Milestones: April 23, 2024

April 23, 2024 Brooklyn Eagle Staff

Share this:

SCHOOL’S 389TH BIRTHDAY — AMERICA’S FIRST PUBLIC SCHOOL opened in the 17th century, on April 23, 1635, (New Style date), predating Harvard College by more than a year. The town of Boston opened the school with its founders’ belief that the matters of the soul are only goods. The curriculum focused on the humanities and especially on the importance of dissent, teaching its students this skill up to the present day.

Today, Boston Latin School (which has an admissions day coming up on April 27) offers not just Latin and Greek, but modern languages including German and Italian, as well as an interdisciplinary capstone project for seniors.

✰✰✰

TH VITASCOPE DEBUTS — THE FIRST MOVIE THEATER OPENED ON APRIL 23, 1896, in New York City, transforming what had earlier been an individual peep show. The movie theater was held at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall, a popular vaudeville venue that once was at the spot where Macy’s flagship department store at Herald Square now sits. Until this time, people had to see a movie individually, through a kinetoscope — a boxlike device. But this event marked the debut of the Vitascope, an early film projector first demonstrated in 1895 by Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat. They had made modifications to Jenkins’ patented Phantoscope, which cast images via film and electric light onto a wall or screen. The Vitascope also enabled an audience to sit in a theater and watch a movie all together.

Advertisements for this landmark event called the Vitascope was “Edison’s Greatest Marvel.” As Thomas Edison found his single-user kinetoscopes to be immensely popular, he didn’t see the need to develop a projector system. However, it was soon apparent that films projected for large audiences would generate even more profits.

✰✰✰

THE TOP QUARK — PHYSICISTS DISCOVER TOP QUARK 30 YEARS AGO, ON APRIL 23, 1994. Quarks are subatomic particles comprising protons and neutrons found in the nuclei of atoms. Physicists at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory found evidence for the existence of the subatomic particle called the top quark, which was the last undiscovered quark of the six that current scientific theory says exists. The discovery provides strong support for the quark theory of the structure of matter.

The five other quark types that have already been proven to exist are the up quark, down quark, strange quark, charm quark and bottom quark.

✰✰✰

DRAGON SLAYER AND SAINT — THE FEAST OF ST. GEORGE IS CELEBRATED ON APRIL 23, for the fourth-century saint who was martyred on this day. Considered the patron saint of England, he is considered a hero and the protagonist in the legend of St. George and the Dragon. In the legend, George’s faith helped him conquer and slay a vicious dragon that craved daily sacrifice. He saved the king’s daughter from becoming the dragon’s next intended victim.

It would be much later before George became England’s patron saint, during the reign of Edward III in the 14th century. King Edward founded the Order of the Garter.

✰✰✰

SHAKESPEARE: HIS WRITINGS AND A GARDEN — ENGLAND’S OTHER MAJOR ICON, OF COURSE, IS WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, also called the Bard, who was both born and died on April 23. Born in 1564, the prolific Shakespeare created an entire canon of English literature, added thousands of words to the English lexicon and wrote some of the most beautiful sonnets. One of his plays, “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” was written at the request of Queen Elizabeth I, who wanted a reprise of the popular character Falstaff. During that time, Shakespeare also produced such masterpieces as “Othello”, “King Lear”, “Macbeth”, and “The Tempest”. Shakespeare died on his birthday in 1616, in his native Stratford-upon-Avon.

The Shakespeare Garden, at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, features 80 kinds of plants mentioned in the Bard’s works. Many of the varieties are labeled with the common or Shakespearean name, the botanical name, a relevant quotation from a poem or play, and a graphic illustration of the plant.

See previous milestones, here.