1674 Richard “Beau” Nash – British gambler who made Bath a city of fashion, improving its streets and buildings
1902 Miriam Hopkins - Actress (The Children's Hour, The Chase, Carrie, Barbary Coast)
1906 James Brooks – Artist who created Flight, the 235 ft. mural at La Guardia Airport, in New York
1918 Bobby Troup - Actor (Emergency!, The Gene Krupa Story, M*A*S*H) and songwriter (Route 66) He was married to Julie London. He was in the Perry Mason episodes The Case of the Wrongful Writ, The Case of the Missing Melody and The Case of the Jaded Joker
1919 Pierre Elliot Trudeau – Prime Minister of Canada from 1968 to 1979 and from 1980 to his retirement in 1984, was born in Montréal. Well-educated and wealthy, Trudeau attended Jean de Brébeuf College, l'Université de Montréal, Harvard University, the École des Sciences Politiques in Paris, and the London School of Economics. His colourful legacy includes reform of foreign policy, securing provincial consent for the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and patriation of the Constitution in 1982
1920 Melina Mercouri – Greek actress (Never on Sunday, Once is Not Enough, Topkapi) She was also Greece's Minister of Culture, Youth and Sports
1926 Chuck Berry – US musician and Rock ‘n Roll legend (Maybellene, Roll Over Beethoven, School Day, Rock & Roll Music, Sweet Little Sixteen, Johnny B. Goode, My Ding-A-Ling)
1927 George C. Scott – Actor (Patton, Anatomy of a Murder, The Flim Flam Man, Taps, Oklahoma Crude, The Prince and the Pauper, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Malice, They Might Be Giants)
1934 Inger Stevens – Swedish actress (The Farmer's Daughter, Madigan, A Guide for the Married Man, Hang 'Em High)
1935 Peter Boyle – Actor (Taxi Driver, While You were Sleeping, Young Frankenstein, Midnight Caller, Joe, Everybody Loves Raymond)
1938 Dawn Wells – Actress (Gilligan’s Island, Return to Boggy Creek, Winterhawk)
1939 Lee Harvey Oswald – Presumed assassin of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas
1947 Joe Morton – Actor (What Lies Beneath, The Good Mother, Taps, Tribeca, Executive Decision, Terminator 2, Scandal, The Good Wife)
1947 Laura Nyro - Singer (Up on the Roof) and songwriter (Wedding Bell Blues, Blowin' Away, And When I Die, Stoney End, Stoned Soul Picnic, Sweet Blindness, Eli's Coming, Time and Love, Save the Country)
1951 Terry McMillan – US author (Mama, Disappearing Acts, Waiting to Exhale, How Stella Got Her Groove Back)
1951 Pam Dawber – Actress (Mork & Mindy, My Sister Sam) She is married to Mark Harmon
1958 Ian Reddington – British actor (Being April, The Sculptress, EastEnders, Highlander) He played the estate agent, Oakley, in the Inspector Morse episode Cherubim and Seraphim
1960 Jean Claude Van Damme – Belgium-born actor (Kickboxer, Universal Soldier, Double Impact, Hard Target, Nowhere to Run)
1961 Erin Moran – Actress (Happy Days, Joanie Loves Chachi, The Don Rickles Show, Daktari, Galaxy of Terror, Twirl, Watermelon Man, How Sweet It Is!)
1961 Wynton Marsalis – Jazz and classical trumpeter (Think of One, Father & Sons) He is the brother of Branford Marsalis
Died this Day
1646 Father Issac Jogues – French missionary who was killed by Mohawk Indians at Ossernenom, in what is now upstate New York. Jogues was the first Catholic priest to set foot on Manhattan Island. The year before he died, Jogues had left a chest of gifts for the Mohawk. A smallpox epidemic broke out, their corn crop had failed, and the Mohawk regarded the chest as the cause of their misfortunes. On a return visit, Jogues was struck with a tomahawk and afterwards decapitated. The following day, Father Jean de La Lande went to retrieve Jogue’s body, and was also killed. Both their bodies were thrown into the Mohawk River and their heads exposed on the palisades enclosing the Mohawk village
1865 Lord Palmerston – Twice British Prime Minister. His deathbed quote was, “Die my dear doctor? That’s the last thing I shall do!” He died two days before his 81st birthday
1871 Charles Babbage, age 78 – British inventor, political economist, and mathematician who helped found England's Analytic, Royal Astronomical, and Statistical Societies, and first proposed the idea of a mechanical calculator in 1812. By 1823, Parliament had granted Babbage funding to build his machine, which he called the "Difference Engine," and which is considered to be the first computer. Babbage's protege, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, helped devise a method to program the machine using punched cards. Babbage devoted the next ten years of his life to building the Difference Engine, spending £17,000 pounds of government funding. Unfortunately, Babbage ran out of funds to build the machine and was forced to abandon the project in 1848. In 1854, a Swedish engineer finally succeeded in constructing a Difference Engine based on Babbage's theories. The machine was largely forgotten until Babbage's drawings were rediscovered in 1937
1931 Thomas Alva Edison, age 84 – US inventor who acquired an astounding 1,093 patents in his lifetime. He died at his home in West Orange, New Jersey. He developed serious hearing problems at an early age, which provided the motivation for many of his inventions. With little formal education, Edison gained experience as a telegraph operator and then went on to invent the light bulb, the phonograph, the gramophone, and a forerunner of the movie projector. He also patented or invented the storage battery, the electron tube, and modern ways of generating and distributing electricity. Edison's experiments were guided by his remarkable intuition, but he also took care to employ assistants who provided the mathematical and technical expertise he lacked
1966 Elizabeth Arden – US cosmetics magnate
1982 Bess Truman, age 97 - Former first lady, she died at her home in Independence, Missouri
On this Day
1469 Ferdinand of Aragon married Isabella of Castile, thus beginning a co-operative reign that would unite all the dominions of Spain and elevate the nation to a dominant world power. In 1478, after incorporating a number of independent Spanish dominions into their kingdom, Ferdinand and Isabella introduced the Spanish Inquisition, a powerful and brutal force of homogenisation in Spanish society. In 1492, the reconquest of Granada from the Moors was completed, and the crown ordered all Moslems and Spanish Jews who refused to convert to Christianity expelled from Spain. In the same year, Christopher Columbus, an Italian explorer sponsored by Isabella and Ferdinand, discovered the New World and made Spanish claims in the rich, new territory. Ferdinand and Isabella's subsequent decision to encourage vigorous colonial activity in the Americas led to a period of great prosperity and imperial supremacy for Spain
1685 King Louis XIV of France revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had established the legal toleration of France's Protestant population, the Huguenots
1748 In France, the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle ended the War of the Austrian Succession. Prince Edward Island, Cape Breton and Louisbourg were returned to France, in exchange for Madras, India
1767 The Mason-Dixon line was agreed upon as the boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania. In 1763 astronomer Charles Mason and surveyor Jeremiah Dixon, both from Britain, landed the monumental task of resolving an 80-year bloody land dispute between the Calvert family of Maryland and the Penn family of Pennsylvania. Mason and Dixon were asked to lay stone markers indicating the boundary. The boundary began at 15 miles south of the southern most tip of the city of Philadelphia and followed a constant latitude west to a point between western Pennsylvania and what is now called West Virginia. Mason and Dixon used the stars to calculate this path through the wilderness and mark out the 233-mile-long boundary line between Pennsylvania and Maryland, and the 83 miles long north-south boundary between Maryland and Delaware. The stones, huge blocks of limestone between 3-½ and 5 feet long and weighing between 300 and 600 pounds, were quarried in Southern Great Britain and shipped to North America. Carried by wagon to their final resting place on the line, the stones were placed at one-mile intervals. Mile markers were decorated with vertical fluting and a P on the north face and M on the southern face; every fifth mile along the line the stones were engraved with the Penn coat of arms on the Pennsylvania side and the Calvert coat of arms on the other. Towards the end of the line the terrain got more hilly so Mason and Dixon did not lay markers, but erected large rock groupings, or cairns, instead
1842 The first telegraph cable was laid by Samuel Morse in New York Harbour, but stopped working the next day when a ship's anchor got caught on the cable. The following year another cable was laid which was encased in lead pipe to avoid a similar accident
1860 British troops occupying Peking, China, looted and then burned the Yuanmingyuan, the fabulous summer palace built by the Manchu emperors in the 18th century. China's Qing leadership surrendered to the Franco-British expeditionary force soon after, ending the Second Opium War and Chinese hopes of reversing the tide of foreign domination in its national affairs
1867 The territory of Alaska was formally handed over from Russia to the United States, and at Sitka, the US flag was raised over the new territory for the first time. The tremendous landmass of Alaska, one-fifth the size of the rest of the US, was largely unexplored when Secretary of State William Seward organised its purchase from Russia for just over seven million dollars. Despite the bargain price of roughly 2¢ an acre, the Alaskan purchase was largely ridiculed in the US press as "Seward's Folly" and critics claimed he was, “wasting money on a lot of ice.” However, the discovery of gold in 1898 brought a rapid influx of people to the territory, and Alaska, rich in natural resources, has contributed to US prosperity ever since
1873 The rules of US football were formulated at a meeting in New York by delegates from Columbia, Princeton, Rutgers and Yale Universities
1877 In Hamilton Ontario, Hugh C. Baker, Charles D. Cory, T.C. Mewburn and Mrs. I.R. Thompson received the world's first telephone service, installed by the Bell Company
1892 The first long distance telephone line between Chicago and New York was formally opened
1898 The US took control of Puerto Rico, only one year after Spain granted Puerto Rico home rule. US troops raised their flag over the Caribbean nation, formalising US authority over the island's one million inhabitants
1922 The BBC was officially formed
1929 The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council of Great Britain ruled that women in Canada were “persons” and therefore, were eligible to become senators. This ruling reversed an April 1928 decision of the Supreme Court of Canada. The fight began in 1918 when a lawyer appeared before Judge Emily Murphy and said her judgements were illegal because she was not a “person” under British legal custom
1957 Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip visited the US and the White House to mark the 350th anniversary of the British settling in Virginia
1988 The British Home Secretary banned all broadcasts involving terrorist spokesmen. The IRA spokesmen could be seen, but not heard. However, their statements could be reported by the media
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