Ray Bradbury (1920) It was on this date, August 22, 1920, that prolific science fiction author Ray Douglas Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois. His formal education ended when he graduated from a Los Angeles high school in 1938. He became a full-time writer in 1943. Bradbury has published more than thirty books, including about […]

Jules Michelet (1798) It was on this date, August 21, 1798, that French historian Jules Michelet was born in Paris, into a family with a Huguenot past. Of his youth, under the post-revolutionary, reactionary French government, Michelet recalled, I remember that in the dire misfortunes of daily deprivation and fears for the future... unsure of […]

H.P. Lovecraft (1890) It was on this date, August 20, 1890, that American author Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who wrote as H.P. Lovecraft, was born in Providence, Rhode Island. Fatherless from the age of three, Lovecraft was reared by his mother and grandparents, and it was his grandmother who held him spellbound with weird tales that […]

Gene Roddenberry (1921) It was on this date, August 19, 1921, that the creator of the Star Trek TV series, Eugene Wesley Roddenberry was born in El Paso, Texas. The family moved to Los Angeles before Gene was two and his father became a career police officer. Roddenberry took classes in law enforcement but got […]

John Galsworthy (1867) It was on this date, August 14, 1867, that British novelist and dramatist John Galsworthy was born into a prosperous family in Kingston Hill, Surrey. He was educated at Harrow and studied law at New College, Oxford. Galsworthy took to travel and, in 1893 met the novelist Joseph Conrad – afterward deciding […]

Russell Baker (1925) It was on this date, August 14, 1925, that US journalist, humorist and biographer Russell Baker was born in Loudon County, Virginia. His father died early on and his hard-working mother reared him and his sisters during the Great Depression. Baker managed to get himself into Johns Hopkins University, where he studied […]

Robert Green Ingersoll (1833) It was on this date, August 11, 1833, that the most eloquent advocate of Freethought, Robert Green Ingersoll, was born in Dresden, New York, the son of a Congregationalist minister. In Peoria, Illinois, he trained in the law before enlisting in the Union Army during the Civil War, where he was […]

Marvin Minsky (1927) It was on this date, August 9, 1927, that the MIT professor Marvin Minsky, known in computer science as the father of artificial intelligence, was born into a Jewish family in New York City. After serving in the US Navy from 1944 to 1945, Minsky earned a BA in Mathematics from Harvard […]

Guy de Maupassant (1850) It was on this date, August 5, 1850, that French naturalistic writer Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was born, probably in Château de Miromesniel, Dieppe. His maternal grandfather was Gustave Flaubert's godfather, and Guy de Maupassant became friends with Flaubert, as well as with Émile Zola, sharing their religious skepticism. […]

John Tyndall (1820) It was on this date, August 2, 1820, that British physicist John Tyndall was born in County Carlow, Ireland, to English Protestant parents. Tyndall left school at the age of 17, with a grounding in basic mathematics and worked for a time as a surveyor in the Irish Civil Service. Higher education […]