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Jan 19, 2016
Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s 127th Birthday
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Gracing the face of every Swiss 50 franc bill is the straightforward gaze of a dark-eyed woman. Behind this serious portrait lies one of Switzerland's most colorful artists: Sophie Taeuber-Arp, whose 127th birthday we celebrate today!
Taeuber-Arp was a Swiss artist, designer, architect and dancer. Notably, she’s one of the most important artists of geometric abstraction – her minimalistic style, which is reflected in her textile artwork, marionettes, interiors, drawings, paintings, reliefs and sculptures, makes her distinguished amongst other artists of the early 20th century.
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Jan 11, 2016
Alice Paul’s 131st Birthday
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When the 19th Amendment to the Constitution became law in August of 1920, women finally won the right to vote after a very long fight. Many suffragists played vital roles in this victory, but none more so than Alice Paul. Paul first made a name for herself by organizing a successful women’s suffrage parade the day before Woodrow Wilson’s first inauguration. Paul thought that public demonstrations were the smartest ways to achieve voting rights. That belief put her at odds with the National American Woman Suffrage Association, so she founded her own organization, the National Women’s Party.
Paul’s group organized daily protests in front of the White House [[marking the first time anyone demonstrated there). Police arrested the protestors on a made up charge, and Paul was one of the women to be sent to jail. While in jail she and the other women were treated horribly. Journalists wrote about the mistreatment, people became outraged, and the suffragists gained public support. A short while later President Woodrow Wilson declared his support for a constitutional amendment that would finally give women the right to vote. It would take another couple of years for the amendment to become the law, but his support marked a crucial turning point. Alice Paul dedicated the rest of her life to fighting for the equality of women, authoring the very first version of the Equal Rights Amendment and working the rest of her life towards its passage.
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Jan 9, 2016
41st Anniversaryof the Discovery of the Mountain of the Butterflies
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In 1975, after a decades long search that involved thousands of volunteers and spanned an entire continent, Ken Brugger and Catalina Trail unlocked one of nature’s most beautiful mysteries: the overwintering place of the monarch butterfly. Led by a team of Canadian Zoologists under Fred Urquhart, the couple followed clues left by tagged butterflies that had strayed or fallen on their migratory journeys south. The scene, in which millions of monarchs cling to oyamel trees in Mexico’s easternmost Sierra Madre Mountains, would have been overwhelming. “They swirled through the air like autumn leaves,” said Urquhart after his first visit, “carpet[ing] the ground in their flaming myriads on the Mexican mountainside.”
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Dec 16, 2015
Remedios Varo’s 107th Birthday
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One of the most accomplished surrealist painters of the 20th century, Remedios Varo is best known for striking oil paintings that blended together elements of science, magic and mysticism.
Varo was born in Spain and moved around a bit before ultimately settling in Mexico, where she created her finest works, including “La Llamada” [[The Call), which is replicated in today’s celebratory Google Doodle. Varo lived during a time when male painters viewed their female counterparts as inferior, but she didn’t hesitate to make women the powerful centerpieces of her paintings. Today’s Google Doodle honors Varo on what would have been her 107th birthday, for her extraordinary imagination and complex paintings that allow her rare talent to live on.
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Dec 15, 2015
Chico Mendes’ 71st Birthday
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Rubber tapping requires serious patience. You strip the bark, then wait — drip, drip, drip — as the liquid appears. Eventually, the waiting pays off, and the drops unite into a beautiful, valuable collection.
Chico Mendez’s life was similar. A second-generation tapper, he passed his days like most other workers: waiting. But inspiration struck — drip! — and he worked to unite his fellow tappers to fight for rainforest preservation. Then, he went global — drip! — bringing the National Council of Rubber Tappers to life, and speaking for human rights and environmentalism. He saw how his small efforts grew into a movement, saying: “At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees, then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest. Now, I realize, I am fighting for humanity.”
Today’s doodle by Kevin Laughlin commemorates Mendez, who was tragically assassinated for his brave efforts.
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Dec 14, 2015
BKS Iyengar’s 97th Birthday
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B.K.S. Iyengar, it’s been said, could hold a headstand for nearly half an hour well into his eighties. He was instrumental in bringing yoga to the West, beloved by followers on nearly every continent [[certainly a few of his techniques have reached a base camp somewhere in Antarctica, but we couldn’t be sure), and advised such aspiring yogis as Aldous Huxley, Sachin Tendulkar, and Queen Elizabeth of Belgium. His style--Iyengar Yoga--is characterized by tremendous control and discipline, which he exercised in ways not limited to confoundingly long headstands.
To remember the pioneering and deeply spiritual yogi on what would have been his 97th birthday, Kevin Laughlin used a few of the master’s poses, or asanas, to help complete the logo on today’s homepage.
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Dec 7, 2015
Matilde Pérez's 99th Birthday
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Borrowing ideas from the kinetic style that made Matilde Pérez an internationally recognized artist, Nate Swinehart added some movement to today’s homepage. Born in 1916, Pérez painted and sculpted into her nineties, using the interplay of abstract shapes and sharp colors to create optical and aesthetic effects of motion. Today would have been her 99th birthday. Feliz cumpleaños, Matilde.
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Nov 29, 2015
42nd Anniversary of the official recognition of the letter ё
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Use of the character Ë in the English language is relatively rare. Some publications, such as the American magazine The New Yorker, use it more often than others. It is used to indicate that the e is to be pronounced separately from the preceding vowel [[e.g. in the word "reëntry", the feminine name "Chloë" or in the masculine name "Raphaël"), or at all - like in the name of the Brontë sisters, where without diaeresis the final e would be mute.
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Nov 24, 2015
41st Anniversary of the discovery of Lucy
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On November 24th, 1974, as dusk settled upon the southern edge of the Afar Triangle near a village called Hadar, a team of scientists organized by Yves Coppens, Maurice Taieb and Donald Johanson toasted a tremendous discovery. They had been scouring this region for weeks--an area Taieb had brought to the forefront of anthropological research years earlier--and that morning their search paid enormous dividends with the find of Dr. Johanson and his student Tom Gray. The skeletal fragments unearthed in the Ethiopian landscape made up the most complete example of Australopithecus afarensis ever found.
While they celebrated, a small tape recorder blared ”Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”, again and again. And then it struck someone--what finer name than Lucy for the incredible specimen pulled from the sand that day?
In the coming months and years, this find would upend our understanding of bipedalism, and rewrite a significant chapter in the story of human evolution. To recognize the 41st anniversary of this historic moment, Kevin Laughlin has brought Lucy and her upright gait to life on our homepage.
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August 6, 2015
Adoniran Barbosa's 105th Birthday
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Music tells stories, stirs emotions, and inspires change, all while getting us to nod our heads along or burst into wild swings. The right mix of melody and message is a language all its own.
Adoniran Barbosa spoke that language fluently. In Brazil, he's known as one of the most influential samba singers the genre's ever seen. But he did more than craft toe-tapping tunes. Adoniran uplifted the working men and women of São Paulo with his expressive storytelling, bringing the city's malocas and cortiços to life through iconic songs like Saudosa Maloca [["Shanty of Fond Memories").
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Dec 19, 2016
Franz Sacher’s 200th Birthday
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In the world of baked goods, few cakes have the culinary status–or intriguing backstory–of the Sacher-Torte, first concocted by the Austrian confectioner, Franz Sacher, in Vienna in 1832.
Perhaps destiny had a hand in its creation. Sacher was a 16-year-old apprentice honing his craft in the court of Austrian state chancellor, Prince Metternich, when the kitchen was tasked with creating a special dessert for the prince’s fussy guests. On the day of the dinner, the chef became ill, and the tall order fell to Sacher.
The trainee whipped up a chocolate cake topped with apricot jam and bittersweet chocolate icing. It was a hit with the prince’s guests, but it wasn’t until Sacher’s son Eduard refined the recipe decades later, that the Sacher-Torte became a Viennese sensation.
Today, the dessert is a signature of Café Sacher in Vienna's Hotel Sacher [[and other locations in Austria). The authentic recipe for the Original Sacher-Torte remains a deep, dark, delicious secret.
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Nov 30, 2015
Lucy Maud Montgomery’s 141st Birthday
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Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote her first novel in 1905. It was rejected by every single publishing house that received it. A few years later, Montgomery tried shopping it again and succeeded. Her story about the adventures of a red-headed girl in Prince Edward Island became a smash hit. That novel ultimately became one of Canada’s most all-time popular books, being translated into around 20 languages and selling more than 50 million copies to date. Anne of Green Gables and its many sequels made Montgomery a wildly successful author and turned PEI into a destination for the book’s thousands of fans.
One of Canada’s most celebrated writers, Montgomery also wrote hundreds of poems and short stories as well as a number of novels apart from the Anne series. She was the first Canadian woman to be made a member of the British Royal Society of Arts and was also appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. Today, on what would have been her 141st birthday, we salute Lucy Maud Montgomery with a Doodle that pays tribute to her most iconic book.
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Jul 25, 2015
Special Olympics World Games 2015
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Today marks the 47th year since the inception of the Special Olympics World Games. 7,000 world-class athletes from 177 countries will compete in 25 events in a celebration of athleticism, teamwork and inclusion. A reminder of the universality of sport, this is an opportunity for athletes with disability to compete in one of humankind's greatest traditions.
The games were created in Chicago by Eunice Shriver to give athletes with cognitive disabilities “the chance to play, the chance to compete and the chance to grow.” Like all World Games, the events over the next 9 days will challenge participants to push their bodies to the best of their capacity. They'll compete against odds and against one another to perform at their peak and to honor their unique gifts to the fullest.
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Jul 14, 2015
New Horizons Pluto flyby
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Earth is getting its first chance for an up close and personal peek at Pluto, the ball of rock and ice orbiting at the furthest edge of our solar system.
It’s all thanks to New Horizons, a thousand-pound space probe NASA sent spinning through space at 31,000 miles per hour. The probe’s interstellar jaunt spanned more than 9 years and 3 billion miles. That’s one heck of a commute!
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Jun 4, 2018
Tom Longboat’s 131st Birthday
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Today we celebrate the 131st birthday of Tom Longboat, a Canadian long-distance runner celebrated as one of the greatest marathoners of all time. Longboat was a member of the Onondaga Nation, born in 1887 on Six Nations Reserve, south of Brantford, Ontario. He first began racing in his early teenage years, inspired by Bill Davis, another First Nations runner who finished second in the Boston Marathon in 1901.
It didn’t take long for Longboat to chase Davis’ legacy. He began racing in 1905 as an amateur and won his first Boston Marathon just two years later, in 1907, making Longoat the first member of the First Nations to win the Boston Marathon. In fact, during his career as an amateur racer, Longboat only lost a total of three races! Two years after winning the Boston Marathon, he went on to become a professional racer. Longboat was one of the first athletes to use a training technique involving rotating training days of hard workouts, easier workouts and recovery days. While these training methods are widely accepted today, he faced skepticism from coaches and media despite consistent victories and multiple world records.
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November 21, 2019
Celebrating Matilde Hidalgo de Procel
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Today’s Doodle celebrates Ecuadorian physician, poet, and activist Matilde Hidalgo de Procel, who was born on September 29th, 1889 in the city of Loja and became the first woman to vote in Latin America in 1924. Inspiring her native Ecuador to become the first Latin American state to grant suffrage to all women, this trailblazing pioneer for women’s rights smashed through glass ceilings throughout her entire lifetime, also becoming the first female Ecuadorian doctor on this day in 1921.
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Nov 4, 2020
Miliki's 91st Birthday
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Today’s Doodle, illustrated by Spain-based guest artist Cinta Arribas, celebrates Spanish clown, actor, director, writer, singer, and composer Emilio Aragón Bermúdez, known fondly by his stage name Miliki. Among his many artistic accomplishments, Aragón starred in the Spanish children’s program “El Gran Circo de TVE” [[“TVE’s Great Circus”) which is widely considered one of the most iconic shows in the history of Spanish television.
Emilio Alberto Aragón Bermúdez was born on this day in 1929 in the town of Carmona in southwestern Spain. The son of a clown and an equestrian acrobatics specialist, Aragón honed his talent for performance art as a child surrounded by entertainers. Determined to carry on the family tradition, Aragón launched his clowning career by the age of 11, performing with his brothers at venues like Madrid’s legendary Circo Price [[Price Circus).
The siblings moved to Cuba in the 1940s and achieved fame over the following decades as they showcased their endearing talents across the Americas. They found their way back to Spain in 1972 and the very next year, they took Spanish television by storm as the hosts of the children’s show which eventually became known as “El Gran Circo de TVE.”
After a hugely successful decade on air, Aragón moved beyond his identity as a clown and throughout the rest of his career explored new endeavors as a writer, TV presenter, filmmaker, and recording musician—a talent which earned him two Latin Grammy Awards.
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February 7, 2015
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s 148th Birthday
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Laura Ingalls Wilder was born in 1867 in a log cabin in the “Big Woods” of Wisconsin. Her beloved Little House books, chronicling her family’s hardscrabble journeys through the American frontier, stand as a notable achievement of early American literature. The television series based on the books—a staple for viewers in the 70s—brought legions of new fans to her work.
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December 3, 2011
Nino Rota's 100th Birthday
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Giovanni Rota Rinaldi, better known as Nino Rota, was an Italian composer, pianist, conductor and academic who is best known for his film scores, notably for the films of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti. He also composed the music for two of Franco Zeffirelli's Shakespeare films, and for the first two films of Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy, earning the Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Godfather Part II.
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Oct 22, 2011
Franz Liszt's 200th Birthday
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Franz Liszt was a Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor, music teacher, arranger, and organist of the Romantic era. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest pianists of all time.He was also a writer, philanthropist, Hungarian nationalist, and Franciscan tertiary.
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Dr. Wu Lien-teh's 142nd Birthday
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Wu Lien-teh also known as Goh Lean Tuck and Ng Leen Tuck in Minnan and Cantonesetransliteration respectively, was a Malayanphysician renowned for his work in public health and particularly, the Manchurian plague of 1910–11.
In the winter of 1910, Wu was given instructions from the Foreign Office, Peking, to travel to Harbin to investigate an unknown disease that killed 99.9% of its victims. This was the beginning of the large pneumonic plague pandemic of Manchuria and Mongolia, which ultimately claimed 60,000 lives.
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Sep 17, 2011
Anant Pai's 82nd Birthday
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Anant Pai, popularly known as Uncle Pai, was an Indian educationalist and a pioneer in Indian comics. He is most famous as the creator of two comic book series viz. Amar Chitra Katha, which retold traditional Indian folk tales, mythological stories, and biographies of historical characters; and Tinkle, a children's anthology. He has been called "The Walt Disney of India."
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August 21, 2017
Great American Eclipse 2017
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Skywatchers on the American continent today are in for a special astronomical treat: front row seats to a total solar eclipse. An eclipse occurs when the moon passes between the sun and the earth, blocking the light of the sun from reaching us.
While eclipses aren’t rare, a total eclipse, when viewers from Earth are at the very center of the moon’s shadow, only happens once every 18 months. To see one requires you to be in just the right place on earth, and a total eclipse in the same location only happens every 375 years on average.
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Aug 20, 2017
Cora Coralina's 128th Birthday
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Anna Lins dos Guimarães Peixoto Bretas led a simple life selling sweets to the townsfolk in rural Goiás, Brazil, the same place where she was born in 1889. At the age of 76, she had her first book of poetry published, under the pseudonym Cora Coralina. She continued to write under that name and eventually was regarded as one of the country's most important writers.
Cora’s poetry is a mirror of her simple and peaceful rural life. She wrote about love and kindness in a light and sweet manner - quite fitting for a lifelong confectioner.
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Mar 31, 2017
Doodle 4 Google 2017 - US Winner
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Nine years in, the U.S. Doodle 4 Google Contest draws thousands of creative submissions from talented young artists across the country. Roughly 140,000 participants answered this year's prompt, "What I see for the future." Some imagined a future with modernized homes, others dreamed of a planet without endangered animals, while some saw a compassionate world built around communal harmony.
Five incredibly talented national finalists spent the day at Google HQ in Mountain View, California. Of those five masterpieces, Connecticut 10th grader Sarah Harrison's Doodle, "A Peaceful Future" was chosen as the national winner! Today, millions in the U.S. can enjoy her masterpeice on the Google homepage.
Sarah says, “My future is a world where we can all learn to love each other despite our religion, gender, race, ethnicity, or sexuality. I dream of a future where everyone is safe and accepted wherever they go, whoever they are.”
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Mar 31, 2017
Sergei Diaghilev’s 145th Birthday
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Born in 1872 to a wealthy Russian family, art critic, visionary, and all-around provocateur Sergei Diaghilev made his mark on the performing arts with his influential Ballets Russes, a trailblazing dance company that united talents from the disciplines of art, fashion, dance, choreography, and music, and vaulted them to dizzying creative heights.
From 1909-1929, the Ballet Russes performed on stages around the globe, mesmerizing, even scandalizing, audiences with its unprecedented costumes, stage sets, compositions, and choreography. In Schéhérazade, which premiered at the Théâtre national de l’Opéra, Paris, in 1910, dancers traded tutus for artist Léon Bakst’s risqué harem pants while Vaslav Nijinsky performed in gold body paint and bejeweled costumes. Firebird, based on Russian fairy tales, marked Diaghilev’s first commissioned score from Igor Stravinsky, kicking off a collaboration that would include the primal work, The Rite of Spring and Pulcinella [[with costumes and sets by Pablo Picasso).
Anna Pavlova, Henri Matisse, Jean Cocteau—all figured into Diaghilev’s sensational productions.
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July 9, 2018
Carlota Jaramillo’s 114th Birthday
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Today’s Doodle celebrates the 114th birthday of Ecuadorian singer and guitarist María Isabel Carlota Jaramillo, whose powerful renditions of traditional tango and pasillo standards keep the spirit of Ecuador’s people alive.
Born in 1904 in Calacalí, a rural parish north of Quito, Jaramillo was taught to play guitar by her uncle. Although her mother encouraged her to focus on her studies, Carolta entered an amateur singing contest with her sister Inés. There, the girls' talent attracted the attention of Rafael Ramos Albuja, who invited them to join his musical theater company.
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April 4, 2020
Celebrating Hashim Khan
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Today’s Doodle celebrates legendary Pakistani squash player Hashim Khan, widely revered as one of the sport’s all-time greatest players. On this day in 1951, Khan won the British Open Squash Championships propelling him from relative obscurity to the status of an international icon.
Born in 1914, Khan was raised in Peshawar, a small village in what was then India. His father worked at a British officers’ club with squash courts where Khan apprenticed as a ballboy. Learning the ropes of the sport while on his off-hours, Khan played barefoot on the club’s rough brick courts—an early testament to his tenacity. By age 28, Khan became a squash pro and soon after, a national champion of the sport. After winning three All-of-India titles, the newly independent government of Pakistan drafted him to represent the country at the 1951 British Open.
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Feb 28, 2020
Sir John Tenniel's 200th Birthday
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Don’t be late for today’s very important date! That is, the 200th birthday of British illustrator and artist Sir John Tenniel, celebrated by today’s Doodle. Tenniel is one of the most highly-regarded Victorian illustrators and painters, and is perhaps best remembered for bringing to life the characters of Lewis Carroll’s timeless “Alice in Wonderland” series.
Tenniel was born in London on this day in 1820, and his talent was clear from a young age. At just 16, the mostly self-taught artist submitted his first work, an oil painting, for exhibition at the Society of British Artists. Tenniel found his calling as an illustrator in 1850 when he became a political cartoonist with the historic weekly magazine Punch. Tenniel developed a distinctive style, due in part to his near-photographic memory.
It was this unique approach that most likely caught the attention of writer and professor Charles Dodgson, whose pen name was Lewis Carroll. After an introduction in 1864, Tenniel agreed to illustrate Carroll’s new book, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” released the following year.
Thus began a highly successful, if strained, creative partnership that continued with “Through the Looking Glass” in 1872. The result: a series of classic characters, such as Alice and the Cheshire Cat, as depicted in the Doodle artwork’s rendition of their iconic meeting—characters who, along with many others, remain beloved by readers of all ages to this day.
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Feb 23, 2020
Ca Trù's Founder Commemoration Day 2020
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Today’s Doodle, illustrated by Ho Chi Minh City-based guest artist Xuan Le, celebrates Ca Trù’s Founders Commemoration Day, a time to honor the genre widely considered to be Vietnam’s most revered traditional form of music.
A style that fits somewhere in between the geisha ceremonies of Japan and the dramatic performances of opera, Ca trù’s unique sound has roots that stretch back to the 11th century. First gaining popularity as entertainment for the aristocracy of Vietnam’s royal palaces, it later made its way into the inns and communal spaces of what is now modern-day Hanoi.
The ensemble is composed of at least three performers, including one female singing intricate poetry while tapping a phach [[a small bamboo box), two musicians playing traditional instruments, and occasionally dancers. Ca trù is now found in cities across Vietnam.
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Sep 4, 2010
25th Anniversary of Buckyball
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Who doesn't like the buckyball? They're super strong, compact, nerdy, and fun! Named after Buckminster Fuller, the buckyball is a bit of science gold that all nerds can get behind-- buckyballs are cool. The structure is so strong it appears in architecture around the world, athletes also deemed it a sound shape for the football [[or American soccer ball). Science, however, sees its potential in display technology, medicine, and security!
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Aug 19, 2010
Anniversary of Belka and Strelka Space Flight
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During the 1950s and 1960s the Soviet space program used dogs for sub-orbital and orbital space flights to determine whether human spaceflight was feasible. In this period, the Soviet Union launched missions with passenger slots for at least 57 dogs. The number of dogs in space is smaller, as some dogs flew more than once. Most survived; the few that died were lost mostly through technical failures, according to the parameters of the test.
A notable exception is Laika, the first dog to be sent into orbit, whose death during the 3 November, 1957 Sputnik 2 mission was expected from its outset.[
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Jul 15, 2010
Josef Frank's 125th Birthday
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Some people see things in an entirely unique way. Josef Frank's work was equal parts inspiring and surprising when I first came across this doodle proposal. Famous in Austria and Sweden for his vivid textiles and patterns, Frank's work delighted the doodle team so much that we decided to launch this doodle in other countries as well!
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Jun 29, 2010
Antoine de Saint-Exupery's 110th Birthday
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I've always loved the imagery from The Little Prince, written by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, but I must confess that until I was assigned this doodle, I had never actually read the book. This was pretty much sacrilege on my part, as I come from working in kids books! My mother-in-law was quick to set me on the right path, lending me her translated copy [[claiming it was the best, most poetic translation), and warned me to read the book with a pack of tissue. I followed her advice, finding a very quiet spot on the Google campus to read the book with a pair of sunglasses.
Cover to cover and an empty tissue pack later, I felt an even greater sense of responsibility to portray this beloved character as genuinely as possible. I painted the character in watercolor and ink, knowing there was no way the digital medium could capture the innocent, naive quality of Mr. Saint-Exupery's artwork. When the doodle finally launched, I was able to read user comments about how this doodle brought them joy, or how they recalled a passage from the book with a tear. It was such a wonderful feeling to emotionally connect with so many people at once and is probably one of the most rewarding experiences I've had as a doodler and illustrator.
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Jun 11, 2010
Jacques Cousteau's 100th Birthday
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Jacques-Yves Cousteau, was a French naval officer, explorer, conservationist, filmmaker, innovator, scientist, photographer, author and researcher who studied the sea and all forms of life in water. He co-developed the Aqua-Lung, pioneered marine conservation and was a member of the Académie Française.
Cousteau described his underwater world research in a series of books, perhaps the most successful being his first book, The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure, published in 1953. Cousteau also directed films, most notably the documentary adaptation of the book, The Silent World, which won a Palme d'or at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival. He remained the only person to win a Palme d'Or for a documentary film, until Michael Moore won the award in 2004 for Fahrenheit 9/11.
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May 9, 2010
J.M. Barrie's 150th Birthday
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Sir James Matthew Barrie, was a Scottish novelist and playwright, best remembered as the creator of Peter Pan.
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Apr 2, 2010
Hans Christian Andersen's 205th Birthday
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Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales sparked the imaginations of generations of children. For this series, one of the first multi-part narrative doodles we created, I had the privilege to interpret Andersen's famous work, Thumbelina.
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Mar 31, 2015
126th Anniversary of the public opening of the Eiffel Tower
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On this day 126 years ago, construction of the Eiffel Tower came to an end–marking the arrival of one of the most famous and recognized landmarks on the planet. Guest doodler Floriane Marchix depicts this anniversary on our homepage today.
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Dec 5, 2014
Lina Bo Bardi's 100th Birthday
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Pioneering modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi was born in Italy in 1914 but spent much of her life in Brazil. She graduated from the University of Rome in 1939 and worked as an illustrator during World War II. Shortly after the war, she traveled to South America and decided to establish an architecture firm in Brazil. There, she designed many iconic buildings, including one of her most famous works, the São Paulo Museum of Art. The local legislature was worried that the museum would block views of the city, so Bo Bardi suspended the building high above a public square.
Beyond her career as an architect, Bo Bardi was also a publisher, teacher, and politically activist in both Italy and Brazil. She saw architecture as an expression of people's lives.