Time Travel Tuesday #timetravel a look back at the Adafruit, maker, science, technology and engineering world

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1791 – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, lauded Classical composer, dies from unknown causes.

Croce Mozart Detail

Born in Salzburg, he showed prodigious ability from his earliest childhood. Already competent on keyboard and violin, he composed from the age of five and performed before European royalty. At 17, Mozart was engaged as a musician at the Salzburg court, but grew restless and traveled in search of a better position. While visiting Vienna in 1781, he was dismissed from his Salzburg position. He chose to stay in the capital, where he achieved fame but little financial security. During his final years in Vienna, he composed many of his best-known symphonies, concertos, and operas, and portions of the Requiem, which was largely unfinished at the time of his death.

The circumstances of his early death have been much mythologized. He was survived by his wife Constanze and two sons.

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1868 – Arnold Sommerfeld, German theoretical physicist, is born.

Sommerfeld1897

In October 1893, Sommerfeld went to the University of Göttingen, which was the center of mathematics in Germany.[7] There, he became assistant to Theodor Liebisch, at the Mineralogical Institute, through a fortunate personal contact – Liebisch had been a professor at the University of Königsberg and a friend of the Sommerfeld family.[8]

In September 1894, Sommerfeld became Felix Klein’s assistant, which included taking comprehensive notes during Klein’s lectures and writing them up for the Mathematics Reading Room, as well as managing the reading room.[5] Sommerfeld’s Habilitationsschrift[9] was completed under Klein, in 1895, which allowed Sommerfeld to become a Privatdozent at Göttingen.[10] As a Privatdozent, Sommerfeld lectured on a wide range of mathematical and mathematical physics topics. His lectures on partial differential equations were first offered at Göttingen,[5] and they evolved over his teaching career to become Volume VI of his textbook series Lectures on Theoretical Physics, under the title Partial Differential Equations in Physics.

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1901 – Walt Disney is born.

Walt Disney 1946

Born in Chicago in 1901, Disney developed an early interest in drawing. He took art classes as a boy and got a job as a commercial illustrator at the age of 18. He moved to California in the early 1920s and set up the Disney Brothers Studio with his brother Roy. With Ub Iwerks, Walt developed the character Mickey Mouse in 1928, his first highly popular success; he also provided the voice for his creation in the early years. As the studio grew, Disney became more adventurous, introducing synchronized sound, full-color three-strip Technicolor, feature-length cartoons and technical developments in cameras. The results, seen in features such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Fantasia, Pinocchio (both 1940), Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942), furthered the development of animated film. New animated and live-action films followed after World War II, including the critically successful Cinderella (1950) and Mary Poppins (1964), the latter of which received five Academy Awards.

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1932 – Albert Einstein obtains an American visa.

456px Einstein 1921 by F Schmutzer restoration

In October 1933 Einstein returned to the U.S. and took up a position at the Institute for Advanced Study,[91][94] noted for having become a refuge for scientists fleeing Nazi Germany. At the time, most American universities, including Harvard, Princeton and Yale, had minimal or no Jewish faculty or students, as a result of their Jewish quota which lasted until the late 1940s.

Einstein was still undecided on his future. He had offers from several European universities, including Christ Church, Oxford where he stayed for three short periods between May 1931 and June 1933 and was offered a 5-year studentship,[96][97] but in 1935 he arrived at the decision to remain permanently in the United States and apply for citizenship.

Einstein’s affiliation with the Institute for Advanced Study would last until his death in 1955.[99] He was one of the four first selected (two of the others being John von Neumann and Kurt Gödel) at the new Institute, where he soon developed a close friendship with Gödel. The two would take long walks together discussing their work. Bruria Kaufman, his assistant, later became a physicist. During this period, Einstein tried to develop a unified field theory and to refute the accepted interpretation of quantum physics, both unsuccessfully.

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2013- NeoPixel Mini PCB – Pack of 5 is added into the Adafruit store!

1612 LRG

These are the smallest NeoPixel breakouts around! Tiny, bright RGB pixels to your project. These little PCBs are only 8mm x 10mm and have two sets of three pads on the back for soldering wires. These ultra-bright LEDs have a constant-current driver cooked right into the LED package! The pixels are chainable – so you only need 1 pin/wire to control as many LEDs as you like.

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