Virgil Newlands (1879 - 1969)

Refresh this page to see various historical events that occurred during Virgil's lifetime.

In 1879, in the year that Virgil Newlands was born, on April 26th, the National Park - later renamed the Royal National Park - the 2nd oldest national park in the world, was formally proclaimed in New South Wales, Australia. It was the first park to have the word "national" in its name.

In 1882, when he was merely 3 years old, on September 4th, the switch to the first commercial electrical power plant in the U.S. - at 255-257 Pearl Street - was flipped by Thomas Edison. It lit one square mile of lower Manhattan and was powered by coal. The "electrical age" had begun.

In 1899, when he was 20 years old, the meaning of Chinese "oracle bones" was rediscovered. Farmers in China had been turning up the bones in their fields for generations but most often they were ground up and sold as medicine. The chancellor of the Imperial Academy and a friend noticed, before they ground the bones, that they had writing. The bones had been used around the second millennium BC for divination.

In 1902, at the age of 23 years old, Virgil was alive when the Aswan Low Dam (the old Aswan Dam) began construction in Egypt in 1899 and was completed in 1902 - making it the largest masonry dam in the world at the time. The dam was built on the Nile River in order to conserve water and regulate flooding, allowing for population increase along the Nile.

In 1969, in the year of Virgil Newlands's passing, in August, a previously planned small concert turned into a (free) more than 400,000 strong gathering of attendees and bands at Max Yasgur's farm in upstate New York - now called Woodstock. Just some of the 32 acts: Richie Havens, Joe Cocker, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Joan Baez, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe, Santana, The Band, and Sly and the Family Stone.