1452 Richard III - King of England from 1483 to 1485. He proved a skilful ruler, despite being suspected of the murder of Edward V
1832 Sir Edward Burnett Tylor – British anthropologist who is considered the founder of cultural anthropology
1852 Sir William Ramsay – Scottish chemist who discovered the noble gasses. Helped by Lord Rayleigh, he found argon in 1894 and helium in 1903. He went on to isolate neon, krypton and xenon
1869 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi - Indian nationalist leader, was born in Porbandar, India. He campaigned for Indian independence using the techniques of civil disobedience, and his philosophy of non-violence influenced movements around the world
1879 Wallace Stevens – US poet (Sunday Morning, Three Travellers Watch a Sunrise, The Man With the Blue Guitar and Other Poems, The Emperor of Ice Cream, Ideas of Order)
1890 Groucho Marx - One of the Marx Brothers of vaudeville and film fame (Animal Crackers, A Day at the Races, Duck Soup, Horse Feathers, The Cocoanuts, Monkey Business) and TV host (You Bet Your Life) He was the Marx Brother with the crazy slouched walk, odd moustache, and large cigar
1895 Bud Abbott - Actor/comedian who partnered with Lou Costello (Who's on First?, The Abbott & Costello Show, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man)
1904 Graham Greene – British novelist, playwright and short story teller (The End of the Affair, Our Man in Havana, The Living Room, The Potting Shed, The Third Man)
1928 Spanky (George) McFarland - Actor (Little Rascals series, Our Gang comedies)
1929 Moses Gunn – Actor (Ragtime, Othello, Shaft, The Great White Hope, Good Times, Father Murphy)
1938 Rex Reed - Movie critic and actor (Myra Breckenridge)
1945 Don McLean – US singer (American Pie, Vincent, Castles in the Air) and songwriter (Killing Me Softly)
1949 Annie Leibovitz – Photographer who has photographed many celebrities for Rolling Stone
1950 Ian McNeice – British actor (Doc Martin, Chef!, Rome, Lewis: Life Born of Fire, Oliver Twist, Around the World in 80 Days, Dune, Longitude, David Copperfield, Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls) He played Winston Churchill in several Doctor Who episodes He also played the pathologist in the Inspector Morse episode Deadly Slumber
1950 Mike Rutherford - Rock musician with Genesis (Land of Confusion, Invisible Touch, No Reply At All), and with Mike & the Mechanics (All I Need Is A Miracle, The Living Years)
1950 Persis Khambatta - India-born actress (Star Trek the Motion Picture, The Wilby Conspiracy, Nighthawks, First Strike, Deadly Intent, Conduct Unbecoming) In 1965 she was crowned Miss India
1951 Sting (Gordon Sumner) – British musician with the group The Police (Message In a Bottle, Walking On the Moon, Every Breath You Take, Roxeanne) and solo (Set Them Free, Fortress Around Your Heart)
1954 Lorraine Bracco – Actress (Goodfellas, The Sopranos, Rizzoli & Isles, Radio Flyer, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Someone to Watch Over Me)
1970 Kelly Ripa – Actress (Hope & Faith, Someone to Love, All My Children, Live with Regis & Kelly)
Died this Day
322BC Aristotle – Greek philosopher. He died of a stomach illness
1780 Major John André - British officer, was hanged as a spy by US forces in Tappan, New York, during the American War for Independence. Ten days before, André was apprehended by three highwaymen sympathetic to the Patriot cause, who turned him over to American authorities after finding intelligence information hidden in his boot. André was returning from a secret meeting with US General Benedict Arnold, who, as the commander of West Point, had agreed to surrender the important Hudson River fort to the British for a bribe of £10,000. With the plot uncovered, Arnold, whose name would forever be synonymous with the word traitor in the US, fled to the British warship Vulture and joined the British in their fight against his country
1803 Samuel Adams, age 81 - US statesmen and one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence. He helped plan the Boston Tea Party
1931 Sir Thomas Lipton – British sportsman and merchant, and America’s Cup competitor
1985 Rock Hudson, age 59 - Actor (McMillan and Wife, Tobruk, Pillow Talk, Darling Lili, The Mirror Crack’d) He died at his home in Beverly Hills, California, after a battle with AIDS
1987 Catherine Bramwell-Booth, age 104 – Commissioner of the Salvation Army, and granddaughter of its founder
1998 Gene Autry – US singer and actor who was in over 100 westerns, and who was known as the Singing Cowboy (Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, You are My Sunshine, Back in the Saddle Again) He was a part owner of the Los Angeles Angels (later the California and Anaheim Angels) He purchased TV station KTLA for $12 million in 1964 and sold it in 1982 for $245 million. There is a Gene Autry museum in Los Angeles. He died three days after his 91st birthday
On this Day
1608 Dutch lens maker Hans Lippershey demonstrated the first telescope
1754 The inaugural session of the first Supreme Court in English-speaking Canada was held at Halifax
1758 Charles Lawrence convened the first meeting of the Nova Scotia Legislature in the Halifax Court House. It was the first elected Parliament in Canadian history
1835 The first shots of the Texas Revolution were fired in the Battle of Gonzales, as the growing tensions between Mexico and Texas erupted into violence when Mexican soldiers attempted to disarm the people of Gonzales. Texas, or Tejas as the Mexicans called it, had technically been a part of the Spanish empire since the 17th century. However, even as late as the 1820s, there were only about 3,000 Spanish-Mexican settlers in Texas, and Mexico City's hold on the territory was tenuous at best. After winning its own independence from Spain in 1821, Mexico welcomed large numbers of Anglo-American immigrants into Texas in the hopes they would become loyal Mexican citizens and keep the territory from falling into the hands of the US. During the next decade men like Stephen Austin brought more than 25,000 people to Texas, most of them from the US. But while these emigrants legally became Mexican citizens, they continued to speak English, formed their own schools, and had closer trading ties to the US than to Mexico. In 1835, the president of Mexico, Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana, overthrew the constitution and appointed himself dictator. Recognising that the "American" Texans were likely to use his rise to power as an excuse to secede, Santa Ana ordered the Mexican military to begin disarming the Texans whenever possible. This proved more difficult than expected, and on October 2, 1835, Mexican soldiers attempting to take a small cannon, known as the Come & Take It cannon, from the village of Gonzales encountered stiff resistance from a hastily assembled militia of Texans. After a brief fight, the Mexicans retreated and the Texans kept their cannon. The determined Texans would continue to battle Santa Ana and his army for another year and a half before winning their independence and establishing the Republic of Texas
1836 British naturalist Charles Darwin returned to Falmouth, England, aboard the HMS Beagle, ending a five-year surveying expedition of the southern Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Visiting such diverse places as Brazil, the Galapagos Islands, and New Zealand, Darwin acquired an intimate knowledge of the flora, fauna, wildlife, and geology of many lands. This information proved invaluable in the development of his theory of evolution, first put forth in his groundbreaking scientific work of 1859, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Darwin's theory of natural selection argued that species are the result of a gradual biological evolution of living organisms in which nature encourages, through natural selection, those species best suited to their environments to propagate future descendants. The Origin of Species was the first significant work on the theory of evolution, and was greeted with great interest in the scientific world. However, it was also violently attacked because it contradicts the account of creation given in the Bible. Nevertheless, the work, unquestionably one of the most important in the history of science, eventually succeeded in gaining acceptance from almost all biologists
1870 Rome was declared the capital of Italy
1887 In British Columbia, a Fraser River fisherman netted a 12 foot sturgeon weighing 822 pounds
1895 Much of the far northern territory of Canada was formed into the districts of Mackenzie, Yukon, Ungava and Franklin and placed under control of the North West Territories government at Regina. Yukon became a territory in 1897. The remaining area was further divided into the districts of Mackenzie, Keewatin and Franklin in 1918
1901 Britain’s first Royal Navy submarine was launched at Barrow, built by Vickers. There were five of these experimental six-man crew submarine boats on order
1907 Hampstead Garden Suburb, London’s first garden suburb, was officially opened by the Lord Mayor, who symbolically unlocked one of the houses
1919 President Wilson suffered a stroke that left him partially paralysed
1925 London’s first distinctive red double-decker buses, almost entirely enclosed, began service. The fully-enclosed vehicles entered service in 1935, by which time authorities were convinced it would not be unsafe
1940 The Empress of Britain, enroute to Canada with child evacuees, was sunk by a German submarine. British warships rescued most of the 634 crew and passengers
1942 The British cruiser Curacao sank off the coast of Donegal, after colliding with the liner Queen Mary. There was a loss of 338 lives
1944 Nazi troops crushed the two-month-old Warsaw Uprising, during which 250,000 people were killed
1950 Legal aid started in Britain
1950 The comic strip, Peanuts, created by Charles M. Schulz, was first published in nine newspapers
1955 ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, one of the first digital computers, was turned off for good. It occupied a 1,500-square-foot room, contained nearly 18,000 vacuum tubes and 6,000 manual switches. The computer performed complex routines in a fraction of a second
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