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George Soros. Born August 12, 1930, Budapest, Hungary.
American Financier
George Soros, (born August 12, 1930, Budapest, Hungary), Hungarian-born American financier, author, philanthropist, and activist whose success as an investor made him one of the wealthiest men in the world. He was also known as a powerful and influential supporter of liberal social causes. Soros, who was born into a prosperous Jewish family, had his upbringing disrupted by the Nazis’ arrival in Hungary in 1944. The family split up and used false papers to avoid being sent to concentration camps. In 1947 they moved to London. Soros studied philosophy under Karl Popper at the London School of Economics, but he …
William B. Shockley. Died Aug. 12, 1989, Palo Alto, California., U.S.
American Physicist
William B. Shockley, in full William Bradford Shockley, (born Feb. 13, 1910, London, Eng.—died Aug. 12, 1989, Palo Alto, Calif., U.S.), American engineer and teacher, cowinner (with John Bardeen and Walter H. Brattain) of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1956 for their development of the transistor, a device that largely replaced the bulkier and less-efficient vacuum tube and ushered in the age of micro miniature electronics. Shockley studied physics at the California Institute of Technology (B.S., 1932) and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1936). He joined the technical staff of the Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1936 and there …
François Hollande. Born August 12, 1954, Rouen, France.
President of France
François Hollande, in full François Gérard Georges Hollande, (born August 12, 1954, Rouen, France), French politician who was president of France (2012–17). He earlier served as first secretary of the Socialist Party (1997–2008). The son of a physician in France’s northwestern Haute-Normandie région, Hollande was educated at the elite École Nationale d’Administration, where his classmates included future prime minister Dominique de Villepin and future Socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal, who would also become Hollande’s longtime companion. In 1979, while still a student, Hollande joined the Socialist Party, and he worked as an economic adviser in the administration …
George IV. Born August 12, 1762, London, England.
King of United Kingdom
George IV, in full George Augustus Frederick, German Georg August Friedrich, (born August 12, 1762, London, England—died June 26, 1830, Windsor, Berkshire), king of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and king of Hanover from January 29, 1820, previously the sovereign de facto from February 5, 1811, when he became regent for his father, George III, who had become insane. The eldest son of George III and Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, he had become by age 17, as he said, “rather too fond of women and wine.” His way of life and his close friendship with Charles James …
Erwin Schrödinger. Born August 12, 1887, Vienna, Austria.
Austrian Physicist
Erwin Schrödinger, (born August 12, 1887, Vienna, Austria—died January 4, 1961, Vienna), Austrian theoretical physicist who contributed to the wave theory of matter and to other fundamentals of quantum mechanics. He shared the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics with British physicist P.A.M. Dirac. Schrödinger entered the University of Vienna in 1906 and obtained his doctorate in 1910, upon which he accepted a research post at the university’s Second Physics Institute. He saw military service in World War I and then went to the University of Zürich in 1921, where he remained for the next six years. There, in a six-month …
Phonograph invented by Thomas Alva Edison
On this day in 1877, American inventor Thomas Alva Edison made perhaps his most original discovery, the phonograph, and his early recordings were indentations embossed into a sheet of tinfoil by a vibrating stylus