December 8

© 1997, 1998 by Paul A. Schons

December 8, 1672

Death of Johann Christian Baron von Boyneburg in Mainz, Germany. He was a diplomat of the archbishop-elector of Mainz, Philipp von Schönborn. He was a principal negotiator of the League of the Rhine (1658) by which an alliance was struck between several small German states and France to defend against the re-establishment of Habsburg domination sought by the Holy Roman emperor, Leopold I.

December 8, 1815

Birth of Adolf von Menzel in Breslau, Germany (now in Poland). Menzel was a very popular Prussian patriotic painter. His paintings involving Friedrich the Great were favorites of the age.

December 8, 1816

Birth of Adolf Fischhof in Alt-Ofen, Austrian Empire (now in Hungary). Fischhof was a leader in the Viennese revolution of 1848. He was the first speaker to address the crowd at the building of the Austrian Estates on March 13, 1848. After the suppression of the revolution in 1849, he was granted amnesty but did not again enter public life. Some of his political theories and plans, did, however, continue to have influence.

December 8, 1854

The dogma of the Immaculate Conception is defined by the Roman Catholic Church.

December 8, 1881

The Ring Theater in Vienna, Austria burns. Over 700 people die.

December 8, 1896

Death of Ernst Engel in Radebeul, Germany. Engel was a statistician. He was head of the Saxon statistical office from 1854 to 1858 and the head of the Prussian statistical office from 1860 to 1882. He undertook a study of Belgian families in which he concluded that the income of a family is in inverse proportion to the proportion of income spent on food. This is now known as the "Engel curve". He also undertook a study of the size of the Prussian rye harvest in relation to the price of rye. This study was the first of its sort and led to the theory of supply and demand.

December 8, 1914

In World War I the German admiral Maximilian Graf von Spee is defeated by a British naval group near the Falkland Islands. Spee's flagship is sunk and Spee dies.

December 8, 1942

Death of Albert Kahn in Detroit, MI (born in Rhaunen, Germany). Kahn immigrated to the United States with his family as a teenager. He became an industrial architect, designing factories, primarily automobile factories. His first commission was in 1904 for the Packard Motor Company. He designed for most of the car companies, but most extensively for Ford, for which he planed over a thousand projects. Internationally his largest client was the Soviet Union for which he designed 521 factories.

December 8, 1955

Death of Hermann Weyl in Zürich, Switzerland. Weyl was a mathematician who developed contacts between pure mathematics and theoretical physics. He made significant contributions to quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. His book, Raum, Zeit, Materie (1918) presents his work on relativity. He had only had his appointment at the University of Göttingen for two years when the Nazis came to power and he wisely accepted an offer from the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

December 8, 1976

The U.N. General Assembly re-elects Kurt Waldheim of Austria as Secretary General for a second term.