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Tu B'Av 2015



Whether a time for a romantic date, to catch up with friends, or catch up on cat videos, Tu B'Av is a good excuse to connect with the world around you. As nerds, the doodle team wanted to sweeten up our homepage with ways in which technology brings people together. The gesture may be as subtle as charging someone else's laptop or as bold as sending an affectionate text, but technology is fully engrained in the ways we express appreciation for one another.

We hope you enjoy our five quick animations of how love and technology go hand-in-hand!

101st Anniversary of the First Electric Traffic Signal System

Adoniran Barbosa’s 105th Birthday



Versão em português veja abaixo

Music tells stories, stirs emotions, and inspires change, all while getting us to nod our heads along or burst into wild swings. The right mix of melody and message is a language all its own.

Adoniran Barbosa spoke that language fluently. In Brazil, he’s known as one of the most influential samba singers the genre’s ever seen. But he did more than craft toe-tapping tunes. Adoniran uplifted the working men and women of São Paulo with his expressive storytelling, bringing the city’s malocas and cortiços to life through iconic songs like Saudosa Maloca ("Shanty of Fond Memories").

In his time, other artists and composers criticized Adoniran for using “wrong” Portuguese, the vernacular of the common people. Like most of history’s influencers, his unique musical identity resonated with his listeners through its brand of honesty and authenticity, vindicating his art as a musical milestone and a cherished relic of Brazilian samba. Adoniran’s drive to be different is why his music continues to inspire generations of samba composers.

229th Anniversary of the first ascent of Mont Blanc



Capped by snow and shrouded in mist sits Mont Blanc, the highest point in the Alps. Its summit, forever white, towers 15,000+ feet above Europe’s sea level. Lord Byron called it “the monarch of mountains.” And for centuries, no human had ever reached its peak.

Until 1786. That year, armed only with alpenstocks and measuring equipment (the trek was for scientific purposes), Frenchmen Michel Gabriel Paccard and Jacques Balmat set foot at the top. Now, 229 years later, thousands of hopeful hikers annually descend upon the Alpine towns of Chamonix, Saint-Gervais, and Courmayeur to recreate this exceptional feat, and take in this incredible view.

Latifa al-Zayyat’s 92nd Birthday



Today we pay tribute to novelist, activist, and scholar Latifa al-Zayyat (1923-1996). Her best-known novel, The Open Door, chronicles political unrest in midcentury Cairo through the eyes of its young protagonist, Layla. Layla is a semi-autobiographical character: Al-Zayyat, like Layla, was inspired to become an activist at a very young age. (You can see Layla's name, in Arabic, at the center of today's design.)

The Open Door was revolutionary, when it was published in 1960, not only for its narration by a female protagonist, but also for its use of natural speech and its dual challenge to political and cultural authorities. But Al-Zayyat's bravery extended beyond her fiction. She was incarcerated once in her twenties, when she was a leader in the Students' and Workers' National Committee, and again in her sixties, after she formed the Committee for Defense of National Culture. While a professor at Cairo University, Al-Zayyat advanced our understanding of how female characters function in Arabic novels, while also bringing Anglo-American literary scholarship into the Egyptian academy by translating works of New Criticism into Arabic.

Al-Zayyat, who died in 1996, wrote her memoirs while she was in prison. Her tireless work was driven by a belief that self-fulfillment comes through devotion to a broader community. "One can only find one's self," she wrote, "by initially losing it to a much wider issue than one's own subjectivity."

Lee Tai-young’s 101st Birthday

Gustavo Cerati’s 56th Birthday

Russian Geographical Society's 170th anniversary



In the early 1830s, the explorer Fyodor Litke paused his program of documenting little-known islands and circumnavigating the globe, returned to Russia, and took on his next challenge: the education of a five-year-old boy. Litke had been asked by Tsar Nicholas I to tutor one of his sons, Konstantin Nikolaevich.

The explorer taught his young pupil principles of navigation and appreciation for the natural sciences. This teaching relationship led to the establishment, in 1845, of the Russian Geographical Society, whose original mission was to "bring together and enable the brightest youth to explore the homeland." The Society created Russia's first national parks, and aims to protect rare species of plants and animals. Since its founding 170 years ago, the Society has never ceased its work.

Qixi Festival/Chilseok 2015



A love story for the ages unfolds every year on Chilseok, a folk holiday with origins in the Chinese Qixi Festival. According to popular myth, the celebration marks the one day a year when two separated lovers can reunite. Though the traditions vary from country to country, they can all be traced back to an old story of a young couple who are kept apart by a large river and forbidden to be together except for this one night.

On Chilseok, which takes place on the seventh day of the seventh month in the lunar calendar (and August 20th in this year’s standard calendar), crafty crows and magpies come to the rescue by forming a bridge over the water, allowing the two to finally reach each other. This romantic reunion is what Doodler Sophie Dao wanted to illustrate in today’s celebratory Doodle. We talked to her to find out how this Doodle came to be.

Mundaneum co-founder Paul Otlet's 147th Birthday



History’s most prolific thinkers had the vision to see how the world might look a year, a decade, even a century into the future. These innovators thought up today’s most advanced technology well before it was even possible to create it.

For many of us, it’s hard to imagine a world before the Internet. Belgian lawyer Paul Otlet lived in that world. In 1895, he worked with Henri La Fontaine to create the Universal Bibliography in Brussels, a repository of more than 12 million searchable index cards that came to be called the Mundaneum in the early 1900's.

Years later, Paul brought clarity and a future to the project through his vision for the Mundaneum: a universal system of written, visual, and audio information that people could access from the comfort of their own homes. The roots of that vision took hold just a few decades later when engineers planted the technological seeds that brought electronic information sharing to life.