Two Seeming Unrelated Events
by jwhang67 · 5 minutes ago
September 18, 1945
Blind Willie Johnson dies in Beaumont, Texas. Blind Willie Johnson was blinded at the age of seven by his stepmother who threw lye in his face. Johnson lived as a pauper all his life; he died of malaria fever which contracted while sleeping on a wet mattress in the burnt out remains of his home which he could not afford to repair. He was taken to a hospital but was turned away because he was blind. (Some say it was because he was black.) A seminal blues pioneer, Johnson's influence spanned from Willie Nelson to Bob Dylan to Eric Clapton to Led Zeppelin, yet he died penniless and practically forgotten and was buried in an unmarked grave.
September 12, 2013
NASA officially confirms that the Voyager 1 space probe has passed into interstellar space, Launched 36 years earlier in 1977, it had passed through the termination shock, the heliosheath, and the heliopause, thus becoming the first man-made object to exit the solar system. At the time of the event, which happened in August 2012, the spacecraft was 11.25 billion miles from the sun. (By comparison, the earth orbits between 94.5 and 91.4 million miles from the sun.)
What ties these together...
On the Voyager spacecraft is a golden record. This disc is intended as a greeting from our planet to intelligent life outside our solar system. It includes pictures and sounds of earth, as well as spoken greetings in 55 ancient and modern languages. And contained among the works of Beethoven, Bach, and Stravinsky is a song, "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" by Blind Willie Johnson.
by jwhang67 · 5 minutes ago
September 18, 1945
Blind Willie Johnson dies in Beaumont, Texas. Blind Willie Johnson was blinded at the age of seven by his stepmother who threw lye in his face. Johnson lived as a pauper all his life; he died of malaria fever which contracted while sleeping on a wet mattress in the burnt out remains of his home which he could not afford to repair. He was taken to a hospital but was turned away because he was blind. (Some say it was because he was black.) A seminal blues pioneer, Johnson's influence spanned from Willie Nelson to Bob Dylan to Eric Clapton to Led Zeppelin, yet he died penniless and practically forgotten and was buried in an unmarked grave.
September 12, 2013
NASA officially confirms that the Voyager 1 space probe has passed into interstellar space, Launched 36 years earlier in 1977, it had passed through the termination shock, the heliosheath, and the heliopause, thus becoming the first man-made object to exit the solar system. At the time of the event, which happened in August 2012, the spacecraft was 11.25 billion miles from the sun. (By comparison, the earth orbits between 94.5 and 91.4 million miles from the sun.)
What ties these together...
On the Voyager spacecraft is a golden record. This disc is intended as a greeting from our planet to intelligent life outside our solar system. It includes pictures and sounds of earth, as well as spoken greetings in 55 ancient and modern languages. And contained among the works of Beethoven, Bach, and Stravinsky is a song, "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground" by Blind Willie Johnson.
