Holidays and commemorative dates:
Days of remembrance and reconciliation – May 8 and May 9 all over the world are dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Second World War. In Ukraine, May 8 is the Day of Remembrance and Victory over Nazism in the Second World War of 1939-1945.
International Day of the Red Cross and Red Crescent – on this day, the principles of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement are honored. The date is the anniversary of the birth of Jean-Henri Dunant (in the main photo), who was born in 1828. He was the founder of the International Committee of the Red Cross and the first laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize.
In 1859, Dunant witnessed the consequences of the Battle of Solferino – when nine thousand people, sick and wounded soldiers were left to die on the battlefield. Impressed by what he saw, Dunant tries to create the first Society for the Aid of the Wounded. This is how the International Committee of the Red Cross was founded, and in 1864 the first Geneva Convention on the Amelioration of the Fate of the Wounded in Land War was adopted.
In 1901, Henri Dunant, together with the Frenchman Frédéric Passy, became the first laureates of the Nobel Peace Prize. He immediately transferred all the money allocated to him to charitable activities in Switzerland and Norway.
Events on this day:
1541 – the Spanish traveler and conquistador Hernando de Soto discovered the Mississippi River, which he named the River of the Holy Spirit.
1713 — the capital of the Muscovite Empire was moved from Moscow to St. Petersburg. The corresponding decree was signed by Peter I.
1794 — executed on the guillotine of the 51-year-old French chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, whose entire guilt before the participants of the French Revolution was that he worked in the General Redemption, an institution that collected taxes. Before the execution, he asked for a little more time to finish the experiment, but he was refused.
Lavoisier came from a wealthy bourgeois family. His father was one of the 400 lawyers at the disposal of the Paris Parliament. He wanted his son to become a lawyer too. However, Lavoisier was more attracted to the natural sciences, so he studied mathematics, astronomy, botany, mineralogy, geology and chemistry at the same time as jurisprudence.
At the age of 20, he became a qualified lawyer. Already as a scientist of natural sciences at the age of 25, he was elected a corresponding member, four years later – an academician, and at the age of 42 – the director of the Academy of Sciences.
At that time, scientists acquired everything necessary for research at their own expense. But Antoine found a way out — he joined the “Company of Redemptions”, whose members contributed a certain amount to the treasury every year, and the state conceded for a certain fee the collection of indirect taxes (wine, tobacco, salt, etc.). Such funding allowed him to make revolutionary discoveries in chemistry. And not only that – this money was used to open schools, research fields for agronomic experiments, various charitable institutions for the people, insurance funds in case of impoverishment and old age.
But the Great French Revolution had tragic consequences for the scientist. At first, everything was fine. Lavoisier was a member of the “National Treasury”, in which he established a strict and exemplary order. He carried out these duties free of charge.
Then the scientist received a denunciation. He was arrested. Lavoisier was accused of “conspiracy with the enemies of France against the French people, which aimed to steal from the nation the huge sums necessary for the war against the despots.” On May 7, 1794, Lavoisier stood before the revolutionary court as an “enemy of the people”. The decision of the tribunal contained the words: “The motherland does not need scientists.”
The next day, the prominent chemist was beheaded. According to the testimony of Lavoisier’s wife, the scientists who were supposed to defend Lavoisier simply kept silent.
Two years later, Lavoisier was recognized as unjustly convicted and was fully rehabilitated.
One of his scientific discoveries, which are most understandable to us, is that a person inhales oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide. Once upon a time, it became big scientific news. And Lavoisier’s oxygen theory of combustion was met with such hostility by the scientific world that this work was publicly burned after its publication in Berlin.
The fate of the scientist’s wife is interesting – after the death of her husband, Maria-Anna married the American physicist, inventor and adventurer Count Rumford, while keeping her last name from her first marriage. Although the marriage did not last long, the couple constantly quarreled and Rumford once declared that “Lavoisier was very lucky with the guillotine.”
1847 — Scottish inventor Robert Thomson received a patent for a rubber tube for wheels.
1884 – US President Harry Truman was born.
1886 — Dr. John Pemberton of Atlanta first sold his healing elixir, which today is sold worldwide under the name “Coca-Cola.”
1900 — Andrey (Sheptytskyi) was appointed Metropolitan of Lviv.
1903 — the first real Lebodi airship made a pilot flight at a distance of 37 km.
1919 — The Central Russian People’s Council concluded the Uzhhorod memorandum — a decision on the accession of Transcarpathia to Czechoslovakia.
1921 — the first cockroach races started in Istanbul. The author of the idea is our compatriot Oleksandr (Abram) Osypovych Drankov. He was born in the south of present-day Ukraine. The exact place of Drankov’s birth is unknown – according to one version, it is Odesa, according to another – Sevastopol.
Before the revolution, he was engaged in everything – from the dance hall, photography to cinema. Drankov became one of the pioneers of “silent cinema” and one of the first film producers. In 1908, he was the first to photograph Leo Tolstoy, who was still alive at the time, and also filmed the first TV series “Sonka the Golden Handle”. He also became the first in the world to use frames from his films on advertising posters, and before each session he showed fragments of films for advertising purposes.
It was Drankov who started the tradition of “spinning” a film magazine, announcing films. And later this tradition was adopted in all European and American cinemas.
In the 1920s, Oleksandr Drankov fled with the remnants of the “white” army to Constantinople. And so, sitting in a cheap hotel, I saw a cockroach jogging across the table. “Look, trotter,” Yosypovych thought. And when the second cockroach climbed out from under the saucer and began to catch up with the first, Oleksandr had the idea to monetize cockroach races.
On May 8, 1921, a sign appeared in the coffee shop of the Greek Sinopli: “Race of trained cockroaches. Russian folk entertainment”… They say that this kind of entertainment was very popular even in Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece.
Cockroaches, frightened by the electric light, ran, harnessed to carts. Bets were placed on numbers, that is, on cockroaches, as on horses. A large table with paths for insects (cockroach racetrack) was called a kafarodrom.
Over time, the fascination with cockroach racing in Constantinople came to nothing. Drankov emigrated to America. He tried to make films, but failed. After that, he opened a cafe and a small photography firm in California.
1926 — the date of the first flight over the North Pole.
1942 — the Wehrmacht launched an offensive in the Crimea (World War II).
1945 — in Karlshorst, a suburb of Berlin, representatives of the German command led by Field Marshal Keitel signed the act of unconditional surrender of the German armed forces for the second time. The act entered into force at 23:01
1951 — Ivan Drach’s first poem was published.
1954 — the foundation of the Asian Football Federation.
1962 — the last trolleybuses stopped running in London.
1962 Oles Ulyanenko, Ukrainian writer, laureate of the Small Shevchenko Prize in 1997, was born.
1984 — Borys Antonenko-Davydovych, Ukrainian writer, translator, researcher of problems of the development and culture of the Ukrainian language, victim of Stalin’s terror, died.
1994 — Azerbaijan joined the Karabakh ceasefire agreement.
