31st May: Nipper the Dog (His Master's Voice)

It was on this date in 1889 that a painting of a small Dog listening to a phonograph was shown to William Barry Owen, general manager of the Gramophone Company in Maiden Lane, London by the painter, Francis Barraud. The dog's name was Nipper and he became the trademark of His Master's Voice record label.

1. Nipper was a mixed-breed dog, probably part Jack Russell, or possibly smooth fox terrier or bull terrier. He was born in Bristol in 1884.
2. He was given the name Nipper because he would bite the backs of visitors' legs.
3. Nipper's first owner wasn't the painter of the picture. The dog initially belonged to Mark Henry Barraud. a scenery designer at the Prince's Theatre. The painter, his brother Francis, took care of the dog after Mark Henry died.
4. The famous picture of Nipper was actually painted three years after the dog had died.
5. In the original picture, Nipper was listening to a phonograph, not a gramophone. Francis had the idea that the picture might be useful to the phonograph company and showed it to them, but the person he showed it to, James E. Hough, missed a trick when he dismissed it as being any use, commenting, "Dogs don't listen to phonographs".
6. William Barry Owen, manager of the Maiden Lane offices of The Gramophone Company, saw the painting's potential and, on condition that Barraud painted out the phonograph and replaced it with a gramophone, offered to buy the painting.
7. The company paid £100 for the picture along with the "His Master's Voice" slogan and the copyright.
8. Nipper died at 11 years old of natural causes. He was buried in a small park in Kingston upon Thames, under a magnolia tree. The site of Nipper's grave is no longer a park, but a branch of Lloyd's Bank. There is a plaque on the wall of the bank commemorating Nipper.
9. There's also a memorial in Nipper's birthplace of Bristol - there is a small statue of him above a doorway in the Merchant Venturers Building. This building is part of the University of Bristol, and stands near the site of the old Prince's Theatre.
10. The advertising icon lives on, with a puppy, Nipper's son, Chipper, being added. Real dogs play the parts in modern day commercials. In 2007, Nipper was replaced temporarily by Gromit, of Wallace and Gromit fame, as part of an advertising campaign for children's DVDs.

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30th May: The Lincoln Memorial

On this date in 1922 The Lincoln Memorial, in Washington DC, was dedicated. It is an American national monument built to honour the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. It is located on the western end of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., across from the Washington Monument.

1. The building is in the form of a Greek Doric temple. It measures 189.7 by 118.5 feet (57.8 by 36.1 m) and is 99 feet (30 m) tall. There are 36 columns which represent the 36 states of the Union at the time of Lincoln's death, and the names of those states are inscribed above the colonnade. The architect was Henry Bacon.
2. As well as the statue of a seated Abraham Lincoln there are inside inscriptions of two well-known speeches by Lincoln, "The Gettysburg Address" and his Second Inaugural Address. The latter has a typo in it. The word “FUTURE” is misspelled as “EUTURE." Although there were attempts to alter it, the mistake is still visible. There are also murals by Jules Guerin which portray the principles evident in Lincoln's life: Freedom, Liberty, Immortality, Justice, and the Law on the south wall; Unity, Fraternity, and Charity on the north. The cypress trees in the background of the murals represent eternity.
3. The foundations are up to 65 feet deep. The basement has steel reinforced columns covered in graffiti made by the construction workers. It even had hundreds of stalactites. It used to be possible to go on a tour of the basement but not any more because the health and safety people put a stop to it.
4. The statue itself was designed by Daniel Chester French and was carved by the Piccirilli Brothers. It was originally going to be ten feet tall (3m) but was enlarged to 19 feet (5.8 m). So if Lincoln was standing up, he would be 28 feet (8.5 m) tall. The statue is made from Georgia white marble and was shipped in 28 pieces.
5. There are a couple of myths about the statue which are denied by the National Park Service. One is that the face of General Robert E. Lee was carved onto the back of Lincoln's head, and the other is that Lincoln's hands are positioned so that he is spelling out his initials, A and L, in sign language. The second one is actually quite plausible since Daniel Chester French had a son who was deaf, so he would have been familiar with sign language, and Lincoln signed the federal legislation giving Gallaudet University, a university for the deaf, the authority to grant college degrees.
6. A memorial for Lincoln was suggested almost immediately after his assassination and a Lincoln Monument Association was set up within two years. However, people couldn't agree about details such as where the monument should be. Speaker of the House Joe Cannon didn't want the memorial built "in that god-damned swamp,” ie the site near the Potomac River. Washington DC's railway station was suggested as an alternative. There were other suggestions for the design of the building, too. Lincoln could easily have found himself sitting in a Mayan temple, a Mesopotamian ziggurat or an Egyptian pyramid instead. So it was 1914 before they could start building it, and then the First World War broke out, and so it was 1922 before it was finally finished. It cost $3 million to build.
7. Abraham Lincoln's son was present at the dedication ceremony. Robert Todd Lincoln was 78 years old.
8. It is open to the public 24 hours a day. About six million people visit it every year, and it often features in films. Over 60 films have featured it, including The Day the Earth Stood Still, Planet of the Apes, X-Men: First Class, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian and Forrest Gump.
9. It was at the Lincoln memorial that Martin Luther King Jr delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963, and it has become a symbolic place for the Civil Rights Movement and other groups of activists. Many speeches and protests have taken place there. In 1970, young Americans holding an overnight candlelight vigil to protest against the Vietnam War were surprised when the then president Richard Nixon dropped in on them at about 4am to “talk some sense” into them. Nixon and the students shook hands and had a friendly chat.
10. Until 2008 the memorial was featured on the back of the US one cent coin and it is depicted on the back of the five dollar bill which has Lincoln's portrait on the front.

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29 May: Pink Flamingo Day

It's Pink Flamingo Day. Here's all you need to know about these long-legged birds.

1. The word flamingo comes from the Portuguese or Spanish flamengo, meaning "flame-coloured". The name of the family they belong to, Phoenicopterus, comes from the Greek for "blood red-feathered".
2. There are six main species of flamingo: the greater, Chilean, lesser, Caribbean, Andean and puna, although there are several subspecies. The greater flamingo is the largest and can be up to five feet tall when standing erect. The lesser flamingo is the smallest and is about three feet tall.
3. Flamingoes don't weigh much for their height. A greater flamingo never weighs more than eight pounds. This lack of body density is what helps them fly. Although they are most often seen wading, they can fly very well when they need to, reaching speeds of up to 35 miles an hour. When they fly the Black feathers on the underside of their wings become visible. Flamingoes are also strong swimmers.
4. Flamingoes eat brine Shrimp and blue-green algae, which they obtain by stirring up the mud on the bottom of the water with their feet and filtering the yummy shrimp and algae through their specially adapted bills. Their upside down bills are perfect for doing this. The characteristic Pink colour comes from their diet, aqueous bacteria and beta-Carotene, to be exact, which is broken down into pigments by the flamingo's liver. In the wild, the pinkest birds are the best fed and therefore the strongest, best at finding food and the most desirable mates. A pale or White flamingo is probably malnourished. Flamingoes in zoos tend to be paler because, although they are well fed, they don't get the concentration of beta-carotene the wild birds get.
5. They have backward bending knees. Actually, that isn't true. The joint in a flamingoes leg which we can see bending backwards is actually its ankle. Its knees are much higher up his legs under the plumage and aren't usually seen at all. They do have long legs - up to 30-50 inches long, which is longer than their entire body.
6. Why do they stand on one leg? Nobody actually knows. The most widely accepted theory is that it's to conserve body heat, because they are wading in cold water and their little tootsies get cold. However, flamingoes which live in warm water do it as well.
7. A flock of flamingos is called a stand, colony, regiment or a flamboyance.
8. The flamingo is the national bird of the Bahamas. A type of flamingo is also the official bird of the city of Madison in Wisconsin, USA - plastic ones. Plastic lawn flamingos (Phoenicopterus plasticus) are an American cultural icon introduced in 1957 by artist Don Featherstone. They are less popular these days and in 2009 Madison made the plastic flamingo its official bird to try and revive their popularity.
9. In Ancient Egypt, the flamingo was thought to be the living representation of the god Ra. In Ancient Rome, however, they were food - flamingo tongues were a delicacy. Miners in the Andes believed that flamingo fat was a cure for tuberculosis.
10. Flamingoes in the wild generally live to be about 20-30 years old, but in captivity they can live a lot longer and reach 50 or even 70. The oldest flamingo in the world died at the age of 83 in Adelaide Zoo in 2014.

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28th May: Slugs

Today, according to tradition, slugs return to people's gardens from Capistrano after spending the winter there.

1. Slugs belong to the gastropod family, and are, not surprisingly, related to Snails. Some species of slug even have shells - inside their bodies.
2. While gardeners see slugs as pests, only a few species want to chomp away at your prize veggies. Most eat rotting vegetation and are vital to the ecosystem. A few species are carnivorous and will eat worms or other slugs. There is a species of sea slug that eats hydroids. A hydroid is a marine creature with a sting. The Spanish shawl sea slug eats the hydroid except for the sting, which it keeps and uses to defend itself.
3. There are about 30 species of slug in Britain and an average garden will contain 200 slugs per cubic metre. An acre of farmland will probably have over 250,000.
4. The smallest slugs are about a quarter of an inch long, but some species can reach 10 inches in length. Sea slugs get even bigger - there is a species found in California which can reach 40 inches long.
5. Slugs are known for being slimy. The slime is a type of liquid crystal, and contains fibres to help the slug climb things like walls or plant stalks. The slime allows it to get over sharp edges like razor blades and broken glass. It absorbs Water, so if you get it on your hands it can be nearly impossible to wash off, but it will come off if you use vinegar. Finally the slime trails slugs leave behind are actually helpful to the slug. They use their slime as a scent trail to find their way home, and the trails of other slugs to find mates, or in the case of the carnivorous ones, a meal.
6. Slugs have remarkably exciting sex lives. They are hermaphrodite, having both male and female reproductive organs, so they can reproduce on their own if they have to, but they prefer to do it with another slug. Some species like the leopard slug use their slime to make a thread which they dangle from while mating. The banana slug chews off its partner's penis when it's finished and there is a species of sea slug that chews its own penis off after mating and grows a new one for its next partner. A slug lays 20-100 eggs several times a year. Slug eggs can lay dormant in the soil for years and hatch when conditions are favourable.
7. Slugs like moisture, which is why they are so active when it has been raining. Even then, the ones you see on the wet path only amount to about 5% of the local slug population. The rest are underground eating or laying their eggs. When it is dry, slugs hide under things like logs or stones where it is damp. They don't hibernate in winter - if it's above five degrees centigrade the slugs are active.
8. A slug can stretch out to 20 times its normal length, so it can squeeze through small openings.
9. A slug has four tentacles which are retractable, and if it loses one, it will grow back. Two are for seeing and smelling and two are for touching and tasting. The eye stalks can move independently so a slug can look at and/or smell, two different things at once.
10. The University of California at Santa Cruz has the banana slug as the mascot for its sports teams. In 1980, however, when the university joined the National Collegiate Athletic Association, officials thought the slug wasn't athletic or pretty enough to use as an official mascot and proposed the sea lion instead. Many of the students had become fond of the slug mascot; “Slime 'em!” and “Go slugs!” were common shouts of encouragement during matches and the debate about whether the slug or the sea lion should be the mascot was so hotly debated that it reached the national newspapers. In 1986, they settled it by having a vote. The slug supporters won by a landslide.

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27th May: FA Cup Final

The FA cup final 2017 takes place today. It is the 136th cup final and will be between Arsenal and Chelsea. Here are some facts about the FA cup final.

The oldest surviving FA Cup trophy, on display at the
National Football Museum, Preston.
The trophy was used between 1896 and 1910,
being an exact replica of the original trophy,
which was stolen and never recovered.

1. The official name for it is the Football Association Challenge Cup and it's been going for 146 years, making it the oldest association football competition in the world.
2. The first FA Cup final was in 1872 and came about because a sporting newspaper suggested a "challenge cup" tournament should be held. The first FA Cup final was played at the Kennington Oval. Wanderers beat the Royal Engineers one nil. The game was watched by two thousand people.
3. At time of writing the most successful teams are Arsenal and Manchester United who have won twelve cup finals each, followed by Tottenham Hotspur with eight wins. Leicester City has reached the final four times but has never won the cup, making them the unluckiest team ever.
4. There have been several versions of the FA cup. The first was stolen from the window of a shoe shop in 1895 and was never seen again. A replacement trophy was in use between 1896 and 1910, when it was was presented as a gift to Lord Kinnaird, the then head of the FA. A third came into service in 1911, which lasted until 1991 when it was deemed to have become to fragile and was retired. The most recent version of the trophy has been in use since 2014, when the 1992 trophy was showing increasing signs of wear and tear. There is also a "back-up" FA cup in case the original one gets lost, stolen or damaged.
5. During the game, ribbons in the colours of both finalists are tied to the cup. When the result is known, the ribbons for the losing side are removed.
6. The FA cup is open to any team which competes in English football, regardless as to the level at which they play. Amateur village teams can compete against Premier League clubs and sometimes the little guys win. This is known as a "giant killing". One club with a particular reputation for giant killing is Yeovil Town. As a non-league team the club recorded twenty wins against league sides; more than any other club in the competition.
7. Football clubs may appear at the final multiple times, but any referee can only appear once. The last referee to oversee more than one cup final was Arthur Kingscott in 1900 and 1901. In 1931, the cup final referee was his son. The referee for the match stays at the White’s Hotel the night before the game and is strongly advised by the FA not to go out. The Referee’s Association host a dinner for the officials and other serving referees the evening before the game.
8. The youngest player to play in a cup final was Curtis Weston who played for Millwall at 17 years and 119 days in 2004. The oldest was Billy Hampson who played for Newcastle United at 41 years and 257 days in 1924.
9. The largest total number of goals scored in a final is seven and this has happened twice. In 1890 when Blackburn Rovers beat The Wednesday by six goals to one, and in 1953 when Blackpool beat Bolton 4-3. There have only been two occasions upon which the final of the FA Cup has been decided on penalties, in 2005 and 2006.
10. The FA Cup Final is one of 10 events reserved for live broadcast on UK terrestrial television under the Ofcom Code on Sports and Other Listed and Designated Events. It was first broadcast in 1927, but that was a recording. The first live broadcast of an FA cup final was in 1938.

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26th May: George Formby

George Formby, famous for singing comedy songs and playing the Ukulele, was born on this date in 1904. Here are some things you might not know about him.

1. George Formby was born in Wigan, Lancashire and was christened George Hoy Booth. His father was James Lawler Booth, who was a music hall performer - he used the name George Formby as a stage name. His mother was Eliza Hoy. George was the eldest of their seven children. George Formby senior was a bigamist - he was still married to his first wife when he married Eliza.
2. George's father didn't want his son to go into showbusiness. When George dropped out of school at the age of seven, he was sent away to work as a stable boy so that he wouldn't see his father perform and want to follow in his footsteps. "One fool in the family is enough", he said.
3. At the age of ten, George was a jockey running in professional races.
4. George Formby Sr. died at the age of 45. To help the young George get over his grief, his mother took him to London where they went to the theatre. Performing at the Victoria Palace Theatre was a Tyneside comedian called Tommy Dixon who was billing himself as "The New George Formby" and basically copying Formby Sr's act. This angered the young George who decided then to follow in his father's profession, with his mother's support.
5. Although he eventually became the highest-paid British entertainer of his day, his first performances weren't well received. "I was the first turn, three minutes, died the death of a dog", he said of his first night. He was booed and hissed at in some places, and was frequently unemployed and his mother supported him financially.
6. During his career, he recorded 189 songs, including Leaning on a lamp post and When I’m cleaning Windows. He starred in 20 films between 1934 and 1946, including No limit, Come on George, Let George do it and Turned out nice again (his catch phrase). This was in spite of the one of the first producers his wife and manager tried to sell him to saying he was "too stupid to play the bad guy and too ugly to play the hero".
7. During the second world war he toured the world entertaining the troops and became a national treasure, awarded an OBE in 1945.
8. "If I'd had a bag of rotten tomatoes with me I'd have thrown them at him", said one performer on the same bill at Castleford, West Yorkshire. Her name was Beryl Ingham, a champion clogdancer and actress who had formed a dance act with her sister. She must have seen some potential in him eventually as she married him and became his manager. Most sources seem to suggest that their marriage was far from happy. While some sources are tabloid press it should be taken with a pinch of salt but if it was really as bad as they made out, when he was earning £1.5million for a film she would give him 25p a week (five shillings) pocket money. They both had affairs while pretending to be happily married. One source suggested Beryl had surgery to prevent her ever having children with George. Yet she was still jealous and banned him from kissing his leading ladies. The marriage continued to unravel as Beryl was diagnosed with terminal cancer and became an alcoholic while George, a chain smoker, became addicted to morphine prescribed for heart disease.
9. Just seven weeks after Beryl died, George became engaged to the daughter of his car dealer, a teacher called Pat Howson. The Formbys and the Howsons had been close friends, but even so the romance caused a stir. They seemed an odd match, too, with Pat being very religious - her subject was religious education and she had at one time wanted to become a nun. She was also more than 20 years younger than him. However, the couple never married, for George died of a heart attack two days before their wedding, aged 56.
10. In spite of the fact George Formby sang cheeky songs and had a turbulent private life, the royal family loved him. Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen was an especially big fan. He gave private performances at Buckingham Palace. The Queen was once asked if she'd become President of the George Formby Society. She was strongly advised against it by her correspondence secretary who didn't think it appropriate for the head of the armed forces and head of the Church of England to accept such a role, to which the Queen replied, ‘Well, I do see that but I love George Formby. I know all his songs and I can sing them.’

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25th May: Black Holes

On this date in 1994, astronomers announced that the Hubble Space Telescope had for the first time confirmed the existence of a black hole. It was found in the constellation Virgo. Here are some facts about black holes.

1. What is a Black hole, anyway? They are objects in space which have a lot of mass compressed into such as small space that their gravitational field is huge. Not even light can escape its pull.
2. This isn't to say they suck like Vacuum cleaners and that one day they'll clean up the universe. They don't do that any more than our own Sun does - they simply have this massive amount of gravity. If our sun became a black hole (which it won't, this is just an illustration so don't panic) the Earth would continue to orbit it exactly as it does now. As long as you don't cross the event horizon they can be observed safely from a distance.
3. Black holes range in size from supermassive black holes which have the mass of millions of suns to primordial black holes which can be as small as an atom. The most common type is the stellar black hole, about 20 times bigger than our sun.
4. Einstein didn't discover black holes, but he did predict them in his Theory of Relativity. It was a man called Karl Schwarzschild who did more work on Einstein's equations and proved they exist. In fact, even before Einstein there were scientists who theorised that there might be such a thing as a black hole, although John Michell and Pierre-Simon Laplace in the 18th century called them "dark stars". "Frozen star" was another term used to describe a star's collapse to the point that light couldn't escape and it would appear frozen in time. John Wheeler coined the term "black hole" as it appeared that they swallowed all the light and gave nothing back.
5. It's not strictly true that they don't emit anything. They do in fact evaporate, gradually dispersing some of their mass into space over time until they disappear. Stephen Hawking figured this out in 1974, so the phenomenon is called "Hawking radiation". For large black holes this happens very slowly, but if you have a very small one it would happen very fast. Scientists at Kansas University have worked out that there is an optimum size for a black hole which is small enough to be artificially created and large enough that it lasts for long enough for us to harness its energy. That's pretty small - about one one-thousandth the size of a proton, but a black hole like that, they say, could be used to power a starship.
6. You cannot see a black hole because it doesn't give off any light. It can't even be seen through instruments using any kind of electromagnetic radiation, like X Rays, for example. The way to spot one is to look at what's happening around it. For example, if a black hole is captured by a black hole its matter gets faster and hotter and that can be detected by X-rays.
7. Strange things happen to time and space around black holes. It gets warped, to the extent that time passes more slowly for someone falling into a black hole than it does for someone watching from a safe distance.
8. The black holes we know about are made from collapsing stars, but in theory, anything could be turned into a black hole if you compress it enough. That's everything from the sun to a human being to your car keys.
9. Black holes could be the ultimate in star recycling centres. As things get pulled into a black hole they get broken down into subatomic particles, which can create elements such as Iron and carbon and others that are essential to the formation of life, and influence the production of new stars. Some scientists think the number of stars in the universe is limited by the number of black holes; without black holes, none of us would exist.
10. Nobody really knows what goes on in the middle of a black hole and so there has been a lot of speculation by science fiction authors. Perhaps they act as wormholes to other parts of the universe, or even other universes. Perhaps the laws of physics don't even apply there, or could be altered sufficiently to create new universes slightly different to our own.

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24th May: Westminster Bridge

Westminster bridge opened 1862. Here are ten things you may not know about Westminster Bridge.

1. The current Westminster bridge is the oldest road bridge across the Thames.
2. It is 820 feet (250 m) long and 85 feet (26 m) wide. It has seven spans, the most of any of the Thames bridges.
3. The previous bridge on the site caused a lot of controversy before it was built. A bridge at Westminster was proposed in 1664, since the nearest bridges were London Bridge and Kingston. However the City Corporation and the watermen (think water taxi drivers) opposed it as they would lose their livelihood of ferrying people across the river all day. They were so opposed to the bridge that they bribed the King of the time, Charles II, with an interest free loan of £100,000 (a LOT of money in those days) if he'd refuse permission to build the bridge. The watermen also argued that if their jobs became obsolete, there would be no skilled sailors to call up if England went to war. When George II eventually granted permission for the bridge to be built in 1736, he had to pay the watermen the equivalent of £2 million in compensation.
4. The old Westminster Bridge was funded in a somewhat novel way for the time - lottery funding - rather than tolls and private capital. Lotteries were fashionable, but subject to corruption. Some people, like Henry Fielding, thought lotteries were bad, and hence he called the bridge 'The Bridge of Fools'.
5. Crossing the old Westminster Bridge was actually quite dangerous as it had octagonal turrets along it which were handy hiding places for muggers and prostitutes. It got so bad that twelve night watchmen had to be hired to protect people as they crossed.
6. By the middle of the 19th century the bridge was in danger of falling down, so Thomas Page was hired to design a new one. (Another interesting fact about his is that he also came up with the idea of a Channel Tunnel in 1870.) It opened on 24th May 1862, which happened to be Queen Victoria's birthday. She was meant to open the new bridge, but since Prince Albert had died the previous November, the Queen was in deep mourning and so the ceremony had to happen without her.
7. Artists, writers and film makers have all found this bridge inspiring. It has been painted by Canaletto, Samuel Scott, Antonio Jolli and JMW Turner; William Wordsworth wrote a poem about it (although he was actually writing about what he could see from the bridge rather than the bridge itself). See his sonnet, Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802, below. In modern times, films which feature it include 28 Days Later, 102 Dalmatians, Queen of the Damned, Sceptre and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It has also been the site of a Dalek invasion in Doctor Who and a Monty Python sketch about a stolen chair.
8. On the second Wednesday of every month, a 2.3 mile running race known as 'The Lensbury' or The Bridges Handicap Race, begins at Westminster Bridge at 12.30pm, and also ends there.
9. Westminster Bridge is painted the same shade of Green as the leather benches in the House of Commons. This is intentional - Lambeth Bridge, upstream from it, is painted to match the Red seats in the House of Lords.
10. It's not known whether another architectural feature was intentional or not. Given it's a Victorian structure, I suspect not. At about 1pm on a sunny day, when the sun shines through the trefoil designs along the bridge, the resulting shadow shows a line of male reproductive organs on the pavement along the bridge. Since the Bridge leads to and from the House of Commons, if politicians were as bad in the 1860s as they are now, perhaps it was a political comment by the architect!

Earth has not anything to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

This City now doth, like a garment, wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill;

Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will:

Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;

And all that mighty heart is lying still!

William Wordsworth, Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

More Bridges over the Thames

Albert Bridge
Battersea Bridge
Blackfriars Bridge
Cheslea Bridge 
London Bridge
Southwark Bridge

Wandsworth Bridge

Waterloo Bridge

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