Loyal readers have probably noticed by now that censorship is one of my core issues. My mother worked in a library, and I've been in publishing or communications all my life, free speech is in my blood. On this day a writer, translator, and publisher was burned at the stake for heresy, the Roman church at the time strenuously opposed allowing the Bible to fall into the hands of the general public. John Wycliffe's English bible wasn't much of a threat, it took a scribe a full ten months to write out a single copy, but Tyndale's translation combined with the recently invented printing press was another matter.
Two countering landmark events occurred on this date as well. The American Library Association was founded, a group that is now critical to defending the Internet from censorship. Not only do they share a passionate opposition to government control of information, they don't look as scary as some of us might when giving testimony to Congressional committees. Traditional publishers have always had one problem with dealing with state power, their presses are big, hard to move, and hard to hide. Chet Carlson changed that forever when he invented the process that made photocopying affordable and ubiquitous. My friend Jerry Pournelle, writing in BYTE Magazine some ten years ago, was probably correct when he identified the Hewlett Packard LaserJet as the single instrument most responsible for bringing an end to Communist rule in the Soviet Union - a machine based directly on Carlson's patent.
We've got the first talking picture, the second polio vaccine, prohibition of LSD in California (all 50 states had banned it by the end of the year), and today is German-American Day - I think that calls for firing up the Weber (a German name on an American grill) and grilling some bratwurst. I may even go in search of a pilsner or two, I'm of the opinion that the finest pilsner (Bitburger) is brewed in Duesseldorf, less than twenty miles from Krefeld where the first German immigrants came from.
1536 - William Tyndale, the first to translate the New Testament from Greek and Hebrew sources in 1526, was executed for the heresy of providing scripture in the vernacular. He had been kidnapped in Antwerp, imprisoned and examined at the fortress of Vilvorde near Brussels, bound to the stake, strangled, and burned.
1876 - The American Library Association (ALA) was founded at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania by Justin Winsor, William Frederick Poole and Melvil Dewey (who rushed to be the first to sign, got membership number 1). The group has been headquartered in Chicago since 1909 and currently has 55,000 members. Through its Office of Intellectual Freedom is important defense against censorship on the Internet.
1927 - Warner Brothers debuted the first motion picture with synchronized speech, "The Jazz Singer" starring Al Jolson, at the Warner Theatre which had been bought and wired for sound. The speech was not planned, the irrepressible Jolson ad-libbed and Sam Warner, who died the day before the premiere, decided to leave it in.
1942 - Chester F. Carlson was granted US Patent No. 2,297,691 for a process of "Electrophotography" which the Haloid Company would later rename "xerography" after acquiring the rights to Chet Carlson's patents on the process.
1956 - Dr Albert Sabin developed a "live-virus vaccine" for polio, arguing that it would be more effective and long lasting than the killed-virus vaccine developed by Jonas Salk. It would be tested on a wide scale in the Soviet Union in 1957 - 1958 and become the primary polio vaccine in the following decade. Unfortunately, polio infection was a rare side effect of the vaccine.
1966 - The possession, manufacture, sale, or importation of LSD became illegal in California. FDA Commissioner James Goddard had been publicizing the threat to society from 3.6 million "acid" users in the US - a figure derived by a careful calculation that for every reported incident there were 10,000 unreported, the agency had 360 case reports on file in the summer of 1966.
German-American Day, Anniversary of the 1683 arrival of the first 13 Mennonite families at Penn's Landing, Philadelphia on the ship Concord. The very first German settler had been their pastor, Francis Daniel Pastorius, who had arrived six weeks before. This group from Krefeld founded Germantown.
What must the English and French think of the language of our philosophers
when we Germans do not understand it ourselves?
- Goethe
It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother
me, it is the parts that I do understand.
- Mark Twain
The American mind, unlike the English, is not formed by books, but, as
Carl Sandburg once said to me, by newspapers and the Bible.
- Van Wyck Brooks
I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school
but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer
so I could see my name in the card catalog.
- Sandra Cisneros
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