Repo Man

Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton in Repo Man

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 4 February Radium synthesised, 1936 The element radium had been discovered by Marie Sklodowska-Curie and her husband Pierre in 1898. They had taken a ton of pitchblende and from it separated out a tenth of a gram of radium chloride. From that, by 1910, Marie Curie had managed to isolate pure radium, along the way coining the word “radioactivity”. Sources for this useful metal (it was what made luminous watch faces and instrument dials glow) were scarce and when the Austrian government banned further export of silver-mine tailings, the search was on to find other radioactive elements, and to produce radium … Read more

Bobby

Sharon Stone and Demi Moore in Bobby

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 20 November Robert Kennedy born, 1925 On this day in 1925, Robert Kennedy was born. The seventh child and third son of Joseph Kennedy Sr – who had made a fortune out of brokering deals with Hollywood studios and then importing whisky into post-Prohibition America – Robert was, like his father, not particularly academic but, having been gifted a good education by his socially and politically ambitious father, made it to Harvard, then went on to law school. Thanks to the manoeuvring of his father, Robert rose quickly, working first at the US Department of Justice, then for scourge-of-the-communists Joe McCarthy, … Read more