1812 Richard Marsh Hoe – British born US inventor of the rotary printing press, which greatly improved upon other patents, including the Napier printing press
1818 Sir David Macpherson - Scottish-born US politician and railway builder
1818 Richard Jordan Gatling – US inventor of the Gatling gun, precursor of the modern machine gun. It was a crank-operated multi-barrelled gun, which he patented in 1862
1852 Herbert Henry Asquith – British Prime Minister who put through radical changes and introduced old age pensions
1880 H.L. Mencken - Author (The Smart Set, American Mercury, The American Language) and a newspaper journalist and critic for the Baltimore Sun
1888 Maurice Chevalier – French actor and singer (Gigi, Fanny, Can-Can)
1892 Alfred Knopf – US publisher who founded Alfred A. Knopf, Incorporated
1913 Jesse Owens – US athlete and gold medal winner at the Berlin Olympics where he was snubbed by Hitler because he was black
1925 Dickie Moore - Actor (Our Gang films, Miss Annie Rooney, Oliver Twist, Little Men, Sergeant York, Cody of the Pony Express)
1927 Freddie Jones – British actor (Sword of Honour, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Juggernaut, The Elephant Man, Firefox, Krull, Dune) He played Harry Field Sr, in the Inspector Morse episode, Who Killed Harry Field? He also played Cragwitch in the movie, Young Sherlock Holmes He was Inspector Baynes in the Sherlock Holmes episode Wisteria Lodge, and a peddler in the episode The Last Vampyre
1931 George Jones - Country singer (Just One More, White Lightning, Tender Years, He Stopped Loving Her Today)
1931 Sir Ian Holm – British actor (Alien, Brazil, Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Game Set and Match, The Fifth Element, Juggernaut, Robin and Marian, All Quiet on the Western Front, Frankenstein, Chariots of Fire, Time Bandits) He appeared in The Bofors Gun, with John Thaw
1937 George Chuvalo – Canadian boxing heavyweight champion
1942 Linda Gray - Actress (Dallas, The Two Worlds of Jennie Logan, All That Glitters, Oscar, Melrose Place)
1943 Maria Muldaur - Singer (Midnight At The Oasis)
1943 Michael Ondaatje – Ceylon-born Canadian poet and novelist (The English Patient, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do, Coming Through Slaughter, In The Skin of a Lion)
1944 Leonard Peltier – Native American activist. He was born on the Anishinabe (Chippewa) Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota
1944 Barry White - Singer (I'm Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby, Never Never Gonna Give You Up, Can't Get Enough of Your Love, Babe, Love's Theme)
1951 Joe Pantoliano - Actor (Orphans, Bound, The Sopranos, The Spy Within, The Fugitive, Nightbreaker, Midnight Run, La Bamba, Empire of the Sun, The Goonies, Risky Business, Eddie and the Cruisers, Idolmaker, From Here to Eternity, The Fanelli Boys)
1952 Gerry Beckley – Singer with the group America (A Horse with No Name, Sister Golden Hair, Tin Man, Ventura Highway, Lonely People, You Can Do Magic)
1952 Neil Peart – Drummer with the group Rush (Distant Early Warning, Tom Sawyer, The Spirit of Radio)
1954 Peter Scolari - Actor (Bosom Buddies, Newhart, The Mommies, Goodtime Girls, Family Album, Camp Nowhere, Corporate Affairs)
1957 Rachel Ward – British actress (The Thorn Birds, How to Get Ahead in Advertising, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, Wide Saragasso Sea)
1963 Amy Yasbeck – Actress (Life on a Stick, Dracula: Dead and Loving It, Wings, The Mask, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Problem Child) Her husband was John Ritter. He died on their daughter’s 5th birthday, and the day before her 40th birthday
1978 Benjamin McKenzie – Actor (Gotham, Southland, The OC, Junebug)
Died this Day
1869 Dr. Peter Mark Roget – Compiler of Roget’s Thesaurus
1972 William Boyd, age 77 – Actor known for his numerous Hopalong Cassidy movies and TV series. He died in Laguna Beach, California. Boyd's greatest achievement was to be the first cowboy actor to make the transition from movies to television. Following WWII, people began to buy television sets in large numbers for the first time, but despite their proven popularity in movie theatres, westerns were slow to come to the small screen. Many network TV producers scorned westerns as lowbrow "horse operas" unfit for their middle and upper-class audiences. Boyd proved them wrong. During the 1930s, Boyd had made numerous inexpensive but successful "B-grade" westerns starring as Hopalong Cassidy. After the war, Boyd recognised an opportunity to take Hopalong into the new world of television, and he began to market his old "B" westerns to TV broadcasters in Los Angeles and New York City. This proved a popular move, and rethinking their initial disdain for the genre, television producers contracted with Boyd in 1948 to produce a new series of half-hour westerns for television. Soon other TV westerns followed Boyd's lead, becoming popular with both children and adults…and connie
1977 Steven Biko, age 30 - Leader of South Africa's "Black Consciousness Movement," which stressed black identity, self-esteem, and self-reliance. He died of severe head trauma on the stone floor of a prison cell in Pretoria. Six days earlier, he had suffered a major blow to his skull during a police interrogation in Port Elizabeth. Instead of receiving medical attention, he was chained spread-eagled to a window grill for 24 hours. On September 11, he was dumped, naked and shackled, on the floor of a police vehicle and driven 740 miles to Pretoria Central Prison. He died the next day. South African authorities attempted to cover-up the circumstances of Biko's death, saying he starved himself on a hunger strike. They later claimed he died of kidney failure. Finally, when the findings of a postmortem were made public, they said he might have "hurt his head when he fell out of bed." A judicial inquiry found no one responsible for his death and most of the policemen who interrogated Biko were promoted
1992 Anthony Perkins, age 60 – Actor (Psycho, The Actress, Friendly Persuasion, Catch-22, Murder on the Orient Express)
1993 Raymond Burr, age 76 - Canadian actor (Ironside, Rear Window, A Place in the Sun, The Defence Never Rests, Peter and Paul, Godzilla, His Kind of Woman, Meet Danny Wilson, A Cry in the Night) And, of course, he was Perry Mason!
1995 Jeremy Brett, age 61 – British stage and screen actor (My Fair Lady, War and Peace, Country Matters, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Rebecca, Madame X, The Good Soldier, On Approval, The Barretts of Wimpole Street, Moll Flanders) He established himself on television as the most mannered, yet totally convincing, Sherlock Holmes.
2003 Johnny Cash, age 71 - Country singer, guitarist (Folsom Prison Blues, I Walk the Line, Don't Take Your Guns to Town, A Boy Named Sue, Ring of Fire, I Hear the Train Coming)
On this Day
1440 Eton College was founded by King Henry VI. It originally had 70 King’s Scholars or ‘Collegers’ who lived in the College and were educated free, and a small number of ‘Oppidans’ who lived in the town of Eton and paid for their education. Today it is a secondary school for approximately 1,290 boys between the ages of 13 and 18, all of whom are boarders
1856 The British Columbia legislature met for the first time
1858 Gold was discovered in Nova Scotia, at Tangier
1878 Cleopatra’s Needle, the obelisk of Thothmes III, was erected on London’s Thames Embankment. It stands almost 69 feet tall
1908 Winston Churchill, future Prime Minister of England, married Clementine Hozier
1940 The Lascaux cave paintings were discovered near Montignac, France. The collection of prehistoric cave paintings were discovered by four teenagers who stumbled upon the ancient artwork after following their dog down a narrow entrance into a cavern. The 15,000- to 17,000-year-old paintings, consisting mostly of animal representations, are among the finest examples of art from the Upper Palaeolithic period. First studied by the French archaeologist Henri-Édouard-Prosper Breuil, the Lascaux grotto consists of a main cavern 66 feet wide and 16 feet high. The walls of the cavern are decorated with some 600 painted and drawn animals and symbols and nearly 1,500 engravings. The pictures depict in excellent detail numerous types of animals, including horses, red deer, stags, bovines, felines, and what appear to be mythical creatures. There is only one human figure depicted in the cave, a bird-headed man. Archaeologists believe that the cave was used over a long period of time as a centre for hunting and religious rites. The Lascaux grotto was opened to the public in 1948 but was closed in 1963 because artificial lights had faded the vivid colours of the paintings and caused algae to grow over some of them. A replica of the Lascaux cave was opened nearby in 1983 and receives tens of thousands of visitors annually
1953 Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy of Massachusetts married Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, a photographer for the Washington Times-Herald, at St. Mary's Church in Newport, Rhode Island. More than 750 guests attended the ceremony presided over by Boston Archbishop Richard Cushing and featuring Boston tenor Luigi Vena, who sang "Ave Maria." A crowd of 3,000 onlookers waited outside the church for a glimpse of the newlyweds, who were taken by motorcycle escort to their wedding reception at Hammersmith Farm, an estate overlooking Naragansett Bay. Kennedy was elected the 35th president of the United States seven years later
1970 The Concorde landed at Heathrow for the first time. It received a barrage of complaints about noise
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