August 11: The day Microsoft released IE

1778: Birth of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, German teacher and patriot who is considered the ?father of gymnastics".

• 1778: Birth of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, German teacher and patriot who is considered the “father of gymnastics”. He founded the Turnverein (gymnastic club) movement in Germany and invented the parallel bars, the rings, the balance beam, the horse and the horizontal bar which are now standard equipment for gymnastics.

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• 1858: Birth of Christiaan Eijkman, Dutch scientist and physician whose demonstration that beriberi is caused by poor diet led to the discovery of vitamins. He investigated beriberi (Sinhalese word for “extreme weakness”) in the Dutch East Indies and was the first to show that the human disease too was caused by the lack of an essential food factor (later shown to be vitamin B1). He shared the 1929 Nobel Prize for Medicine for this work.

• 1919: Death of Andrew Carnegie, Scottish born multimillionaire and philanthropist whose munificent benefactions ran to over a $350 million and included the provision of libraries in Great Britain and the United States. (“A man who dies rich dies disgraced.”).

• 1921: Birth of Alex Haley, author of Roots: The Saga of an American Family. The blend of fact and fiction, drawn largely from stories recited by Haley’s grandmother, chronicles seven generations of Haley’s family history, from the enslavement of his ancestors to his own quest to trace his family tree. Roots became a TV miniseries in 1977.

• 1996: Microsoft released its Internet Explorer browser to compete with Netscape’s Navigator software. To attract users, Microsoft offered free subscriptions to websites.