1868 QWERTY Keyboard patented

19th Century, Culture

In the 1860s, a politician, printer, newspaper man and amateur inventor in Milwaukee by the name of Christopher Latham Sholes spent his free time developing various machines to make his businesses more efficient.  One such invention was an early typewriter, which he and several of his colleagues patented in 1868. Their keyboard resembled a piano and was built with an alphabetical arrangement of about two dozen keys. The team surely assumed it would be the most efficient arrangement. After all, anyone who used the keyboard would know immediately where to find each letter. Hunting would be reduced; pecking would be increased. The […]

1879 Discovery Altamira Cave, Spain

19th Century, Art

Altamira Cave’s recognition as the “Sistine Chapel of Quaternary Art” is well deserved, given the cave’s magnificent paintings (and engravings) and importance to our understanding of similarly decorated caverns throughout Europe. Found in 1879 by an intrepid little girl who happened to stumble upon this incredible find, Altamira Cave is located in northern Spain. The cave zigzags through the ground, extending almost 300 meters in total length. The ceiling varies in height to a maximum of 12 meters and in width to 20 meters.  The age of the cave is a story in and of itself. While many scholars […]

†1516 Hieronymus Bosch

16th Century, Art, With Docu

Hieronymus Bosch (1450 – 1516) was a Dutch/Netherlandish painter from Brabant. He is one of the most notable representatives of the Early Netherlandish painting school. His work, generally oil on oak wood, mainly contains fantastic illustrations of religious concepts and narratives. Within his lifetime his work was collected in the Netherlands, Austria, and Spain, and widely copied, especially his macabre and nightmarish depictions of hell.  Little is known of Bosch’s life, though there are some records. He spent most of it in the town of ‘s-Hertogenbosch, where he was born in his grandfather’s house. The roots of his forefathers are in Nijmegen and Aachen (which is visible in […]

1008 The Tale of Genji

11th Century, Culture, Literature

Like the palace cats’, the eyes of the Lady Murasaki Shikibu were accustomed to the dark. The gloomy corridors of the vast complex of imperial buildings at Heian, where a wanderer could get waylaid or lost, were her home territory. The half-light in which Japanese court life was lived in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries concealed nothing from her stare, though the obscurity was deep enough to make stories of mistaken identity among lovers credible. Her powers of observation produced The Tale of Genji, which has some claim to be the world’s first novel: Genjfs intricate realism, recorded […]

†1609 John Dee

16th Century

John Dee was an English mathematician, astronomer, teacher, astrologer, occultist, and alchemist. He was the court astronomer for, and advisor to, Elizabeth I, and spent much of his time on alchemy, divination, and Hermetic philosophy  As an antiquarian, he had one of the largest libraries in England at the time. As a political advisor, he advocated the foundation of English colonies in the New World to form a “British Empire“, a term he is credited with coining. Dee eventually left Elizabeth’s service and went on a quest for additional knowledge in the deeper realms of the occult and supernatural. He aligned himself with several individuals who may have been charlatans, travelled through […]

1577 Florentine Camerata: The Beginnings of Opera

16th Century, Music, Renaissance

The Florentine Camerata, also known as the Camerata de’ Bardi, were a group of humanists, musicians, poets and intellectuals in late Renaissance Florence who gathered under the patronage of Count Giovanni de’ Bardi to discuss and guide trends in the arts, especially music and drama.  They met at the house of Giovanni de’ Bardi, and their gatherings had the reputation of having all the most famous men of Florence as frequent guests. After first meeting in 1573, the activity of the Camerata reached its height between 1577 and 1582.  While propounding a revival of the Greek dramatic style, the Camerata’s musical experiments […]

†915 The music of Tuotilo

10th Century, Early Music

Tuotilo Renaissance maestro in 9th century Tuotilo was a Frankish monk at the Abbey of Saint Gall. He was a composer, and according to Ekkehard IV a century later, also a poet, musician, painter and sculptor. Various trope melodies can be assigned to Tuotilo, but works of other mediums are attributed with less certainty. He was a student of Iso of St. Gallen [de] and friends with the fellow monk Notker the Stammerer. Tuotilo played several instruments, including the harp. The history of the ecclesiastical drama begins with the trope sung as Introit of the Mass on Easter Sunday. It has come down to us in a St. Gallen manuscript dating from the time of Tuotilo. According to […]

†865 The music of Kassia

09th Century, Early Music

Hymn of Kassia  Kassia, Cassia or Kassiani was a Byzantine-Greek composer, hymnographer and poet. She holds a unique place in Byzantine music as the only known woman whose music appears in the Byzantine liturgy.  Approximately fifty of her hymns are extant, most of which are stichera, though at least 26 have uncertain attribution.The authenticity issues are due to many hymns being anonymous, and others ascribed to different authors in different manuscripts. She was an abbess of a convent in the west of Constantinople. Additionally, many epigrams and gnomic verses are attributed to her, at least 261. Kassia is notable as one of at least two women in the middle Byzantine period known to have written in their own names, the other being Anna Comnena. Like […]

†930 – the music of Hucbald

10th Century, Early Music

Hucbald was a Benedictine monk active as a music theorist, poet, composer, teacher, and hagiographer.   He was long associated with Saint-Amand Abbey, so is often known as Hucbald of St Amand. Deeply influenced by Boethius‘ De Institutione Musica, Hucbald’s (De) Musica, formerly known as De harmonica institutione, aims to reconcile ancient Greek music theory and the contemporary practice of Gregorian chant with the use of many notated examples. Among the leading music theorists of the Carolingian era, he was likely a near contemporary of Aurelian of Réôme, the unknown author of the Musica enchiriadis, and the anonymous authors of other music theory texts Commemoratio brevis, Alia musica, and De modis.

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