1673 Richard Meade – British physician whose patients included royalty and politicians. He made a significant contribution to preventative medicine writing on the treatment of smallpox, measles, the plague and scurvy
1876 Mary Roberts Rinehart – US mystery writer (The Circular Staircase, Haunted Lady)
1897 Enid Blyton – British children’s author (The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, Malory Towers, St Clare's, The Sea of Adventure, The Castle of Adventure, Little Noddy) She was born in South London, the eldest of three children. She was a talented pianist, but decided to train as a teacher so that she could support herself while writing in her spare time. By the time of her death in 1968, she had over 700 books and 10,000 short stories to her name
1902 Lloyd Nolan - Actor (The Caine Mutiny, Airport, Hannah and Her Sisters, Ice Station Zebra, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Peyton Place, Julia)
1913 Sir Angus Wilson – British author (Hemlock and After, The Old Men at the Zoo, The Mulberry Bush)
1915 Jean Parker - Actress (Little Women, Apache Uprising, The Gunfighter, The Texas Rangers)
1917 Dik Browne – Cartoonist (Hägar the Horrible, Hi and Lois)
1921 Alex Haley – Author (Roots, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Queen)
1925 Mike Douglas - TV host (The Mike Douglas Show) and singer (The Men in My Little Girl's Life) He died in 2006, on his 81st birthday
1928 Arlene Dahl – Actress (Night of the Warrior, Slightly Scarlet, Three Little Words, One Life to Live) She is the mother of actor, Lorenzo Lamas
1933 Jerry Falwell – US TV evangelist
1937 Anna Massey – British actress (A Doll's House, Frenzy, Anna Karenina, Hotel du Lac, Haunted, A Respectable Trade) Her father was Raymond Massey, who once played Sherlock Holmes, and her brother was Daniel Massey, who appeared in the Sherlock Holmes episode The Problem of Thor Bridge. She had been married to Jeremy Brett in the early 60s She also portrayed Lady Emily Balcombe in the Inspector Morse episode Happy Families
1944 Ian McDiarmid – Scottish actor (Star Wars series, Sleepy Hollow, All the King's Men, Touching Evil, Karaoke, Cold Lazarus, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Gorky Park) He played Hugo De Vries in the Inspector Morse episode Masonic Mysteries
1945 David Horovitch – British actor (Ivanhoe, Heat of the Sun, The Sculptress, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman) He played Inspector Slack in the Joan Hickson Miss Marple series
1949 Ian Charleson – Scottish actor of stage, screen and television (Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, Reilly: The Ace of Spies, Greystoke: the Legend of Tarzan)
1949 Eric Carmen – Musician, singer and songwriter with the group The Raspberries (Go All the Way) and solo (All By Myself, Never Gonna Fall in Love, Almost Paradise, Again, Hungry Eyes)
1950 Steve Wozniak – Inventor of the Apple computer, which launched the personal computer revolution. In the mid-1970s, Wozniak, who designed calculators at Hewlett-Packard, invented the Apple I as a demonstration for his friends in the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley. His friend Steve Jobs convinced him to build a model that could be sold in retail stores, inspiring the Apple II computer, which boasted a colour video display and floppy disk drive. Wozniak was injured in a plane crash in February 1981 and suffered temporary amnesia. He was away from the company for two years, during which time he finished his bachelor's degree at Berkeley
1953 Hulk Hogan (Terry Bollea) – Wrestler and actor (Mr. Nanny, Suburban Commando, Thunder in Paradise)
1954 Joe Jackson – British singer (Steppin' Out, Is She Really Going Out with Him?, On the Radio, Be My Number 2)
1965 Viola Davis – Actress (Doubt, Solaris, Far From Heaven, The Help, Eat Pray Love, United States of Tara, Jesse Stone: Sea Change, Disturbia, Century City, City of Angels, How to Get Away With Murder)
1969 Ashley Jensen – Scottish actress (Extras, Ugly Betty, Accidentaly on Purpose, Eleventh Hour, City Central, May to December, Agatha Raisin, The Escape Artist)
1983 Chris Hemsworth – Australian actor (Thor, Star Trek, Home and Away, The Cabin in the Woods, Red Dawn)
Died this Day
1519 Johan Tetzel – The monk who sold indulgences to raise money to pay for the building of St Peter’s in Rome, and by doing so, incensed and provoked Martin Luther
1919 Andrew Carnegie, age 83 – Scottish-born industrialist and philanthropist who devoted his vast wealth to libraries and universities
1956 Jackson Pollock – US painter, died in an automobile accident in East Hampton, NY
1977 Sir Frederick Williams, age 66 – British electrical engineer who invented an early form of computer memory which was based on a cathode-ray tube. His tiny experimental computer, which lacked a keyboard or printer, could store programs, whereas previous computers like ENIAC had to be rewired to execute each new type of problem. He also worked on code-breaking systems during World War II, and made important contributions to the development of radar
1994 Peter Cushing, age 81 – British actor (The Curse of Frankenstein, The Horror of Dracula, Tales from the Crypt, Top Secret!, The Mummy, Dr. Who and the Daleks, Star Wars, Hamlet, At the Earth’s Core) He did many movies for the Hammer House of Horror. He was in the movie Dr. Phibes Rises Again, with John Thaw. In the movie, The Great Houdini, he portrayed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He played Sherlock Holmes in a 1959 production of The Hound of the Baskervilles, the 1984 movie The Masks of Death, and in the 1967 BBC Sherlock Holmes series
On this Day
1767 England held its last burning at the stake
1772 A mysterious cloud, charged with lightning, lashed the island of Java, killing 2,100 people
1806 While hunting for elk along the Missouri River, Meriwether Lewis was shot in the hip. Lewis, along with William Clark, had led the Corps of Discovery on the journey to the Pacific two years earlier and were returning home, with St. Louis just over a month away. A few weeks earlier, Lewis and Clark had divided the party in order to explore additional new territory, and were to reunite at the junction of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers. On the morning of the mishap, Lewis spotted some elk on a bar in the river thickly overgrown with willows. He put to shore and set out to hunt accompanied by Private Cruzatte. Lewis was just about to fire his rifle when he was hit in the buttocks by a bullet. The blow spun him around and slashed a three-inch gash in his hip. Knowing that Cruzatte was blind in one eye and nearsighted in the other, Lewis immediately assumed the private had mistaken him for an elk, and cried out, "Damn you! You have shot me." When Cruzatte did not respond, Lewis feared Indians might have attacked him, and rushed back to the boat sending his men off to save Cruzatte. Twenty minutes later, the men returned with Cruzatte. They had seen no Indians, and Cruzatte denied having shot Lewis and claimed he had not heard his shouts. For the rest of his days, Cruzatte insisted he had not shot his captain. Lewis, however, had the offending bullet: A .54 calibre slug from a modern US Army rifle identical to the one carried by Cruzatte, and one unlikely to be in the hands of any Indian. The near-sighted Cruzatte probably mistook the leather-clad Lewis for an elk, though it is unlikely the private's guilt will ever be proven with absolute certainty. The following day, they caught up with Clark. Lewis’ wound was not serious, but he spent the next several days lying faced down in the bottom of a canoe as the party proceeded home
1860 The US’s first successful silver mill began operation near Virginia City, Nevada
1883 At Calgary, Alberta, crowds cheered as the first Canadian Pacific Railway construction train puffed into the tiny settlement, then just a tent city whose only permanent structures were the barracks of the North West Mounted Police at Fort Calgary and the stores of the Hudson's Bay and the I.G. Baker trading companies
1909 The SOS distress signal was first used by a US ship, the Arapahoe, off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina
1934 A group of federal prisoners classified as "most dangerous" arrived at Alcatraz Island, a 22-acre rocky outcrop situated 1.5 miles offshore in San Francisco Bay. The convicts, the first civilian prisoners to be housed in the new high-security penitentiary, joined a few dozen military prisoners left over from the island's days as a US military prison. Alcatraz was an uninhabited seabird haven when it was explored by Spanish Lieutenant Juan Manuel de Ayala in 1775. He named it Isla de los Alcatraces, or Island of the Pelicans. In 1854, the island had the distinction of housing the first lighthouse on the coast of California. Beginning in 1868 Alcatraz was used to house military criminals, and in 1907, it was designated the Pacific Branch of the United States Military Prison. In 1934, Alcatraz was fortified into a high-security federal penitentiary designed to hold the most dangerous prisoners in the US penal system, especially those with a penchant for escape attempts. The first shipment of civilian prisoners arrived on August 11, and later, more shiploads arrived, featuring other infamous convicts, including mobster Al Capone and George "Machine Gun" Kelly, another luminary of organised crime. In the 1940s, a famous Alcatraz prisoner was Richard Stroud, the Birdman of Alcatraz. A convicted murderer, Stroud wrote an important study on birds while being held in solitary confinement in Leavenworth Prison in Kansas. Regarded as extremely dangerous because of his 1916 murder of a guard at Leavenworth, he was transferred to Alcatraz in 1942. Stroud was not allowed to continue his avian research at Alcatraz. Although some three dozen attempted, no prisoner was known to have successfully escaped The Rock. However, the bodies of several escapees believed drowned in the treacherous waters of San Francisco Bay were never found. The story of the 1962 escape of three of these men, Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin, inspired the 1979 film Escape from Alcatraz. Another prisoner, John Giles, caught a boat ride to the shore in 1945 dressed in an army uniform he had stolen piece by piece, but he was questioned by a suspicious officer after disembarking and was sent back to Alcatraz. Only one man, John Paul Scott, was recorded to have reached the mainland by swimming, but he came ashore exhausted and hypothermic at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. Police found him lying unconscious and in a state of shock. In 1963, US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy ordered Alcatraz closed, citing the high expense of its maintenance. In its 29-year run, Alcatraz housed more than 1,500 convicts
1965 Rioting and looting broke out in the predominantly black Watts section of Los Angeles after white police officers arrested a black man suspected of drunk driving. In the week that followed, 34 people were killed and more than 1,000 injured in rioting
1992 The Mall of America, the biggest shopping mall in the US, opened in Bloomington, Minnesota. It was built by the same people who built the West Edmonton Mall, the biggest mall in the world at the time
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