1709 Samuel Johnson – British lexicographer and author (Rasselas: Prince of Abyssinia) He created the first true dictionary of the English language, in 1755. His life was chronicled by his biographer James Boswell
1819 Jean-Bernard Foucault - French physicist and inventor. In 1851 he invented the Foucault pendulum, which demonstrated the earth’s rotation in the laboratory. The following year he had developed the gyroscope to produce the same effect
1888 Archibald Stansfeld Belaney (Grey Owl) – British-born naturalist, pseudo-Indian and author (Men of the Last Frontier, Pilgrims of the Wild, The Adventures of Sajo and Her Beaver People, Tales of an Empty Cabin) He was born at Hastings, England, and had an unhappy childhood, being raised by maiden aunts and a stern grandmother. He fantasised about the Indians he read about in boys' magazines, and at age 17, left England for Northern Ontario. There, he lived with the Ojibway, took the name Grey Owl, and claimed he was the son of an Apache woman and a Scots fur trader. With his Iroquois wife, Anahareo, he managed a beaver conservation program in Prince Albert National Park, and gave popular lectures on wildlife. He died in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan in 1938
1894 Fay Compton – British actress (The Haunting, The Forsythe Saga, Nicholas Nickleby, Uncle Vanya)
1895 John George Diefenbaker – Canadian Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963. He was born in Neustadt, Ontario, and raised on the prairies, in Saskatchewan
1905 Greta Garbo – Swedish-born actress (Camille, Grand Hotel, Ninotchka, Mata Hari, The Painted Veil)
1905 Eddie "Rochester" Anderson - Actor (Jack Benny Show, Birth of the Blues, Gone with the Wind)
1916 Rossano Brazzi – Italian actor (South Pacific, Three Coins in the Fountain, The Barefoot Contessa, Formula for a Murder)
1920 Jack Warden - Actor (Brian's Song, Bad News Bears, Crazy like a Fox, From Here to Eternity, All the President's Men)
1926 Phyllis Kirk – Actress (The Red Buttons Show, The Thin Man, House of Wax)
1929 Elizabeth Spriggs – British actress (Shackleton, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Wives and Daughters, Sense and Sensibility) She played Mrs Mason in the Sherlock Holmes episode The Last Vampyre
1933 Robert Blake - Actor (Baretta, In Cold Blood, Pork Chop Hill, PT 109, Our Gang, Red Ryder)
1939 Frankie Avalon - Singer (Venus, Bobby Sox to Stockings) and actor (Guns of the Timberland, The Carpetbaggers, Beach Party series)
1939 Fred Willard - Actor (Silver Streak, The Harrad Experiment, Fernwood 2nite, This is Spinal Tap)
1946 Nicholas Clay – British actor (Excalibur, Berlin Break, Virtual Murder) He played Mr Justice Fulgright in the Kavanagh QC episode Blood Money He also played Dr Percy Trevelyan in the Sherlock Holmes episode The Resident Patient
1952 Dee Dee Ramone – Drummer with The Ramones (Howling at the Moon, Do You Remember Rock 'n' Roll Radio)
1956 Tim McInnerny – British actor (Blackadder, Gunpowder Treason & Plot, Longitude, Notting Hill, 101 Dalmatians) He played Vincent Spaulding in the Sherlock Holmes episode The Red-Headed League
1961 James Gandolfini – Actor (The Sopranos, All the King's Men, The Last Castle, The Mexican, 8MM, Get Shorty)
1967 Tara Fitzgerald – British actress (Waking the Dead, Frenchman's Creek, The Woman in White, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall)
1970 Aisha Tyler – Actress (Ghost Whisperer, CSI, 24, Friends, XIII: The Series, Archer)
1971 Lance Armstrong – U.S. champion cyclist
1971 Jada Pinkett Smith – Actress (Gotham, Hawthorne, Scream 2, The Matrix Reloaded, The Human Contract, Ali, Bamboozled, A Low Down Dirty Shame) She is married to Will Smith
1973 James Marsden – Actor (X-Men movies, Zoolander, The Notebook, The Alibi, Death at a Funeral, Straw Dogs)
Died this Day
1961 Dag Hammarskjöld, age 56 - United Nations Secretary-General, died when his plane crashed under mysterious circumstances near Ndola in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). During his second term, he initiated and directed the UN’s vigorous role in the Congolese Civil War. A UN force was sent to restore order, but it soon became entangled in the Cold War aspects of the conflict. In September 1960, the Soviet Union demanded Hammarskjöld's resignation after the UN gave tacit approval to the removal of Congo's left-leaning prime minister. Despite the challenge to his authority, Hammarskjöld remained secretary-general. On the night of September 18th, Hammarskjöld was flying to Ndola to negotiate an end to the bloodshed when his Swedish DC6 aircraft crashed just a few miles short of its destination. The secretary-general and 15 others were killed. Hammarskjöld's body was thrown out of the wreckage and came to rest in a sitting position beside a giant ant-hill. Many suspected that the plane had been shot down or exploded by a bomb, a theory that was reinforced when the sole survivor of the crash, a US security guard, spoke of hearing an explosion before the plane went down. In 1962, the Rhodesian Federal Inquiry Commission, which investigated the crash, concluded that the pilot flew too low and struck trees, thereby bringing the aircraft to the ground. Dag Hammarskjöld was posthumously awarded the 1961 Nobel Peace Prize
1970 Jimi Hendrix, age 27 - Rock musician (Purple Haze, Voodoo Chile, Hey Joe) He was born in Seattle, and grew up playing guitar. In 1959, he joined the army and became a paratrooper, but was honourably discharged in 1961 after an injury that exempted him from duty in Vietnam
On this Day
1634 Anne Hutchinson, an Englishwoman who would become an outspoken religious thinker in the colonies, arrived at the Massachusetts Bay Colony with her family. She settled in Cambridge and began organising meetings of Boston women in her home, leading them in discussions of recent sermons and religious issues. Soon ministers and magistrates began attending her sessions as well. Hutchinson preached that faith alone was sufficient for salvation, and therefore that individuals had no need for the church or church law. By 1637, her influence had become so great that she was brought to trial and found guilty of heresy against Puritan orthodoxy. Banished from Massachusetts, she led a group of 70 followers to Rhode Island, a colony based on religious freedom, and established a settlement on the island of Aquidneck. After the death of her husband in 1642, she settled near present-day Pelham Bay, New York, on the Long Island Sound. In 1643, she and all but one of her children were massacred in an Indian attack. She is recognised as the first notable woman religious leader in the American colonies
1762 The French garrison at St. John's, Newfoundland surrendered to the British. It was the last battle between the nations of France and England on what is now Canadian soil
1810 Chile declared its independence from Spain
1846 Weeks behind schedule and the massive Sierra Nevada mountains still to be crossed, the members of the ill-fated Donner party realised they were running short of supplies and sent two men ahead to California to bring back food. The group of 89 emigrants had begun their infamous western trek earlier that summer in Springfield, Illinois. Unfortunately, the Donner party was guided by The Emigrant's Guide to Oregon and California, the imaginative creation of an irresponsible author-adventurer named Lansford Hastings, who wanted to encourage more overland emigrants to travel to the Sacramento Valley of California. The Donners innocently accepted Hastings' claim that a shorter route he had blazed to California would cut weeks off the usual trip and agreed to place the fate of the wagon train in his hands once they reached Fort Bridger, Wyoming. From that point forward, the men, women, and children of the Donner Party were in trouble. Though the so-called Hastings Cutoff was shorter than the usual route, Hastings' glowing descriptions of his trail irresponsibly downplayed its many difficulties. After following a boulder-strewn and nearly impassable route over the Wasatch Range in Utah, the party found that the trek across the desert took six days, not the promised two. Lightening their loads by abandoning chairs, family heirlooms, wagons, and livestock to be swallowed up by the blazing sands, the emigrants struggled onward towards the Sierra Nevada. A month after the two men had left for California, one returned with the desperately needed provisions as well as two Indian guides to help lead the party on the final stage of the trip through the Sierras. But by then it was already late October. Hastings' "shortcut" had cost the Donner group so much time that they would be trapped in the high mountains for the winter by an early snowstorm late that October
1851 The first edition of The New York Times was published
1867 In the new country of Canada, John Alexander Macdonald won the first Dominion election, defeating George Brown. Macdonald won 108 seats to the Liberal’s 72. Balloting took place from August 9th to September 18th
1875 The Supreme Court of Canada was first organised. It held its first session in 1876
1904 Mr. and Mrs. Charles Glidden completed the first crossing of the Canadian Rockies by automobile, arriving exhausted from their 3,536-mile trip. The couple had driven from Boston, Massachusetts, to Vancouver, Canada, in their 24 hp Napier
1914 The Irish Home Rule Bill received Royal Assent
1917 Aldous Huxley, future author of Brave New World, was hired as a schoolmaster at Eton. One of his pupils would be Eric Blair, who would later use the pen name George Orwell
1927 The Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting System, later CBS, made its debut with a basic network of 16 radio stations
1942 The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and its French counterpart, Radio Canada, were authorised to start a national radio service
1947 The US’s National Security Act, which unified the Army, Navy and newly formed Air Force, went into effect
1975 Newspaper heiress and wanted fugitive Patty Hearst was captured in a San Francisco apartment and arrested for armed robbery. In February 1974, Patricia Hearst, the 19-year-old daughter of newspaper publisher Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California, by two men and a woman, all three of whom were armed. Her fiancé, Stephen Weed, was beaten and tied up along with a neighbour who tried to help
1984 During his Canadian visit, Pope John Paul II was prevented by a heavy fog from visiting thousands of Chipewyan First Nations people gathered in Fort Simpson, North West Territories. He promised to return to the NWT at a future date and made good on that promise exactly three years and two days later
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