More than a century before the proliferation of cell phones, Bell invented a wireless telephone that transmitted conversations and sounds by beams of light. Alexander Graham Bell and assistant use an electrical detector to find a bullet inside President James Garfield.
In spite of gaining fame as the inventor of the telephone, Bell continued his lifelong work to help the hearing impaired. In , Captain Arthur Keller traveled from Alabama to meet with Bell in order to seek help for his 6-year-old daughter, Helen, who had become blind and mute at the age of 19 months, possibly from scarlet fever.
Bell began experimenting in aviation in the s, even developing giant manned tetrahedral kites. His dreams of airplanes that could take off from water led him to work on the designs of winged hydrofoil boats that skipped across the water surface at high speeds.
The HD-4 model on which he collaborated reached a speed of more than 70 miles per hour during a test on a lake in Nova Scotia, a world water-speed record that stood for more than a decade. The headstone of Alexander Graham Bell photographed in Bell died at his summer home in Nova Scotia on August 2, Two days later all telephone service in the United States and Canada was suspended for a full minute at the precise moment when Bell was lowered into his grave.
He was poor and he had reorganized his classes in vocal speech. Toward the end of June he went to the station to see Miss Hubbard off for Philadelphia. There had been some talk of his going, hut he had put it quietly aside.
She believed he was going; when they reached the station she pleaded with him and was refused. As he put her aboard the train and it moved out, leaving him on the platform, she burst out crying. Bell dashed after her and sprang aboard the train, without baggage, ticket or any other trifles. The next Sunday afternoon Bell was promised an inspection of his invention by the judges of exhibits.
It was a hot day and the judges had seen a great deal. Some of them were for going home; one jeered, and there was a general boredom Then there appeared the blondebearded Emperor of Brazil, with outstretched hands.
His greeting made a stir. Bell made ready for his demonstration. A wire hid been strung the length of the room. Bell took the transmitter; Don Pedro placed the receiver to his ear.
He started up amased. He was the engineer of the first Atlantic cable. He nodded his head solemnly as he got up. It was mobbed by scientists the remainder of the summer. The distinguished inventor was the recipient of many honors in this country and abroad. The French government, ever quick to recognize science, conferred on him the decoration of the Legion of Honor, the French Academy bestowed on him its valuable Volta prize of 50, francs, the Society of Arts in London in gave him its Albert medal and the University of Warsburg, Bavaria, made him « Ph.
We heard the echoes of shots that reverberated in America and around the world. We mingled with criminals , leaders , protesters , artists and athletes , many who forever changed their professions. We relived the first steps on the moon and the speech that divided India and Pakistan. Petraeus whom from our archives they would dine with, and why. You can find more fascinating New York Times obituaries, year round, here and on our Twitter feed.
It will be available for preorder and will appear on store shelves in October. We welcome your feedback about Not Forgotten here. We hope you enjoyed it. She died young. She died violently. She was a global celebrity in the broadest sense, a woman of startling charisma who became famous when she married the heir to the English throne and even more famous when she divorced him and embarked on a life of her own. But the sudden death of Diana, the Princess of Wales, alongside her lover in a fiery car crash in a Paris tunnel on Aug.
Britain went a little crazy. For a few disorienting weeks, everything seemed up for grabs, including the monarchy itself. She was born Lady Diana Spencer, the daughter of an earl, in Althorp, her childhood home, was a stately, drafty pile, crammed with priceless works of art. Her childhood was privileged but lonely — her parents had a terrible divorce — and her education indifferent. In fact, nothing remarkable at all happened to Diana until, at age 19, she married Charles, the Prince of Wales, in view of thousands of strangers millions, if you count the television audience , wearing a voluminous puffball of a dress that drowned her slender frame.
If the wedding was a gossamer fairy tale, the marriage was a real-life nightmare. Diana was emotional, fragile, needy, anorexic, bulimic; Charles came from the stiff-upper-lip school of interpersonal relations and had a longtime married girlfriend, Camilla Parker-Bowles. Charles and Diana had two sons. She eventually found various lovers, too. They died together in a high-speed chase in Paris, fleeing from paparazzi pursuing them in cars and motorcycles after a date.
The power of the emotion — and the frenzy whipped up by the tabloid newspapers — all but forced Queen Elizabeth to break with centuries of tradition and protocol and make a public address to the nation.
Elton John sang at the funeral. Diana is nearly as vivid a figure in death as in life. She lives on in her sons, William and Harry, who have talked in recent years about her effect on them. The young man in question was Christopher McCandless. His identity was not confirmed for weeks, but in time he would become internationally famous as a bold, or very imprudent, figure.
McCandless died alone in an abandoned bus on the Stampede Trail, a desolate stretch of backcountry near Denali, in August He was surrounded by his meager provisions: a. Before Mr. McCandless died, from starvation aggravated by accidental poisoning, he had survived for more than days on nothing but a pound sack of rice and what he could hunt and forage in the unforgiving taiga.
Jon Krakauer, at the time a freelance writer, heard about Mr. The editor wanted Mr. Krakauer to write a long article about Mr. McCandless on a tight deadline, and he delivered. Krakauer said in a telephone interview. Over the next few years he dug into Mr. He chronicled Mr. A film based on the book, starring Emile Hirsch as Mr. McCandless and directed by Sean Penn, was released in McCandless came from a well-off family on the East Coast. He graduated from Emory University with honors, then disappeared in He donated virtually all the money in his bank account to Oxfam, a charity dedicated to fighting poverty, then drove west before abandoning his car and burning the cash he had left.
He deserted his family and a privileged life without looking back. McCandless canoed into Mexico, hitchhiked north and worked odd jobs along the way. He often roamed alone, but left an impression on many of the friends he made along the way.
An older man named Ron Franz even offered to adopt him; Mr. McCandless gently turned him down. His parents were worried, but knew that long, improvised jaunts were nothing new for their son.
Some readers see Mr. Many others, especially native Alaskans, have argued that he must have been mentally ill, suicidal or hubristic, and that it was irresponsible for Mr.
Krakauer to glorify his story. Walt McCandless and Mr. Krakauer both disagreed with that assessment. In Mr. McCandless said in an interview. But she said she does feel her parents should accept some blame. Walt and Billie McCandless said they did not want to comment on the memoir.
By the time Mr. It said:. An earlier version of this article, using information from Mr. By the time he was 10, he and his brothers were pop sensations performing as the Jackson 5. The group had four No. By 20, Jackson wanted to break away from his overbearing father, his demanding siblings and the Jackson 5 sound. It won eight Grammy Awards, spent two years on the Billboard album chart and sold more than million copies around the world.
It was also hugely successful, with five No. Jackson died on June 25, , from an overdose of the anesthetic propofol. There was a worldwide outpouring of grief. Radio stations played marathons of his music. And fans were left to decide which Jackson they would remember, as the pop music critic Jon Pareles wrote in an appraisal in The New York Times :. On Aug. Bryant was working alone in the store when Till went in to buy bubblegum.
It is not clear what happened inside, but soon afterward Ms. Bryant stormed out, presumably to get a pistol from her car parked outside. Till, unaware of the danger, whistled, and his cousins, now panicked, quickly drove him away. Bryant later claimed that Till had flirted with her on a dare.
The details would later change depending on when she told the story. Four days later, around a. Milam pounded on the door of the Wright family home where Till was staying with a pistol. His body was so mutilated that it could be identified only by the silver signet ring, still on his finger. People left in tears. Some fainted. The murder became a rallying point for the nascent civil rights movement. The Rev. The Bryant brothers were found not guilty.
After the acquittal, they kissed their wives, lit cigars and posed for pictures. And later, protected from double jeopardy, they boasted about how they had murdered Till. She tried to meet with President Dwight D. Eisenhower, but he refused. Edgar Hoover, the director of the F. It provoked international outrage and pressure on political leaders in the United States. Young black Americans grasped the precariousness of their own lives, and figures like the Rev.
Martin Luther King Jr. Till Mobley became a teacher and civil rights activist herself, as did many whites. As Mr. Friedrich Nietzsche, the rebel of 19th-century philosophy who died years ago on Aug. Nietzsche wrote with the confidence and vehemence of any pundit. He posited extreme precursors to moral relativism and self-actualization, two ideas that have become prevalent during the last few decades.
His often-aphoristic writing style would be perfect for Twitter, where there are many accounts in his name. Whether he would be pleased about how his ideas have influenced our culture is another matter, but it would be very difficult to argue that they have not. Perhaps the most well-known example is the frequently made accusation that his writings fostered a sense of Teutonic racial superiority that Germany and then Hitler would use to justify embarking on two world wars, even though Nietzsche himself had repudiated his nationality and claimed to be descended from Polish nobles.
His ideas might seem more familiar to us now, but at his death they were controversial, even shocking. Those enemies included organized religion, especially Christianity, democracy, mediocrity, nationalism and women. Nietzsche railed against these and other adversaries on pages often densely packed with allusions, symbolism and language closer to romantic poetry than fusty metaphysics. Here is a sampling of his best-known writings:.
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you. God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console our selves, the most murderous of all murderers? Unlike many of his philosophical predecessors, Nietzsche did not argue for a specific weltanschauung, or worldview, even though his writings may suggest one.
He distrusted any thinker who proposed a comprehensive system for interpreting the world, and he often wrote in a manner that allowed for multiple interpretations. A critical examination of his work in The New York Times in explained his approach:. Nietzsche is not a philosopher in the strict and technical sense of the word. He has no system or consistent body of thought professing to explain all aspects of the universe. He does not expressly deal with epistemology, ontology or, indeed, with metaphysics in general.
He was born on Oct. His father died when he was young, and his mother hoped he would join the church, but by the time he went to the University of Bonn he later moved to the University of Leipzig he had decided to study the classics and pursue a career in philology. He earned a professorship in Greek at the University of Basel in Switzerland when he was just 24 and became inspired by Richard Wagner and Arthur Schopenhauer.
But his ideas endured, and have since intrigued innumerable thinkers. But she was also a girl next door, a teenager with her own street style who rose above the vulgarity of other stars. Aaliyah Dana Haughton died 15 years ago along with eight other passengers of a small airplane that crashed in the Bahamas. She was 22, but she had already reached a level of fame few could achieve in a lifetime. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Detroit, Aaliyah was raised for stardom.
At 11, she sang on stage with Gladys Knight. In one of her more gossip-provoking moments, it was widely reported that she had secretly married R. Kelly, who was in his late 20s. Their marriage was annulled. That album sold two million copies. He soon realized that it was the story he had been waiting to write for 20 years. Crime, he decided, could be the perfect vehicle. Capote disagreed. The killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, both of them ex-convicts, had intended to rob the family, which they knew to be well-off.
But they were surprised to find almost no money in the house; everyone but the robbers, it seemed, knew that the farm owner, Herbert Clutter, paid only with checks.
Before arriving at the farm, Smith and Hickock had agreed that no witnesses could be left behind, whether or not the robbery was successful.
The Clutters were tied up in separate rooms and killed at close range by shotgun blasts. Made into a book, it became a national best seller, despite assertions that it is not entirely factual.
And it brought Capote even more financial and social success. The book, disturbing and gory, took its toll on him, though. Like a bat out of hell. Capote formed a bond with Perry Smith; though strikingly different, they both had endured turbulent childhoods. Capote knew that before he could finish his book, the ending — the executions of the two convicted murderers — had to happen.
Clarke said in an email. Siegel, who died last January , asked the obviously inebriated Capote what would happen to him if he did not give up alcohol and drugs. He was not able to kick his destructive habits. Six years later, a coroner attributed his death , at 59, to liver failure. At a memorial service , Robert L. Newton Gun Club carried their rifles on a march in Dallas. And last month, in response to more police shootings, they took them to another rally in Dallas in which five officers were fatally shot by a veteran of the Army Reserve, not a club member.
The Dallas club began in after an officer there killed an unarmed black man and wounded a child with a stray bullet but was not disciplined. The name Huey P. Newton advocated armed self-defense in black communities, where the organization also provided social services.
They would patrol the streets, guns drawn, turning them on drug dealers and police officers alike. Expressing a willingness to defend oneself with weapons was hardly revolutionary. The Black Panthers, which never grew beyond a few thousand members, tried to combine socialism and black nationalism.
Its charter called for full employment, decent housing, and the end of police brutality. Unlike black separatists, the Panthers welcomed all races and found wealthy liberals willing to give them money. Historians have detailed its mistreatment of female members, extortion, drug dealing, embezzlement and murder. At least 19 Panthers were killed in shootouts with one another, the authorities or other black revolutionaries.
As many members went off to prison and the group dwindled, Newton became a despotic and paranoid drug addict, wielding dictatorial powers with a small coterie, and knocking off anyone in his way. In , he earned a Ph. But he was shot to death on Aug. He was 47, a victim of the same streets he had once tried to make safe.
During the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Not Forgotten is resurfacing obituaries about some of the greatest Olympic athletes of all time. Coachman was in a position to know. That set an Olympic record and — because Coachman had achieved it on the first try — earned her the gold medal. When Coachman died in , at 90, the fact that she was the first black woman to win an Olympic gold medal was the salient point of her obituary in The New York Times.
Sixty-six years earlier, however, The Times had not even mentioned the fact in its dispatch from London. The correspondent, Allison Danzig , barely noted that Coachman had set a record. Viewers could see with their own eyes what newspaper reporters and radio commentators of earlier eras did not necessarily emphasize. Coachman was treated almost as a nonperson on her homecoming to Albany, Ga. The mayor refused to shake her hand. Some of it had to do with one of her gifts.
Rhoden of The Times in That was the climax. I won the gold medal. I proved to my mother, my father, my coach and everybody else that I had gone to the end of my rope. At the Olympics, maybe. The truth is that her career as an exemplar was just beginning. If you could have dinner with one person who is no longer with us, and whose obituary was published in The New York Times, who would it be, and why that person?
Not Forgotten is asking that question of a variety of influential people this summer in a series of posts called Breaking Bread. Today we have Dominique Dawes , the first African-American female gymnast to win an individual medal. If I could choose to have dinner with somebody who has passed away, I would choose to dine with Mother Angelica. She is the only woman to have founded and led a cable network for over 20 years.
Mother Angelica would understand this meal: She was raised around blacks and poor Italians in a tough Canton, Ohio, neighborhood. She knew people, she understood their plights, she was one of them! And she knew resilience most of all, raised by a single mother from an early age after her father had abandoned them. I often wondered how she overcame this abandonment, learned to forgive her father and ultimately trust in God?
She was a cloistered nun, in a convent, yet she was seen by hundreds of millions of people worldwide as the host of a series on EWTN. How was she able to embrace both of these so very opposite vocations? I am an introvert by nature, and performing in front of millions during the Olympic Games gave me anxiety, as does speaking at events in front of thousands now. And I would ask her how I might help others, whether they suffer from anxiety, depression, addiction, physical ailments or the pain of abandonment or divorce.
Her whole life, after all, was dedicated to helping others, especially the disenfranchised. Mother Angelica, I would ask, how can we here on earth emulate what you did, even in a smaller way, offering help to others in a world that so desperately needs it? The Sultan of Swat. The Caliph of Clout. The Great Bambino. When baseball fans hear these monikers, nearly 70 years after Babe Ruth died on Aug.
But before Ruth tantalized fans with his prodigious power, he was practically helpless. From the time he was 7 years old, Ruth grew up in St. He might have amounted to nothing without the help of one dedicated mentor. George Herman Ruth Jr. His mother was the former Katherine Schamberger. He was a rambunctious child who routinely skipped school, drank and taunted local police officers around his home.
He became so unruly that his parents sent him to St. At St. His parents had signed over custodial rights to the school and essentially washed their hands of him, leaving Ruth alone and desperately in need of a father figure.
Then he met Brother Matthias, a brawny, 6-foot-6 disciplinarian and assistant athletic director at St. Matthias was widely credited with introducing Ruth to baseball. Ruth learned to play during the dead-ball era of the early 20th century, when hitters swung down on the ball, kept it inside the park and relied on speed as their greatest asset.
Baseball was strategic, built on grounders, bunts and stolen bases instead of power. Matthias had a different approach. He belted majestic fly balls deep into the St. That summer he was acquired by the Boston Red Sox, for whom he would win his first three championships as a pitcher and an outfielder.
Ruth played 15 seasons with the Bombers, amassing four more championships. His records include a. An inveterate cigar smoker, he learned he had throat cancer a decade later and died from the disease on this day in Most boxers battle for the title, money and acclaim. Stevenson, who stood 6 feet 5 inches, weighed pounds and battered opponents with a deft left jab and a sledgehammer straight right, won three consecutive Olympic heavyweight gold medals for Cuba, in in Munich, in Montreal and in Moscow.
His victory made him the first Olympic boxer to earn three consecutive gold medals in the same division. But he might have had a chance for another: Stevenson was still a tremendous fighter when Cuba boycotted the Olympics in Los Angeles. He won the last of his three amateur boxing world titles two years later at the age of After his first two medals, boxing promoters were practically slavering at the potential ticket sales of a Cold War-era match between Stevenson, a product of Communist Cuba, and Muhammad Ali , who died in June at Ali told The New York Times in that he thought Stevenson was a promising amateur fighter but that he was probably not ready for the pros.
Stevenson never took the bait. He had remained a promising amateur at his death, in Havana on June 11, You make a lot of money, but how many boxers in history do we know that died poor? While the world was consumed with war in the first half of the s, three men were subsumed with growing unrest across India, with the fates of tens of millions of their compatriots in their hands.
At the stroke of midnight on Aug. But there was a fatal flaw: There were no borders. Indians had struggled for decades to rid themselves of British rule, galvanized by the nonviolent movement led by Gandhi. Their efforts were kept in check by ruthless military force, but by the end of World War II, Britain lacked the will and the means to defeat the campaign. They reluctantly relinquished India after years, leaving the country at the brink of implosion. Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah were divided on what should happen once the British left.
Gandhi, more an idealist than a realist, wanted an undivided nation; he chose to remain out of government. The British negotiated with the Muslim League, led by Jinnah, who believed that a separate state was the only way to protect the rights of Muslims, who were a minority; and the mostly Hindu Indian National Congress, led by Nehru, who grudgingly went along with the British decision to divide India on the basis of religion.
But it prolonged the uncertainty for millions and very likely increased the loss of life to come. Shortly before the clock struck midnight on Aug. Those stirring words met the occasion, but had no effect on the swirling chaos on the ground as mobs sought on their own to determine the religious makeup of towns and villages.
Communities that had lived together for centuries viciously turned on each other. The borders were announced two days after independence: Hindu-majority India flanked by Muslim-majority West Pakistan and East Pakistan. Up to 15 million people moved across the two borders in less than a year, one of the fastest mass migrations in history. Millions of Muslims fled India, most heading west. About the same number of Hindus and Sikhs went mostly east into the new India.
About one million people were killed. On Jan. Nehru ruled for 17 years and died on May 27, Those hastily drawn borders by the British became the focus of four wars and seven decades of animosity between India and Pakistan. For many millions on the subcontinent today, all the promise that came with independence remains unfulfilled. Were you, a family member or your community personally affected by the partition of India?
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Robin Williams, an indefatigable, improvisational genius, arrived on screens as an alien and left as an Academy Award-winning actor. After his death , two years ago today, The New York Times described him like this:.
Onstage he was known for ricochet riffs on politics, social issues and cultural matters both high and low; tales of drug and alcohol abuse; lewd commentaries on relations between the sexes; and lightning-like improvisations on anything an audience member might toss at him. His gigs were always rife with frenetic, spot-on impersonations that included Hollywood stars, presidents, princes, prime ministers, popes and anonymous citizens of the world. His irreverence was legendary and uncurtailable.
We remember Williams with some of our favorite scenes and lines some of which contain strong language , and encourage readers to do the same on Twitter using tellnyt. Williams broke through to mainstream audiences on this quirky sitcom, in which he played Mork from Ork, a sweet, goofy alien who befriends a young Colorado woman.
Stick that sword into that snake! He voiced an unforgettably zany blue genie in the Walt Disney feature. Oh, dear. Well, they say a man who has to buy a big car like that is trying to compensate for smaller genitals. Williams played an actor who cross-dressed as a British housekeeper to spend more time with his children in this family comedy. Babe Didrikson preferred victory to humility. Didrikson backed up her swagger; There was seemingly no sport she could not master.
Some teams had as many as 22 athletes, but Didrikson performed solo in all of the events as a publicity stunt for her sponsor. She won five individual events, tied in a sixth and won the championships single-handed. At the Games, Didrikson won gold medals in both the javelin throw and the high hurdles. In the high jump, she cleared 5 feet 5 inches, the same as gold medalist Jean Shiley. But she was disqualified on her final jump and awarded the silver medal after a judge ruled her technique had violated Olympic rules, even though the issue had not been raised in earlier rounds.
The fact that Didrikson won only three medals also deserves an asterisk. Women were limited to three Olympic track and field events in , so Didrikson could possibly have won more had she been allowed to compete. She had only taken up the sport in , but had tackled it with the same drive she brought to all of her athletic endeavors. She met her future husband, the professional wrestler George Zaharias, when they were paired to play golf together at a tournament. She took his surname when they married in She developed an aggressive, dramatic style, hitting down sharply and crisply on her iron shots like a man and averaging yards off the tee with her woods.
As an amateur golfer, Zaharias once won 14 tournaments in a row. Zaharias beat Betty Hicks by 12 strokes in the United States Open, an astonishing margin considering that Zaharias had been treated for colon cancer in and had undergone a colostomy. Zaharias became a spokeswoman for cancer awareness and toured for as long as she could, but the disease returned.
She died from it in September Eisenhower said at the time. Sports Illustrated lauded her as the woman Athlete of the 20th Century in individual sports. A few seconds, perhaps a fraction of a second, can mean the difference between victory and defeat, between becoming a legend or leaving as a footnote. Yet that lifetime of training, which propelled Owens into the history books with his performance in the Games in Berlin, seemed for a time as if it might be of little use.
With the rise of Nazi Germany roiling Europe, the Amateur Athletic Union remained divided in over whether to allow American athletes to compete in Berlin; it ultimately approved their participation, but only by a narrow vote. The purpose of the Olympics, anyway, was to do your best.
The A. Owens, who was black, was encouraged by some civil rights groups to boycott the games. After deciding to go, he found a chilly reception in Germany, where claims of Aryan supremacy were central to Nazi ideology. He was called racial epithets and subjected to other mistreatment.
To the dismay of Hitler and the Nazis, Owens went on to win four gold medals — in the long jump, meter dash, the meter dash and the 4x meter relay — more than any other American track and field athlete in a single Olympic Games. His long jump record, of 8. The son of a sharecropper and grandson of a slave, James Cleveland Owens was born on Sept. Sickly in his youth, he went by the nickname J. But it was his time at Ohio State University that proved crucial in his development.
For all his record-breaking Olympic success overseas, his return home was sobering. President Franklin D. Unlike modern-day athletes who can be paid handsomely through endorsements and other commercial deals, Owens had to take myriad jobs to support his family. He later became a motivational speaker and public relations representative.
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