EVENTS: On this day in 1945 Colonel Paul Tibbets, piloting the US B-29 bomber Enola Gay, left Tinian island, flew 1,490 miles northwest and dropped the Little Boy atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The device detonated at 8.16.02am, killing two-thirds of the population — over 200,000 people — in the first use of a nuclear weapon in warfare. Many Manhattan Project scientists had suggested warning Japan so that the city could be evacuated, but a combination of the horrors of Iwo Jima, where there were 26,000 American casualties, including 6,800 dead, and the Soviet Union entering the war in the Far East, prevented the advice being followed.
In 1889 the Savoy Hotel was opened; in 1890 the electric chair was used for the first time to execute the murderer William Kemmler in New York.
Advertisement
BIRTHS: In 1928, while working on the influenza virus, Sir Alexander Fleming observed that mould had developed accidentally on a staphylococcus culture plate and created a bacteria-free circle around itself. After further experimentation he found that a mould culture prevented growth of staphylococci, even when diluted 800 times. The active substance, which he named penicillin, initiated the highly effective practice of antibiotic therapy for infectious diseases. Fleming, who was born on this day in 1881, shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1945 with Ernst Boris Chain and Howard Walter Florey, who both carried Fleming’s work forward.
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1st Baron Tennyson), Poet Laureate 1850-92, born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, 1809; Rolf Boldrewood (Thomas Alexander Browne), writer, born in London, 1826; Paul Claudel, poet, dramatist and diplomat, born in Villeneuve-sur-Fere, 1868; Robert Mitchum, film actor, born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, 1917.
Advertisement
DEATHS: Ben Jonson, the bricklayer imprisoned for murder who later became known as a poet and dramatist, with plays such as Volpone and The Alchemist, died in London on this day in 1637. He had lived in great poverty in a house near Westminster Abbey, where he is buried, perhaps the only person interred in an upright position. One story says that he begged “eighteen inches of square ground in Westminster Abbey” from King Charles I. Another has it that one day, being railed by the Dean of Westminster about being buried in Poets’ Corner, the poet replied: “I am too poor for that and no one will lay out funeral charges upon me. No, sir, six feet long by two feet wide is too much for me: two feet by two feet will do for all I want”. Sir John Young is thought to have paid a mason eighteen pence to inscribe four words upon the gravestone: “O rare Ben Jonson.” Some scholars believe that the first two words were a stonecutter’s error and should have been joined together, forming the Latin word “orare” and giving the sentence the meaning “Pray for Ben Jonson”.
St Dominic, founder of the Dominican Order of Friars, died in Bologna, 1221; Anne Hathaway, wife of William Shakespeare, died in Stratford-upon-Avon, 1623.