Every person’s name has a corresponding name day. As a car and movie fan, I have taken the 2000 movie Gone in 60 seconds, starring Nicolas Cage an inspiration. In the movie fifty cars are stolen in one night. The fifty cars are listed and given girls names. I have created selective coloration images…
Voyager 2 is a space probe launched by NASA on August 20, 1977, as a part of the Voyager program. It was launched on a trajectory towards the gas giants (Jupiter and Saturn) and enabled further encounters with the ice giants (Uranus and Neptune). The only spacecraft to have visited either of the ice…
Sir Sean Connery (25 August 1930 – 31 October 2020) was a Scottish actor. He was the first actor to portray the fictional British secret agent James Bond in motion pictures, starring in seven Bond films between 1962 and 1983. Connery originated the role in Dr. No (1962) and continued starring as Bond in…
Kenneth Baker (24 August 1934 – 13 August 2016) was an English actor, comedian and musician. He portrayed the character R2-D2 in the Star Wars franchise and appeared in The Elephant Man, Time Bandits, Willow, Flash Gordon, Amadeus and Labyrinth. While working with Purvis and the Minitones, Baker was selected by George Lucas to…
The Lockheed C-130 Hercules is an American four-engine turboprop military transport aircraft designed and built by Lockheed (now Lockheed Martin). Capable of using unprepared runways for take-offs and landings, the C-130 was originally designed as a troop, medevac, and cargo transport aircraft. The versatile airframe has found uses in other roles, including as a…
Honor Blackman (22 August 1925 – 5 April 2020) was an English actress and singer, known for the roles of Cathy Gale in The Avengers (1962–1964), Bond girl Pussy Galore in Goldfinger (1964), Albert R. Broccoli said Blackman was cast opposite Sean Connery in the Bond film because of her success in the British…
The solar eclipse of August 21, 2017, dubbed the “Great American Eclipse” by some media, was a total solar eclipse visible within a band that spanned the contiguous United States from the Pacific to the Atlantic coasts. It was also visible as a partial solar eclipse from as far north as Nunavut in northern…
Viking 1 was the first of two spacecraft, along with Viking 2, each consisting of an orbiter and a lander, sent to Mars as part of NASA’s Viking program. The lander touched down on Mars on July 20, 1976, the first successful Mars lander in history. Viking 1 operated on Mars for 2,307 days…
The Indianapolis Motor Speedway is a motor racing circuit located in Speedway, Indiana, United States, an enclave suburb of Indianapolis, Indiana. It is the home of the Indianapolis 500 and the Brickyard 400, and formerly the home of the United States Grand Prix and the Indianapolis motorcycle Grand Prix. It is located six miles…
Didier Auriol (born 18 August 1958) is a French former rally driver. Born in Montpellier and initially an ambulance driver, he competed in the World Rally Championship throughout the 1990s. He became World Rally Champion in 1994, the first driver from his country to do so. He was a factory candidate for Lancia, Toyota…
Margaret Hamilton (born August 17, 1936) is an American computer scientist. She directed the Software Engineering Division at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, where she led the development of the on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo Guidance Computer for the Apollo program. She later founded two software companies, Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton…
The iMac is a series of all-in-one computers from Apple Inc., sold as part of the company’s Mac family of computers. First introduced in 1998, it has remained a primary part of Apple’s consumer desktop offerings since and evolved through seven distinct forms. The iMac natively runs the macOS operating system. In its original…
The Panavia Tornado is a family of twin-engine, variable-sweep wing multi-role combat aircraft, jointly developed and manufactured by Italy, the United Kingdom and Germany. There are three primary Tornado variants: the Tornado IDS (interdictor/strike) fighter-bomber, the Tornado ECR (electronic combat/reconnaissance) SEAD aircraft and the Tornado ADV (air defence variant) interceptor aircraft. It first flew…
The Bayerische Motoren Werke Aktiengesellschaft, trading as BMW Group), is a German multinational manufacturer of luxury vehicles and motorcycles headquartered in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. The company was founded in 1916 as a manufacturer of aircraft engines, which it produced from 1917 to 1918 and again from 1933 to 1945, creating engines for aircraft that…
The final phase of flight testing involved free flights. These saw Enterprise mated to the SCA and carried to a launch altitude, before being released to glide to a landing on the runways at Edwards AFB. The intention of these flights was to test the flight characteristics of the orbiter itself, on a typical…
George Herman “Babe” Ruth (February 6, 1895 – August 16, 1948) was an American professional baseball player whose career in Major League Baseball (MLB) spanned 22 seasons, from 1914 through 1935. Nicknamed “the Bambino” and “the Sultan of Swat”, he began his MLB career as a star left-handed pitcher for the Boston Red Sox…
The Magellan spacecraft was a 1,035-kilogram (2,282 lb) robotic space probe launched by NASA on May 4, 1989. Its mission objectives were to map the surface of Venus by using synthetic-aperture radar and to measure the planetary gravitational field. The Magellan probe was the first interplanetary mission to be launched from the Space Shuttle,…
Gillian Anderson, OBE (born August 9, 1968) is an American actress. Her credits include the roles of FBI Special Agent Dana Scully in the series The X-Files, ill-fated socialite Lily Bart in Terence Davies’s film The House of Mirth (2000), DSU Stella Gibson in the BBC/RTÉ crime drama television series The Fall, sex therapist…
Mont Blanc is a mountain in the Alps, rising 4,805.59 m (15,766 ft) above sea level, located right at the Franco-Italian border. It is the highest mountain in Europe outside the Caucasus Mountains, the second-most prominent mountain in Europe (after Mount Elbrus in Russia), and the 11th most prominent mountain in the world. In…
STS-85 was the 23rd flight of Space Shuttle Discovery that performed multiple space science packages. It was launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on 7 August 1997. The main STS-85 payloads included the satellite known as Cryogenic Infrared Spectrometers and Telescopes for the Atmosphere-Shuttle Pallet Satellite-2 CRISTA-SPAS-02. During the flight, Davis used Discovery’s robot…
The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond IT specialists and hobbyists. It allows documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet according to specific rules of the Hypertext Transfer…
Neil Alden Armstrong (August 5, 1930 – August 25, 2012) was an American astronaut and aeronautical engineer who, as the commander of the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, became the first person to walk on the Moon. He was also a naval aviator, test pilot and university professor. On July 20, 1969, Armstrong and Apollo…
Firestone Tire and Rubber Company is an American tire company founded by Harvey S. Firestone (1868–1938) in 1900 initially to supply solid rubber side-wire tires for fire apparatus, and later, pneumatic tires for wagons, carriages, and other forms of wheeled transportation common in the era. Firestone soon saw the huge potential for marketing tires…
The Clay Street Hill Railroad was the first successful cable hauled street railway. It was located on Clay Street, a notably steep street in San Francisco in California, United States, and first operated in August 1873. The promoter of the line was Andrew Smith Hallidie, and the engineer was William Eppelsheimer. Accounts differ as…
Joseph Priestley FRS (24 March 1733 – 6 February 1804) was an English chemist, Unitarian, natural philosopher, separatist theologian, grammarian, multi-subject educator and classical liberal political theorist. He published over 150 works and conducted experiments in several areas of science. Priestley is credited with his independent discovery of oxygen by the thermal decomposition of…
Mikko Hirvonen (born 31 July 1980) is a Finnish former rally driver, and a current Rally-Raid driver, who drove in the World Rally Championship. He placed third in the drivers’ championship and helped Ford to the manufacturers’ title in both 2006 and 2007. In 2008, 2009, 2011 and 2012 he finished runner-up to Sébastien…
On 30 July 2003 at 9:05 a.m., at the Puebla plant in Mexico, Volkswagen produced the final Type 1, after 21,529,464 examples were produced globally during its tenure.[ Its production span of 65 years is the longest of any single generation of automobile, and its total production of over 21.5 million is the most…
Stig Blomqvist (born 29 July 1946) is a retired Swedish rally driver. He made his international breakthrough in 1971. Driving an Audi Quattro for the Audi factory team, Blomqvist won the World Rally Championship drivers’ title in 1984 and finished runner-up in 1985. He won his home event, the Swedish Rally, seven times. Outside…