1809 Alfred Lord Tennyson – British poet laureate (The Charge of the Light Brigade, In Memoriam, The Lady of Shallot, Ulysses, Morte D'Arthur) Tennyson was born into a chaotic and disrupted home. His father, the eldest son of a wealthy landowner, was disinherited in favour of his younger brother. Forced to enter the Church to support himself, the Rev. Dr. George Tennyson became a bitter alcoholic. However, he educated his sons in the classics, and Alfred Tennyson, the fourth of 12 children, went to Trinity College at Cambridge in 1827. At Cambridge, Tennyson befriended a circle of intellectual undergraduates who strongly encouraged his poetry. In 1830, Tennyson published Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. The following year, his father died, and he was forced to leave Cambridge for financial reasons. Besieged by critical attacks and struggling with poverty, Tennyson remained dedicated to his work and published several more volumes. In 1850 Queen Victoria named him poet laureate. At long last, Tennyson achieved financial stability and finally married his fiancée Emily Sellwood, whom he had loved since 1836. He continued writing and publishing poems until his death in 1892
1881 Leo Carrillo - Actor (The Cisco Kid, Pancho Villa Returns, Phantom of the Opera)
1881 Sir Alexander Fleming - Scottish bacteriologist who discovered penicillin in 1928 at St. Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, London, when green mould appeared on a culture dish. Scientists usually discarded these, but Fleming decided to make a close examination
1881 Louella Parsons - Gossip columnist who competed in print and on radio with her nemesis, Hedda Hopper
1892 Hoot (Edmund) Gibson - Actor (Death Valley Rangers, Frontier Justice, The Marshal's Daughter, The Prairie King)
1910 Charles Crichton – British film director (The Lavender Hill Mob, A Fish Called Wanda)
1911 Lucille Ball – Comedienne and actress (I Love Lucy, The Lucy Show, Yours Mine and Ours, Mame, Stage Door) She starred as a ditzy wife in the radio show My Favourite Husband. When CBS decided to launch the popular series on the relatively new medium of TV, Lucy insisted her husband Desi Arnaz be cast as her husband in the TV version. The network executives argued that no one would believe the couple were married, but Desi and Lucy performed before live audiences and filmed a pilot, which convinced network executives that audiences would respond well to their act
1917 Robert Mitchum - Actor (The Sundowners, Cape Fear, Scrooged, The Winds of War, The Big Sleep, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Out of the Past, The Longest Day, El Dorado) He was the brother of actor John Mitchum
1922 Sir Freddie Laker – British entrepreneur who pioneered cheap air-flights. His Laker Airlines went bust in 1982
1926 Frank Finlay – Scottish actor (Casanova, The Molly Mcguires, Longitude) He played Inspector Lestrade in the Sherlock Holmes movie, Murder by Decree, and he also played Professor Coram in the Sherlock Holmes episode The Golden Pince-Nez
1928 Andy Warhol – US pop artist who became a cultural icon. He coined the phrase, "In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes"
1930 Abbey Lincoln - Actress (For Love of Ivy, Mo' Better Blues)
1937 Barbara Windsor – British actress (EastEnders, Alice in Wonderland, Carry On films)
1938 Peter Bonerz - Actor (The Bob Newhart Show, 9 to 5, Catch -22) He has also directed many TV episodes (ALF, Murphy Brown, Home Improvement, Friends, The Bob Newhart Show)
1947 Oliver Tobias – Swiss-born British actor (The Brylcreem Boys, Sharpe's Waterloo, The Paper Man, The Wicked Lady, Smuggler) He played Captain Croker in the Sherlock Holmes episode, The Abbey Grange
1950 Dorian Harewood – Actor (Full Metal Jacket, The Jesse Owens Story, Pacific Heights, Amerika, The Falcon and the Snowman, Glitter, Strike Force, Looker, Beulah Land, Roots: The Next Generations, Gray Lady Down, Panic in Echo Park)
1951 Catherine Hicks - Actress (Marilyn, Peggy Sue Got Married, The Bad News Bears, Star Trek 4)
1956 Stepfanie Kramer - Actress (Hunter)
1958 Randy DeBarge – Musician and singer with the group DeBarge (Rhythm of the Night, I Like It, All this Love, Time Will Reveal)
1962 Michelle Yeoh – Malaysian actress (Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Tomorrow Never Dies, Sunshine, Memoirs of a Geisha, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, Star Trek: Discovery, Crazy Rich Asians, Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol 2, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Minions: The Rise of Gru)
1970 M. Night Shyamalan – India-born US director and screen writer (The Sixth Sense, Signs, The Village, The Lady in the Water) He has appeared in many of his movies
1976 Josh Schwartz – Writer and producer (Chuck, The O.C., Gossip Girl, Rockville CA)
1976 Soleil Moon Frye - Actress (Punky Brewster, The Liar's Club, The St. Tammany Miracle)
Died this Day
1623 Anne Hathaway – Shakespeare’s wife
1890 William Kemmler – Convicted murderer, died at Auburn Prison in New York. His was the first execution by electrocution in history. He had been convicted of murdering his lover, Matilda Ziegler, with an axe. Electrocution as a humane means of execution was first suggested in 1881 by Dr. Albert Southwick, a dentist. Southwick had witnessed an elderly drunkard "painlessly" killed after touching the terminals of an electrical generator in Buffalo, New York. In 1889, New York's Electrical Execution Law, the first of its kind in the world, went into effect, and Edwin R. Davis, the Auburn Prison electrician, was commissioned to design an electric chair. Closely resembling the modern device, Davis' chair was fitted with two electrodes, which were composed of metal disks held together with rubber and covered with a damp sponge. The electrodes were to be applied to the criminal's head and back
1964 Sir Cedric Hardwicke, age 71 – British actor (Suspicion, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Stanley and Livingstone, The Ten Commandments, Around the World in Eighty Days, Rope, I Remember Mama) He was the father of Edward Hardwicke
1978 Pope Paul VI, age 81 – He died at Castel Gandolfo
1991 Roland Michener, age 91 – Canadian politician and former Governor General. The Alberta native was a Rhodes Scholar, and set up the Order of Canada
On this Day
1786 Scottish poet, Robert Burns, was released from a marriage to Jean Armour. Burns and Armour met in 1784, and by early 1786, Armour was pregnant. She produced a marriage contract signed by Robert Burns, but her father, enraged at Burns, had the contract mutilated and partially destroyed. Despite this, Burns was still anxious to officially certify himself as single. To free himself from the marriage, whose validity was questionable, he appeared before the local government three times, did public penance in a church, and was finally acknowledged a single man on this day in 1786. However, he continued to see Armour and eventually married her properly. The couple had nine children, the last of whom was born on the day of Burns' funeral. Burns also had three children with other women
1787 In Philadelphia, delegates to the Constitutional Convention began debating the first complete draft of the proposed Constitution of the United States
1806 The Holy Roman Empire went out of existence as Emperor Francis I abdicated
1812 An armistice to end the War of 1812 was signed by Governor Prevost of British North America and General Dearborn of the United States. It was later revoked by the US Congress
1825 Bolivia declared its independence from Peru
1859 “Worth a guinea a box” appeared on Beecham Powders’ packets and advertising material to promote the British patent medicine. It was the first known advertising slogan
1866 An Imperial Statute established union between Vancouver Island and the mainland of British Columbia
1889 London’s Savoy Hotel was opened
1932 Ontario's Welland Canal was opened
1939 Regular air mail service was inaugurated between Canada and Britain
1945 At 8:16 a.m. Japanese time, a US B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped the world's first atom bomb, weighing nearly 9,000 pounds, over the city of Hiroshima. Approximately 80,000 people were killed as a direct result of the blast, and another 35,000 were injured. At least another 60,000 would be dead by the end of the year from the effects of the fallout. US President Harry S. Truman, discouraged by the Japanese response to the Potsdam Conference's demand for unconditional surrender, made the decision to use the atom bomb to end the war, and hopefully lessen the total loss of life. On August 5th, while a conventional bombing of Japan was underway, Little Boy, the nickname for one of two atom bombs available for use against Japan, was loaded onto Lt. Col. Paul W. Tibbets' plane on Tinian Island in the Marianas. The bomb had been delivered to the island just days before, by the ill-fated ship Indianapolis. Tibbets' B-29, named the Enola Gay after his mother, left the island at 2:45 a.m. on August 6th. Five and a half hours later, Little Boy was dropped, exploding 1,900 feet over a hospital and unleashing the equivalent of 12,500 tons of TNT. The bomb had several inscriptions scribbled on its shell, one of which read "Greetings to the Emperor from the men of the Indianapolis." There were 90,000 buildings in Hiroshima before the bomb was dropped, and only 28,000 remained after the bombing. Of the city's 200 doctors before the explosion, just 20 were left alive or capable of working. There were 1,780 nurses before, and 150 after, who were able to tend to the sick and dying. There were so many spontaneous fires set as a result of the bomb that a crewman of the Enola Gay stopped trying to count them. Another crewman remarked, "It's pretty terrific. What a relief it worked." Three days later, Nagasaki was also hit with an A-bomb
1962 Jamaica became an independent dominion within the British Commonwealth
1969 75 per cent of the windows in an eight-block area of downtown Kelowna, British Columbia were smashed when a US Navy jet broke the sound barrier. The US agreed to pay damages
1991 Tim Berners-Lee released files describing his experimental World Wide Web project on the Internet. Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist on fellowship at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, had been working on a hypertext system allowing documents to "link" to each other easily. By 1990, he had created the basic parameters of the World Wide Web, and a working version was posted on CERN's internal computers in May 1991. On August 6th, and again on the 16th, the 19th, and 22nd, Berners-Lee released Web files and requested input from other developers. By late 1991 and early 1992, the Web was widely discussed, and in early 1993, when Marc Andreesen and other graduate students at the University of Illinois released the Mosaic browser, Netscape's precursor, the Web rapidly became a popular communications medium. And aren’t we glad it did!
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