January 9 Birthday
On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs walked onto a stage at Macworld, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a device that would render the cell phone industry obsolete. The iPhone combined three products — a phone, an iPod, and an internet device — into one. The crowd that day did not understand what they were seeing. Many tech journalists dismissed it. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer laughed. The physical keyboard was dead, the app economy was born, and within a decade the smartphone would become the most consequential technology since the printing press. Jobs was ill with the cancer that would kill him, but he performed as though nothing was wrong. He died four years later. On the same date in 1493, Christopher Columbus, sailing near Hispaniola, reported seeing three mermaids rising from the water. He wrote in his journal that they were "not so beautiful as they are said to be, for their faces had some masculine traits." He was almost certainly looking at manatees. Columbus's capacity to see what he expected rather than what was in front of him defined his career — he died insisting he had reached Asia. The manatee is a gentle, slow-moving marine mammal that has no predators and still cannot seem to survive human contact. Their closest living relative is the elephant. Simone de Beauvoir, born this day in 1908, published The Second Sex in 1949. The book's opening line — "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman" — became the foundational statement of second-wave feminism. She wrote it in six months, after a publisher who had initially asked her to write about mythology suggested she write about women instead. The book sold 22,000 copies in its first week in France and was immediately placed on the Vatican's banned books list. The English translation was famously truncated and garbled — it took until 2009 for a complete, accurate English version to appear. Richard Nixon, born this day in 1913, remains the most complex president of the 20th century. He opened China, created the EPA, signed the Clean Air Act, and desegregated southern schools faster than any president before or since. He also ordered the bombing of Cambodia, kept an enemies list, and recorded himself committing crimes in the Oval Office. He is the only president to resign. People born on January 9 fall under the zodiac sign of Capricorn. The birthstone is Garnet and the birth flower is Carnation. Historical events on January 9 include 1493: Columbus reports seeing mermaids (likely manatees) near Hispaniola, 1793: Jean-Pierre Blanchard makes first balloon flight in the Americas, 2007: Steve Jobs unveils the iPhone at Macworld. Famous people born on January 9 include Richard Nixon (1913), Simone de Beauvoir (1908), Bob Denver (1935).