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John Lennon 70th birthday anniversary celebrated in new Google doodle
John Lennon, the late Beatles singer, has been celebrated with a special interactive Google doodle to commemorate what would have been his 70th birthday.
By Andrew Hough
Published: 12:25PM BST 08 Oct 2010
John Lennon 70th birthday anniversary Google Doodle Photo: GOOGLE
John Lennon (right) with wife Yoko Ono and son Julian in 1968. Photo: PA
When users go to the search engine's home page they are greeted to an illustration which has been designed in celebration a day before what would have been the singer-songwriter's milestone. Clicking on the logo it links to a 32 second track, which plays his popular song Imagine. As it plays the logo generates different pictures including that of a butterfly and flower before turning back to a black and white version of the Google name. Users can then click through to the YouTube version of it.
Lennon was born in Liverpool on October 9 1940 and became one of the most famous musicians together with the other three members of the Beatles. After they split he developed a successful solo career. He was shot dead by Mark David Chapman outside the New York apartment building where he and his wife Yoko Ono lived on the night of December 8, 1980. Chapman, 55, has been in jail since shooting Lennon outside the Dakota apartment building in Manhattan in front of his wife.
If he was alive Lennon would be celebrating his 70th birthday on Saturday. His anniversary is set to be commemorated by his widow, whom he married in 1969, on Saturday with a series of events in Iceland. The artist and peace campaigner will round off her the celebration of the former Beatle with a performance by the Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band. She will also be presenting awards to figures chosen for their contribution to world peace with a biennial award created in 2002.
Earlier this week it was disclosed that a set of John Lennon’s fingerprints seized by the FBI, is to be auctioned for at least $100,000 (£63,000) 30 years after the singer’s death. He was investigated by the FBI in the early 1970s for anti-war activity. Friday's design is perhaps Google's most ambitious interactive doodle to date. It launched its first fully-interactive Doodle in May to celebrate the 30th birthday of Pac-Man. The graphic allowed the Pac-Man character to be moved using the arrow keys on the keyboard.
It was later claimed that the Pac-Man Doodle led to almost five million wasted hours and cost the economy around $120 million dollars, with office workers unable to tear themselves away from the rudimentary computer game. Over the past 12 years Google has created more than 900 Doodles to mark various birthdays, anniversaries and major world events. Last year a series of Doodles showing UFOs and crop circles caused lengthy speculation before it was revealed that they were celebrating the birthday of HG Wells, the science fiction author.
The Gothic novelist Mary Shelly was honoured on the 213th anniversary of her birth with what was described by some bloggers as "the creepiest Doodle ever". Most recently, Google celebrated its own 12th birthday with an image of a birthday cake. The 50th anniversary of The Flintstones was celebrated by the search engine giant. The first Google Doodle was born in 1998 when the search engine's founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page replaced the logo with a picture of a Burning Man, to notify the world that they had gone on holiday to the Burning Man Festival.
