Jorge Newbery
| Jorge Newbery | |
|---|---|
Newbery in 1909.
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| Born |
May 28, 1875 Buenos Aires Argentina |
| Died | March 1, 1914 (aged 38) Mendoza Province Argentina |
| Occupation |
Aviator Engineer |
| Relatives | Jorge P Newbery, Eduardo Newbery |
Jorge "George" Newbery, born Jorge Alejandro Newbery (29 May 1875 in Buenos Aires – 1 March 1914 in Mendoza Province), was an Argentine aviator, civil servant, engineer and scientist with ancestry from the United States of America. His father, Ralph Newbery (a dentist born in 1848), emigrated from Long Island to Argentina after the American Civil War (in which he is said to have taken part in the Battle of Gettysburg). Along with Alberto Braniff and Jorge Chávez, Jorge Newbery was one of the first Latin American aircraft pilots. He was also an engineer, and is considered to be the architect and founder of the Argentine Air Force.
Jorge Newbery was in the public eye between the 1890s and the first fifteen years of the 20th century, a very important time for Argentina which was characterised by an enormous immigration of Europeans which multiplied the country’s demographic importance by a factor of five. The population of Argentina, which represented 0.12% of the global population in 1869, would come to make up 0.57% of mankind in 1930. and the expansion of an economy of agricultural export which increased the GDP per capita from $334 in 1875 to $1,151 in 1913.
The Newbery years were years of unshakeable faith in the possibilities of Argentina, when Rubén Darío wrote in his famous Canto a la Argentina y otros poemas: “Argentina, your day has come!” These years saw the appearance of tango, Vaslav Nijinsky dancing in the Teatro Colón, the opening of the Buenos Aires Metro, the arrival of Guglielmo Marconi in Argentina in order to carry out the first radio-telephonic communication with Ireland and Canada. In 1909 Guglielmo Marconi won the Nobel Prize for Physics and in 1910 he visited Argentina to join in the Centenary celebrations. The estancieros of Argentina “throwing butter on the ceiling” in Paris. In 20th century Buenos Aires, young rich men used to have late night competitions throwing butter packets at the ceilings of restaurants using their knives as catapults, with the winner being whoever managed to stick the most pieces of butter to the ceiling. Since then, “throwing butter at the ceiling” became a popular saying in that country, referring to irrational waste and frivolity, and the first appearances of popular idols of sport and art. Buenos Aires ceased to be the “Great Village” and became the “Paris of South America”.
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Wikipedia