Grock
Charles Adrien Wettach  

(1880-1959)

Swiss clown whose blunders with the piano and the violin became proverbial.

  He was the son of a watchmaker and began his performance career by partnering with his father in a cabaret act. He then became an amateur acrobat and was allowed to spend each summer with a circus, where he performed first as a tumbler and then as a violinist, pianist, and xylophonist. He became the partner of a clown named Brick and changed his name to Grock in 1903. Together they appeared in France,North Africa, and South America. When Brick married, Grock joined the celebrated clown Antonet (Umberto Guillaume). At Berlin, appearing on a stage instead of in an arena, they failed at first; but, by mastering the stage technique, they obtained a London engagement in 1911. Two years later Grock perfected those adventures of a simpleton among musical instruments that made many a European audience laugh—for instance, at his wonder as to where the strings had gone when he held his fiddle the wrong side up.

-Encyclopedia Britannica

Klaus Kinski 

as

Count Dracula
in

Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979)

 "I would never except it if it wouldn't be in me, if I couldn't feel the metamorphosis."

Atlas Textbook Of Dentistry Including Diseases Of The Mouth

 Gustav Preiswerk

1906

Nate Salsbury (1846 - 1902) 
 In 1875 he organized the musical comedy troupe, Salsbury's Troubadours.
 In 1884, he became co-owner of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.
 In 1895 he established "Black America," an acting, singing, and tumbling extravaganza with a cast of 600 blacks. 


  Info from Yale University Library Online

Reggie Nalder (The face that launched a thousand trips)

 as Kurt Barlow in the 1979 TV miniseries, Salem's Lot.

Francois Fratellini (1879-1951)

The 'poetic clown'.Postcard photo by Studio V. Henry.

Francois Fratellini was a member of the famous French/Italian circus family, The Fratellini Family, who performed in the late 1900s and 1920s. After appearing at the Circus Medrano in Paris, France, after World War I, they became so successful that it sparked a strong resurgence of interest in the circus. By 1923, the Fratellini brothers had become the darlings of the Parisian intellectuals. They were lauded in print and worshiped by adoring fans who would show up at the circus just in time for the Fratellini entree.He also appeared in the 1923 film The Clairvoyant with Sarah Bernhardt.

Phrenologists believed the shape and size of various areas of the brain (and therefore the overlying skull) determined personality. This is a plaster copy of a cast from the head of a 24 year-old woman called Victoire. She experienced microcephaly. Microcephaly is a disease in which the brain does not develop normally and her head circumference is therefore reduced. Phrenological heads such as this were used for demonstrations by phrenological lecturers. They were also used for training phrenologists. Phrenology was popular in the 1800s. However, it became controversial within medical circles, and was eventually dismissed by the medical profession as unfounded. Phrenology was still studied in the UK until 1967, when the British Phrenological Society finally closed.

                    http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/objects/display.aspx?id=92696

Anton Giulio and Arturo Bragaglia - Polyphysignomical Portrait of Umberto Boccioni, 1913

The first known photograph ever taken of a moving image produced by John Logie Baird's "Televisor". The subject is Oliver Hutchinson, Baird's business partner.
circa 1926

Baird was a prominent pioneer and made major advances in the field of television.

In early 1923, Baird built what was to become the world's first working television set using items including an old hatbox and a pair of scissors, some darning needles, a few bicycle light lenses, a used tea chest, and sealing wax and glue that he purchased.

In February 1924, he demonstrated to the Radio Times that a semi-mechanical analogue television system was possible by transmitting moving silhouette images. In July of the same year, he received a 1000-volt electric shock, but survived with only a burnt hand. 

Baird gave the first public demonstration of moving silhouette images by television at Selfridges department store in London in a three-week series of demonstrations beginning on 25 March 1925.

In his laboratory on 2 October 1925, Baird successfully transmitted the first television picture with a greyscale image: the head of a ventriloquist's dummy nicknamed "Stooky Bill" in a 30-line vertically scanned image, at five pictures per second. 
Baird went downstairs and fetched an office worker, 20-year-old William Edward Taynton, to see what a human face would look like, and Taynton became the first person to be televised in a full tonal range.Looking for publicity, Baird visited the Daily Express newspaper to promote his invention. The news editor was terrified: he was quoted by one of his staff as saying: "For God's sake, go down to reception and get rid of a lunatic who's down there. He says he's got a machine for seeing by wireless! Watch him — he may have a razor on him."

Portrait bust of King Akhenaten, from studio of Thutmose, Amarna, Egypt, stone, h: NA,
(Dynasty XVIII, New Kingdom), 1,348-1,335 B.C. (Museum of Art, Egyptian Museum, Berlin)

-noted for abandoning traditional Egyptian polytheism and introducing worship centered on the Aten, which is sometimes described as monotheistic or henotheistic.

-Akhenaten tried to bring about a departure from traditional religion, yet in the end it would not be accepted. After his death, traditional religious practice was gradually restored, and when some dozen years later rulers without clear rights of succession from the Eighteenth Dynasty founded a new dynasty, they discredited Akhenaten and his immediate successors, referring to Akhenaten himself as "the enemy" in archival records.

-Much of the art and building infrastructure created during Akhenaten's reign was defaced or destroyed in the period following his death, particularly during the reigns of Horemheb and the early Nineteenth Dynasty kings. Stone building blocks from Akhenaten's construction projects were later used as foundation stones for subsequent rulers' temples and tombs.

The Madonna of Nagasaki
In 1929, a wooden alter piece with a madonna was crafted for the Urakami Cathedral. The wooden madonna was inspired by Murillo's painting of the Immaculate Conception.
On Aug 9th, 1945, the US atomic bomb, nicknamed "Fat Boy" was dropped on Nagasaki.
The Cathedral was destroyed. The head of the Madonna was pulled from the rubble by Kaemon Noguchi, a discharged soldier and Catholic priest.
He kept it for 30 years before giving it to Yakichi Kataoka, who kept it at the Jushin Women's College for 15 years. In 1990 Kataoka gave it back to the rebuilt cathedral which then placed it in the Atomic Bomb Museum. 10 years later it was again placed back in the cathedral.

Target of image Smashers

                                            Battered but IndestructibleSan Lorenzo head, 1947

Photo Matthew W. Stirling

On October 23, 1956, around two hundred thousand Hungarians gathered in Budapest to demonstrate in sympathy for the Poles who had just gained political reform during the Polish October. The Hungarians broadcast sixteen demands over the radio, one of them being the dismantling of Stalin's statue. A hundred thousand Hungarian revolutionaries demolished the Stalin statue, leaving only his boots, in which they planted a Hungarian flag. The bronze inscribed name of the Hungarians' leader, teacher and "best friend" was ripped off from the pedestal. Before the toppling of the statue, someone had placed a sign over Stalin's mouth that read "RUSSIANS, WHEN YOU RUN AWAY DON'T LEAVE ME BEHIND!" The revolutionaries chanted "Russia go home!" while pulling down the statue. “W.C.” and other insulting remarks were scrawled over the fragmented parts of the statue.
The account of the incident by Sandor Kopacsi, head of Budapest’s police: "[The demonstrators] placed [...] a thick steel rope around the neck of the 25-metre tall Stalin’s statue while other people, arriving in trucks with oxygen cylinders and metal cutting blowpipes, were setting to work on the statue’s bronze shoes. [...] An hour later the statue fell down from its pedestal."
On the 4th of November, a large Soviet force invaded Budapest and other regions of the country. Hungarian resistance continued until 10 November. Over 2,500 Hungarians and 700 Soviet troops were killed in the conflict, and 200,000 Hungarians fled as refugees. Mass arrests and denunciations continued for months thereafter. By January 1957, the new Soviet-installed government had suppressed all public opposition.