On This Day
1690 – Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, the first newspaper to appear in the Americas, is published for the first and only time.
Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick was the title of the first multi-page newspaper published in the Americas. Before then, single-page newspapers, called broadsides, were published in the English colonies and printed in Cambridge in 1689. The first edition was published September 25, 1690, in Boston, then a city in the Dominion of New England, and was intended to be published monthly, “or, if any Glut of Occurrences happen, oftener.” It was printed by American Richard Pierce of Boston, and it was edited by Benjamin Harris, who had previously published a newspaper in London. The paper contained four 6-by-10-inch pages, but filled only three of them.
No second edition was printed because the paper was shut down by the Colonial government on September 29, 1690, who issued an order as follows:
Whereas some have lately presumed to Print and Disperse a Pamphlet, Entitled, Publick Occurrences, both Forreign and Domestick: Boston, Thursday, Septemb. 25th, 1690. Without the least Privity and Countenace of Authority. The Governour and Council having had the perusal of said Pamphlet, and finding that therein contained Reflections of a very high nature: As also sundry doubtful and uncertain Reports, do hereby manifest and declare their high Resentment and Disallowance of said Pamphlet, and Order that the same be Suppressed and called in; strickly forbidden any person or persons for the future to Set forth any thing in Print without License first obtained from those that are or shall be appointed by the Government to grant the same.[2]
In popular culture
A reincarnation of Publick Occurrences appears in the 2015 video game Fallout 4.
Born On This Day
1906 – Phyllis Pearsall, English painter, cartographer, and author (d. 1996)
Phyllis Isobella Pearsall MBE (25 September 1906 – 28 August 1996) was a British painter and writer who founded the Geographers’ A-Z Map Company. She has erroneously been credited with creating London’s first popular indexed street map.
Biography
Early years
She was born Phyllis Isobella Gross in East Dulwich, London on 25 September 1906. Her father, Alexander Gross (originally Grosz), was a Hungarian Jewish immigrant and her mother, Isabella Crowley, an Irish-Italian Roman Catholic suffragette, whose parents disapproved of the match.[1] Phyllis Gross was baptised a Roman Catholic.
She grew up with her older brother, the artist Anthony Gross, in London and travelled all over Europe from an early age. Her father founded the cartographic company Geographia Ltd,[2] which produced, among others, street maps of most British towns and although successful, eventually went bankrupt; Gross re-launched the company in the United States as the Geographia Map Company a few years later.
Her parents had a very tense marriage which soon dissolved. Her mother remarried but died some years later in an asylum.
Phyllis Gross was educated at Roedean School, a private boarding school near Brighton, which she had to leave when her father went bankrupt. She then became an English tutor in a small school in Fécamp, Brittany. Later, she studied at the Sorbonne, spending her first few months in Paris, sleeping rough before moving to a bedsit where she met the writer Vladimir Nabokov.[3] She started working as a shop assistant in a big department store, selling gloves.
She married Richard Pearsall, an artist friend of her brother. They were together for eight years, travelling in Spain and living in Paris, when she left him in Venice while he was asleep, without telling him anything. She did not remarry.
The start of mapping
By 1935, she had become a portrait painter but became lost in London while using the latest map she could find, which was 17 years old. This stimulated her to produce a new map to cover the rapidly expanding area of London, including places of interest such as museums, bus routes etc.[4]
She claimed that the work involved walking 3,000 miles to check the names of the 23,000 streets of London, waking up at 5am every day, and not going to bed until after an 18-hour working day.[5][6] In her autobiography she points to one novelty: “House numbers along main roads; I’ve walked them from start to finish; you won’t find them on any other London map.”[7] It is often claimed to be the first indexed London street map, but this claim is easily refuted by reference to Bartholomew’s Reference Atlas of London and Suburbs, which was published and widely available from 1908 onwards.[8] The first Pearsall A-Z claimed on its front cover to include “9,000 more [streets] than any similar atlas index”, but in fact it had almost the same number of streets as the Bartholomew’s version.
The map was drawn using the 72 6″ Ordnance Survey maps for London dating from 1919 by her father’s cartographer, Mr Fountain, updated by visits to the LCC planning offices.[9] In 1936, when her map was complete, she printed 10,000 copies and began contacting bookstores who might sell it. She tried Hatchards in Piccadilly, Selfridges, where they would not see her without an appointment, and Foyles. None of them would take it. Next she went to W H Smith where, after being snubbed for days by an office junior, she received an order for 1,250 copies, which she delivered using a hand barrow borrowed from the pub next door.[10] They sold well and within weeks she was taking regular orders to every main railway station in London. F. W. Woolworth took a few thousand copies too. By 1938 the London A-Z was well-established. Until her father’s death in 1958, all copies included the words “Produced under the direction of Alexander Gross, F.R.G.S.”, but he was not actually involved but it was hoped that he would find the acknowledgement useful.[11]
During the Second World War, when selling maps to the public was forbidden, she worked for the Ministry of Information. There was also limited production of maps of the war fronts, but this was a hard time for her fledgling company.[11]
In 1945, returning from a trip to Amsterdam where they were printing a new edition of the London map to get round shortages of paper in England, she was involved in a plane crash which left her with permanent scars.[12]
Later years
In 1966, she turned her company, the Geographers’ A–Z Map Co, into a trust to ensure that it was never bought out. This secured the future of her company and its employees. Through her donation of her shares to the trust, she was able to enshrine her desired standards and behaviours for the company into its statutes.
A respected typographer, although not credited with the design of any typefaces, her arrangement of type is considered one of the most interesting of her age. The ‘A to Z’ type-style for street names was for decades a conspicuously hand-drawn sans-serif. She designed the type for a few children’s encyclopaedias and some other titles, though her slant was always toward publishing.
She wrote about her early days in From Bedsitter to Household Name, published by her own company. She was awarded an MBE in HM The Queen’s birthday honours of 1986.[13] She was involved with the company she founded, as well as painting prolifically, until her death.
In her later years, she lived in Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex, and died of cancer on 28 August 1996, a month before her 90th birthday.
Legacy
In 2005 Southwark Council placed a blue plaque on the house where she was born in Court Lane Gardens, Dulwich.[14]
In 2012 Crossrail named one of its first pair of tunnel boring machines (TBMs) Phyllis to honour Pearsall’s memory. The other machine was named Ada, after Ada Lovelace.[15]
In 2014 a musical about Phyllis Pearsall, The A-Z of Mrs P, written by Diane Samuels and Sophie Thompson, was performed at Southwark Playhouse.[16]
FYI
Sir Charles Kuen Kao GBM KBE FRS FREng,[5][6][7][8][9] (4 November 1933 – 23 September 2018[10]) was a Hong Kong-American-British electrical engineer and physicist who pioneered the development and use of fibre optics in telecommunications. In the 1960s, Kao created various methods to combine glass fibres with lasers in order to transmit digital data, which laid the groundwork for the evolution of the Internet. “Communication as we know it, including the Internet, would not exist without fiber optics,” said William Wulf, president of the National Academy of Engineering in 1999.[11]
Known as the “Godfather of Broadband”,[12] the “Father of Fibre Optics”,[13][14][15][16][11] and the “Father of Fiber Optic Communications”,[17][18] Kao was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for “groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication”.[19] Kao held citizenships in the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as having been a permanent resident of Hong Kong.[12]
Read more ->
By George Dvorsky: A Dog With Cancer Got a New, 3D-Printed Titanium Skull
By OZY Editors – Special Briefing: The Future of Fertility
By Gary Price: The Next Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song Will Be Awarded to Emilio and Gloria Estefan
By Gary Price: World War II: “A Thousand ‘Lost Voices’ Preserved for Future Generations in Digital Archive”
By Adino Mayo: Organized Me vs Real Me: 4 Things to Get Back on Track
By Atlas Obscura – Abbey Perreault: The Donkey Refuge Where Burros Become Coyote-Kicking Livestock Guardians With the right training, feral donkeys go from zero to hero.
By Josh Jones: Long-Lost Letter Shows How Galileo Tried to Fool the Inquisition & Escape Censure for Putting Scientific Truth Ahead of Church Dogma (1613)
By DC: A Book about Women in Philosophy by Women in Philosophy: Help Crowdfund It
Ideas
By attosa: Golden Zipper-Face Costume
By PCaron4: Halloween Flameless Candles
By Hometalk Highlights: You Never Thought Of Using An Old Fence Like This (12 Ideas) Don’t throw out old fence boards! We’ve got the perfect upcycling ideas for you!
By Hometalk Highlights: 15 Inexpensive Tricks To Help You Landscape (Without Stressing Out!) Take the stress out of landscaping your property with these hacks!
wikimedia
- Wikimedia Commons picture of the day for November 25 November 25, 2024Picture of the day Papaya fruits in a grocery store. Colatina, Espírito Santo, Brazil.
- Wikimedia Commons picture of the day for November 24 November 24, 2024Picture of the day The Scroll of Eighty-Seven Immortals, drawn by an unknown painter, measuring 30cm high and 292cm wide, is a line-drawing Chinese figure painting. Drawn on a long silk scroll with lines, the painting depicts 87 taoist immortals, including three supreme gods with halo, ten divine generals, seven deities and 67 celestial maidens […]
Recipes
Widget not in any sidebars
Widget not in any sidebars
Widget not in any sidebars