Today in History: June 13

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
 
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
 
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
—William Butler Yeats, “When You Are Old”

William Butler Yeats (above) was born on his date in 1865.
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Today in History: June 12

Anne Frank was born 87 years ago today.

A few years ago the Anne Frank House released a short film clip, 20 seconds long, of a home movie: a bride and groom walk out of Merwedeplein 39 in Amsterdam on July 22, 1941, and a 12 year-old girl looks on from the front of Merwedeplein 37. She is seen in a second shot leaning out of an upstairs window. Smiling. Being 12. It is the only film footage that has ever been found of Anne Frank, the 12-year-old child. The film (below the jump):
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Today in History: June 11

The inventor Edwin Howard Armstrong gave a demonstration of FM radio to an audience of engineers and everyday listeners 80 years ago today.

Anyone who has listened to an AM broadcast for more than a few hours has encountered its drawbacks: crackles, hisses, static-y noises, pops. Armstrong, building on 15 years of research into high frequency signals, had devices that could send and receive high frequency signals. Armstrong played a jazz record through AM equipment and then through FM. A reporter who was there wrote, “If the audience of 500 engineers had shut their eyes they would have believed the jazz band was in the same room. There were no extraneous sounds.” It worked, yet the FM radio era lay decades off in the future.
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