1778 Sir Humphry Davey – British chemist and inventor of the miner’s safety lamp. He also discovered the metals sodium, strontium and potassium
1796 Thomas C. Haliburton – Canadian judge and author. He was the creator of the fictional Sam Slick, a resourceful Yankee clock peddler and cracker-barrel philosopher. He was the first Canadian writer to get significant recognition outside the country
1797 Joseph Henry - Scientist who is known as the father of the US weather service
1874 William Lyon MacKenzie King - Canada's 10th prime minister, born in what is now Kitchener, Ontario. His mother, Isabel Mackenzie, was the daughter of the 1837 Rebellion leader William Lyon Mackenzie
1889 Rosemary (Silver Dollar) Tabor - The second daughter of Horace and Elizabeth (Baby Doe) Tabor. The Tabors were one of Colorado's wealthiest families of the time. Silver's mother, Elizabeth Doe, came west from Wisconsin with her then husband Harvey in 1877, hoping to make a fortune in the booming gold and silver mines of Colorado. Harvey Doe proved to be an inept and lazy miner, though, so Elizabeth divorced him and moved to the mining town of Leadville in 1881, where she performed on the stage under the name Baby Doe. During a chance encounter, Baby Doe won the affections of Horace Tabor, an emigrant from Vermont who made millions in the silver mines. Although Tabor was a married man, he moved Baby Doe into an elegant hotel in Denver and began a not-so-secret affair that scandalised the Colorado gentry. Ignoring the wagging tongues, Tabor divorced his wife and married the beautiful Baby Doe, who was nearly a quarter-century younger than he. For a time, the couple lived a life of extraordinary opulence and pleasure, and Baby Doe had two daughters they called Lillie and Silver Dollar, the latter in recognition of the source of the family's wealth. During the early 1890s, the good times started to slow as some of Tabor's investments went sour and his mines began to decline. The fatal blow came in 1893, when the US Congress repealed the Silver Purchase Act of 1890, which had kept silver prices high through government investment. Without these large purchases of silver by the US treasury, prices plummeted and Tabor's once valuable mines were suddenly nearly worthless. In a matter of months, Tabor was bankrupt and the family was reduced to living on the modest income he earned as Denver's postmaster. When Tabor died in 1899 of appendicitis, Baby Doe and her young daughters were left penniless, and moved back to Chicago to live with relatives. Eventually, Baby Doe left Lillie in Chicago and returned to Leadville with Silver Dollar. The decision was disastrous: mired in poverty, Baby Doe and Silver Dollar eked out a threadbare existence, living in a small shack near one of the worthless silver mines they inherited from Horace Tabor. As Silver Dollar grew older she drank heavily and used drugs. She moved to Chicago, where she was murdered in 1925 at 36 years of age. Baby Doe survived for another decade, an impoverished recluse who used old gunny sacks for shoes and doctored herself with turpentine and lard. During a severe blizzard that hit Leadville for several days in February 1935, Baby Doe, who had once been one of the richest people on earth, died cold and alone at 81 years old
1891 Robertson Hare – British actor (Rookery Nook, Cuckoo in the Nest, All Gas and Gaiters) His trademark cry was “Oh, calamity!”
1894 Arthur Fiedler – Conductor of The Boston Pops Orchestra
1903 Erskine Caldwell – US author (Tobacco Road, God's Little Acre, The Courting of Susie)
1908 Willard Frank Libby – US chemist who developed the method of radio-carbon dating
1910 Sy Oliver – US trumpeter, singer, arranger, bandleader composer (Easy Does It, Swing High, It Ait Whatcha Do)
1915 Joan Woodbury - Actress (Brenda Starr Reporter, The Ten Commandments, Flame of the West)
1931 Dave Madden – Canadian-born U.S. actor (The Partridge Family, Charlotte’s Web, Alice)
1936 Tommy Steele – British pop star (Singing the Blues, Shiralee, Butterfingers) and actor (Finian’s Rainbow, Where’s Jack?, The Happiest Millionaire)
1937 Art Neville – Rock musician and keyboardist with his family group, the Neville Brothers (Mona Lisa, The Ten Commandments of Love)
1938 Nat Stuckey - Country singer/songwriter (Got Leaving on Her Mind, Sweet Thang)
1944 Bernard Hill - British actor (I Claudius, Ghandi, The Bounty, Shirley Valentine, Lipstick on Your Collar, The Mill on the Floss, Great Expectations)
1945 Ernie Hudson – Actor (Miss Congenialty, Oz, Ghostbusters, The Crow, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle)
1946 Eugene Levy – Canadian comedian/actor (Second City TV, Splash, National Lampoon's Summer Vacation, Schitt’s Creek, Finding Dory, Road to Avonlea) He is the father of Dan Levy
1946 Jayne Eastwood – Canadian actress (My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Chicago, Dawn of the Dead, This is Wonderland, Haven)
1947 Wes Studi – Actor (Skinwalkers, Coyote Waits, Undisputed, Heat, Streets of Laredo, The Last of the Mohicans, Geronimo: An American Legend, Hell on Wheels, Avatar, Kings, Penny Dreadful)
1953 Barry Livingston - Actor (My Three Sons, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet) He is the brother of Stanley Livingston, who also played in My Three Sons
1953 Bill Pullman - Actor (Spaceballs, A League of Their Own, Zero Effect, Sleepless in Seattle, Independence Day, Lake Placid, While You Were Sleeping, Torchwood: Miracle Day, The Sinner, LBJ)
1974 Sarah Paulson – Actress (Serenity, What Women Want, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Deadwood, American Gothic, American Horror Story, American Crime Story, Cupid)
1974 Giovanni Ribisi – Actor (Avatar, Saving Private Ryan , Cold Mountain, Gone in Sixty Seconds, Boiler Room)
1975 Milla Jovovich – Ukranian-born actress (Resident Evil, Zoolander, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, The Fifth Element, Chaplin)
Died this Day
1830 Simón Bolívar - South American revolutionary who was known as The Liberator, died in Colombia. Bolivia is named in his honour
1917 Elizabeth Garret Anderson – The first English woman physician, and later the first woman mayor in England
1957 Dorothy L. Sayers, age 64 – British author who created the upper-class detective Lord Peter Wimsey (Whose Body?, Hangman’s Holiday, The Nine Taylors) She was also a dedicated Holmesian
1996 Nancy Malloy, age 51 - Vancouver nurse was slain, along with five other aid workers, as they slept at a hospital in Chechnya, Russia. She was the first Canadian Red Cross worker ever killed in the field
On this Day
1538 Britain's King Henry VIII was excommunicated by Pope Paul III. Married and divorced several times, Henry had declared himself head of the Church of England
1777 France recognised US independence
1790 The Aztec calendar stone was uncovered by workmen in Mexico City. About thirteen feet wide and weighing 24 tons, the hand-carved slab accurately described the solar calendar
1792 The first assembly for Lower Canada opened at Québec
1849 British hatmakers Thomas and William Bowler sold their first bowler hat – Dr. Watson’s favourite hat!
1859 Montreal’s Victoria Bridge was opened to passenger train traffic, although it wouldn’t be formally opened until the next August, by the Prince of Wales. The single-track iron tubular bridge was entirely enclosed, which caused ventilation problems. A slit 20" wide would have to be cut the full length of the bridge to let smoke escape
1903 Near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first successful flight of a self-propelled, heavier-than-air aircraft. Orville piloted the gasoline-powered, propeller-driven biplane, which stayed aloft for 12 seconds and covered 120 feet on its inaugural flight, enough to convince the brothers that sustained flights were possible. Orville and Wilbur Wright grew up in Dayton, Ohio, and developed an interest in aviation after learning of the glider flights of the German engineer Otto Lilienthal in the 1890s. After exhaustively researching other engineers' efforts to build a heavier-than-air, controlled aircraft, the Wright brothers wrote the US Weather Bureau inquiring about a suitable place to conduct glider tests. They settled on Kitty Hawk, an isolated village on North Carolina's Outer Banks, which offered steady winds and sand dunes from which to glide and land softly. Their first glider, tested in 1900, performed poorly, but a new design, tested in 1901, was more successful. Later that year, they built a wind tunnel where they tested nearly 200 wings and airframes of different shapes and designs. The brothers' systematic experimentations paid off, and they flew hundreds of successful flights in their 1902 glider at Kill Devils Hills near Kitty Hawk. Their biplane glider featured a steering system, based on a movable rudder, that solved the problem of controlled flight. They were now ready for powered flight. In Dayton, they designed a 12-horsepower internal combustion engine with the assistance of machinist Charles Taylor, and built a new aircraft to house it. They transported their aircraft in pieces to Kitty Hawk in the autumn of 1903, assembled it, made a few further tests, and on December 14th, Orville made the first attempt at powered flight. The engine stalled during take-off and the plane was damaged, and they spent three days repairing it. Then at 10:35 am on December 17th, in front of five witnesses, the aircraft ran down a monorail track and into the air. The modern aviation age was born. Three more tests were made that day, with Wilbur and Orville alternately flying the airplane. Wilbur flew the last flight, covering 852 feet in 59 seconds
1932 Radio City Music Hall opened in New York City
1939 The German battleship, Admiral Graf Spee, was scuttled in the River Plate of Montevideo, Uruguay, after a battle with the British cruisers Exeter, Ajax and Achilles
1969 The US Air Force closed its Project Blue Book by concluding there was no evidence of extraterrestrial spaceships behind thousands of UFO sightings
1969 Singer Tiny Tim, Herbert Khaury, married his sweetheart Miss Vickie, Victoria Budinger, on The Tonight Show. Tiny Tim and Miss Vickie had one daughter, Tulip
1979 Stuntman Stan Barrett became the first person to break the sound barrier on land. He drove the Budweiser Rocket car at a top speed of 739.6 miles per hour in a one-way run at Rogers Dry Lake, California. The ultrasonic speed set an unofficial record, as an official record requires trips in both directions, whose speeds are averaged
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