Who has a birthday on the 8th of June?
Who has a birthday on the 8th of June? I searched the Internet and came up with an expert in every field, every walk of life, every area imaginable. There was a cartographer, a sculptor, a topographer, a First Lady of the United States, a Cardinal, an explorer/pirate (how could he be both at once?), an Irish Mathematician called Alicia Boole Stott (I must find out more about her), and even a Rear Admiral but… but I couldn’t find an author of any shape, size or colour, popular or otherwise, good, bad or indifferent.
I searched online from Wikipedia to Google and beyond, I even watched Jimi Hendrix burn his guitar and then smash it to pieces, but that was on the 18th of June so no use to us at all. And then I discovered that the creator of the World Wide Web, Timothy Berners-Lee, who made all my searching possible was born on – wait for it! – the 8th of June 1955 in London, England. Without this imaginative inventor there would be no world wide web, no email, no online access to books, neither amazon.com and Raven Books would be unable to reach out to the world. Someone else may have come up with the idea but no one would have made it freely available to everyone.
With renewed vigour I continued my search, undaunted, unable to give up in the face of the amazing talent that proud mothers gave birth to on the 8th day of June and eventually, at last (my own mother would have been proud of me, the woman who gave birth to this particular genius on the 20th of June) I found Charles Reade, dramatist, novelist, and journalist whose birthday we can now formally celebrate. Did his mother know, on that fateful day in 1814 her beloved son would produce such fine novels as, “Hard Cash” and “The Cloister and the Hearth”? She can rest assured that with the help of Tim Berners-Lee and this dogged researcher his name will live on in the annals of literary history.
I searched online from Wikipedia to Google and beyond, I even watched Jimi Hendrix burn his guitar and then smash it to pieces, but that was on the 18th of June so no use to us at all. And then I discovered that the creator of the World Wide Web, Timothy Berners-Lee, who made all my searching possible was born on – wait for it! – the 8th of June 1955 in London, England. Without this imaginative inventor there would be no world wide web, no email, no online access to books, neither amazon.com and Raven Books would be unable to reach out to the world. Someone else may have come up with the idea but no one would have made it freely available to everyone.
With renewed vigour I continued my search, undaunted, unable to give up in the face of the amazing talent that proud mothers gave birth to on the 8th day of June and eventually, at last (my own mother would have been proud of me, the woman who gave birth to this particular genius on the 20th of June) I found Charles Reade, dramatist, novelist, and journalist whose birthday we can now formally celebrate. Did his mother know, on that fateful day in 1814 her beloved son would produce such fine novels as, “Hard Cash” and “The Cloister and the Hearth”? She can rest assured that with the help of Tim Berners-Lee and this dogged researcher his name will live on in the annals of literary history.
Labels: birthdays, Charles Reade, Tim Berners-Lee
