It's the birthday of literary critic and James Joyce scholar William York Tindall, (books by this author)
born in Williamstown, Vermont (1903). He was a literature student when
he discovered James Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) while traveling in
Paris. He became obsessed with Joyce, and read all of his works. When
he returned to the U.S., he started teaching a course in modern
literature at New York University, and he was one of the first
professors in the United States to assign Ulysses to his students. The
book was still banned in the U.S. at the time, so his students had to
read a bootlegged copy that was chained to a desk in the library.
It was on this day in 1876 that Alexander Graham Bell received patent No. 174,465 for the telephone.
He filed for his patent on the same day as a Chicago electrician named
Elisha Gray filed for a patent on basically the same device. Bell only
beat Gray by two hours.
It was on this day in 1933 that a man named Charles Darrow trademarked the board game Monopoly.
Darrow based the game on an earlier game called "The Landlord's Game,"
which had been designed by a woman named Elizabeth Magie to teach
people about the evils of capitalism.
It was on this day in 1917 that the Victor Talking Machine Company released the first jazz record in American history.
There were various terms for this new music. It was called "ratty
music," "gut-bucket music," and "hot music." Historians aren't sure how
it came to be called jazz, but it's believed that the word may have
come from a West African word for speeding things up. It was also a
slang term for sex.
CORRECTION: Actually it all happened on March 7.
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