An excellent article in the Guardian on 31 Decemberhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/dec/30/anniversary-year-darwin makes the point that 2009 is a great year for anniversaries.It is of course not the be all and end all of history – but it would be a shame if we didn’t recognize quite a few of them in passing.
Turns out that 1809 was quite a year – the birth of Darwin, Edgar Allan Poe, Abraham Lincoln, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Felix Mendelssohn, Nikolai Gogol and William Gladstone.
There’s more.Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, and in that same year Charles Dickens published A Tale of Two Cities, Alfred Lord Tennyson published Idylls of the King, George Eliot introduced Adam Bede, John Stuart Mill wrote On Liberty and Edward FitzGerald translated the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
The big one that everyone will talk about will be the 40th anniversary of the landing on the moon by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.The Soviet Union sent two probes onto Venus and showed us once and for all what that world was like.Concord made its first flight 40 years ago, and it is interesting to reflect on why the project was such a failure in the commercial world.The Boeing 747 also went up for the first time and was a huge success.In 1909 Louis Bleriot flew across the Channel.
Fifty years ago the Soviet Union launched the first moon orbiter, and we got the first pictures of the far side of the moon – which did look a bit different from the side we see, but didn’t contain any aliens. It may not suit politics, but the really big science was learned from the Venus expedition.
Abe Lincoln, Gogol, Gladstone, Poe, Mendelssohn, FitzGerald… of course there are many more – but that’s a start.
