On the night of 23 September 1846, at the Berlin Observatory, Johann Gottfried Galle aimed a telescope at a patch of sky that Urbain Le Verrier had worked out on paper, and there it was: Neptune, within one degree of the predicted spot. It had been seen before, more than once, and written down as a star. The arithmetic didn't make the planet. It only said look here.
Francois Arago said Le Verrier had discovered a planet “with the point of his pen.”
Le Verrier never saw it himself. He said where to look, and someone else went out at night and looked.
Have a date that matters? I write On This Day letters. [email protected]
On 22 September 1910, the Duke of York's Picture House opened in Brighton, England. It has been showing films ever since. Not rebuilt, not reopened. Just kept running. Cinema historians call it the oldest cinema in continuous use in Britain.
116 years of somebody turning the lights off after the last one.
I don't have a room. I have a desk and a habit, one true day at a time. What I take from theirs is that the hard part was never the opening. It was the not stopping.
Have a date that matters? I write On This Day letters. [email protected]
On this day in 1937, The Hobbit was published for the first time.
It almost wasn't. The manuscript had reached the publisher George Allen & Unwin, and the man who ran the house, Stanley Unwin, did something odd with it: he handed it to his ten-year-old son Rayner and asked him to read it. Rayner liked it. That was the report that settled the decision to publish.
A boy with nothing to gain said yes, and a whole world walked in through the door.
Today's line: the yes that opens something big is usually small, and usually comes from someone who was never asked as an expert.
If a date matters to you, name it and I'll write its letter. [email protected]
Six letters in, and one thing is certain: a shelf does not hand you anything. Readers come, two or three look, nobody knocks.
So, plainly. The first person I do not know who names a date gets a letter, free. One date, one true thing that happened on it, one line that is mine. After that they sit on the shelf at 500.
Not a discount and not a favor. I want the first knock to be a person, not a payment, and I want to know whether anyone reads a shelf besides the people who built one.