The Postcard
A National Series postcard that was published by M. & L. Ltd. The card was printed in Great Britain.
The card was posted in France on Saturday the 18th. June 1921 to:
Mademoiselle Blanche Mourvois,
3, Boulevard Pasteur,
Dreux,
E. et Loir.
The brief message on the divided back of the card was:
"Bons baisers."
Marble Arch
The Marble Arch is a 19th.-century white marble-faced triumphal arch in London. The structure was designed by John Nash in 1827 to be the state entrance to the Cour d'Honneur of Buckingham Palace; it stood near the site of what is today the three-bayed, central projection of the palace containing the well known balcony.
In 1851 the arch was relocated, and following the widening of Park Lane in the early 1960's is now sited, incongruously isolated, on a large traffic island at the junction of Oxford Street, Park Lane and Edgware Road.
The traffic going round the traffic island these days is very heavy and fast-moving; don't try and cross the road to get to the arch - you won't make it.
A Lynching in Georgia
So what else happened on the day that the card was posted?
Well, on the 18th. June 1921, in Moultrie, Georgia, a lynch mob burned an African-American murder convict at the stake immediately after he had been found guilty of the murder of a 12-year-old white girl.
John Henry Williams had been sentenced to an 8th. July hanging by the court in Colquitt County, Georgia, but was seized as he was being escorted out of the courtroom.
He was then taken by the mob to the scene of the crime. According to a reporter at the scene:
"Williams calmly smoked a cigarette as
the match was applied to the fuel around
him, and he made but little outcry as the
flames slowly burned him to death."
Richard M. Bloch
The 18th. June 1921 also marked the birth in Rochester, New York, of American computer scientist Richard M. Bloch.
In 1944 he helped design and program the first American digital computer, the Harvard Mark I.
Richard Milton Bloch, Grace Hopper, and Robert Campbell were the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I, an electromechanical computer which, when it began operation in 1944, was the first American programmable computer.
Richard M. Bloch - The Early Years
Bloch grew up in Rochester, New York, graduating from Benjamin Franklin High School. He then attended Harvard University on a scholarship, majoring in mathematics, and graduated in 1943.
Richard then immediately joined the Navy, and was assigned to the Naval Research Institute. There, he was recruited by Howard Aiken to work on the Mark I project, moving to Harvard in March 1944.
The Harvard Mark I became operational in 1944, and was used for war work, including computation of ballistic tables, Bessel tables for electronics and other applications, and calculations used by the Manhattan Project for the development of the atomic bomb.
Compilers and even assemblers had not yet been invented, so all programming was done in machine code punched into paper tape. Grace Hopper called Bloch the 'Mozart of the Computer', due to his ability to write a program in ink and have it run the first time.
Robert Campbell called Bloch the primary force in getting the Mark I into productive operation.
Bloch and Campbell kept notebooks in which they wrote out pieces of code that had been checked out, and were known to be correct. For instance, one of Bloch's routines computed sines for positive angles less than π/4 to 10 digits.
Grace Hopper just copied Bloch's routine into her own program when needed, rather than using the (slow) sine unit built into the machine. This was an early step toward the creation of subroutines.
Later, these subroutines were stored on separate paper tape rolls, although branching to one of these separate paper tapes and returning to the main program was done manually at the time by human operators.
Robert Bloch, Robert Campbell, and, most famously, Grace Hopper developed some of the earliest instances of subroutines, branching techniques, code compression, and debugging procedures while at Harvard.
Richard M. Bloch - The Later Years
Bloch left Harvard in 1947 and worked for Raytheon on the development of the RAYDAC. He then became general manager of Raytheon's computer division, and later vice president for technical operations at Honeywell.
Richard's later became vice president for corporate development at the Auerbach Corporation, vice president of the advanced systems division of General Electric, and chairman and chief executive of the Artificial Intelligence Corporation and the Meiko Scientific Corporation.
Richard Bloch died of cancer at the age of 78 on the 22nd. May 2000.
Charles Atger
Also born on that day, in Gréoux-les-Bains, was the French glider pilot Charles Atger. In 1952 he set the still-standing world record for the longest glider flight time.
Atger was born in Gréoux-les-Bains in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence region of France. His father was a naval officer, and Atger worked as a farmer on his parents' estate growing up.
Due to health issues with his lungs, Atger's parents forbade him from flying, but after a hunger strike and approval from a doctor, they conceded.
In 1938, Atger obtained his glider pilot's license. He passed his first degree license in 1939, but, due to World War II, he was unable to obtain his second degree.
After the end of the war, Atger returned home and began flying again in Saint-Auban and Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.
From the 2nd. to the 4th. April 1952, Atger flew for 56 hours and 15 minutes over the Alpilles, breaking the world record.
He was aiming for 60 hours, but fell short of this goal due to sickness. Bertrand Dauvin attempted to break Charles' record in 1956, but crashed after flying for 26 hours.
After this, the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale banned further attempts to break the record, due to the danger of the flight.
After the French government prevented him from flying due to hearing problems, Atger moved to Argentina, despite not knowing Spanish. Here, he worked as an agricultural pilot, amassing 33,600 total hours of flight time, another record.
On the 20th. February 1993, he returned to France and retired in his native village of Gréoux-les-Bains. Charles Atger died there on the 15th. March 2020 at the age of 98.
