In 2015, a new HTTPS error code called 451 was approved by the Internet Steering Group for sites and pages that can’t be accessed by the person requesting the resource due to the request potentially breaking the censorship laws of the countries involved. The person who submitted the code, Tim Bray (co-author of XML Specification) chose 451 for the error code as a nod to Ray Bradbury and his iconic book Fahrenheit 451.

Who was Ray Bradbury?
Well, he was an American writer who was born on 22nd August 1920 to Esther (née Moberg) Bradbury who was a Swedish immigrant and her husband Leonard Spaulding Bradbury, a man of English ancestry in Waukegan in the US State of Illinois. He was given the middle name Douglas as a tribute to actor Douglas Fairbanks. Ray obtained a love for writing from his aunt reading him short stories when he was a little boy. He only dated one girl, Marguerite McClure and she ended up becoming his wife in 1947 and the two had 4 children together.

Ray Bradbury began writing during the Golden Age of Science Fiction, starting with science fiction comic books before moving onto literary works and his first major work as The Martian Chronicles in 1950. That book is considered a key Golden Age narrative with the plot being about the conflict between the native Martians of the Planet Mars and their new neighbours, humans who are colonising the Red Planet. His most famous work Fahrenheit 451 came about in 1953. The book is about a society that bans and censors all books and this leads to ideas being censored. The number 451 was chosen because Bradbury had been told that was the temperature that paper can catch fire at. 451 degrees Fahrenheit is 233 degrees Celsius in metric measurements. The book has gained notoriety for its depiction of violence, profanity and a negative attitude towards religion. It is said that he supposedly wrote it within 9 days. Other books he wrote include:
The Illustrated Man (1951), a coming of age book called Dandelion Wine (1957) and Green Shadows, White Whale (1992) which was a fictionalized memoir. The New York Times declared Bradbury to be “the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream” but strangely enough, Ray himself considered The Martian Chronicles to be fantasy. These mentioned works of his and many others were adapted into films, TV Shows and comic books.

Another thing he penned was a cherished Halloween story called The Halloween Tree which entails the history of the Celtic pagan festival of Samhaim (pronounced Sow-in or Sow-wen, thanks Arthur Dark of Hollywood Graveyard for pronouncing it correctly in your Halloween special of Hollywood Graveyard) and Halloween.
Ray Bradbury didn’t just write books because he also wrote and consulted on screenplays and television scripts like It came from Outer Space, a 1953 American science fiction film and he also worked on a 1956 film adaption of Moby Dick.
As Ray got older, technology marched on. The invention and growing popularity of e-books and electronic media’s impact on written books worried him as it made him fear a world where society no longer valued actual reading. He was also concerned about who had control over the digital sources of electronic and broadcast media. He was widowed in 2003, 9 years before he died in 2012. Oddly enough, he had his own grave bought and marked years before he died and that is located in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery, Los Angeles in the US State of California.