1768 Joseph Bonaparte - Eldest brother of Napoleon. He became King of Naples in 1806 and of Spain in 1808
1800 Millard Fillmore - The 13th president of the US, born in Summerhill, NY
1827 Sir Sanford Fleming - Scottish born Canadian engineer and railway surveyor who is known as "The Father of Standard Time" for his work in dividing the world into time zones. While in charge of the initial survey for the Canadian Pacific Railway, the first Canadian railway to span the continent, he realized the problems of coordinating such a long railway. He developed the concept of international standard time and time zones, which were adopted in 1884. As well, Fleming designed the first Canadian postage stamp. Issued in 1851, it cost three pennies and depicted the beaver, now the national animal of Canada
1844 Marie-Bernard Soubirous - St. Bernardette of Lourdes. She was an asthmatic French girl who claimed to see visions of the Virgin Mary at a spring near her home. This became the shrine at Lourdes
1873 Adolph Zukor - Hungarian born US entrepreneur who built the Paramount movie empire. He worked in the penny arcade before becoming a film magnate
1891 Zora Neale Hurston - US novelist and folklorist (Jonah's Gourd Vine, Mules and Men, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Dust Tracks on a Road) She was born in Eatonville, Florida
1903 Alan Napier - Actor (My Fair Lady, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Sinbad the Sailor, Across the Wide Missouri, QB VII) He played Alfred the butler on the Batman TV series
1911 Butterfly McQueen – Actress (Gone With the Wind, The Mosquito Coast, Beulah)
1912 Charles Addams - Cartoonist for The New Yorker (The Addams Family) He is said to have been fascinated by graveyards at an early age
1948 Kenny Loggins - Musician, singer (I'm Alright, This is It, Welcome to Heartlight, Danger Zone)
1950 Erin Gray – Actress (Silver Spoons, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Born Beautiful)
1956 David Caruso – Actor (CSI: Miami, NYPD Blue, Hudson Hawk, King of New York, Crime Story, Rambo: First Blood)
1957 Katie Couric – TV anchor (Dateline NBC, The Today Show)
1964 Nicolas Cage - Actor (Raising Arizona, Guarding Tess, The Rock, ConAir) He is the nephew of Francis Ford Coppola
1971 Jeremy Renner – Actor (The Hurt Locker, The Town, Mission: Impossible – The Ghost Protocol, The Unusuals, North Country)
1988 Robert Sheehan – Irish actor (Misfits, The Borrowers, Love/Hate, Ghostwood, Young Blades, Foreign Exchange)
Died this Day
1536 Catherine of Aragon - First wife of Henry VIII
1864 Caleb Blood Smith, age 55 - US Secretary of the Interior who played a major role in managing relations with Native Americans during the Civil War. He died in Indianapolis. Smith was born in Boston and raised in Cincinnati. Educated at the College of Cincinnati and Miami University, he practised law in Indiana and became involved in state politics. A member of the Whig Party, Smith served in the Indiana state legislature before being elected to Congress in 1842. He opposed the expansion of slavery, and he fought hard against the 1845 annexation of Texas. After serving on the US-Mexico Boundary Commission in the late 1840s, Smith left public life to work for the railroads in Ohio. As the Civil War drew near, he became active in the Republican Party. He was a delegate to the 1860 convention and he became one of Abraham Lincoln's most enthusiastic supporters. Lincoln rewarded him by naming him to the post of Secretary of the Interior. In this role, Smith supervised Indian agents in the West and worked with Secretaries of War Simon Cameron and Edwin Stanton to forge Indian policy. However, Smith was generally disliked by most members of the cabinet and was described by one insider as a man with "neither heart nor sincerity about him." He found himself overworked and increasingly at odds with the rest of the administration on key issues such as the emancipation of slaves. Smith resigned at the end of 1862 and Lincoln appointed him district judge in Indianapolis. Smith died suddenly while working at the federal courthouse
1912 Sophia Louisa Jex-Blake - British physician who successfully sought legislation permitting women in Britain to receive the MD degree and a license to practice medicine and surgery. Through her efforts a medical school for women was opened in London in 1874, and in 1886 she established one in Edinburgh
1943 Nikola Tesla, age 86 - Serbian-born US inventor and researcher who discovered the rotating magnetic field, the basis of most alternating-current machinery. He emigrated to the US in 1884 and sold the patent rights to his system of alternating-current dynamos, transformers, and motors to George Westinghouse
1945 Major Thomas McGuire - The US's second-highest-scoring WWII flying ace, killed over Negros Island in the Pacific just three victories short of setting a new record. McGuire was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor and the McGuire Air Force Base in Wrightstown, New Jersey, was later named in his honour
1989 Emperor Hirohito of Japan - He died of cancer in Tokyo, after a 62-year reign
1998 Jerome Murray, age 85 - US inventor of such varied items as the airplane boarding ramp, a television antenna rotator, and a pump that made open-heart surgery possible
On this Day
1450 Glasgow University, Scotland, was founded
1610 The astronomer Galileo Galilei dated his first letter describing telescopic observations in which he saw the moon's cratered surface using his twenty-powered spyglass. He wrote, "... it is seen that the Moon is most evidently not at all of an even, smooth, and regular surface, as a great many people believe of it and of the other heavenly bodies, but on the contrary it is rough and unequal. In short it is shown to be such that sane reasoning cannot conclude otherwise than that it is full of prominences and cavities similar, but much larger, to the mountains and valleys spread over the Earth's surface." Galileo went on to describe the phenomena in considerable detail, rehearsing, as it were, the observations and conclusions he was to publish more elaborately a few months later in Sidereus Nuncius
1618 Francis Bacon became Lord Chancellor of England
1714 Englishman Henry Mill patented the first typewriter, but it was never manufactured
1785 Jean-Pierre Blanchard, of France, and John Jeffries, of Boston, travelled from Dover, England, to Calais, France, in a gas balloon, becoming the first balloonists to successfully cross the English Channel, and to make an international flight. However, the two men nearly crashed into the Channel along the way as their balloon was weighed down by extraneous supplies such as anchors, a non-functional hand-operated propeller, and silk-covered oars with which they hoped they could row their way through the air. Just before reaching the French coast, the two balloonists were forced to throw nearly everything out of the balloon, and Blanchard even threw his trousers over the side in a desperate, and apparently successful, attempt to lighten the ship
1789 The first US presidential election was held. Americans voted for electors who, a month later, chose George Washington to be the nation's first president
1857 The London Central Omnibus Company started its first omnibus service
1859 The first Canadian silver coins were issued
1867 In Quebec, Private Timothy O'Hea was awarded the Victoria Cross for his bravery in 1866, for protecting the lives of 800 emigrants on a Grand Trunk train menaced by a fire in a boxcar carrying explosives. This is the only Victoria Cross awarded for a brave deed not done in the face of the enemy
1904 The first international radio distress signal was established by the Marconi Company. The CQD signal meant "Stop sending and listen," although the popular interpretations of the letters were "Seek You! Danger" or "Come quick! Danger!" The code was to take effect February 7th of that year, and was used until 1908, when it was replaced by the SOS code
1914 The first steamship passed through the Panama Canal
1927 The Harlem Globetrotters basketball team was founded by Abraham Sapperstein of Chicago
1927 Commercial transatlantic telephone service was inaugurated between New York and London, as Walter Sherman Gifford, president of AT&T in New York, called Sir George Evelyn Pemberton Murray, secretary of the British Post Office, in London. Thirty-one calls were placed the first day, each costing $75 for a three-minute conversation. New York Times publisher Adolph Simon Ochs made the first private call to Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times of London
1954 The Allen B. Du Mont Laboratories demonstrated the Duoscopic, a forerunner of today's picture-in-picture television set, in New York and Chicago. The viewer wore Polaroid glasses to decipher the two signals displayed on the screen and earphones in each ear heard a different program
1955 In Ottawa, Ontario, the Speech from the Throne and the opening ceremonies of the Canadian Parliament were broadcast live on television for the first time
1990 For safety reasons, Italy's leaning Tower of Pisa was closed to the public for the first time since it opened around 1275
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