On this day in 1516 the Reinheitsgebot was signed into law in Bavaria in what is present day Germany. The literal translation of Reinheitsgebot is “purity order” and it had to do with a very German thing: beer. It mandated that beer could only be made of barley, hops, and water. The order also made recommendations for punishing those that dared serve or sell impure beer and set guidelines for the price of beer in Bavaria.
The Reinheitsgebot was expanded to include a handful of herbs and spices around 1550. Yeast wasn’t recognized as a separate ingredient and was added to the list when it was discovered later on.
Some historians and critics argue that the Reinheitsgebot stunted the development of the German beer scene, though it certainly has given a strong identity to German beer. In 2015, the Reiheitzgebot was revised yet again, this time to allow beer to more broadly contain natural ingredients.
Today is the birthday of Annie Easley, mathematician and rocket scientist for NASA. She was born in 1933 in Birmingham, Alabama and defied odds for African-American females at the time, graduating as valedictorian of her high school and going on to attend university. While back in Birmingham, taking some time off from school, she registered to vote. The Jim Crow Laws required African American voters to pay a fee and take a literacy test. She was charged two dollars and after taking the test, decided to help her fellow African Americans prepare for the overtly lengthy test.
Annie started working for NASA while in Cleveland, after reading a newspaper article about other females working as “computers” there. She completed an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Cleveland State University while working at the Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory and continued increasing her knowledge and skills through courses offered and run by NASA.
During her time with NASA she worked on creating and applying computer code to more accurately assess power technologies for rocket propulsion and flight. Her work was built on by later rocket scientists and physicists for launching rockets and satellites into space.
When speaking on how she dealt with discrimination in the work place Annie said: “When people have their biases and prejudices, yes, I am aware. My head is not in the sand. But my thing is, if I can’t work with you, I will work around you. I was not about to…walk away. That may be a solution for some people, but it’s not mine.”
Today is the birthday of 15th President, James Buchanan. He served one term from 1857 to 1861, and remains the only bachelor president in America’s history. Historians often look at Buchanan as the worst president in our history, as he failed to hold the union together, and by the end of his term, with Lincoln’s future presidency confirmed, South Carolina succeeded from the Union.
Buchanan had wanted to be remembered as a George Washington, but his attempts to appease both the North and South only seemed to increase the polarization of the two. Certainly, he was faced with one of the toughest times in history to be president.
And today is the birthday of Max Planck. Max was born into a highly educated family in what is present day Germany. He became a physicist in the hopes of understanding the building blocks of the world, despite a professor advising against the field as ‘limited.’ In 1918, he received a Nobel Prize for his discovery of quantum theory. His contemporaries included Robert Andrews Millikan, Walter Nernst, Max von Laue, and Albert Einstein.
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