63BC Gaius Octavius Caesar Augustus – The first Roman emperor and autocratic genius who brought stability to the empire. He was the adopted son and heir of Julius Caesar, his great-uncle whose assassins he defeated at the battle of Philippi in 42BC
1800 William McGuffey – US educator who published the popular elementary school readers, McGuffy Readers
1819 Armand Hyppolyte Louis – French physicist who first measured the speed of light
1865 Baroness Emmuska Orczy – Hungarian-born British novelist (The Scarlet Pimpernel series, The Emperor’s Candlesticks, Lady Molly of Scotland Yard) She is credited with introducing the armchair detective to detective fiction with her Old Man in the Corner stories
1897 Walter Pidgeon – Canadian born actor (Mrs. Miniver, Funny Girl, Hit the Deck, How Green was My Valley, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Calling Bulldog Drummond, Forbidden Planet) He played Sherman Hatfield in the Perry Mason episode The Case of the Surplus Suitor
1920 Mickey Rooney – US stage and screen actor (Will Roger's Follies, Boy's Town, Captains Courageous, Breakfast at Tiffany's, The Human Comedy, The Black Stallion, Babes in Arms, Andy Hardy series, National Velvet, Baby Face Nelson, Sugar Babies)
1926 John Coltrane – Composer and musician on the tenor and soprano saxophone (Stablemates, Softly as in a Morning Sunrise, Greensleeves, Chim Chim Cheree, In a Sentimental Mood)
1930 Colin Blakely – Irish actor (Murder on the Orient Express, The Pink Panther Strikes Again, Equus, Peer Gynt, The Beiderbecke Affair)
1930 Ray Charles – Singer known as The Genius (Georgia on My Mind, Let the Good Times Roll, Hit the Road Jack, I Can't Stop Loving You, What'd I Say, Take These Chains from My Heart, You Don't Know Me) and actor (The Blues Brothers, Ballad in Blue, Limit Up)
1943 Julio Iglesias – Spanish singer (To All the Girls I've Loved Before – with Willie Nelson)
1945 Paul Peterson - Actor (The Donna Reed Show, Mickey Mouse Club)
1947 Mary Kay Place – Actress (Mary Hartman Mary Hartman, Forever Fernwood, The Big Chill)
1949 Bruce Springsteen – Singer known as The Boss and lead singer with the E-Street Band (Darkness on the Edge of Town, Born to Run, Hungry Heart, Dancing in the Dark, Rosalita, Glory Days, Thunder Road, Promised Land, The River, Nebraska, Born in the USA) and songwriter (Blinded By The Light, Fire, Protection)
1957 Rosalind Chao – Actress (Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The OC, Freaky Friday, I Am Sam, The Joy Luck Club, After MASH, The Terry Fox Story)
1959 Jason Alexander - Actor (Seinfeld, Pretty Woman, Coneheads, Jacob’s Ladder, The Paper)
1961 Chi McBride – Actor (Hawaii Five-O, Boston Public, Human Target, Pushing Daisies, I Robot, The John Larroquette Show, The Terminal, Gone in 60 Seconds, Golden Boy, House, Mercury Rising)
1961 Elizabeth Peña – Actress (Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Resurrection Blvd, Rush Hour, Jacob's Ladder)
1969 Crispin Bonham-Carter – British actor (Pride and Prejudice, Victoria & Albert, Wuthering Heights)
1979 Anthony Mackie – Actor (The Hurt Locker, Million Dollar Baby, The Adjustment Bureau, Notorious)
Died this Day
1889 Wilkie Collins – British author who was one of the first to write mysteries (The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Poor Miss Finch, The Law and the Lady, My Lady's Money) His later works tackled social issues (The Black Robe, Man and Wife, The New Magdalen, Heart and Science, The Fallen Leaves) He was good friends with Charles Dickens
1897 Stephen Kempton, age 9 – The first recorded victim of a traffic fatality in Great Britain. He had been trying to steal a ride from a taxi by hanging on to a spring, but lost his grip and was trapped underneath the wheel of the vehicle. The tragedy occurred on Stockmar Road near Hackney
1915 Joseph Tremblay - Canadian soldier. The Quebec-born soldier was the first Canadian to die at the front in World War I
1939 Sigmund Freud - Austrian originator of psychoanalysis, died in London
1981 Chief Dan George, age 82 (Teswahno) – Canadian actor (Cariboo Country, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, Centennial, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Harry and Tonto, The Beachcombers, Little Big Man, Smith!) He was Chief of the Squamish Band in Burrard Inlet BC in the 1950s & 60s
1987 Bob Fosse, age 60 – Director (Cabaret, All That Jazz) and choreographer (Big Deal, Dancin', Sweet Charity, Damn Yankees)
1998 Mary Frann, age 55 - Actress (Newhart, King’s Crossing)
On this Day
1577 Explorer Martin Frobisher returned to England at Gravesend from his second voyage to the Arctic. He had with him 200 tons of ore as ballast. His three kidnapped Inuit, a man, woman and child, would die a month later of influenza
1642 Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, held its first commencement, graduating its first nine students
1779 A naval battle between the US ship, Bonhomme Richard, commanded by Scottish-born John Paul Jones, and the British ships Serapis and Countess of Scarborough, in the North Sea off Flamborough Head, saw Jones score a dramatic victory. After inflicting considerable damage to the Bonhomme Richard, Richard Pearson, the captain of the Serapis, asked Jones if he had struck his colours, the naval sign indicating surrender. From his disabled ship, Jones replied, "I have not yet begun to fight," and after three more hours of furious fighting the Serapis and Countess of Scarborough surrendered to him. After the victory, the Americans transferred to the Serapis from the disabled Bonhomme Richard, which sunk the following day. Jones was hailed as a great hero in France, but recognition in the US was somewhat belated. He continued to serve the US until 1787 and then served briefly in the Russian navy before moving to France, where he died in 1792 amid the chaos of the French Revolution. He was buried in an unmarked grave. In 1905, his remains were located and then escorted by US warships, back to where his body was enshrined in a crypt at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland
1780 British spy John André was captured along with papers revealing Benedict Arnold's plot to surrender West Point to the British. André was hanged, and his remains were later interred in Westminster Abbey
1787 Guy Carleton, Lord Dorchester, purchased the site of Toronto from three Mississauga Indian chiefs in a meeting near the site of the old French Fort Rouillé. The Toronto Purchase cost the British Crown £1,700 in cash and trade goods. The land was surveyed a year later, but not settled for another six years
1806 Amid much public excitement, US explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark returned to St. Louis, Missouri, from their journey from the Mississippi River to the Pacific coast and back. The Lewis and Clark Expedition had set off more than two years before to explore the territory of the Louisiana Purchase. Even before the US government concluded purchase negotiations with France, President Thomas Jefferson commissioned his private secretary Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, an army captain, to lead an expedition into what is now the US Northwest. The Corps of Discovery, featuring 28 men and one woman, a Native American named Sacagawea, left St. Louis for the US interior, arriving at the Pacific Ocean on November 8, 1805. After pausing there for winter, the explorers began their long journey back to St. Louis, returning with a wealth of information about the largely unexplored region, as well as valuable US claims to Oregon Territory
1846 The eighth planet, Neptune, was discovered by German astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle at the Berlin Observatory. Neptune, usually the eighth planet from the sun, was postulated by the French astronomer Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier, who calculated the approximate location of the planet by studying gravity-induced disturbances in the motions of Uranus. On September 23, 1846, Le Verrier informed Galle of his findings, and the same night Galle and his assistant Heinrich Louis d'Arrest identified Neptune at their observatory in Berlin. Noting its movement relative to background stars over 24 hours confirmed that it was a planet. The blue gas giant, which has a diameter four times that of Earth, was named for the Roman god of the sea. It has eight known moons, of which Triton is the largest, and a ring system containing three bright and two dim rings. It completes an orbit of the sun once every 165 years. In 1989, the US planetary spacecraft Voyager 2 was the first spacecraft to visit Neptune
1862 Russian Count Leo Tolstoy married Sophie Andreyevna Behrs. The 34-year-old Tolstoy was nearly twice the age of his teenage bride. Tolstoy was constantly engaged in a spiritual struggle between his responsibilities as a wealthy landlord and his desire to renounce his property altogether. Some of his inner turmoil appeared in his great masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Later in his life, he tried to give away the rights to his works, but his wife gained control of the copyrights for all his work published before 1880
1884 Herman Hollerith took out his first patent for "improvements in the art of compiling statistics." He developed a mechanical adding machine which, like many later computer systems, used punch cards for data entry. After his machine won a competition for the most efficient data processing equipment to be used in the 1890 census, he established his own company, which merged with two others in 1924 to become IBM
1912 Mack Sennett's first Keystone Cops short subject, a split-reel of two comedies starring Mabel Normand and Ford Sterling, was released. It was financed by two of his bookie friends
1952 Republican vice-presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon went on television to deliver what came to be known as the Checkers speech as he denied allegations of improper campaign financing
1957 Nine black students who had entered Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas were forced to withdraw because of a white mob outside. Two days later, President Eisenhower sent federal troops to aid them
1992 Quebec hockey player Manon Rhéaume played in goal for the Tampa Bay Lightning, giving up 2 goals on 9 shots in 1 period of the exhibition game. She was the first woman to play in an NHL game
1999 Sherlock Holmes returned to Baker Street in the form of a statue located in front of the Baker Street Underground station
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