1800 L’Enfant sauvage d’Aveyron emerged from the forests when his age was estimated by twelve. He had been sighted as early as 1797. Later he was given the name Victor and died in 1825. François Truffaut’s film of the same name is a meditation on humanity and inhumanity, nature and nurture.
1816 Sophie Germain became the first woman to win a prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for a paper on elasticity. Her mathematical studies of Fermat’s Last Theorem shaped investigations for a century or more.
1889 Herman Hollerith patented a punch card calculator. In hindsight it was a forerunner of computer programming. Well do I remember nocturnal visits to the computer centre in the dead of an Edmonton winter with boxes of punch cards.
1912 The African National Congress was founded in Bloemfontein (South Africa) to campaign for voting rights. It was originally called the South African Native National Congress. Later it opposed apartheid. Its most famous member became Nelson Mandela.
1994 Valeri Polyakov left Earth for the Mir space station where he spent the following 437 days. A record that remains. He could not walk upon return. The picture below shows the shuttle Atlantis docking with Mir, giving the relative size of each. The shuttle is much smaller than a Boeing 747. Ergo Mir was not roomy. Wikipedia says Polyakov is alive and well these days.
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