A day in history. August 13

Today is World Left Handed Day. It first appeared in 1992 at the initiative of the British Left-handers Club, created in 1990. On this day, left-handers around the world strive to draw the attention of manufacturers of goods to the need ...

Today is World Left Handed Day. It first appeared in 1992 at the initiative of the British Left-handers Club, created in 1990. On this day, left-handers around the world seek to draw the attention of manufacturers of goods to the need to take into account their convenience, arrange a variety of events and competitions. Organizations that help left-handers also want to ensure that schools do not retrain children who write with their left hand.

According to statistics, about 10% of the population is left-handed. The list of famous people who did everything “with one hand” is Mark Twain, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Beethoven, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, Marilyn Monroe, Robert de Niro. Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, Napoleon and Charlemagne, Winston Churchill and Joan of Arc were left-handed.

People :

1655 - Johann Christoph Denner, German music master, inventor of the clarinet, was born.

1803 - Vladimir Odoevsky, prince, Russian writer, philosopher, founder of Russian musicology, founder of the Moscow Bulletin magazine (Princess Zizi, Russian Nights) was born.

1814 - Anders Jonas Angstrom was born, Swedish physicist, astronomer, who discovered hydrogen in the solar atmosphere, founder of spectroscopy.

1829 - Ivan Sechenov, physiologist, founder of the physiology of labor (“Reflexes of the brain”) was born.

1836 - Nikolai (Ivan Dmitrievich) Kasatkin, an Orthodox missionary, the first archbishop of the Orthodox Church in Japan, was born. By decision of the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church, Kasatkin arrived in Japan in 1861. Capable by nature, Kasatkin quickly learned the hieroglyphs, studied local customs and traditions. Already in the mid-1860s, he began to hold services in the consular church in Japanese. The new faith interested the Japanese no less than the Anglican, which the British missionaries tried to instill in them. In 1868, Hieromonk Nikolai baptized the first three Japanese, and five years later his flock numbered more than 400 people. At baptism, the Japanese received Russian names, and Kasatkin sent the most capable to study at the seminaries and theological academies of Russia. In 1870 he founded the Russian Spiritual Mission in Japan and headed it. Saint Nicholas translated the Holy Scriptures and liturgical books into Japanese and built a cathedral in Tokyo. Officially called the Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ, the people of the temple received the name "Nikoray-do" (House of Nicholas). During the years of the Russo-Japanese War, Kasatkin turned out to be the only Russian person in Japan and tried in every possible way to help the captured soldiers and officers. In 1906 he was promoted to archbishop. By the time Nicholas died on February 16, 1912, more than 30,000 Japanese had been converted to the Orthodox faith. In 1970 Nicholas was canonized as a saint.

1844 - Johann Friedrich Miescher, Swiss scientist, who discovered nucleic acids - DNA and RNA, was born.

1866 - Giovanni Agnelli, an Italian industrialist who founded Fiat in 1899, was born.

1881 - Francesco Selmi, Italian chemist, founder of colloidal chemistry, dies.

1896 - Roman Gul, Russian writer, author of memoirs about the Civil War, was born.

1896 - John Everett Millais, English painter, dies.

1900 - Vladimir Solovyov, an outstanding Russian philosopher, poet, publicist, and literary critic, who played a significant role in the development of Russian philosophy and poetry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, died.

1901 - Born Boris Chirkov, Soviet film and theater actor ("Chapaev", "Man with a Gun").

1912 - Salvador Eduard Luria, Italian-American biologist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1969 "for the discovery of the mechanisms of replication and the genetic structure of viruses" (together with M. Delbrück and A. Hershey) was born.

1939 - Irina Dolganova, Soviet and Russian theater and film actress was born ("The Dawns Here Are Quiet").

1946 - Herbert Wells, English science fiction writer (The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man) died.

1962 - Andrey Sokolov was born, Soviet and Russian theater and film actor, theater director (films "Little Vera", "The Art of Living in Odessa").

1998 - Julien Green, American-born French writer, novelist and playwright, dies.

Events :

1521 - Hernan Cortes captured the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan (now the city of Mexico City).

1876 ​​- opening in Bayreuth of a musical theater built according to a special plan for the performance of works by Richard Wagner. On this and several subsequent days, the first performance of the complete opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen took place.

1889 - William Gray of Hartford, Connecticut patents the coin-operated coin-operated telephone. The idea came to him after he was denied a request to make a phone call to call a doctor for his sick wife at one of the farms.

1907 - The first taxi was launched in New York.

1913 - Invention of stainless steel.

1942 - Walt Disney's feature-length animated film "Bambi" premieres in New York.

1961 - The construction of the Berlin Wall, one of the most famous symbols of the Cold War, began. At first, these were mainly wire fences, which then turned into a concrete wall up to five meters high with barbed wire stretched over the top and with watchtowers. The length of the wall dividing the city was 45 kilometers plus 120 kilometers around West Berlin, separating it from the rest of the territory of the GDR. The wall was supposed to reduce the number of defectors from the GDR to West Berlin, whose number grew from year to year (before the construction of the wall, up to two million people fled from the GDR to the west).

1967 - Arthur Penn's film "Bonnie and Clyde" premiered in the United States.

1990 - President of the USSR M. S. Gorbachev signed a decree "On the restoration of the rights of all victims of political repressions of the 20-50s."