 26, 2011, her 25th birthday, Morales gained access to her trust fund, now worth approximately 800,000 dollars, which she plans to save for her children's college education. Morales does not often speak about her rescue, and in a recent interview she insisted it has had very little impact on her life. "Couldn't cage me then, why should it cage me now?" she asked rhetorically. And while people who recognize her by the scar on the forehead still call her "Baby Jessica," Morales says the name does not bother her. "Like they told Lil' Bow Wow, you'll never get rid of the 'little' part," she said. Cause you'll always be what you are remembered as."

Quick Facts

• NAME: Diane Arbus
• OCCUPATION: Photographer
• BIRTH DATE: March 14, 1923
• DEATH DATE: July 26, 1971
• PLACE OF BIRTH: New York, New York 
• PLACE OF DEATH: New York, New York 

Synopsis

 

Diane Nemerov was born on March 14, 1923. An artistic youth, she learned photography from her husband Allan Arbus. Together, they found success with fashion work, but soon Diane branched out on her own. Her raw, unusual images of the people she saw while

Profile

 

Photographer. Born Diane Nemerov on March 14, 1923, in New York, New York. Diane Arbus was one of the most distinctive photographers in the twentieth century, known for her eerie portraits and offbeat subjects. Her artistic talents emerged at a young age; she was created interesting drawings and paintings while in high school. She married Allan Arbus in 1941 who taught her photography.

Working with her husband, Diane Arbus started out in advertising and fashion photography. They became quite a successful team with photographs appearing in such magazines as Vogue. In the late 1950s, she began to focus on her own photography. To further her art, Arbus studied with photographer Lisette Model around this time. She began to pursue taking photographs of people she found during her wanderings around New York City. She visited seedy hotels, public parks, a morgue, and other various locales. These unusual images had a raw quality and several of them found their way in the July 1960 issue of Esquire magazine. These photographs were a spring board for more work for Arbus.

By the mid-1960s, Diane Arbus was a well-established photographer, participating in shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York among other places. She was known for going to great lengths to get the shots she wanted. She became friends with many other famous photographers, such as Richard Avedon and Walker Evans.

While professionally Arbus continued to thrive in the late 1960s, she had some personal challenges. Her marriage ended in 1969, and she later struggled with depression. She committed suicide in her New York apartment on July 26, 1971. Her work remains a subject of intense interest, and her life was part of the basis of the 2006 film, Fur, starring Nicole Kidman as Arbus.

 

 

Quick Facts

• NAME: Howard H. Aiken
• OCCUPATION: Inventor, Physicist
• BIRTH DATE: March 09, 1900
• DEATH DATE: March 14, 1973
• EDUCATION: University of Wisconsin-Madison, Harvard University

• PLACE OF BIRTH: Hoboken, New Jersey
• PLACE OF DEATH: St. Louis, Missouri

 

 

Profile

Born in Hoboken, NJ in 1900, Howard H. Aiken was a U.S. mathematician and inventor who, with three other engineers, developed the first automatic calculating machine. The machine was called the Harvard Mark I and could perform five operations: add, subtract, multiple, divide, and reference previous result. This incredible 1944 invention was 51 feet long, 8 feet high, and weighed 35 tons.

Synopsis

 

Revolutionary leader Emilio Aguinaldo was born March 23, 1869 in Cavite, Philippines. In 1898 he achieved independence of the Philippines from Spain and was elected the first president of the new republic under the Malolos Congress. He also led the Philippine-American War against U.S. resistance to Philippine independence. He died of a heart attack on February 6, 1964 in Quezon City, Philippines.

Early Life

 

Emilio Aguinaldo was born March 23, 1869 in Kawit, Cavite Province, Philippines. Nicknamed Miong, he was the seventh of eight children. His parents were of Chinese and Tagalog descent. His father, Carlos, died when Aguinaldo was just nine years old. Widowed, his mother, Trinidad, sent him to attend public school in Manila.

After graduating from the University of Santo Thomas in Manila, Aguinaldo returned home to Kawit, where he developed a growing awareness of Filipino frustration with Spanish colonial rule.
While serving as the head of barter in Manila, he joined the Pilar Lodge chapter of the Freemasonry in 1895. The Freemasonry was a government- and church-banned resistance group. It was through his role as municipal captain of this fraternity that Aguinaldo met Andres Bonifacio, a key figure in the fight to overthrow Spanish rule.

Independence From Spain

 

Eager to fight for the cause of Philippine independence, in 1895 Aguinaldo took up with a secret society of revolutionaries headed by fellow lodge member Andres Bonifacio. When a rival faction executed Bonifacio in 1897, Aguinaldo assumed total leadership of the revolution against Spain.

By December 1897, Aguinaldo had managed to reach the Truce of Biak-na-Bato with Spain. He and his rebels agreed to a surrendering of arms and accepted exile to Hong Kong in exchange for amnesty, indemnity and liberal reform. However, neither side kept up their end of the bargain. The Spanish government did not deliver in full all that was promised, and the rebels did not truly surrender arms. In fact, Aguinaldo's revolutionaries used some of Spain's financial compensation to purchase additional arms for the resistance. From Hong Kong, Aguinaldo also made arrangements to assist Americans fighting against Spain in the Spanish-American War. As neither peace nor independence had been achieved, in 1898 Aguinaldo returned to the Philippines to resume his rebellion against Spanish rule.

Back in Cavite, Aguinaldo forcibly set up a provisional dictatorship. After meeting with the Malolos Congress and drafting a constitution for a new republic, on June 12, 1898, Aguinaldo at last declared Philippine independence. Announced from his home town of Kawit, Aguinaldo's proclamation put an end to four centuries of Philippine oppression under Spanish Colonial rule. In January of the next year, dressed in a white suit at Barasoain Church in Malolos City, Aguinaldo was sworn in as the first president of the new, self-governed Philippine republic.

Philippine-American War

 

The United States, however, was not eager to accept the Philippines' new government.While the U.S. and Spain had been fighting the Spanish-American War, the Philippines had been ceded by Spain to the United States in the Treaty of Paris in December 1898.Just two weeks after Aguinaldo's inauguration, an American sentry killed a Philippine soldier stationed at the San Juan Bridge, in a gesture of resistance against the newfound Philippine independence. On February 4, 1899,The Philippine-American War exploded into action. Aguinaldo's revolutionaries quickly resorted to guerilla tactics, resulting in one of the bloodiest wars in American history, but in little direct progress for Aguinaldo and his cause. Concerning the apparent futility of his efforts in war, Aguinaldo said, "I saw my own soldiers die without affecting future events."

After three years at war, Aguinaldo was captured by American General Frederick Funston on March 23, 1901. After swearing an oath of allegiance to the United States, on April 19, 1901, Aguinaldo officially declared peace with the United States. By this time, the United States was ready support Philippine independence. Friendly relations, along with an American civil government, were established. Aguinaldo retreated to a private life as a farmer but never forgot the men who fought alongside him. In their honor, he would later establish the Veterans of the Revolution, an organization that arranged their pensions, as well as affordable payment plans for land purchases.

Aguinaldo took another stab at politics when he ran for presidency in 1935 against Manuel Quezon but lost. In 1950 he became a presidential advisor on the Council of State.

Death

 

Emilio Aguinaldo died of a heart attack at Veterans Memorial Hospital in Quezon City, Philippines, on February 6, 1964. His private land and mansion, which he had donated the prior year, continue to serve as a shrine to both the revolution for Philippine independence and the revolutionary himself.

Synopsis

 

Early Years

 

Ralph Abernathy was the 10th child in a family with 12 offspring; he was born on March 11, 1926, in Marengo County, Alabama, to Louivery Abernathy and William Abernathy, a farmer and deacon. Upon graduating high school, he left his family's 500-acre farm after being drafted into the army during World War II. Following his military service, the young man became an ordained minister in 1948 while pursuing his education. Abernathy earned a mathematics degree in 1950 from Alabama State College and a master's degree in sociology from Atlanta University a year later. He then became pastor of the First Baptist Church in Montgomery and dean of students at Alabama State. He also married Juanita Odessa Jones; the two had four children.

Close Allies With Martin Luther King Jr.

 

 

In 1954, when Martin Luther King Jr. became a minster at nearby church, Abernathy mentored him. The two formed an incredible bond and would become leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1955, the pair founded the Montgomery Improvement Association and organized a yearlong bus boycott. Their actions were triggered by the arrest of Rosa Parks, who had refused to give up her bus seat to a white man. The boycott caught the country's attention but also brought violence; Abernathy's home and church were damaged by bomb blasts.

The danger didn't deter Abernathy. In 1957, he and King helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the most prominent of the civil rights organizations in the south. King was president and Abernathy eventually became vice president. A few years later, Abernathy hosted a rally for the Freedom Riders, black and white activists who traveled by bus to protest segregation in the South.
Later that year, when King took his civil rights efforts to Atlanta, Abernathy followed, working at the West Hunger Street Baptist Church. The two activists continued to organize protests, sit-ins and marches. Abernathy was arrested with King 17 times and was always by King's side, including when the civil rights leader was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Abernathy worked to keep King's spirit alive and became president of the SCLC. He also spearheaded the Poor People's Campaign of 1968, which included a march on Washington that led to the creation of the Federal Food Stamps Program.

Death and Legacy

 

In 1977, Abernathy relinquished his role as SCLC president and ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. After failing to be elected, he focused on his work as a minister and speaker.In 1989, his autobiography And the Walls Came Tumbling Down was published.

Abernathy passed away on April 17, 1990 in Atlanta. He’ll always be remembered as King’s closest confidante and second in command. In fact, King himself said in his last speech, "Ralph David Abernathy is the best friend that I have in the world."

• NAME: Mahmoud Abbas
• OCCUPATION: Political Leader
• BIRTH DATE: March 26, 1935 (Age: 77)
• EDUCATION: University of Damascus, Moscow State University
• PLACE OF BIRTH: Zefat, Palestine [now Israel]

• AKA: Abu Mazen
• ZODIAC SIGN: Aries

Profile

 

Mahmoud Abbas was born on March 26, 1935, in Zefat, Palestine (now Israel). In 1980, he became head of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s international and national relations department. His leadership of peace talks between Israel and Palestine led to the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords. He was elected president of the Palestinian Authority in 2005, and became the unofficial president of the State of Palestine in 2008.

Synopsis

 

Alexander Graham Bell was born on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland. His education was largely received through numerous experiments in sound and the furthering of his father’s work on Visible Speech for the deaf. Bell worked with Thomas Watson on the design and patent of the first practical telephone. In all, Bell held 18 patents in his name alone and 12 that he shared with collaborators. He died on August 2, 1922, in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Early Life

 

Alexander Graham Bell was born Alexander Bell on March 3, 1847, in Edinburgh, Scotland. (He was given the middle name "Graham" when he was 10 years old.) The second son of Alexander Melville Bell and Eliza Grace Symonds Bell, he was named for his paternal grandfather, Alexander Bell. For most of his life, the younger Alexander was known as "Aleck" to family and friends. He had two brothers, Melville James Bell (1845–70) and Edward Charles Bell (1848–67), both of whom died from tuberculosis.
During his youth, Alexander Graham Bell experienced significant influences that would carry into his adult life. One was his hometown of Edinburgh, Scotland, known as the "Athens of the North," for its rich culture of arts and science. Another was his grandfather, Alexander Bell, a well-known professor and teacher of elocution. Alexander's mother also had a profound influence on him, being a proficient pianist despite her deafness. This taught Alexander to look past people's disadvantages and find solutions to help them.
Alexander Graham Bell was homeschooled by his mother, who instilled in him an infinite curiosity about the world around him. He received one year of formal education in a private school and two years at Edinburgh's Royal High School. Though a mediocre student, he displayed an uncommon ability to solve problems. At age 12, while playing with a friend in a grain mill, he noted the slow process of husking the wheat grain. He went home and built a device with rotating paddles with sets of nail brushes that dehusked the wheat. It was his first invention.

Early Attempts to Follow His Passion

 

Alexander's father, Melville, followed in his father's footsteps, becoming a leading authority on elocution and speech correction. Young Alexander was groomed early to carry on in the family business, but he was ambitious and headstrong, which conflicted with his father's overbearing manner. Then, in 1862, Alexander's grandfather became ill. Seeking to be out of his father's control, Alexander volunteered to care for the elder Bell. The experience profoundly changed him. His grandfather encouraged his interests, and the two developed a close relationship. The experience left him with an appreciation for learning and intellectual pursuits, and transitioned him to manhood.


At 16, Alexander Graham Bell accepted a position at Weston House Academy in Elgin, Scotland, where he taught elocution and music to students, many older than he. At the end of the term, Alexander returned home and joined his father, promoting Melville Bell's technique of Visible Speech, which taught the deaf to align specific phonetic symbols with a particular position of the speech organs (lips, tongue, and palate).


Between 1865 and 1870, there was much change in the Bell household. In 1865, Melville Bell moved the family to London, and Alexander returned to Weston House Academy to teach. In 1867, Alexander's younger brother, Edward, died of tuberculosis. The following year, Alexander rejoined the family and once again became his father's apprentice. He soon assumed full charge of his father's London operations while Melville lectured in America. During this time, Alexander's own health weakened, and in 1870,
Alexander's older brother, Melville, Jr., also died of complications from tuberculosis.

On his earlier trip to America, Alexander's father discovered its healthier environment, and after the death of Melville, Jr., decided to move the family there. At first, Alexander resisted the move, for he was beginning to establish himself in London. But realizing his own health was in jeopardy, he relented, and in July 1870, the family settled in Brantford, Ontario, Canada. There, Alexander's health improved, and he set up a workshop to continue his study of the human voice.

Passion for Shaping the Future

 

In 1871, Melville Bell, Sr. was invited to teach at the Boston School for Deaf Mutes. Because the position conflicted with his lecture tour, he recommended Alexander in his place. The younger Bell quickly accepted. Combining his father's system of Visible Speech and some of his own methods, he achieved remarkable success. Though the school had no funds to hire Bell for another semester, he had fallen in love with the rich intellectual atmosphere of Boston. In 1872, he set out on his own, tutoring deaf children in Boston. His association with two students, George Sanders and Mabel Hubbard, would set him on a new course.
After one of his tutoring sessions with Mabel, Bell shared with her father, Gardiner, his ideas of how several telegraph transmissions might be sent on the same wire if they were transmitted on different harmonic frequencies. Hubbard's interest was piqued. He had been trying to find a way to improve telegraph transmissions, which at the time could carry only one message at a time. Hubbard convinced Thomas Sanders, the father of Bell's other student, George, to help financially back the idea.


Between 1873 and 1874, Alexander Graham Bell spent long days and nights trying to perfect the harmonic telegraph. But his attention became sidetracked with another idea: transmitting the human voice over wires. The diversion frustrated Gardiner Hubbard. He knew another inventor, Elisha Gray, was working on a multiple-signal telegraph. To help Bell refocus his efforts, Hubbard hired Thomas Watson, a skilled electrician. Watson understood how to develop the tools and instruments Bell needed to continue the project. But Watson soon took interest in Bell's idea of voice transmission. Like many inventors before and since, the two men formed a great partnership, with Bell as the ideas man and Watson having the expertise to bring Bell's ideas to reality.


Through 1874 and 1875, Bell and Watson labored on both the harmonic telegraph and a voice transmitting device.Hubbard insisted that the harmonic telegraph take precedence, but when he discovered that the two men had conceptualized the mechanism for voice transmission, he filed a patent. The idea was protected, for the time being, but the device still had to be developed. On March 10, 1876, Bell and Watson were experimenting in their laboratory. Legend has it that Bell knocked over a container of transmitting fluid and shouted, "Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you! 


" The more likely explanation was that Bell heard a noise over the wire and called to his assistant. In any case, Watson heard Bell's voice through the wire and thus received the first telephone call.
To further promote the idea of the telephone, Bell conducted a series of public demonstrations, ever increasing the distance between the two telephones. At the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, in 1876, Bell demonstrated the telephone to the Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro II, who exclaimed, "My God, it talks!" Other demonstrations followed, each at a greater distance than the last. The Bell Telephone Company was organized on July 9, 1877. With each new success, Alexander Graham Bell was moving out of the shadow of his father.


On July 11, 1877, with his notoriety and financial potential increasing, Alexander Graham Bell married Mabel Hubbard, his former student and the daughter of Gardiner Hubbard, his initial financial backer. Over the course of the next year, Alexander's fame grew internationally and he and Mabel traveled to Europe for more demonstrations. While there, the Bells' first child, Elsie May, was born. Upon their return to the United States, Bell was summoned to Washington D.C. to defend his telephone patent from lawsuits by others claiming they had invented the telephone or had conceived of the idea before Bell.
Over the next 18 years, the Bell Telephone Company faced over 550 court challenges, including several that went to the Supreme Court, but none was successful. Despite these patent battles, the company continued to grow. Between the years 1877 and 1886, the number of people in the United States who owned telephones grew to more than 150,000, and during this time, improvements were made on the device, including the addition of a microphone, invented by Thomas Edison, which eliminated the need to shout into the telephone to be heard.

Pursuing His Passion

 

Despite his success, Alexander Graham Bell was not a businessman. As he became more affluent, he turned over business matters to Hubbard and turned his attention to a wide range of inventions and intellectual pursuits. In 1880, he established the Volta Laboratory, an experimental facility devoted to scientific discovery. There, he developed a metal jacket to assist patients with lung problems, conceptualized the process for producing methane gas from waste material, developed a metal detector to locate bullets in bodies and invented an audiometer to test a person's hearing. He also continued to promote efforts to help the deaf, and in 1890, established the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf.

Final Years

 

In the last 30 years of his life, Bell was involved in a wide range of projects and pursued them at a furious pace. He worked on inventions in flight (the tetrahedral kite), scientific publications (Science magazine), and exploration of the earth (National Geographic magazine).

Alexander Graham Bell died peacefully, with his wife by his side, in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada, on August 2,1922. The entire telephone system was shut down for one minute in tribute to his life. Within a few months, Mabel also passed away. Alexander Graham Bell's contribution to the modern world and its technologies was enormous.

Synopsis

 

Early Life

 

Osama bin Laden was born Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden on March 10, 1957, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to construction billionaire Mohammed Awad bin Laden and Mohammed's 10th wife, Syrian-born Alia Ghanem. Osama was the seventh of 50 children born to Muhammad bin Laden, but the only child from his father's marriage to Alia Ghanem.


Osama's father started his professional life in the 1930s in relative poverty, working as a porter in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. During his time as a young laborer, Mohammed impressed the royal family with his work on their palaces, which he built at a much lower cost than any of his competitors could, and with a much greater attention to detail. By the 1960s, he had managed to land several large government contracts to build extensions on the Mecca, Medina and Al-Aqsa mosques. He became a highly influential figure in Jeddah; when the city fell on hard financial times, Mohammed used his wealth to pay all civil servants' wages for the entire kingdom for a six-month period. As a result, Mohammed bin Laden became well respected in his community.


As a father, he was very strict, insisting that all his children live under one roof and observe a rigid religious and moral code. He dealt with his children, especially his sons, as if they were adults, and demanded they become confident and self-sufficient at an early age.


Osama, however, barely came to know his father before his parents divorced. After his family split, Osama's mother took him to live with her new husband, Muhammad al-Attas. The couple had four children together, and Osama spent most of his childhood living with his step-siblings, and attending Al Thagher Model School—at the time the most prestigious high school in Jedda. His biological father would go on to marry two more times, until his death in a charter plane crash in September 1967.


At the age of 14, Osama was recognized as an outstanding, if somewhat shy, student at Al Thagher. As a result, he received a personal invitation to join a small Islamic study group with the promise of earning extra credit. Osama, along with the sons of several prominent Jedda families, were told the group would memorize the entire Koran, a prestigious accomplishment, by the time they graduated from the institution. But the group soon lost its original focus, and during this time Osama received the beginnings of an education in some of the principles of violent jihad.


The teacher who educated the children, influenced in part by a sect of Islam called The Brotherhood, began instructing his pupils in the importance of instituting a pure, Islamic law around the Arab world.


 Using parables with often-violent endings, their teacher explained that the most loyal observers of Islam would institute the holy word—even if it meant supporting death and destruction. By the second year of their studies,Osama and his friends had openly adopted the attitude and styles of teen Islamic activists. They preached the importance of instituting a pure Islamic law at Al Thagher; grew untrimmed beards; and wore shorter pants and wrinkled shirts in imitation of the Prophet's dress.

Osama was pushed to grow up rather quickly during his time at Al Thagher. At the age of 18 he married his first cousin, 14-year-old Najwa Ghanem, who had been promised to him. Osama graduated from Al Thager in 1976, the same year his first child, a son named Abdullah, was born. He then headed to King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, where some say he received a degree in public administration in 1981. Others claim he received a degree in civil engineering, in an effort to join the family business.

From Hero to Exile

 

But Osama would have little chance to use his degree. When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Osama joined the Afghan resistance, believing it was his duty as a Muslim to fight the occupation. He relocated to Peshawar, Afghanistan, and using aid from the United States under the CIA program Operation Cyclone, he began training a mujahideen, a group of Islamic jihadists. After the Soviets withdrew from the country in 1989, Osama returned to Saudi Arabia as a hero, and the United States referred to him and his soldiers as "Freedom Fighters."

Yet Osama was quickly disappointed with what he believed was a corrupt Saudi government, and his frustration with the U.S. occupation of Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf War led to a growing rift between Osama and his country's leaders. Bin Laden spoke publicly against the Saudi government's reliance on American troops, believing their presence profaned sacred soil. After several attempts to silence Osama, the Saudis banished the former hero. He lived in exile in Sudan beginning in 1992.

Formation of al Qaeda

 

By 1993, Osama had formed a secret network known as al Qaeda (Arabic for "the Base"), comprised of militant Muslims he had met while serving in Afghanistan. Soldiers were recruited for their ability to listen, their good manners, obedience, and their pledge to follow their superiors. Their goal was to take up the jihadist cause around the world, righting perceived wrongs under the accordance of pure, Islamic law. Under Osama's leadership, the group funded and began organizing global attacks worldwide. By 1994, after continued advocacy of extremist jihad, the Saudi government forced Osama to relinquish his Saudi citizenship, and confiscated his passport. His family also disowned him, cutting off his $7 million yearly stipend.

Undeterred, Osama began executing his violent plans, with the goal of drawing the United States into war. His hope was that Muslims, unified by the battle, would create a single, true Islamic state.

In 1996, to forward his goal, al Qaeda detonated truck bombs against U.S. occupied forces in Saudi Arabia. The next year, they claimed responsibility for killing tourists in Egypt, and in 1998 they bombed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Tanzania, killing nearly 300 people in the process.
Osama's actions abroad did not go unnoticed by the Sudanese government, and he was exiled from their country in 1996. Not able to return to Saudi Arabia, Osama took refuge in Afghanistan,
where he received protection from the country's ruling Taliban militia. While under the protection of the Taliban, Osama issued a series of fatwas, religious statements, which declared a holy war against the United States. Among the accusations reared at the offending country were the pillaging of natural resources in the Muslim world, and assisting the enemies of Islam.

9/11 and Final Days

 

By 2001, Osama had attempted, and often successfully executed attacks on several countries using the help of Al Qaeda trained terrorists and his seemingly bottomless financial resources. On September 11, 2001, Osama would deliver his most devastating blow to the United States. A small group of Osama's Al Qaeda jihadists hijacked four commercial passenger aircraft in the United States, two of which collided into the World Trade Center towers. Another aircraft crashed into The Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. A fourth plane was successfully retaken, and crashed in Pennsylvania. The intended target of the final aircraft was believed to be the United States Capitol. In all, the attack killed nearly 3,000 civilians.


Following the September 11 attacks on the United States, the government under President George W. Bush formed a coalition that sucecssfully overthrew the Taliban. Osama went into hiding and, for more than 10 years, he was hunted along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. In 2004, shortly before President Bush's re-election, Osama bin Laden released a videotaped message claiming responsibility for the attacks on 9/11.

Then, on May 2, 2011, President Barack Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed in a terrorist compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. In an eight-month plan enacted by the president, and led by CIA Director Leon Panetta and American special forces, Osama was shot several times. His body was taken as evidence of his death, and DNA tests revealed that the body was, in fact, his. "For over two decades, bin Laden has been al Qaeda's leader and symbol and has continued to plot attacks against our country and our friends and our allies," President Obama said in a late-night address to the nation on the eve of Osama's death. "The death of bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation's effort to defeat al Qaeda." He added that "his demise should be welcomed by all who believe in peace and human dignity."


 

Synopsis

 

Born in 1994 in London, Ontario, Canada, to a single mother, Justin Bieber took second place in a local talent competition at a young age and later turned into a YouTube phenomenon. He signed a record contract with Usher and became the first solo artist to have four singles enter the Top 40 before the release of a debut album. His record "My World" has gone platinum in several countries. He lives and works in Atlanta.

Childhood

Born on March 1, 1994, in London, Ontario, Canada, Justin Bieber was raised by a single mom in the small town of Stratford. Bieber, whose debut album, My World, hit stores in November 2009, is a true overnight success, having gone from an unknown, untrained singer whose mother posted YouTube clips of her boy performing, to a budding superstar with a big-time record deal, all in just two years.
Bieber always had an interest in music. His mother gave him a drum kit for his second birthday and, as he tells it, he was "basically banging on everything I could get my hands on."

But it was an obscure talent contest in his hometown, in which the 12-year-old Bieber finished second that put him on the road to superstardom. As a way to share his singing with family, Justin and his mom began posting clips of Bieber performing covers of Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, and Ne-Yo on YouTube.
Within months, Justin was an Internet sensation, with a large following of fans, and an eager manager arranging for the teenager to fly to Atlanta to consider a record deal. There, Bieber had a chance meeting with Usher, who eventually signed the young singer to a contract.

Career Highlights

 

 

Bieber's first single, "One Time," went certified platinum in his native Canada shortly after its release in May 2009. His album My World matched that success, selling more than 137,000 copies within a week of hitting stores. Bieber broke into the Billboard Top 10 in early 2010 with "Baby," which also featured Ludcris. Bieber soon released My World 2.0 (2010), which offered his growing fan base ten new songs.

In 2011, Bieber took to the big screen in the concert documentary Never Say Never. His fans crowded movie theaters to catch him in action on stage and get a glimpse of his life behind the scenes. The movie, which eventually earned more than $73 million at the box office, also had guest appearances by Kanye West, Miley Cyrus and Bieber's musical mentor Usher. That same year, Bieber released an album featuring his own take on such holiday classics as "All I Want For Christmas Is," his duet with Mariah Carey.

Bieber had his biggest hit single to date in April 2012 with "Boyfriend." The song appears on his latest album Believe released in June.

Personal Life

 

Teen idol Justin Bieber broke the hearts of many of his young female fans in 2010 when he started dating television actress and singer Selena Gomez. It hasn't been easy for Gomez to be Bieber's girlfriend. She has been accosted by some of his devoted followers.There were even death threats against her posted on Twitter after the pair was photographed kissing while on vacation in 2011.

While still only in his teens, Bieber has survived his first public scandal. A woman filed suit against Bieber in 2011, claiming that he was the father of her child. But a DNA test proved that the young pop star was not the father and the woman dropped her lawsuit. Bieber sang about the scandal in the song "Maria."

Synopsis

Born in Ulm, Württemberg, Germany in 1879, Albert Einstein developed the special and general theories of relativity. In 1921, he won the Nobel Prize for physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. Einstein is generally considered the most influential physicist of the 20th century. He died on April 18, 1955, in Princeton, New Jersey.

Early Life

 

Born on March 14, 1879 in Ulm, Württemberg, Germany, Albert Einstein grew up in a secular, middle-class Jewish family. His father, Hermann Einstein, was a salesman and engineer who, with his brother, founded Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie, a company that manufactured electrical equipment in Munich, Germany. His mother, the former Pauline Koch, ran the family household. Einstein had one sister, Maja, born two years after him.


Einstein attended elementary school at the Luitpold Gymnasium in Munich, where he excelled in his studies. He enjoyed classical music and played the violin. However, he felt alienated and struggled with the rigid Prussian education he received there. He also experienced a speech difficulty, a slow cadence in his speaking where he’d pause to consider what to say next. In later years, Einstein would write about two events that had a marked effect on his childhood. One was an encounter with a compass at age five, where he marveled at the invisible forces that turned the needle. The other was at age 12, when he discovered a book of geometry which he read over and over.


In 1889, the Einstein family invited a poor medical Polish medical student, Max Talmud to come to their house for Thursday evening meals. Talmud became an informal tutor to young Albert, introducing him to higher mathematics and philosophy. One of the books Talmud shared with Albert was a children’s science book in which the author imagined riding alongside electricity that was traveling inside a telegraph wire. Einstein began to wonder what a light beam would look like if you could run alongside it at the same speed. If light were a wave, then the light beam should appear stationary, like a frozen wave. Yet, in reality, the light beam is moving. This paradox led him to write his first "scientific paper" at age 16, "The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields." This question of the relative speed to the stationary observer and the observer moving with the light was a question that would dominate his thinking for the next 10 years.
In 1894, Hermann Einstein’s company failed to get an important contract to electrify the city of Munich and he was forced to move his family to Milan, Italy. Albert was left at a boarding house in Munich to finish his education at the Luitpold Gymnasium. Alone, miserable, and repelled by the looming prospect of military duty when he turned of age, Albert withdrew from school using a doctor’s note to excuse him and made his way to Milan to join his parents. His parents sympathized with his feelings, but were concerned about the enormous problems that he would face as a school dropout and draft dodger with no employable skills.



Fortunately, Einstein was able to apply directly to the Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule (Swiss Federal Polytechnic School) in Zürich, Switzerland. Lacking the equivalent of a high school diploma, he failed much of the entrance exam but got exceptional marks in mathematics and physics. Because of this, he was admitted to the school provided he complete his formal schooling first. He went to a special high school run by Jost Winteler in Aarau, Switzerland, 


and graduated in 1896 at age 17. He became lifelong friends with the Winteler family, with whom he had been boarding, and fell in love with Wintelers' daughter, Marie. At this time, Einstein renounced his German citizenship to avoid military service and enrolled at the Zurich school.

Marriage and Family

 

Einstein would recall that his years in Zurich were some of the happiest of his life. He met many students who would become loyal friends, such as Marcel Grossmann, a mathematician, and Michele Besso, with whom he enjoyed lengthy conversations about space and time. He also met his future wife, Mileva Maric, a fellow physics student from Serbia.

After graduating from the Polytechnic Institute, Albert Einstein faced a series of life crises over the next few years. Because he liked to study on his own, he cut classes and earned the animosity of some of his professors. One in particular, Heinrich Weber, wrote a letter of recommendation at Einstein’s request that led to him being turned down for every academic position that he applied to after graduation. Meanwhile, Einstein's relationship with Maric deepened, but his parents vehemently opposed the relationship citing her Serbian background and Eastern Orthodox Christian religion. Einstein defied his parents and continued to see Maric. In January, 1902, the couple had a daughter, Lieserl, who either died of sickness or was given up for adoption—the facts are unkown.

At this point, Albert Einstein probably reached the lowest point in his life. He could not marry Maric and support a family without a job, and his father's business had gone bankrupt. Desperate and unemployed, Einstein took lowly jobs tutoring children, but he was unable to hold on to any of them. A turning point came later in 1902, when the father of his lifelong friend, Marcel Grossman, recommended him for a position as a clerk in the Swiss patent office in Bern, Switzerland. About this time, Einstein’s father became seriously ill and just before he died, gave his blessing for him to marry. With a small but steady income, Einstein married Maric on Jan. 6, 1903. In May, 1904 they had their first son, Hans Albert. Their second son, Eduard, were born in 1910.

Miracle Year

 

At the patent office, Albert Einstein evaluated patent applications for electromagnetic devices. He quickly mastered the job, leaving him time to ponder on the transmission of electrical signals and electrical-mechanical synchronization, an interest he had been cultivating for several years. While at the polytechnic school he had studied Scottish physicist James Maxwell's electromagnetic theories which describe the nature of light, and discovered a fact unknown to Maxwell himself, that the speed of light remained constant.


 However, this violated Isaac Newton's laws of motion because there is no absolute velocity in Newton's theory. This insight led Einstein to formulate the principle of relativity.

In 1905—often called Einstein's "miracle year"—he submitted a paper for his doctorate and had four papers published in the Annalen der Physik, one of the best known physics journals. The four papers—the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity,and the equivalence of matter and energy—would alter the course of modern physics and bring him to the attention of the academic world. In his paper on matter and energy, Einstein deduced the well-known equation E=mc2, suggesting that tiny particles of matter could be converted into huge amounts of energy, foreshadowing the development of nuclear power. There have been claims that Einstein and his wife, Maric, collaborated on his celebrated 1905 papers, but historians of physics who have studied the issue find no evidence that she made any substantive contributions. In fact, in the papers, Einstein only credits his conversations with Michele Besso in developing relativity.
At firstm Einstein's 1905 papers were ignored by the physics community. This began to change when he received the attention of Max Planck, perhaps the most influential physicist of his generation and founder of quantum theory. With Planck’s complimentary comments and his experiments that confirmed his theories, Einstein was invited to lecture at international meetings and he rose rapidly in the academic world. He was offered a series of positions at increasingly prestigious institutions, including the University of Zürich, the University of Prague, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and finally the University of Berlin, where he served as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics from 1913 to 1933.


As his fame spread, Einstein's marriage fell apart. His constant travel and intense study of his work, the arguments about their children and the family’s meager finances led Einstein to the conclusion that his marriage was over. Einstein began an affair with a cousin, Elsa Löwenthal, whom he later married. He finally divorced Mileva in 1919 and as a settlement agreed to give her the money he might receive if he ever won a Nobel Prize.

Theory of Relativity

 

In November, 1915, Einstein completed the general theory of relativity, which he considered his masterpiece. He was convinced that general relativity was correct because of its mathematical beauty and because it accurately predicted the perihelion of Mercury's orbit around the sun, which fell short in Newton’s theory. General relativity theory also predicted a measurable deflection of light around the sun when a planet or another sun oribited near the sun. That prediction was confirmed in observations by British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington during the solar eclipse of 1919. In 1921, Albert Einstein received word that he had received the Nobel Prize for Physics. Because relativity was still considered controversial, Einstein received the award for his explanation of the photoelectric effect.


In the 1920s, Einstein launched the new science of cosmology. His equations predicted that the universe is dynamic, ever expanding or contracting. This contradicted the prevailing view that the universe was static, a view that Einstein held earlier and was a guiding factor in his development of the general theory of relativity. But his later calculations in the general theory indicated that the universe could be expanding or contracting. In 1929,astronomer Edwin Hubble found that the universe was indeed expanding, thereby confirming Einstein's work. In 1930, during a visit to the Mount Wilson Observatory near Los Angeles, Einstein met with Hubble and declared the cosmological constant, his original theory of the static size and shape of the universe, to be his "greatest blunder."


While Einstein was touring much of the world speaking on his theories in the 1920s, the Nazis were rising to power under the leadership of Adolph Hitler. Einstein’s theories on relativity became a convenient target for Nazi propaganda. In 1931, the Nazi’s enlisted other physicists to denounce Einstein and his theories as "Jewish physics." At this time, Einstein learned that the new German government, now in full control by the Nazi party, had passed a law barring Jews from holding any official position, including teaching at universities. Einstein also learned that his name was on a list of assassination targets, and a Nazi organization published a magazine with Einstein's picture and the caption "Not Yet Hanged" on the cover.

Move to the United States

 

In December, 1932, Einstein decided to leave Germany forever. He took a position a the newly formed Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, which soon became a Mecca for physicists from around the world. It was here that he would spend the rest of his career trying to develop a unified field theory—an all-embracing theory that would unify the forces of the universe, and thereby the laws of physics, into one framework—and refute the accepted interpretation of quantum physics. Other European scientists also fled various countries threatened by Nazi takeover and came to the United States. Some of these scientists knew of Nazi plans to develop an atomic weapon. For a time, their warnings to Washington, D.C. went unheeded.


In the summer of 1939, Einstein, along with another scientist, Leo Szilard, was persuaded to write a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt to alert him of the possibility of a Nazi bomb. President Roosevelt could not risk the possibility that Germany might develop an atomic bomb first. The letter is believed to be the key factor that motivated the United States to investigate the development of nuclear weapons. Roosevelt invited Einstein to meet with him and soon after the United States initiated the Manhattan Project.
Not long after he began his career at the Institute in New Jersey, Albert Einstein expressed an appreciation for the "meritocracy" of the United States and the right people had to think what they pleased—something he didn’t enjoy as a young man in Europe.


In 1935, Albert Einstein was granted permanent residency in the United States and became an American citizen in 1940. As the Manhattan Project moved from drawing board to testing and development at Los Alamos, New Mexico, many of his colleagues were asked to develop the first atomic bomb, but Eisenstein was not one of them. According to several researchers who examined FBI files over the years,
the reason was the U.S. government didn't trust Einstein's lifelong association with peace and socialist organizations. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover went so far as to recommend that Einstein be kept out of America by the Alien Exclusion Act, but he was overruled by the U.S. State Department. Instead, during the war, Einstein helped the U.S. Navy evaluate designs for future weapons systems and contributed to the war effort by auctioning off priceless personal manuscripts. One example was a handwritten copy of his 1905 paper on special relativity which sold for $6.5 million, and is now located in the Library of Congress.
On August 6, 1945, while on vacation, Einstein heard the news that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. He soon became involved in an international effort to try to bring the atomic bomb under control, and in 1946, he formed the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists with physicist Leo Szilard. In 1947, in an article that he wrote for The Atlantic Monthly, Einstein argued that the United States should not try to monopolize the atomic bomb, but instead should supply the United Nations with nuclear weapons for the sole purpose of maintaining a deterrent. At this time, Einstein also became a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He corresponded with civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois and actively campaigned for the rights of African Americans.

After the war, Einstein continued to work on many key aspects of the theory of general relativity, such as wormholes, the possibility of time travel, the existence of black holes, and the creation of the universe. However, he became increasingly isolated from the rest of the physics community. With the huge developments in unraveling the secrets of atoms and molecules, spurred on by the development to the atomic bomb, the majority of scientists were working on the quantum theory, not relativity. Another reason for Einstein's detachment from his colleagues was his obsession with discovering his unified field theory. In the 1930s, Einstein engaged in a series of historic private debates with Niels Bohr, the originator of the Bohr atomic model. In a series of "thought experiments," Einstein tried to find logical inconsistencies in the quantum theory, but was unsuccessful. However, in his later years, he stopped opposing quantum theory and tried to incorporate it, along with light and gravity, into the larger unified field theory he was developing.
In the last decade of his life, Einstein withdrew from public life, rarely traveling far and confining himself to long walks around Princeton with close associates, whom he engaged in deep conversations about politics, religion, physics and his unified field theory.

Final Years

 

On April 17, 1955, while working on a speech he was preparing to commemorate Israel's 17th anniversary, Einstein suffered an abdominal aortic aneurysm and experienced internal bleeding. He was taken to the University Medical Center at Princeton for treatment, but refused surgery, believing that he had lived his life and was content to accept his fate. Einstein died at the university medical center early the next morning—April 18, 1955—at the age of 76.


During the autopsy, Thomas Stoltz Harvey removed Einstein's brain, seemingly without the permission of his family, for preservation and future study by doctors of neuroscience. His remains were cremated and his ashes were scattered in an undisclosed location. After decades of study, Einstein's brain is now located at the Princeton University Medical Center.


 

Early Life

 

Born Joseph Ratzinger on April 16, 1927, in Marktl am Inn, Bavaria, Germany, the youngest of three children. His father was a policeman and his mother a hotel cook (before she married). His family moved frequently among villages in rural Bavaria, a deeply Roman Catholic region in Germany, as the Nazis strengthened their stranglehold on Germany in the 1930s. His father was a determined anti-Nazi, Ratzinger wrote. Unemployment was rife," he wrote in his memoir, Milestones. "War reparations (from World War I) weighed heavily on the German economy. Battles among the political parties set people against one another."
As a defense against the Nazi regime, Ratzinger threw himself into the Roman Catholic Church, "a citadel of truth and righteousness against the realm of atheism and deceit," he wrote.


Ratzinger entered preparatory seminary in 1939. But he could not avoid the realities of the day. Ratzinger was briefly a member of the Hitler Youth in his early teens, after membership became mandatory in 1941.

Military Service

 

In 1943, he and fellow seminarians were drafted into the anti-aircraft corps. He has said his unit was attacked by Allied forces that year, but he did not take part in that battle because a finger infection had kept him from learning to shoot.


After about a year in the antiaircraft unit, Ratzinger was drafted into the regular military. He told Time magazine in 1993 that while stationed near Hungary, he saw Hungarian Jews being sent to death camps.
Ratzinger was sent home and then called up again before deserting in late April 1945. He was captured by American soldiers and held as a prisoner of war for several months.

Ratzinger returned to seminary at the University of Munich in the fall of 1945 and was ordained a priest in 1951. Two years later, he earned his doctorate at the University of Munich. He earned his teaching licentiate in 1957 and became a professor of Freising College in 1958, teaching dogma and fundamental theology.
Ratzinger became a professor at the University of Bonn in 1959. Later, he moved to the University of Muenster (1963-1966) and took a chair in dogmatic theology at the University of Tübingen. Alienated by the student protests at Tübingen, he returned to Bavaria, to the University of Regensburg.

Promotion Within the Church

 

At the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), Ratzinger served as chief theological expert to Cardinal Joseph Frings of Cologne, Germany

He was viewed as a reformer during this time.In 1972, Ratzinger helped found the theological journal Communio, which became one of the most important journals of Catholic thought.

In March 1977, he was named archbishop of Munich and Freising and, three months later, was named a Cardinal by Pope Paul VI.

In 1981,Pope John Paul II named Ratzinger prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In 1998, he became Vice Dean of the College of Cardinals and was elected Dean in 2002. Ratzinger defended and reaffirmed Catholic doctrine, including teaching on topics such as birth control, homosexuality and inter-religious dialogue.

Papacy

Ratzinger was elevated to the papacy on April 19, 2005, upon the death of Pope John Paul II, and celebrated his Papal Inauguration Mass five days later. Known for his rigid views on Catholicism, he has sought a more inclusive image as pope.
In 2008, Benedict made his first visit as pope to the United States, where he spoke out against clerical sexual abuse and delivered an address at the United Nations. That same year, to foster relations and understanding between religions, Benedict addressed the first Catholic-Muslim Forum, a three-day conference of Catholic theologians and Islamic scholars.

Resignation

 

In February 2013, at age 85, Pope Benedict XVI announced that he would be resigning on February 28, 2013—becoming the first pope in centuries to step down from his post.

According to several media reports, Benedict's decision centered on his old age, and physical and mental weakness. In one statement, the pope explained, "I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise." He went on to state, "In today's world, subject to so many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith, in order to govern the bark of St. Peter and proclaim the gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me ... For this reason, and well aware of the seriousness of this act, with full freedom, I declare that I renounce the ministry of bishop of Rome, successor of St. Peter."
Benedict served his final day as pope on February 28, 2013. Traveling by helicopter, he departed the Vatican for the summer papal residence in Casel Gandolfo, Italy. Benedict stay there while renovations are made at a convent for him at the Vatican where he will live for the rest of his days.

One of Benedict's final acts as a pope was to send a message to the faithful via Twitter. "Thank you for your love and support. May you always experience the joy that comes from putting Christ at the center of your lives." He will continue to be known as Benedict XVI in his retirement and has been given the title of pope emeritus.