1732 Nevil Maskelyne – British Astronomer-Royal who improved optical instruments and methods of observation
1744 James McGill - Scottish-born Canadian fur trader, merchant and politician. McGill began his career in Montreal as a fur trader and North West Company partner until about 1810. His property investments flourished and his bequest of land and money led to the founding of McGill University
1769 Sir Isaac Brock - British politician and soldier who was the Hero of Upper Canada in the War of 1812
1820 Jenny Lind – Swedish soprano known as the Swedish Nightingale
1846 George Westinghouse – US engineer who invented the railway air brake and founded the Westinghouse Electric Company
1866 Reginald Aubrey Fessenden – Canadian inventor, sometimes described as the genius Canada forgot, was born near East Bolton, Québec. After studies at Bishop University, Fessenden went to work for Thomas Edison, then the Westinghouse labs and the US Weather Service. In 1902, he started his own company, and in 1906 accomplished the first two-way radio voice transmission, between Scotland and his shore station at Brant Rock, Massachusetts. That Christmas he broadcast the world's first public program of music and voice transmitted over long distances, from Brant Rock to the ships at sea. His inventions include the wireless telephone, the first wireless compass and the fathometer. He had over 300 patents, and was awarded $2.5 million by the US Radio Trust for his inventions, many of which were used by the US in World War I
1887 Le Corbusier – Swiss-born French architect who was one of the most influential figures in modern architecture and furniture design. He promoted the concept “the house is a habitable machine”
1897 Jerome Cowan – Actor (The West Point Story, Blondie Hits the Jackpot, June Bride, The Maltese Falcon, The Tycoon, The Tab Hunter Show, Not for Publication)
1903 Ernest Walton – Irish physicist, who shared the 1951 Nobel Physics prize for splitting the atom
1906 Janet Gaynor – Actress (A Star is Born, The Johnstown Flood, Seventh Heaven, Sunrise, State Fair, Street Angel, The Young in Heart)
1908 Carole Lombard - Actress (My Man Godfrey, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Made for Each Other) She was the wife of actor Clark Gable
1914 Thor Heyerdahl – Norwegian explorer and anthropologist who led the Kon Tiki expedition in 1947. They sailed their balsa log craft, the Kon Tiki, from the western coast of South America to the islands east of Tahiti to demonstrate that people from the Americas could have colonised Polynesia. The 5,000 mile journey was covered in three and a half months
1939 Lord Melvyn Bragg – British author (For Want of a Nail, A Christmas Child, Autumn Manoeuvres, Land of the Lakes, A Time to Dance, The Soldier's Return)
1942 Britt Ekland - Actress (The Night They Raided Minsky's, The Man with the Golden Gun, Cold Heat, The Children, Scandal)
1946 Millicent Small - Singer (My Boy Lollipop) She is known as The Blue Beat Girl in her native Jamaica
1963 Elisabeth Shue - Actress (CSI, Adventures in Babysitting, The Karate Kid, Call to Glory, Cocktail, Back to the Future 2 & 3, Soap Dish, Leaving Las Vegas, Deconstructing Harry)
1966 Robert Mirabal - Native American singer, songwriter and musician (Owl Song, Medicine Man, Painted Caves, Taos Summer Nights)
1970 Amy Jo Johnson – Actress (Flashpoint, Wildfire, The Division, Felicity)
1973 Ioan Gruffudd – Welsh actor (Horatio Hornblower, Great Expectations, Poldark, Wilde, Fantastic Four, King Arthur, Century City)
1974 Jeremy Sisto – Actor (Law & Order, Thirteen, Suburgatory, Kidnapped, Six Feet Under)
Died this Day
1536 William Tyndale – British reformer and translator of the Bible. He was strangled and burned at the stake at Vivarde, near Brussels, on the orders of Henry VIII
1891 Charles Stewart Parnell – Irish politician who was described as the Uncrowned King of Ireland. He died in Brighton, England
1891 W.H. Smith, age 66 – English newsagent, bookseller and politician
1892 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, age 83 – English Poet Laureate from 1850 (Morte D'Arthur, The Lady of Shallot, Locksley Hall, Ulysses, The Devil and the Lady, Crossing the Bar, The Charge of the Light Brigade)
1896 George du Maurier, age 62 – English author (Trilby)
1951 Will Keith Kellogg - US breakfast food pioneer
1981 Anwar Sadat, age 62 - Egyptian President, was assassinated at a public military rally in Cairo
1985 Nelson Riddle – US conductor and music arranger who worked with Frank Sinatra, among others. He wrote the music for the Batman TV show.
1989 Bette Davis, age 81 – Actress (Dangerous, All About Eve, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Of Human Bondage, Jezebel, The Little Foxes, Hush…Hush Sweet Charlotte, Death on the Nile, Murder with Mirrors)
1992 Denholm Elliott, age 70 - British character actor of stage, screen and television (A Room with a View, Trading Places, A Bridge Too Far, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Rising Damp) He also appeared in two productions of The Hound of the Baskervilles, playing Stapleton in 1978, and Dr. Mortimer in 1983
2000 Richard Farnsworth, age 80 - Actor (The Grey Fox, The Two Jakes, The Natural, Misery, Anne of Green Gables, Lassie, Legend of the Lone Ranger) He was a stuntman before becoming an actor
On this Day
1683 The first Mennonites arrived in America, encouraged by William Penn's offer of 5,000 acres of land in the colony of Pennsylvania and the freedom to practice their religion. They were among the first Germans to settle in the American colonies. The Mennonites, members of a Protestant sect founded by Menno Simons in the 16th century, were widely persecuted in Europe. Led by Francis Daniel Pastorious and Johann Kelpius, thirteen German and Dutch families travelled aboard the Concord, from Krefeld, Germany, to the British colony, establishing a settlement called Germantown, now a neighbourhood in present-day Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
1818 Fort Astoria, on the Columbia River, was returned to the US under the War of 1812 peace treaty. The fort had been sold to the North West Company by starving Americans almost five years earlier, in October 1813. It was then formally captured by a British warship
1847 The book, Jane Eyre, was published by Smith, Elder and Company. Charlotte Brontë, the book's author, used the pseudonym Currer Bell. The book, about the struggles of an orphan girl who grows up to become a governess, was an immediate popular success
1866 Brothers John and Simeon Reno staged the first robbery of a moving train in US history, making off with $13,000 from an Ohio and Mississippi Railroad train in Jackson County, Indiana. Earlier train robberies had all been of stationary trains sitting in depots or freight yards. The Reno brothers' method, which quickly became very popular in the West, was to stop a moving train in a sparsely populated region where they could carry out their crime without risking interference from the law or curious bystanders. Many bandits, who might otherwise have been robbing banks or stagecoaches, discovered that the newly constructed transcontinental and regional railroads in the West made attractive targets. With the western economy booming, trains often carried large amounts of cash and precious minerals, and the wide-open spaces offered plenty of isolated areas ideal for stopping trains, as well as plenty of wild spaces where they could hide from the law. Some criminal gangs, like Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch, found that robbing trains was so easy and lucrative that for a time they made it their criminal speciality. The railroad owners, however, were not about to sit back and let the bandits freely pillage their trains. To their dismay, would-be train robbers increasingly found that the cash and precious metals on trains were well protected in massive safes watched over by heavily armed guards. Some railroads, such as the Union Pacific, even began adding special boxcars designed to carry guards and their horses. In the event of an attempted robbery, these men could not only protect the train's valuables, but could also quickly mount their horses and chase down the fleeing bandits – hopefully putting a permanent end to their criminal careers. As a result, by the late 19th century, train robbery was becoming an increasingly difficult and dangerous activity
1884 The Naval War College was established in Newport, Rhode Island
1889 The Moulin Rouge first opened its doors to the public, in Paris
1927 The first talking film, The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, opened in New York. It was not a true full-length talkie, as sound was only used for Jolson’s songs and some dialogue. The rest was a standard silent movie
1941 Two men went to the electric chair in Florida – their names were Willburn and Frizzel
1942 Chester Floyd Carlson obtained a patent on the xerography process for making electrostatic copies. Carlson worked in the patent department of an electronics firm and was frustrated at the difficulty of making copies of patent drawings. He investigated various processes and developed xerography after four years of experimenting. He had made the first Xerox copy in late October, 1938. Although he received a patent in 1942, he failed to interest companies in producing copy machines until 1947, when the Haloid Company of Rochester, New York, licensed the process. The company, which later changed its name to Xerox, introduced its first copy machine in 1958
1961 US president John F. Kennedy, speaking on civil defence, advised US families to build or buy a bomb shelter to protect them from atomic fallout in the event of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. Kennedy also declared that the US civil defence program would soon begin ensuring such protection for every citizen. Only one year later, true to Kennedy's fears, the world hovered on the brink of full-scale nuclear war when the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted over Soviet placement of nuclear missiles in Cuba. During the tense six-day crisis, many Americans across the country prepared for nuclear war, buying up canned goods and completing last-minute work on their nuclear shelters
1979 Pope John Paul II, on a week-long US tour, became the first pontiff to visit the White House, where he was received by President Jimmy Carter
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