Here is your Today in History -
Tonight's the third night of Kwanzaa. Tonight celebrates Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility) - To build and maintain the community together and make the members of the community's problems, everyone's problems and to solve them together.
December 28, 1869 -Patent for chewing gum granted to William Semple (patent number 98,304), on this date. Does your chewing gum lose it flavor on the bed post overnight?
December 28, 1895 -
Auguste and Louis Lumiere opened the first movie theater at the Grand Café in Paris, on this date . Other inventors, including Thomas Edison, were working on various moving picture devices at the time. But most of those other devices could only be viewed by one person at a time. The Lumieres were the first to project moving pictures on a screen, so that they could be viewed by a large audience.
The first film they showed to a paying audience was called Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory. It was a short, single shot with an immobile camera and it showed a concierge opening the factory gates from which dozens of workers walked and bicycled into the street. It ended with the concierge closing the gates again.
It wasn't a movie in the modern sense. It had no characters, no storyline. It was just an animated photograph. Much like most French New Wave films. The Lumiere brothers went on to make more than 2,000 films like this, each one less than a minute long depicting various scenes of human activity with titles like The Arrival of a Train, Boat Leaving the Harbor, and Baby's First Steps. They didn't call these "movies" or "films," they called them "views." It took other filmmakers to turn movies into a medium for storytelling.
The Lumieres were primarily documentary filmmakers. But in their film Demolition of a Wall they added a reverse loop to the film so that after the wall falls to the ground it miraculously picks itself back up. It was the first special effect ever uses in the history of motion pictures.
The Lumieres' movie house was a big success. Within a few months of its opening, more than 2,000 people lined up every night to buy tickets. But the Lumieres themselves thought that movies would be a passing fad. They told their cinematographers not to expect work for more than six months. Auguste went on to become a medical scientist and Louis went back to working on still photographs.
The Link below leads you to a compilation of some of The Lumiere Bros first films:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH6vb55K4x4
December 28, 1983 -
Dennis Wilson, original drummer of the Beach Boys, drowned while diving from a boat near Marquesas Pier. He was rather drunk at the time. You would think that someone in the Beach Boys could swim.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_KY_d9MQv8
December 28, 1987 -
R. Gene Simmons (not of Kiss fame) kills two coworkers and injures four others in Russellville Arkansas, and then surrenders. The busy man had killed 14 of his relatives over the Christmas holidays.
December 28, 1991 -
Jack Ruby's pistol, used to kill Lee Harvey Oswald, sells at auction at Christie's for $220,000. The perfect gift for the man who has everything.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rp3sX3A48g
And so it goes.
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