On This Day for August 12 - Phonograph invented by Thomas Alva Edison, William Blake is featured, and more

Created: 2020-08-12 10:04 Updated: 2020-08-12 10:04 Notebook: On this Day in History

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August 12

FEATURED BIOGRAPHY

William Blake

FEATURED EVENT

1877

Phonograph invented by Thomas Alva Edison

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MORE EVENTS ON THIS DAY

2014: American actress Lauren Bacall—who was known for her portrayals of provocative women who hid their soft core underneath a layer of hard-edged pragmatism—died in New York. [Test your knowledge of women in classic cinema.]

2007: American television producer and talk-show host Merv Griffin—who hosted the long-running series The Merv Griffin Show (1962–63, 1965–86) and was the creator of two of television's most successful game shows, Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune—died in Los Angeles. [Take our pop culture quiz.]

1990: The most complete and best-preserved skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex was found on South Dakota's Cheyenne River Sioux reservation, and it was nicknamed Sue, after Susan Hendrickson, the paleontologist who discovered the dinosaur fossil. [ Sort fact from fiction in our quiz about dinosaurs.]

1966: During a press conference, John Lennon of the Beatles apologized for saying that his band was “more popular than Jesus now”; the comment had sparked protests and album burnings. [Sort fact from fiction in our quiz about the Beatles.]

1961: East Germany began construction of the Berlin Wall, which served as a symbol of the Cold War , separating East Berlin from West Berlin until 1989. [Read about five famous walls, including the Berlin Wall.]

1887: Austrian theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who shared the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics for his contributions to the wave theory of matter and to other fundamentals of quantum mechanics, was born in Vienna. [How much do you know about physics?]

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ALSO BORN ON THIS DAY

1930

George Soros
American financier

1954

François Hollande
president of France

1762

George IV
king of United Kingdom

1887

Erwin Schrödinger
Austrian physicist

1881

Cecil B. DeMille
American film director