Born on this day
Friday, November 24, 1815. : Grace Darling, the English lighthouse keeper’s daughter who rescued survivors from a shipwreck, is born.
Grace Darling was born on 24 November 1815, in Bamburgh, Northumberland, and grew up in the various lighthouses of which her father was keeper. Grace gained heroine status early in the morning of 7 September 1838, when the steamship Forfarshire ran ashore and broke in two on the rocks by the lighthouse situated in the North Sea. Grace urged her father to row out with her in difficult, stormy conditions to the stricken steamship: her actions saved the lives of nine people – four crew and five passengers. Tragically, forty other people died in the accident.
Grace Darling never married. She died of tuberculosis in 1842, and a memorial in her honour can be seen in the parish church at Bamburgh.
Born on this day
Friday, November 24, 1876. : Walter Burley Griffin, the architect who designed Canberra, Australia’s capital city, is born.
Australia’s two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, had been rivals since before the goldrush days. It was therefore decided that the nation’s capital should be situated between the two cities. A location was chosen which was 248km from Sydney and 483km from Melbourne, and the name selected was a derivation of the Aboriginal word for ‘meeting place’. It was then necessary to select someone who could design a truly unique capital city. The competition to design Australia’s new capital city, Canberra, was won in 1911 by Walter Burley Griffin.
Walter Burley Griffin was born on 24 November 1876, in Chicago, USA. After obtaining his degree in architecture in 1899, Griffin worked for Frank Lloyd Wright in Oak Park, Illinois, designing many houses in the Chicago area. After winning the competition to design Australia’s national capital, he and his wife moved to Australia, where Griffin was appointed as the Federal Capital Director of Design and Construction. Difficulties with Federal government bureaucrats forced Griffin’s resignation from the project in 1920 when a conflict of interest threatened Griffin’s work. Griffin remained in Australia, later designing the Sydney suburb of Castlecrag and the Melbourne suburb of Eaglemont. Griffin also helped design the New South Wales towns of Leeton, Griffith and Culburra Beach.
Australian History
Monday, November 24, 1642. : Dutch explorer Abel Tasman discovers Tasmania, naming it Van Diemen’s Land.
Abel Janszoon Tasman was a Dutch seafarer and explorer born in 1603 in the village of Lutjegast, Netherlands. In 1634 Tasman joined the Dutch East India Company and, after gaining further experience and promotions, was ordered to explore the south-east waters in order to find a new sea trade route to Chile in South America.
On 24 November 1642, Tasman discovered a previously unknown island on his voyage past the Great South Land, or New Holland, as the Dutch called Australia. In his ships’ log, he recorded: “In the afternoon, about 4 o’clock…we saw…the first land we have met with in the South Sea…very high…and not known to any European nation”. Tasman named this land Antony Van Diemen’s Land in honour of the High Magistrate, or Governor-General of Batavia. Although he saw none of the indigenous people, he noted the presence of smoke in several locations, while his crew heard human voices.
It is believed that this first sighting was made at what is now Cape Sorell, on the western coast of Tasmania. The island’s name was changed to Tasmania in 1855, over sixty years after British colonists settled the Australian continent.
World History
Thursday, November 24, 1859. : Charles Darwin publishes his controversial “Origin of the Species”.
British naturalist Charles Robert Darwin was born on 12 February 1809 in Shrewsbury, England. Darwin’s claim to fame is his publication of “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”. The book put forth Darwin’s theory of evolutionary selection, which expounded that survival or extinction of populations of organisms is determined by the process of natural selection, achieved through that population’s ability to adapt to its environment. Ultimately, by following Darwin’s theory of evolution to its conclusion, the book suggested that man evolved from apes. “The Origin of the Species” was first published on 24 November 1859.
Although Darwin is given the credit for the theory of evolution, he developed the theory out of the writings of his grandfather Erasmus. Large sections from Erasmus’s major work, ‘Zoonomia or the Laws of Organic Life’ are repeated in Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’. There is evidence to suggest that many of the other ideas Charles proposed, such as the concept of modern biological evolution, including natural selection, were borrowed from ideas that had already been published by other scientists. Charles De Secondat Montesquieu (1689–1755), Benoit de Maillet (1656–1738), Pierre-Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759), Denis Diderot (1713–1784) and George Louis Buffon are just some whose ideas are believed by historians to have been plagiarised by Darwin, without due credit.