Saturday, March 27, 2021

March 27th in stamps Alfred de Vigny, Wilhelm Röntgen, Henry Royce

Here are some events that happened on March 27th. It could be an event or a person that died or was born on that day


1797 Born: Alfred de Vigny, French author, poet, and playwright (d. 1863)

Alfred Victor, Comte de Vigny (27 March 1797 – 17 September 1863) was a French poet and early leader of French Romanticism. He also produced novels, plays, and translations of Shakespeare.

He settled in Paris with his young English bride Lydia Bunbury, whom he married in Pau in 1825. He collected his recent works in January 1826 in Poèmes antiques et modernes. Three months later he published the first important historical novel in French, Cinq-Mars, based on the life of Louis XIII's favorite Henri Coiffier de Ruzé, Marquis of Cinq-Mars, who conspired against the Cardinal de Richelieu. With the success of these two volumes, Vigny seemed to be the rising star of the Romantic movement, though one of Vigny's best friends, Victor Hugo, soon usurped that role. Vigny wrote of Hugo: "The Victor I loved is no more... now he likes to make saucy remarks and is turning into a liberal, which does not suit him." Unlike Hugo and Alphonse de Lamartine, who moved gradually to the center and then to the left during the 1830s, Vigny remained pliantly centrist in his politics: he accepted the July monarchy, at first welcomed and then rejected the Second French Republic, and then supported Napoleon III. Vigny later denounced members of his inner circle whom he suspected of republican sympathies to the imperial police.

Although Vigny gained success as a writer, his personal life was not happy. His marriage was a disappointment; his relationship with Marie Dorval was plagued by jealousy; and his literary talent was eclipsed by the achievements of others. He grew embittered. After the death of his mother in 1838 he inherited the property of Maine-Giraud, near Angoulême, where it was said that he had withdrawn to his 'ivory tower' (an expression Sainte-Beuve coined with reference to Vigny). There Vigny wrote some of his most famous poems, including La Mort du loup and La Maison du berger. Proust regarded La Maison du berger as the greatest French poem of the 19th century. In 1845, after several unsuccessful attempts to be elected, Vigny became a member of the Académie française.

In later years, Vigny ceased to publish. He continued to write, however, and his Journal is considered by modern scholars to be a great work in its own right, though it awaits a definitive scholarly edition. Vigny considered himself a thinker as well as a literary author; he was, for example, one of the first French writers to take a serious interest in Buddhism. His own philosophy of life was pessimistic and stoical, but celebrated human fraternity, the growth of knowledge, and mutual assistanc as high values. He was the first in literary history to use the word spleen in the sense of woe, grief, gall, descriptive of the condition of the soul of modern man. In his later years he spent much time preparing the posthumous collection of poems now known as Les Destinées, for which his intended title was Poèmes philosophiques. It concludes with Vigny's final message to the world, L'Esprit pur.

French stamps depicting Alfred de Vigny

France 1963 Alfred de Vigny, French author, poet, and playwright


1845 Born: Wilhelm Röntgen, German physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1923)

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (27 March 1845 – 10 February 1923) was a German mechanical engineer and physicist, who, on 8 November 1895, produced and detected electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range known as X-rays or Röntgen rays, an achievement that earned him the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901. In honour of his accomplishments, in 2004 the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) named element 111, roentgenium, a radioactive element with multiple unstable isotopes, after him.

Today, in Remscheid-Lennep, 40 kilometers east of Düsseldorf, the town in which Röntgen was born in 1845 is the Deutsches Röntgen-Museum.
In Würzburg, where he discovered the X-rays, a non-profit organization maintains his laboratory and provides guided tours to the Röntgen Memorial Site.

World Radiology Day: The International Day of Radiology is an annual event promoting the role of medical imaging in modern healthcare. It is celebrated on 8 November each year, coincides with the anniversary of the discovery of X-rays by Wilhelm Roentgen in 1895. It was first introduced in 2012, as a joint initiative, by the European Society of Radiology (ESR), the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), and the American College of Radiology (ACR).

Röntgen Peak in Antarctica is named after Wilhelm Röntgen

Stamps from India, Germany and Spain depicting Wilhelm Röntgen

1995 Wilhelm Röntgen Germany X Rays Discoverer Medicine Health Physicist

GERMANY 150th Anniversary of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen

GERMANY  Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen.jpg


Spain 1967 MNH, Radiology Congress, Radiology Congress, Röntgen, Medicine


1863 Born: Henry Royce, English engineer and businessman, founded Rolls-Royce Limited (d. 1933)

Sir Frederick Henry Royce, 1st Baronet(27 March 1863 – 22 April 1933) was an English engineer famous for his designs of car and aeroplane engines with a reputation for reliability and longevity. With Charles Rolls (1877 – 1910) and Claude Johnson (1864 – 1926), he founded Rolls-Royce.

Rolls-Royce initially focused on large 40-50 horsepower motor cars, the Silver Ghost and its successors. Royce produced his first aero engine shortly after the outbreak of the First World War and aircraft engines became Rolls-Royce's principal product.

Royce's health broke down in 1911 and he was persuaded to leave his factory in the Midlands at Derby and, taking a team of designers, move to the south of England spending winters in the south of France. He died at his home in Sussex in the spring of 1933.

Stamp and a booklet from Great Britain, Liechtenstein and Jersey depicting Rolls-Royce cars

Great Britain 1982 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost & Silver Spirit

Liechtenstein Rolls Royce Phantom II

Jersey 1912 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost on 2010 stamp

Rolls Royce, booklet


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