1725 Nicolas Joseph Cugnot - French engineer and steam pioneer who designed and built the world's first automobile. He built two steam-propelled tractors, which were actually huge and heavy tricycles, and are considered the world's first automobiles
1843 Melvyn Rueben Bissell – US inventor of the carpet sweeper in 1876. His invention was inspired by his allergy to straw, which he had to use to pack china in his shop
1897 William Faulkner – US novelist (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom Absolom!, Sanctuary, The Bear) and screenwriter (To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep) He was born near Oxford, Mississippi, where his father was the business manager of the University of Mississippi. His mother, a sensitive, literary woman, encouraged Faulkner and his three brothers to read. Faulkner was a good student but lost interest in studies during high school. He dropped out sophomore year and took a series of odd jobs while writing poetry. In 1918, his high school sweetheart, Estelle Oldham, married another man, and Faulkner left Mississippi. He joined the British Royal Flying Corps, but World War I ended before he finished his training in Canada. He returned to Mississippi and continued writing poetry. In 1929, he finally married Estelle, who had divorced her first husband and now had two children. Faulkner's difficult novels did not earn him enough money to support his family, so he supplemented his income by selling short stories to magazines and working as a Hollywood screenwriter. In 1949, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature
1926 Aldo Ray - Actor (Battle Cry, God's Little Acre, The Green Berets, The Naked and the Dead, Nightstalker)
1929 Ronnie Barker – British comedian, writer and actor (The Two Ronnies, The Navy Lark, The Gathering Storm, Porridge, Open All Hours, Before the Fringe, Robin and Marian)
1931 Barbara Walters – ABC News correspondent and broadcaster (The View, 20/20, Today)
1932 Glenn Gould - Canadian pianist and composer
1933 Ian Tyson – Canadian folksinger with the duo Ian and Sylvia (Four Strong Winds, You Were On My Mind)
1933 Erik Darling - Folk singer with the group The Tarriers (Cindy Oh Cindy, Banana Boat Song)
1936 Juliet Prowse – Dancer and actress (Can-Can, GI Blues, Mona McCluskey)
1944 Michael Douglas - Actor (Wall Street, Disclosure, The China Syndrome, Fatal Attraction, The Game, Romancing the Stone, Basic Instinct, The Streets of San Francisco) He shares a birthday with his wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and is the son of actor Kirk Douglas
1946 Felicity Kendal – British actress (Rosemary & Thyme, The Good Life aka The Good Neighbours, Solo, Parting Shots, Anything Goes, Honey for Tea)
1949 Mimi Kennedy - Actress (Dharma and Greg, A Promise to Keep, Joe’s Life)
1951 Mark Hamill - Actor (Star Wars, The Texas Wheelers, Eight is Enough, Corvette Summer)
1952 Anson Williams - Actor (Happy Days, I Married A Centrefold) and director (The Pretender, Profiler) He is the nephew of Dr Henry Heimlich, who created the Heimlich Maneuver
1952 Christopher Reeve – Actor (Superman, Gray Lady Down, Deathtrap, Somewhere in Time, The Remains of the Day)
1957 Michael Masden – Actor (Kill Bill: Volumes 1 & 2, Resevoir Dogs, Die Another Day, Donnie Brasco, Mulholland Falls, Species, Wyatt Earp, Fatal Instinct, Thelma & Louise) He is the brother of Virginia Madsen
1961 Heather Locklear - Actress (Melrose Place, Dynasty, TJ Hooker)
1963 Tate Donovan – Actor (Memphis Belle, SpaceCamp, Clean and Sober, Love Potion No. 9, Friends, The OC)
1968 Will Smith - Actor (Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Six Degrees of Separation, Made in America, Men in Black) and singer (Nightmare on My Street, Parents Just Don't Understand)
1966 Jason Flemyng – British actor (Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Marple: The Murder at the Vicarage, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The Red Violin, Tess of the D’Ubervilles, The James Gang, Doctor Finlay)
1969 Catherine Zeta-Jones – Welsh-born actress (Chicago, The Haunting, The Darling Buds of May, Splitting Heirs, The Mask of Zorro, Entrapment) She shares a birthday with her husband, Michael Douglas
1977 Joel David Moore – Actor (Avatar, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, The Dukes of Hazard: The Beginning, Shanghai Kiss, Forever)
Died this Day
1680 Samuel Butler – English poet (Hudibras, The Elephant in the Moon)
1867 Oliver Loving - Pioneering US cattleman known as the Dean of the Trail Drivers. He died from gangrene poisoning in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. A few weeks before, he had been trapped by the Commanche along the Pecos River while driving cattle from Texas to Denver. Shot in the arm and side, Loving managed to escape to Fort Sumner. Though the wounds alone were not fatal, Loving soon developed gangrene in his arm. Even then he might still have been saved had his arm been removed, but unfortunately the fort doctor "had never amputated any limbs and did not want to undertake such work"
1960 Emily Post – US columnist and etiquette writer. She died a week before her 87th birthday
1970 Erich Maria Remarque – German author (All Quiet on the Western Front)
1980 Lewis Milestone – Russian born US director (All Quiet on the Western Front, Mutiny on the Bounty, The Front Page, Of Mice and Men, Ocean’s Eleven) He died five days before his 85th birthday
1984 Walter Pidgeon – Canadian-born actor (Mrs. Miniver, How Green was My Valley, Forbidden Planet) He died of a stroke, two days after his 87th birthday
1987 Mary Astor, age 81 – Actress (The Maltese Falcon, The Prisoner of Zenda, Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte)
On this Day
1493 Christopher Columbus set sail from Cadiz, Spain, with a flotilla of 17 ships on his second voyage to the Western Hemisphere
1513 Spanish explorer Vasco Nunez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama to reach the Pacific Ocean
1670 Dutch inventor Jan Van Der Hieda first demonstrated a fire engine using a water hose
1690 The first US newspaper was published in Boston “Publick Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestic”
1750 Nova Scotia fixed the wage of labourers at 18 pence a day, with a rum and beer provision. It is the first recorded instance of government wage fixing in Canada
1775 US Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen was captured by the British, and would be a prisoner in an English jail for three years. The rash leader of the Green Mountain Boys was leading an attack toward Montréal before the Army of the Continental Congress could arrive to help
1789 Two years after the Constitution of the United States of America was signed at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, the first Congress of the United States approved 12 amendments, and sent them to the states for ratification. The amendments, known as the Bill of Rights, were designed to protect the basic rights of US citizens, guaranteeing the freedom of speech, press, assembly, and exercise of religion, the right to fair legal procedure and to bear arms, and that powers not delegated to the federal government were reserved for the states and the people. It was influenced by the English Bill of Rights of 1689. In December 1791, Virginia became the 10th of 14 states to approve 10 of the 12 amendments, thus giving the Bill of Rights the two-thirds majority of state ratification necessary to make it legal. Of the two amendments not ratified, the first concerned the population system of representation, while the second prohibited laws varying the payment of congressional members from taking effect until an election intervened. The first of these two amendments was never ratified, while the second was finally ratified more than 200 years later, in 1992
1818 The first blood transfusion using human blood, as opposed to earlier attempts using animal blood, took place at Guy’s Hospital, London
1897 Britain’s first motor bus service started, in Bradford
1926 In Montreal, the National Hockey League granted franchises to the Chicago Black Hawks and the Detroit Red Wings
1956 The first transatlantic phone call placed over the transoceanic telephone cable took place with an exchange of greetings between London, Ottawa and New York. The British Post Office (which ran the British telephone Service), the Canadian Overseas Telecommunications Corporation, and the Bell System in the US, worked jointly to lay the cable, which could handle thirty-six conversations at once. The new $42 million cable from Oban, Scotland, jointly owned by the three firms, consisted of two lines laid 20 miles apart on the ocean floor
1957 Under escort from the US Army's 101st Airborne Division, nine black students entered the all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Three weeks earlier, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus had surrounded the school with National Guard troops to prevent its federal court-ordered racial integration. After a tense stand-off, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalised the Arkansas National Guard and sent 1,000 army paratroopers to Little Rock to enforce the court order. Troops remained at Central High School throughout the school year, but still the black students were subjected to verbal and physical assaults from a faction of white students. Melba Patillo, one of the nine, had acid thrown in her eyes, and Elizabeth Eckford was pushed down a flight of stairs. The three male students in the group were subjected to more conventional beatings. Minnijean Brown was suspended after dumping a bowl of chilli over the head of a taunting white student. She was later suspended for the rest of the year after continuing to fight back. The other eight students consistently turned the other cheek. On May 27, 1958, Ernest Green, the only senior in the group, became the first black to graduate from Central High School. Governor Faubus continued to fight the school board's integration plan, and in September 1958 he ordered Little Rock's three high schools closed rather than permit integration. Many Little Rock students lost a year of education as the legal fight over desegregation continued. In 1959, a federal court struck down Faubus' school-closing law, and in August 1959 Little Rock's white high schools opened a month early with black students in attendance. All grades in Little Rock public schools were finally integrated in 1972
1971 The International Typographical Union ended a seven-year strike against the three major Toronto newspapers: The Star, The Telegram and The Globe & Mail
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