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DriveArt

Artemisia Gentileschi, born in Rome in 1593, was one of the first women in Western Europe to build a successful career as a painter. She painted heroines from the Bible and ancient history, such as Judith and Susanna, as strong women who act, not as decorative figures to be looked at.

Artemisia trained in the workshop of her father, Orazio Gentileschi, a painter influenced by Caravaggio's dramatic use of light, and finished her earliest known painting, Susanna and the Elders, at 17. In 1612 she testified at a public trial in Rome of the painter Agostino Tassi, who had assaulted her; he was found guilty. She then moved to Florence, where in 1616 she became the first woman admitted to the city's Academy of the Arts of Drawing. She later worked in Rome, Venice and Naples, and from 1638 in London at the court of Charles I. Her Judith Slaying Holofernes hangs in the Uffizi in Florence. After her death in Naples, probably in the mid-1650s, she was largely forgotten until the Italian critic Roberto Longhi wrote about her in 1916. In 2020 the National Gallery in London gave her a major exhibition.

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DriveArt

It is often said that Van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime, The Red Vineyard. In fact that is just his best-documented sale: the Van Gogh Museum lists several others, and he also traded many works with fellow artists.

The Red Vineyard, painted in Arles in November 1888, was shown at the exhibition of Les XX, an avant-garde artists' group in Brussels, in early 1890. The Belgian painter Anna Boch, sister of Van Gogh's friend Eugène Boch, bought it for 400 francs; it now hangs in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. The Van Gogh Museum names other sales too. His first commission came from his uncle Cor, an art dealer, who ordered 19 views of The Hague to help him get started. The Paris paint and art dealer Julien Tanguy bought a painting, and his brother Theo sold another work to a gallery in London. Van Gogh also often swapped work with other artists and, when he was younger, for food or painting supplies. Exactly how many works he sold is not known. He died in July 1890, a few months after the Brussels sale.

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WonderHistory

Violet Jessop was aboard the Olympic when it collided with a warship in 1911, the Titanic when it sank in 1912 and the Britannic when it sank in 1916. She survived all three sister ships' disasters and kept working at sea for decades.

Jessop was born in Argentina in 1887 to Irish parents and went to sea as a stewardess in her early twenties. She was working on the Olympic in September 1911 when the cruiser HMS Hawke struck it; no one died. On the Titanic in April 1912 she was ordered into lifeboat 16, and an officer handed her a baby to look after. During the First World War she served as a nurse on the hospital ship Britannic, which hit a German mine in the Aegean Sea in November 1916. Her lifeboat was pulled towards the ship's still-turning propellers, and she jumped into the water and suffered a head injury. She went back to work on liners after the war and retired in 1950 to Great Ashfield in Suffolk.

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WonderHistory

Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived both atomic bombs. He was on a business trip to Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, went home to Nagasaki badly burned, and was there when the second bomb fell three days later.

Yamaguchi, then 29, was an engineer who designed oil tankers for Mitsubishi. In Hiroshima he was about three kilometres from the point below the explosion; the blast burst his eardrums, briefly blinded him and burned the left side of his upper body. Back in Nagasaki he returned to work on 9 August and was describing the Hiroshima bomb to his supervisor when the second flash filled the office, again about three kilometres away. In 2009 the Japanese government officially recognised him as a survivor of both bombings, the only person given that status, although a 2006 documentary shown at the United Nations counted about 165 people who had lived through both. He later spoke out against nuclear weapons and died in 2010, aged 93.

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WonderHistory

Abraham Lincoln's son Robert once fell between a moving train and a platform in Jersey City and was pulled out by a stranger: the famous actor Edwin Booth, whose brother would later shoot the president.

Robert Todd Lincoln described the incident himself in a 1909 letter to Richard Watson Gilder, editor of The Century Magazine, and dated it to 1863 or 1864. Waiting for a sleeping-car ticket, he was pressed by the crowd against a train that began to move, and dropped into the gap. A hand seized his collar and hauled him back onto the platform. He turned and recognised Edwin Booth, the most celebrated American actor of the day. In April 1865 Edwin's younger brother, John Wilkes Booth, shot President Lincoln at Ford's Theatre in Washington. Edwin learned whom he had saved from Adam Badeau, an officer on General Grant's staff, and that knowledge is said to have been some comfort to him after the assassination.

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WonderScience

Roy Sullivan, a park ranger in Virginia, was struck by lightning seven separate times between 1942 and 1977 and survived every one. The strikes cost him a big toenail and his eyebrows, and twice set his hair on fire.

Sullivan worked in Shenandoah National Park in the Blue Ridge Mountains, high ground where summer thunderstorms are common, which helps explain one or two strikes but hardly seven. In the United States the odds of being struck even once in a lifetime are roughly 1 in 15,000. He came to fear storms, and said that some people kept their distance from him in bad weather. Guinness World Records lists him as the person struck by lightning more times than anyone else on record, and two of his scorched ranger hats have been shown in Guinness exhibition halls in New York and South Carolina. He died in 1983.

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WonderHistory

On Christmas Eve 1971, seventeen-year-old Juliane Koepcke fell about three kilometres into the Peruvian rainforest, still strapped to her seat, after lightning struck her airliner and it broke apart. She survived the fall and spent eleven days making her way through the jungle to find help.

She was the only survivor of the 92 people aboard LANSA Flight 508. As many as 14 others lived through the fall but died before help came, among them her mother, the ornithologist Maria Koepcke. Juliane had a broken collarbone, a deep cut on her arm, a torn knee ligament and concussion. Her parents ran a research station in the rainforest, and she remembered her father's advice: follow water downstream, because rivers lead to people. She waded and floated along streams for eleven days until she reached a shelter used by forest workers, who took her by canoe to safety. Werner Herzog, whose own booking on that flight had been cancelled, later made the documentary Wings of Hope with her. She went on to become a biologist.

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WonderHistory

In 1972 the Yugoslav flight attendant Vesna Vulović survived a fall of 10,160 metres without a parachute, after a bomb blew her airliner apart over Czechoslovakia. She was trapped in a piece of the fuselage that came down on a snowy slope. Guinness World Records lists it as the highest fall ever survived without a parachute.

She was 22 and was not meant to be on JAT Flight 367 at all: the airline had mixed her up with another flight attendant called Vesna. She was the only survivor of the 28 people aboard. Investigators believed a food trolley pinned her inside the falling section of fuselage, and the snow-covered slope softened the impact. She spent days in a coma and was paralysed from the waist down for a time, but learned to walk again. She remembered nothing of the fall and said she was never afraid of flying afterwards. In 2009 two journalists claimed the plane had been shot down at a far lower altitude; the Czech Civil Aviation Authority dismissed this as a conspiracy theory, and the record stands.

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WonderHistory

Poon Lim, a Chinese steward, survived 133 days alone on a raft in the South Atlantic. A German submarine had sunk his British cargo ship, the Benlomond, in November 1942; Brazilian fishermen rescued him in April 1943.

The Benlomond sank within about two minutes, and Lim was its only survivor. After some two hours in the water he climbed onto an empty 2.4-metre wooden raft stocked with food, water and a torch. When the supplies ran out after around two months, he made a fish hook from the torch's spring and a line from unravelled rope, caught fish and seabirds, and collected rain in the canvas cover of his life jacket. Passing ships and a US Navy patrol plane saw him but did not rescue him. He drifted about 1,200 kilometres west and was found 16 kilometres off the Brazilian coast, 9 kilograms lighter. King George VI awarded him the British Empire Medal, and the Royal Navy added his methods to its survival manuals.

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WonderHistory

A famous story says Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, read a mistaken obituary calling him a 'merchant of death' and decided to change his legacy. Historians are unsure it is true. What is documented is his will of 1895, which left most of his fortune to fund the prizes.

Nobel's plans took shape over years rather than in one moment. His fortune came from dynamite and other explosives made in factories in many countries, and late in life he also bought the Swedish arms maker Bofors. In January 1893 he wrote to the Austrian peace campaigner Bertha von Suttner, a friend who had briefly been his secretary, about a prize for work towards peace in Europe. His final will, signed in Paris on 27 November 1895, named five fields: physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace, and said nationality must play no part in choosing winners. Relatives contested it, and the first prizes were awarded only in 1901, five years after his death.

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WonderTechnology

In 1942 the actress Hedy Lamarr and the composer George Antheil patented a way to stop enemies jamming radio-controlled torpedoes: the signal kept hopping between frequencies. Bluetooth uses frequency hopping today.

Born in Vienna in 1914, Lamarr became a Hollywood star billed as the most beautiful woman in the world, but she was bored by her roles and kept an inventing table at home. Antheil, known for a piece written for synchronised player pianos, suggested using punched rolls like a pianola's to keep the transmitter and the torpedo hopping in step across 88 frequencies, the number of keys on a piano. The US Navy shelved the idea, and the patent expired without earning either of them anything. Frequency hopping later became common in military and civilian radio, including Bluetooth. Lamarr was inducted into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014, fourteen years after her death.

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WonderSpace

In 1962 John Glenn asked for NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson to check the electronic computer's orbit calculations by hand before his flight. If she said the numbers were good, he said, he was ready to go. He became the first American to orbit Earth.

Johnson worked from 1953 at the Langley research centre in Virginia, first for NASA's predecessor, NACA, and then for NASA. She began among the 'human computers', mostly women who did calculations by hand, in the segregated West Area Computing unit for Black mathematicians. She calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard's 1961 flight, checked Glenn's orbit and later worked on Apollo 11's path to the Moon. When Apollo 13 was crippled in 1970, her work on backup procedures and charts helped the crew return safely. She retired in 1986, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 and became widely known through the 2016 book and film Hidden Figures. She died in 2020, aged 101.

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DriveTechnology

British inventor James Dyson spent about five years developing a bagless vacuum cleaner that spins dust out of the air, and says 5,126 prototypes failed before one worked. When established manufacturers turned it down, he eventually sold it through his own company.

Dyson got the idea in 1978, when he noticed that his vacuum lost suction as its bag clogged with dust. He adapted cyclone separation, a technique used in sawmills and factories, in which fast-spinning air flings dust outwards so it drops into a bin and no bag is needed. By his own account he built 5,127 prototypes and only the last one worked. British manufacturers declined the design; Dyson has said one reason was their profitable trade in replacement bags. He licensed an early version, the G-Force, in Japan, where it went on sale in 1986, and in 1993 launched his own machine, the DC01, in Britain.

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DriveMusic

Sister Rosetta Tharpe, an American gospel singer and guitarist, was playing loud, virtuosic electric guitar in the 1940s, before rock and roll had a name. Her playing and showmanship inspired the first rock and roll musicians.

Tharpe grew up singing in a Pentecostal church with her mother and, from 1938, took gospel into nightclubs and onto records, which shocked some churchgoers. Her song 'Strange Things Happening Every Day', recorded in 1944, reached number two on Billboard's chart for Black music in 1945 and is often named as an early rock and roll record. In 1947 she heard a 14-year-old Little Richard singing in Macon, Georgia, and invited him to open her show, his first paid performance. Johnny Cash called her his favourite singer as a boy. In May 1964 she played in the rain on a disused railway platform in Manchester for British television. She joined the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.

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DriveTrade

The Medici Bank, founded in Florence in 1397, became one of the most powerful banks in fifteenth-century Europe, and its profits paid for the Medici family's political power and its patronage of artists such as Donatello and Botticelli.

Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici founded the bank, and much of its profit came from handling the finances of the popes. The Church banned charging interest, so the bank earned money through bills of exchange: a merchant paid in one city and was repaid in another currency elsewhere, and the exchange rate hid the bank's fee. Under Giovanni's son Cosimo it had branches in cities including Rome, Venice, Milan, Geneva, Avignon, Bruges and London. Later managers lent heavily to rulers who could not repay, such as Edward IV of England and Charles the Bold of Burgundy, and branches closed one by one. The bank finally collapsed in 1494, the year the Medici were driven out of Florence.

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DriveMigration

During the Great Migration, from the 1910s to the 1970s, roughly six million Black Americans left the U.S. South for cities in the North, Midwest and West, reshaping work, politics, music and family life.

People left to escape Jim Crow laws, which enforced racial segregation and kept most Black Southerners from voting, as well as racial violence and poorly paid work as sharecroppers, tenant farmers paid with a share of the crop. Historians usually describe two waves: the first, from about 1916 to 1940, began when the First World War left northern factories short of workers; the second and larger wave ran from 1940 to 1970. Chicago, Detroit, New York and Los Angeles gained large Black communities. Migrants brought Southern music with them: Muddy Waters moved from Mississippi to Chicago in 1943 and helped create electric Chicago blues. In the North they still met discrimination, including redlining, in which lenders and a federal agency marked Black neighbourhoods as too risky for home loans.

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DriveBiography

Fazlur Rahman Khan, a Bangladeshi-American structural engineer, made very tall buildings cheaper to build with his 'tube' systems, in which a tower's outer walls work together to resist the wind. They shaped Chicago's John Hancock Center and the Sears Tower, now Willis Tower.

Before Khan, most skyscrapers relied on a rigid internal frame of steel columns and beams, and the taller they went, the more steel they needed to keep them from swaying in the wind. In Khan's framed tube, columns are set close together around the outside of the building and tied by deep beams called spandrels, so the whole outer wall acts like one stiff, hollow tube anchored in the ground. Working at the Chicago firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, he developed variations: the John Hancock Center (1969) braces its tube with giant diagonal X-shapes, and the Sears Tower (1973) bundles nine tubes together. Khan was born in Dhaka in 1929 and died in 1982.

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WonderBiography

Zaha Hadid, the Baghdad-born British architect, became in 2004 the first woman to win the Pritzker Prize, architecture's most prestigious award. Her sharply angled and flowing forms, first explored in paintings, widened what contemporary buildings could look like.

For years Hadid was called a 'paper architect': her competition entries, such as The Peak, a club planned for a Hong Kong hillside that she won in 1983, drew wide praise but were not built. She worked out her ideas in large paintings that bent perspective on purpose, treating a building less as a fixed box than as a set of forces in motion. Her first completed building, a fire station for the Vitra furniture company in Weil am Rhein, Germany, opened in 1993. As computer modelling caught up with her drawings, projects such as the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku (2012) and the London Aquatics Centre, built for the 2012 Olympics, showed her flowing forms at full scale. She died in 2016.

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WonderBiography

In her 1925 doctoral thesis, the British-American astronomer Cecilia Payne showed that stars are made mostly of hydrogen and helium, unlike the Earth. She read this from starlight split into its colours, using new physics that explained how heat strips electrons from atoms.

At the time, astronomers assumed stars had roughly the same make-up as the Earth. Working at Harvard College Observatory, Payne showed that the differences between star spectra, starlight spread out into its colours, came mainly from temperature rather than composition, and that hydrogen was vastly more abundant than anyone expected. Henry Norris Russell, the leading American astronomer, found this implausible, and in the published thesis she called her own hydrogen figure 'almost certainly not real'. Four years later Russell reached the same result by other means and acknowledged her work. The astronomers Otto Struve and Velta Zebergs later called hers the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy. In 1956 she became the first woman promoted to full professor in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

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WonderBiography

In 1912 Henrietta Swan Leavitt found that certain pulsing stars, called Cepheids, take longer to brighten and dim the brighter they really are. That rule turned them into cosmic measuring sticks: by timing a Cepheid, astronomers can work out how far away it is.

Leavitt joined Harvard College Observatory in 1893, at first as a volunteer, as one of the women known as 'computers' who measured stars on photographic plates for low pay. Studying the Magellanic Clouds, two small galaxies whose stars all lie at roughly the same distance from us, she catalogued 1,777 variable stars. Because they were all about equally far away, a Cepheid that looked brighter really was brighter, which revealed the link between brightness and period. Once others had measured the distances to a few nearby Cepheids, the rule could be used anywhere. In the 1920s Edwin Hubble used it to show that the Andromeda nebula lies far outside the Milky Way. Leavitt died in 1921, before the importance of her work was widely recognised.

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WonderBiography

At 19, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar calculated that a white dwarf, the dense core left when a star like the Sun dies, cannot be more than about 1.4 times the Sun's mass. Above this limit, now named after him, it can no longer hold itself up against its own gravity.

Chandrasekhar did the calculation in 1930 on the ship taking him from India to England to study at Cambridge, combining quantum mechanics with Einstein's special relativity. A white dwarf is held up by electron degeneracy pressure: when electrons are squeezed very tightly together, they resist being packed any closer, a purely quantum effect. He showed that this resistance has a ceiling. When he presented the result in 1935, the influential astronomer Arthur Eddington mocked it in public, and many colleagues sided with Eddington for years, although the mathematics was right. The limit is now central to understanding supernovae and neutron stars. Chandrasekhar shared the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the structure and evolution of stars.

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WonderMusic

Umm Kulthum, the Egyptian singer known as 'the Star of the East', was one of the most celebrated voices of the twentieth-century Arab world. Her monthly radio concerts of classical Arabic poetry, sung with long improvised passages, drew listeners across the region.

Born in a village in the Nile Delta in the early 1900s, she learned to recite the Qur'an as a child and sang religious songs in her father's small troupe, dressed as a boy so she could appear on stage. That training shaped the ornamented, flexible phrasing she later brought to love songs. From 1937 she gave a concert on the first Thursday of each month, broadcast live across the Arab world. A single song could last more than an hour as she repeated and varied a line in answer to the crowd, building the shared musical ecstasy known in Arabic as tarab. After Egypt's defeat in the 1967 war she gave concerts at home and abroad and handed the proceeds to the state. Her funeral in Cairo in 1975 drew an estimated four million people.

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DriveBiography

Chilean singer and songwriter Violeta Parra travelled through her country in the 1950s, collecting folk songs from rural musicians. She carried what she learned into radio programmes, records, her own songs and her visual art.

Parra (1917–1967) came from a family of artists; her brother Nicanor Parra became one of Chile's best-known poets. She sought out elderly singers whose songs had never been written down, and her own compositions, above all Gracias a la vida (1966), gave that tradition new life. She also made arpilleras, pictures stitched from fabric, and in 1964 became, by most accounts, the first Latin American artist to hold a solo exhibition at the Louvre palace, in its Museum of Decorative Arts. Her work laid the foundations of the Nueva Canción Chilena, the Chilean New Song movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She died in 1967.

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DriveBiography

South African singer Miriam Makeba was barred from returning home in 1960, when the government cancelled her passport. She spent 30 years in exile, using her concerts and her testimony at the United Nations to campaign against apartheid.

Apartheid was the system of legal racial segregation that ruled South Africa from 1948 until the early 1990s. Makeba left in 1959 to attend the Venice premiere of Come Back, Africa, an anti-apartheid film in which she sang, then settled in New York with Harry Belafonte's help. When she tried to return for her mother's funeral in 1960, she was refused entry. In 1963 she spoke against apartheid before a United Nations committee, and her records were banned at home. In 1966 she and Belafonte shared a Grammy for their joint album, and her song Pata Pata became a worldwide hit in 1967. She returned home in 1990, after Nelson Mandela's release, and was widely known as 'Mama Africa'.

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