1839 General Nelson Appleton Miles – US Army officer who was one of the most successful but controversial officers in the Plains Indian Wars
1866 Matthew Henson – Explorer on the North Pole expedition from 1908 to 1909 with Robert Peary
1876 Charles Hamilton– British author who wrote under many pseudonyms, including Frank Richards, under which he created the school-boy characters of Harry Wharton and Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School
1879 Emiliano Zapata – Mexican revolutionary who lead peasants and indigenous people during the Mexican revolution
1896 Marjorie Rawlings – US author (The Yearling)
1900 Victor Young – US composer and conductor, mainly of film scores (Three Coins in the Fountain, Around the World in Eighty Days, Shane)
1901 Ernest Orlando Lawrence – US physicist and inventor of the cyclotron, the first subatomic particle accelerator, in 1936. He also invented and patented a colour television tube
1907 Benny Carter – US jazz multi-instrumentalist, composer and bandleader. He wrote music for films and TV (Snows of Kilimanjaro, Ironside)
1910 Sylvia Sidney - Actress (Beetlejuice, Les Miserables, Love from a Stranger, Raid on Entebbe, Mars Attacks!)
1919 Dino DeLaurentiis – Italian film producer (The Bible, Silver Bullet, Ragtime, The Dead Zone, Hannibal, Barbarella, War and Peace)
1922 Rory Calhoun – Actor (Angel, Apache Uprising, River of No Return)
1922 Esther Williams – Swimmer and actress (Take Me Out to the Ball Game, Dangerous When Wet, Neptune's Daughter, Million Dollar Mermaid)
1923 Jimmy Witherspoon - Singer (Ain't Nobody's Business, Some of My Best Friends are the Blues)
1926 Richard Anderson - Actor (The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, Escape from Fort Bravo, The Long Hot Summer)
1926 Urbie Green – Trombonist who played with Cab Calloway
1926 Webb Pierce - Singer (In the Jailhouse Now, Honky Tonk Song, Tupelo County Jail, I've Got Leaving on My Mind)
1932 Mel Tillis – Singer and songwriter (I Believe In You, Detroit City, I Ain't Never, Good Woman Blues) and actor (Every Which Way But Loose, Smokey and the Bandit II, The Cannonball Run, Uphill All the Way)
1933 Joe Tex – Singer (I Gotcha, Hold What You've Got, Skinny Legs and All)
1936 Keith Barron – British actor (Haggard, Madame Bovary, Dalziel and Pascoe: Deadheads, The Land That Time Forgot, Voyage of the Damned) He portrayed Bob Ferguson in the Sherlock Holmes episode The Last Vampyre
1937 Dustin Hoffman - Actor (Rain Man, Kramer vs. Kramer, The Graduate, Tootsie, Midnight Cowboy, Little Big Man, Dick Tracy, Hook, Search for Tomorrow, Agatha, Sleepers)
1938 Connie Stevens - Singer (Sixteen Reasons, Kookie Kookie) and actress (Hawaiian Eye, The Grissom Gang, Scorchy)
1939 Philip Balsley – Singer with the group The Statler Brothers (Flowers on the Wall, Bed of Roses)
1947 Ken Dryden - Former NHL goalie with the Montréal Canadiens and former Canadian Member of Parliament
1947 Larry Wilcox – Actor (Lassie, CHIPS, The Dirty Dozen, Sky Hei$t)
1949 Keith Carradine - Actor (Coyote Waits, Cowboys & Aliens, Dexter, Deadwood, Pretty Baby, The Long Riders, Nashville, The Duellists, Will Rogers Follies) He is the son of John Carradine, the brother of David and Robert, and the father of actress Martha Plimpton
1953 Donny Most - Actor (Happy Days, Edtv, Huckleberry Finn)
1980 Michael Urie – Actor (Ugly Betty, WTC View)
1986 Peyton List – Actress (Mad Men, FlashForward, Big Shots, Day Break, Windfall)
1988 Princess Beatrice Elizabeth Mary – The first child of Prince Andrew and the Duchess of York
Died this Day
1834 Joseph-Marie Jacquard - French silk weaver and loom inventor who started the textile technology revolution. His Jacquard loom utilised a punch card system to programme patterns into textiles. He died exactly one month after his 82nd birthday
1884 Sir William James Erasmus Wilson – British dermatologist and Egyptologist who used some of his personal wealth to bring “Cleopatra’s Needle” to London where it stands on the Thames embankment
1919 Frank Winfield Woolworth, age 67 – US merchant who created the five and dime store. A former farm labourer and shop assistant, he persuaded his employers to back his idea for a store that would sell everything for 5¢ or less. When it failed, he tried again offering items up to 10¢. It succeeded famously, setting off a chain with over 1,000 stores. He also funded New York's Woolworth Building
1991 James B. Irwin, age 61 – US astronaut who was the pilot of the Lunar Roving Vehicle. Irwin visited the surface of the moon during the Apollo 15 mission in 1971, during which he spent almost three days on the moon’s surface investigating the Hadley-Apennine site, 462 miles north of the lunar equator. The Lunar Rover was a specially designed vehicle used to transport Irwin and David Scott around the moon’s surface while collecting rocks and core samples
2005 Barbara Bel Geddes, age 83 – Actress (Dallas, Vertigo, I Remember Mama, The Five Pennies)
On this Day
AD117 Hadrian became emperor of Rome following the death of his father, Trajan
1576 Tycho Brahe began work in the first purpose-built observatory at Uraniborg, Denmark
1619 The first Lutheran service in Canada was held at Icy Cove, Hudson Strait, in the North West Territories, during the Jens Munck expedition. Rasmus Jensen, the ship's chaplain officiated
1815 Napoleon Bonaparte set sail for St. Helena, in the South Atlantic, to spend the remainder of his days in exile
1834 In Britain, the Poor Law Amendment Act was passed, which abandoned the system by which parishes look after their poor via a rate (or tax) for poor relief. In place of this, the workhouse for those requiring assistance was instituted
1864 Twelve governments drew up the first Geneva Convention to protect war wounded, personnel caring for them and medical supplies for their use
1876 Thomas A. Edison received a patent for his mimeograph machine, an automated method for creating multiple copies of a document. Four years later, Edison received a second patent for an improved model. The mimeograph machine preceded the electronic copier and was used through the early 1970s
1907 Bill Miner, the Gentleman Bandit also known as The Grey Fox, escaped from a penitentiary in British Columbia. In 1906, he had been jailed for 25 years for his part in a bungled train robbery in Kamloops, BC. After his escape, he fled to the US where he continued his bank robbing career until he was captured and incarcerated in a Georgia prison, where he died. The film, The Grey Fox, is based on his exploits
1918 General Sir Arthur William Currie mounted a four day assault on Amiens, France, with the Canadian Corps, backed by Australians. This marked the start of "Canada's Hundred Days," a string of almost continuous victories, during which the Canadian Corps played the major role in breaking the German lines and driving them back along the Western Front, culminating in the First World War armistice of November 11th. German General Erich Ludendorff called today the "black day of the German army"
1925 Toronto's first traffic lights were installed, at Bloor and Yonge Streets
1942 During World War II, six German saboteurs who secretly entered the US on a mission to attack its civil infrastructure were executed by electric chair in Washington, DC, for spying. Two other saboteurs who disclosed the plot to the FBI and aided US authorities in their manhunt for their collaborators were imprisoned. In 1942, under Hitler's orders, the defence branch of the German Military Intelligence Corps initiated a program to infiltrate the US and destroy industrial plants, bridges, railroads, waterworks, and Jewish-owned department stores. The Nazis hoped that sabotage teams would be able to slip into the US at the rate of one or two every six weeks. The first two teams, made up of eight Germans who had all lived in the States before the war, departed the German submarine base at Lorient, France, in late May. Just before midnight on June 12, in a heavy fog, a German submarine reached the US coast off Long Island, and deployed a team who rowed ashore in an inflatable boat. Just as the Germans finished burying their explosives in the sand, a young US Coast Guardsman, came upon them during his regular patrol of the beach. The leader of the team, George Dasch, bribed the suspicious Coast Guardsman, and he accepted the money, promising to keep quiet. However, as soon as he passed safely back into the fog, he sprinted the two miles back to the Coast Guard station and informed his superiors of his discovery. After retrieving the German supplies from the beach, the Coast Guard called the FBI, which launched a massive manhunt for the saboteurs, who had fled to New York City. Unaware that the FBI was looking for them, Dasch and another saboteur, Ernest Burger, decided to turn themselves in and betray their colleagues, perhaps because they feared capture was inevitable after the botched landing. On July 18, the same day that Dasch turned himself in, a second four-man team successfully landed at Ponte Verdra Beach, Florida. Dasch agreed to help the FBI capture the rest of the saboteurs. Burger and the rest of the Long Island team were picked up by June 22, and by June 27 the whole of the Florida team was arrested. To preserve wartime secrecy, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered a special military tribunal consisting of seven generals to try the saboteurs. At the end of July, Dasch was sentenced to 30 years in prison, Burger was sentenced to hard labour for life, and the other six Germans were sentenced to die. The six condemned saboteurs were executed. In 1944, two other German spies were caught after a landing in Maine. No other instances of wartime German sabotage within the US have come to light. In 1948, Dasch and Burger were freed by order of President Harry Truman, and they both returned to Germany
1963 Britain's Great Train Robbery took place at Cheddington, Buckinghamshire, when thieves stole in excess of £2.6 million (US$7.5 million) in banknotes. A gang of 15 men, including Ronnie Biggs, Buster Edwards, and Charles Wilson, robbed the Royal Mail train travelling from Glasgow to London. The secret train had already picked up mail and cash from banks in Scotland and northern England by the time the gang sprang into action near Cheddington. By faking a red light on the railways, the thieves ensured that the engineer would stop the train. The masked and armed men then ambushed the engineer, detached the back cars from the train, and unloaded the millions from the front cars into their getaway truck. The 75 postal workers who were riding in the rear cars did not even realise that there was a robbery in progress until the gang drove away. The workers’ attempts to call the police were thwarted because the thieves had cut the phone lines in the area. With a significant head start, the robbers made it to their planned hideout, Leatherslade Farm. After it was announced on the radio that law enforcement officials planned on searching an area that included the farm, the gang panicked and fled. However, the person in charge of cleaning up the hideout left without doing his job, so the leaders decided that they would have to return to get rid of any evidence left behind. Unfortunately for the robbers, the police beat them to the farm and found fingerprints everywhere. Scotland Yard officials tracked down 12 of the gang members, all of whom were found guilty, receiving 20 to 30 year sentences. Wilson escaped and eluded authorities for nearly four years until his capture in Montréal, Canada. In 1965, Biggs escaped from prison and fled to Brazil. Although he was eventually found, he successfully fought extradition because he had fathered a son in his adopted country, which forbids deportation of parents. In 2001, partly paralysed and in failing health, Biggs decided to turn himself in, hoping to receive the vital medical treatment that he could not afford in Brazil. Most of the money from the robbery was never recovered
1968 Richard M. Nixon was nominated for president at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach. Later that day, Nixon chose Maryland Governor Spiro T. Agnew to be his running mate
1973 Vice President Spiro T. Agnew branded as “damned lies” reports he had taken kickbacks from government contracts in Maryland and vowed not to resign. He eventually did resign
1974 US President Richard Nixon announced his resignation, which would take effect at noon the following day
1978 The US launched Pioneer Venus II, which carried scientific probes to study the atmosphere of Venus
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