1491 Jacques Cartier – French explorer of North America. He was the first European to explore, chart, and attempt colonisation in the St. Lawrence area
1732 Sir Richard Arkwright – British inventor of the spinning frame, which infuriated his Preston spinners in 1768, who felt their jobs were at stake. He also introduced steam power into his Nottingham factory
1790 Jean-François Champollion – French Egyptologist who deciphered the Rosetta Stone by recognising that the Egyptian symbols were not just alphabetic or syllabic, but could express an entire idea
1805 Joseph Smith – US leader of the Mormons, who claimed he had been directed by an angel to find buried golden plates written by Indians who were descendants of the Biblical Hebrews
1810 Karl Richard Lepsuis – German Egyptologist, who advanced archaeology greatly by introducing a scientific approach. He was the first to estimate the date of the pyramids
1812 Samuel Smiles – British author (Self Help, Thrift) His self-improvement books were meant as the tools of Victorian virtues
1885 Vincent Sardi - Restaurateur (Sardi's Bar & Grill, New York)
1908 Yousuf Karsh – Turkish-Armenian photographer who immigrated to Canada to escape persecution. His wartime portrait of Sir Winston Churchill brought him international fame, and he became recognised as one of the finest portrait photographers in the history of photography. As a way of thanking Canada for its hospitality, he always signed himself “Karsh of Ottawa”
1909 Maurice Denham – British character actor (Sink the Bismarck!, The Alphabet Murders, Murder on the Orient Express, 4:50 From Paddington, Rumpole of the Bailey, Peak Practice, The Beggar Bride, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Julia) He played Lance Mandeville in the Inspector Morse episode Fat Chance He also played Reverend Augustus Merridew in the Sherlock Holmes episode The Last Vampyre
1911 James Gregory - Actor (The Manchurian Candidate, Barney Miller, PT 109, Beneath the Planet of the Apes)
1921 Gerald O'Loughlin - Actor (The Rookies, Our House, Ensign Pulver, A Matter of Life and Death)
1925 Harry Guardino - Actor (Hell is for Heroes, Dirty Harry, The Enforcer, Fist of Honour)
1935 'Little' Esther Phillips - Pianist, singer (Release Me, What a Diff'rence a Day Makes) She received a Grammy nomination for Best female R & B vocalist in 1973. Aretha Franklin won, but gave the award to Esther
1936 Frederic Forrest – Actor (The Rose, Apocalypse Now, 21 Jump Street, Lonesome Dove, Hammett, The Conversation, The Two Jakes)
1940 Tim Hardin – Singer and composer (If I Were a Carpenter, Reason to Believe, Hang on to a Dream, Misty Roses, Tippy-Toein')
1943 Harry Shearer – Actor, comedian (The Truman Show, A League of Their Own, This is Spinal Tap, Saturday Night Live, The Simpsons)
1945 Ron Bushy – Musician and drummer with the group Iron Butterfly (In-A- Gadda-Da-Vida, Metamorphosis)
1947 Susan Lucci – Actress (All My Children, Blood on Her Hands, Ebbie, Dallas, Mafia Princess)
1955 Belinda Lang – British actress (Inspector Alleyn Mysteries, 2.4 Children, Second Thoughts, The Bretts) She is married to Hugh Fraser, who plays Captain Hastings in the Poirot series
1971 Corey Haim – Canadian Actor (The Lost Boys, Without Malice, Merlin, The Edison Twins, Firstborn, Murphy's Romance)
Died this Day
1771 Mother Marie Marguerite d'Youville, age 70 - Founder of the Grey Nuns. She died in Montréal. She was declared venerable in 1890 and first steps in her beatification were taken in 1955. Among other accomplishments, the Grey Nuns founded many hospitals across Canada
1944 Charles Dana Gibson, age 77 – US illustrator who created the “Gibson Girl”
1972 Charles Atlas, age 79 – Italian-born US bodybuilder who co-created a mail-order bodybuilding course. His advertisement featured the 97-lb. weakling who had sand kicked in his face
1982 Jack Webb, age 62 - Actor (Dragnet, Sunset Boulevard, Pete Kelley’s Blues, The Last Time I Saw Archie) He died of a heart attack in West Hollywood, California
On this Day
1620 One week after the Mayflower arrived at Plymouth Harbour in present-day Massachusetts, construction on the first permanent European settlement in New England began. After coming to anchor in what is today Provincetown Harbour in the Cape Cod region of Massachusetts, a party of armed men under the command of Captain Myles Standish was sent out to explore the immediate area and find a location suitable for settlement. On December 11, the explorers went ashore in Plymouth where they found cleared fields and plentiful running water. The expedition returned to the Mayflower and on December 16 the ship came to anchor in Plymouth Harbour. One week later, the pilgrims began work on dwellings that would shelter them through their difficult first winter in North America. In the first year of settlement, half the colonists died of disease. In 1621, the health and economic condition of the colonists improved, and that autumn Governor William Bradford invited neighbouring Indians to Plymouth to celebrate the bounty of that year's harvest season. Plymouth soon secured treaties with most local Indian tribes, the economy steadily grew, and more colonists were attracted to the settlement. By the mid-1640s, Plymouth's population numbered 3,000 people, but by then the settlement had been overshadowed by the larger Massachusetts Bay Colony to the north, settled by Puritans in 1629. The term "Pilgrim" was not used to describe the Plymouth colonists until the early 19th century and was derived from a manuscript in which Governor Bradford spoke of the "saints" who travelled to the New World as "pilgrimes." In 1820, the orator Daniel Webster spoke of "Pilgrim Fathers" at a bicentennial celebration of Plymouth's founding, and thereafter the term entered common usage
1783 George Washington resigned as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and retired to his home at Mount Vernon, Virginia
1788 Maryland voted to cede a 100-square-mile area for the seat of the national government; about two-thirds of the area became the District of Columbia
1823 The poem A Visit from St. Nicholas by Clement C. Moore (‘Twas the night before Christmas...) was published in the Troy, NY Sentinel
1834 British architect Joseph Hansom patented the Patent Safety Cab, a 2-wheeled, horse-driven cab with the driver seated above and behind the passengers, known as the Hansom Cab. The cab had a front folding entrance door and room for two passengers. The driver communicated through a trap door on top. They proved to be the most popular of London’s cabs, and were later introduced into New York and Boston. Holmes and Watson sure made good use of them!
1848 The London Illustrated News published the first Christmas supplement with advice on “Making the Christmas Pudding”
1888 Vincent Van Gogh, who was suffering severe depression, sliced off one his ears
1929 The teletype machine was first used by a police department as law enforcement officials found they could use rapidly developing communications technology to speed their work. The Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, police department initiated the first teletypewriter system to be used by police. The machine connected ninety-five cities via 3,400 miles of telephone wire and allowed police departments to share information more quickly
1983 Jeanne Sauvé was appointed Canada's first female Governor-General, who, as the Queen’s Representative, acts as the Canadian head of state. Sauvé was born in Saskatchewan in 1922. First elected to the Commons in 1972, she went on to become the first female French Canadian cabinet minister, and the first female Speaker of the House of Commons
1986 After nine days and four minutes in the sky, the experimental airplane Voyager, piloted by Dick Rutan and Jeanna Yeager, completed the first non-stop, around-the-world flight without refuelling as it landed safely at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Voyager was made mostly of plastic and stiffened paper and carried more than three times its weight in fuel when it took off from Edwards Air Force Base on December 14th. By the time it returned, after flying 25,012 miles around the planet, it had just five gallons of fuel left in its remaining operational fuel tank. Voyager was built by Burt Rutan of the Rutan Aircraft Company without government support and with minimal corporate sponsorship. Dick Rutan, Burt's brother and a decorated Vietnam War pilot, joined the project early on, as did Dick's friend Jeanna Yeager (no relation to aviator Chuck Yeager). Voyager's extremely light yet strong body was made of layers of carbon-fibre tape and paper impregnated with epoxy resin. Its wingspan was 111 feet, and it had its horizontal stabiliser wing on the plane's nose rather than its rear. Essentially a flying fuel tank, every possible area was used for fuel storage. On December 23, when Voyager was flying north along the Baja California coast and just 450 miles short of its goal, the engine it was using went out, and the aircraft plunged from 8,500 to 5,000 feet before an alternate engine was started up. Almost nine days to the minute after it lifted off, Voyager appeared over Edwards Air Force Base and circled as Yeager turned a primitive crank that lowered the landing gear. Then, to the cheers of 23,000 spectators, the plane landed safely with a few gallons of fuel to spare, completing the first non-stop circumnavigation of the earth by an aircraft that was not refuelled in the air. Voyager is on permanent display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC
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