Born on this day
Thursday, April 23, 1564. : Today is the traditional, though unofficial, date of William Shakespeare’s birth.
William Shakespeare, also spelled Shakspere, Shaksper, and Shake-speare, because spelling in Elizabethan times was not fixed and absolute, was born in Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England, in April 1564. 23 April 1564 is the unofficial date which has been settled upon as Shakespeare was baptised on 26 April of that year, and baptisms were usually performed within a few days of birth. Shakespeare also died on the same date, 23 April, in 1616.
Shakespeare is known for the dozens of plays he wrote, which continue to remain a popular theatrical genre centuries after his death. Nicknamed the “Bard of Avon”, he was equally skilled at creating high drama, romance and slapstick comedy. Shakespeare’s better-known plays include Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, and Twelfth Night. Many popular quotes in today’s language derive from these plays. Shakespeare also wrote over 150 sonnets, and other narrative poems.
Australian Explorers
Wednesday, April 23, 1873. : William Gosse departs Alice Springs on an expedition, during which he discovers Ayers Rock.
Explorer William Gosse, of the South Australian Survey Department, became the first European explorer to see Ayers Rock, quite by accident. His expedition into the central interior departed Alice Springs on 23 April 1873, heading in a north-westerly direction.
The need to find water for his camels forced him to take a more southerly course than he had originally planned. It was then that he sighted Ayers Rock in central Australia, recording that, “This rock is certainly the most wonderful natural feature I have ever seen”. The second largest monolith in the world, second only to Mt Augustus, which is also in Australia, Ayers Rock was named after the former Premier of South Australia, Sir Henry Ayers. It is now known by its native name of Uluru.
Australian Explorers
Thursday, April 23, 1874. : Alf Gibson, companion to explorer Ernest Giles, disappears in the desert, resulting in the naming of the Gibson Desert.
Ernest Giles emigrated to Australia in 1850 and was employed at various cattle and sheep stations, allowing him to develop good bush skills. He made several expeditions in the Australian desert. The first, lasting four months, commenced in August 1872 and resulted in discoveries such as Palm Valley, Gosse’s Bluff, Lake Amadeus, and the first sighting of Mount Olga.
Alf Gibson was a young stockman who accompanied Giles on his next expedition, which departed in August 1873. On this expedition, Giles was able to approach closer to the Olgas, but his attempts to continue further west were thwarted by interminable sand, dust, biting ants and lack of water. After a two month recovery period at Fort Mueller, Giles set out north towards the Rawlinson Range, from which he again tried to penetrate westwards, but was once more thwarted by Aboriginal attack and insufficient water. In April 1874, Giles decided to make one last attempt to reach the west, taking Gibson with him. After one day, lack of water caused Giles to send the packhorses back to their camp. A day or two later, Giles’s horse was unable to continue, so the men began their return to the base camp, sharing Gibson’s horse.
On 23 April 1874, Giles instructed Gibson to return to the camp for help, leaving Giles to walk. Giles reached where the men had left water kegs and continued on with a supply of water that lasted him six more days. On the third day of his trek, he saw that the packhorses had veered off their original course east, and headed south, deeper into the desert. Gibson had followed the tracks. After reaching the base camp the next day, Giles immediately took another man and attempted to search for Gibson, but no trace of him was ever found. In his journal, Giles noted that he named the waterless country Gibson’s Desert, “after this first white victim to its horrors”.
Australian History
Monday, April 23, 2001. : Australian newspaper ‘The Sydney Morning Herald’ erroneously reports that the British Flying Saucer Bureau has closed down due to lack of UFO sightings.
The British Flying Saucer Bureau was founded in 1953. In its heyday, it boasted a worldwide membership exceeding 1500. However, on 23 April 2001, Australian newspaper ‘The Sydney Morning Herald’ reported that, due to a lack of UFO sightings or evidence of extra-terrestrial activity, the Bureau was closing down.
However, it seems it was an example of erroneous reporting by a number of publications around the world, initiated by a report from a British newspaper. Chairman and co-founder of the Bureau, Denis P Plunkett, was shocked to read a report on the Bureau’s closure in a later edition of UFO Magazine. It seems that an informal comment to a local journalist in his native England had been misconstrued. Plunkett had merely stated that the Bureau was suspending lectures over the summer break, and this had been misinterpreted as the Bureau itself closing.
World History
Thursday, April 23, 1896. : Following Edison’s invention of the motion picture, the first film is presented to a large audience in a movie theatre.
Thomas Alva Edison was born on 11 February 1847 in Milan, Ohio, USA. Childhood illness meant that he was a slow starter and easily distracted in his schooling. After his teacher described him as “addled”, his mother, a former schoolteacher herself, took charge of her son’s education, stimulating his curiosity and desire to experiment.
He began selling newspapers on the railroad at age 12, and learned how to operate a telegraph. In 1868, his first invention was an electric vote-recording machine. The invention which first gained Edison fame was the phonograph in 1877, but in 1876 he had moved his laboratory to Menlo Park, New Jersey, where he invented the first prototype of a commercially practical incandescent electric light bulb, in 1879.
By the late 1880s he started experimenting with moving pictures. In his laboratory he produced the Kinetograph, a motion picture camera, and the Kinetoscope, which was a peephole motion picture viewer. Late in 1889, he showed his first motion picture. Motion pictures quickly became popular, to the point where Edison needed to build a projector suitable for showing films to bigger audiences. His company developed a projector known as the Projectoscope. The first moving pictures to be shown in an actual movie theatre in America were presented to audiences on 23 April 1896, in New York City.