1753 Samuel Crompton – British inventor of the spinning-mule, the first major mechanisation of the cotton industry. He could not afford to patent his device, and revealed its secrets to mill owners in return for a promise to pay him a royalty. All he ever received was £60
1795 Sir Rowland Hill – British postal pioneer who invented the idea of the Penny Post in 1840 while Postmaster General. He was also founder of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge
1857 Joseph Conrad – Polish born British sailor and author (Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, Under Western Eyes, The Secret Agent, Nostromo) When Conrad was 21, he travelled to England as a deck hand on a British freighter. He learned English during six voyages on a small British trade boat, spent 16 years with the British merchant navy, and got his first command in 1888. The following year, he commanded a Congo River steamboat for four months. Conrad began writing in the late 1890s. His first novel was published in 1895, and the following year he married an English girl and gave up the sea to write full time
1925 Ferlin Husky – Country singer (Gone, Wings of a Dove)
1927 Andy Williams - Singer (Moon River, Canadian Sunset, Butterfly)
1937 Bobby Allison - Racecar driver
1945 Paul Nicholas – British actor (Just Good Friends, Tommy, The Jazz Singer)
1949 Heather Menzies – Canadian actress (The Sound of Music, Logan's Run, Hawaii)
1952 Mel Smith – British comedy actor (Alias Smith and Jones, Not The Nine O’Clock News, Bullshot, The Princess Bride)
1960 Daryl Hannah – Actress (Splash, Roxanne, Bladerunner, Grumpy Old Men, Wall Street, Kill Bill Vols.1 & 2)
1960 Julianne Moore - Actress (Hannibal, An Ideal Husband, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Magnolia, The Big Lebowski, The Hours, The Shipping News)
1968 Brendan Fraser – Actor (George of the Jungle, Encino Man, The Mummy, Airheads, Mrs. Winterbourne, Crash, Blast from the Past, The Whale, Doom Patrol, Trust)
1980 Anna Chlumsky – Actress (My Girl, Trading Mom, A Child’s Wish)
Died this Day
1552 Francis Xavier – Jesuit Missionary who was canonised in 1622
1894 Robert Louis Stevenson - Scottish traveller and author (Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, A Child's Garden of Verse) He died three weeks after his 44th birthday. Stevenson was born in Scotland and studied civil engineering and law, but decided to pursue a career as a writer, which upset his parents, who expected him to follow the family trade of lighthouse keeping. In 1876, he fell in love with a US woman named Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne, and followed her to San Francisco in 1879. The couple married and returned to Scotland in 1880. In June 1888 Stevenson and his family left San Francisco for their first visit to the South Seas. Stevenson, an adventurous traveller plagued by tuberculosis, was seeking a healthier climate. The family finally settled in Samoa, where Stevenson died
1910 Mary Eddy Baker – US founder of the Christian Science Movement
1981 Allan Dwan, age 96 – Canadian director (Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Heidi, Escape to Burma, The Sands of Iwo Jima)
1999 Madeline Kahn, age 57 – Stage and screen actress (Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, What’s Up Doc?, Paper Moon, High Anxiety, The Cheap Detective, Nixon) She played Jenny Hill in The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother
2000 Hoyt Curtin, age 78 - Composer and music director for Hanna-Barbera who wrote the music for countless cartoon theme songs (The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Scooby-Doo, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Johnny Quest)
2000 Gwendolyn Brooks, age 83 - US poet (Children Coming Home, The Bean Eaters, A Street in Bronzeville, Annie Allen) She died at her South Side Chicago home, of cancer
On this Day
1557 The first covenant toward organisation of the Presbyterian Church was signed in Edinburgh, Scotland
1660 Margaret Hughes was the first professional actress to appear on a British stage, where she received a rousing reception at the Vere Street Theatre. She played Desdomona in Thomas Killigrew’s version of Othello, which he titled The Moor of Venice
1738 In North Dakota, Pierre Gaultier de Varennes de La Vérendrye travelled south to Mandan country with his sons Louis-Joseph and François. They reached the main Mandan village on the Missouri River
1818 Illinois became the 21st state of the Union. Illinois presented unique challenges to immigrants unaccustomed to the soil and vegetation of the area. The strange but beautiful prairie lands east of the Mississippi differed greatly from the familiar, heavily forested lands of states like Kentucky and Tennessee. The early immigrants to Illinois did not know what to make of the vast treeless stretches of the prairie. Most pioneers believed that the fertility of soil revealed itself by the abundance of vegetation it supported, so they assumed that the lack of trees on the prairie signalled inferior farmland. Early prairie farmers found that their flimsy ploughs were inadequate to cut through sod thickly knotted with deep roots, and felt helpless without ready access to the trees they needed for their tools, homes, furniture, fences, and fuel. For these reasons, most of the early Illinois settlers remained in the southern part of the state, where they built homes and farms near the trees that grew along the many creek and river bottoms. When Illinois was granted statehood in 1818, the population was only about 35,000, and most of the prairie was still largely unsettled. Gradually, a few tough Illinois farmers took on the difficult task of ploughing the prairie and discovered that the soil was far richer than they had expected. The development of heavy prairie ploughs and improved access to wood and other supplies through new shipping routes encouraged even more farmers to head out into the vast northern prairie lands of Illinois. By 1840, the centre of population in Illinois had shifted decisively to the north, and the once insignificant hamlet of Chicago rapidly became a bustling city
1833 Oberlin College in Ohio opened. It was the first totally co-educational college in the US, and the first school to advocate the abolition of slavery
1878 The Canadian Pacific Railway connected Winnipeg, Manitoba with Emerson, Minnesota, and the outside world. The Pembina branch line connected with St. Paul and the Pacific Railroad
1896 Hermann Hollerith incorporated the Tabulating Machine Company, which would eventually become IBM
1910 Neon lighting, developed by French physicist Georges Claude, was displayed for the first time at the Paris Motor Show
1912 Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro signed an armistice with Turkey, ending the first Balkan War. During the two-month conflict, a military coalition between Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Montenegro, known as the Balkan League, expelled Turkey from all the Ottoman Empire's former European possessions, with the exception of Constantinople, now Istanbul
1917 The Quebec Bridge opened near Quebec, Canada, as the first train made the crossing. At the time, it was the world's longest cantilever truss span, a span in which stiff trusses extend from the bridge piers, without additional support
1925 Concerto in F, by George Gershwin had its world premiere at New York's Carnegie Hall, with Gershwin himself at the piano
1926 Agatha Christie disappeared from her Surrey home. It was an episode as puzzling and intriguing as any in her many novels. She was discovered on the 14th, staying under an assumed name at the Old Swan Hotel in Harrowgate. She said she had no recollection of how she became to be in Yorkshire
1947 Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire opened on Broadway, starring Jessica Tandy as Blanche DuBois, Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski and Kim Hunter as Stella Kowalski
1956The Canadian Overseas Telecommunication Corporation introduced international Telex to Canada
1964 Police arrested some 800 students at the University of California at Berkeley, one day after the students stormed the administration building and staged a massive sit-in
1967 Dr. Christiaan Barnard led a team of surgeons in Cape Town, South Africa as they performed the first human heart transplant. Louis Washkansky lived 18 days with the new heart. Washkansky, a South African grocer dying from chronic heart disease, received the transplant from Denise Darvall, a 25-year-old woman who was fatally injured in a car accident. The problem of persuading the patient's immune system to accept the transplanted heart was overcome in the early 1980s with the discovery of anti-rejection drugs
1970 British Trade Commissioner James Cross was finally released by the Liberation cell of the militant separatist group the FLQ in Montréal. He had been taken from his home on Redpath Crescent in Montreal and held for 60 days in an 8-by-14 ft room on des Récollets Street in Montreal North. Québec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte, had also been kidnapped that October, but was murdered by his abductors. Cross was taken to the Cuban pavilion at the Expo '67 site and released, in exchange for safe passage to Cuba for his captors
1979 Eleven people were trampled to death, and many more injured in a stampede for seats for a concert at Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum, where the British rock group The Who was performing. The tragedy was blamed on “rush seating”. The band was not informed of the deaths until after the show
1984 More than 4,000 people died after a cloud of gas escaped from a pesticide plant operated by a Union Carbide subsidiary in Bhopal, India
1986 President Ronald Reagan unveiled the first one-trillion dollar US budget
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