AD 76 Hadrian - Spanish born Roman emperor whose defensive policies led to the building of Hadrian's Wall on the border of Scotland and England
1732 Pierre Beaumarchais - French playwright of The Marriage of Figaro and The Barber of Seville. Both were the basis of operas by Mozart and Rossini, respectively
1862 Edith Wharton - Pulitzer Prize winning US author (Ethan Frome, The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, Twilight Sleep, A Backward Glance)
1917 Ernest Borgnine - Actor (Marty, The Poseidon Adventure, The Dirty Dozen, McHale's Navy, Airwolf, The Single Guy, All Dogs Go To Heaven, Hoover, SpongeBob SquarePants)
1918 Oral Roberts - US evangelist and founder of the Oral Roberts University
1936 Jack Scott - Singer (My True Love, Goodbye Baby, What In the World's Come Over You, Burning Bridges)
1939 Doug Kershaw - Cajun fiddler, songwriter, singer (Louisiana Man, Diggy Liggy Lo)
1939 Ray Stevens - Singer, entertainer (Everything Is Beautiful, Mr. Businessman, Ahab the Arab, Gitarzan, The Streak)
1941 Neil Diamond - Singer (Sweet Caroline, Cracklin' Rosie, Song Sung Blue, America)
1941 Aaron Neville - Singer with The Neville Brothers (Mona Lisa, The Ten Commandments of Love)
1943 Sharon Tate – Actress (Valley of the Dolls, Don't Make Waves, The Wrecking Crew, The Fearless Vampire Killers, The Beverly Hillbillies) She and four other people were murdered by Charles Manson’s followers
1944 Julie Gregg - Actress (From Hell to Borneo, The Seekers)
1945 Elaine Giftos - Actress (The Student Nurses, The Wrestler, Angel)
1946 Michael Ontkean – Canadian actor (The Rookies, Twin Peaks, Postcards from the Edge, Slap Shot)
1947 Warren Zevon - Singer (Werewolves of London)
1949 John Belushi - Comedian, actor (Second City, Saturday Night Live, 1941, The Blues Brothers, Animal House)
1956 Peter Woodward – British actor (The Patriot, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, Crusade, Deceptions) He is the son of actor Edward Woodward
1959 Nastassia Kinski - Actress (Cat People, Tess, Paris Texas) She is the daughter of German actor Klaus Kinski
1966 Julie Dreyfus – French actress (Inglourious Basterds, Kill Bill Vol. 1, Vinyan)
1986 Mischa Barton – Actress (The O.C., Once and Again, The Sixth Sense, Notting Hill)
Died this Day
AD 41 Caligula - Notorious Roman emperor, murdered by a tribune of the guard
1895 Lord Randolph Churchill - Leader of Britain's Conservative Party, who died 70 years to the day before the death of his son, Winston
1961 Elsa - The lioness of Joy Adamson's Born Free books, was reportedly found dead in Kenya
1965 Sir Winston Churchill, age 90 - British Prime Minister and statesman. His military career started when he joined the British Fourth Hussars upon his father's death in 1895. Over the next five years, he enjoyed an illustrious military career, distinguishing himself several times in battle. In 1899, he resigned his commission to concentrate on his literary and political career, and in 1900 was elected to Parliament. In 1915, in the second year of World War I, Churchill was held responsible for the disastrous Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaigns and he was excluded from the war coalition government. However, in 1917, he returned to politics as a cabinet member and from 1919 to 1921 he was Secretary of State for War. After the outbreak of World War II in Europe, Churchill returned to his post as First Lord of the Admiralty, and eight months later replaced Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister of a new coalition government. He helped guide Great Britain and the world through the crisis of World War II
1983 George Cukor, age 83 – Director (My Fair Lady, A Star is Born, Born Yesterday, Love Among the Ruins, The Philadelphia Story) He was fired as director of Gone With The Wind after only ten days
1989 Ted Bundy - Serial killer, executed in the electric chair at the Florida State Prison for murdering two female university students. The former law student was also suspected in several other US murders
On this Day
1848 James W. Marshall discovered a gold nugget along the banks of Sutter's Creek, at Sutter's Mill, in northern California. His discovery led to the Gold Rush of '49 and dramatically changed the course of history in the US West. Sutter's Creek was named for a Swiss immigrant, John Augustus Sutter, who came to California in 1839. Sutter hired the millwright Marshall to build a sawmill in January 1848. In order to redirect the flow of water to the mill's waterwheel, Marshall supervised the excavation of a shallow millrace. On the morning of the 24th, Marshall was looking over the freshly cut millrace when a sparkle of light in the dark earth caught his eye. Looking more closely, Marshall found that much of the millrace was speckled with what appeared to be small flakes of gold, and he rushed to tell Sutter. After an assayer confirmed that the flakes were indeed gold, Sutter quietly set about gathering up as much of the gold as he could, hoping to keep the discovery a secret. However, word soon leaked out and, within months, the largest gold rush in the world had begun
1860 French inventor Etienne Lenoir was issued a patent for the first successful internal-combustion engine. Lenoir's engine was a converted steam engine that burned a mixture of coal gas and air. Its two-stroke action was simple but reliable, and many of Lenoir's engines were still working after 20 years of use. His first engines powered simple machines like pumps and bellows. In 1862, Lenoir built his first automobile powered by an internal-combustion engine, a vehicle capable of making a six-mile trip in two to three hours. It wasn't a practical vehicle, but it was the beginning of the automobile industry
1885 The Canadian Pacific Railroad telegraph was completed from the Atlantic to the Pacific
1908 The Boy Scouts movement began with the publication of the first instalment of Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys, in England. The name Baden-Powell was already well known to many English boys, and thousands of them eagerly bought up the handbook. By the end of April, the serialisation of Scouting for Boys was completed, and scores of impromptu Boy Scout troops had sprung up across Britain. In 1900, Baden-Powell became a national hero in Britain for his 217-day defence of Mafeking in the South African War. Soon after, Aids to Scouting, a military field manual he had written for British soldiers in 1899, caught on with a younger audience. Boys loved the lessons on tracking and observation and organised elaborate games using the book. Hearing this, Baden-Powell decided to write a non-military field manual for adolescents that would also emphasise the importance of morality and good deeds. He tested his ideas on an actual group of boys in July 1907, taking a group of 21 to Brownsea Island in Dorsetshire where they set up camp for a fortnight. With the aid of other instructors, he taught the boys about camping, observation, deduction, woodcraft, boating, lifesaving, patriotism, and chivalry. Baden-Powell set up a central Boy Scouts office, which registered new Scouts and designed a uniform. By the end of 1908, there were 60,000 Boy Scouts, and troops began springing up in British Commonwealth countries across the globe, and in September 1909, the first national Boy Scout meeting was held at the Crystal Palace in London. Ten thousand Scouts showed up, including a group of uniformed girls who called themselves the Girl Scouts. In 1910, Baden-Powell organised the Girl Guides as a separate organisation. The US version of the Boy Scouts was first organised in February, 1910
1922 Christian K. Nelson of Onawa, Iowa, patented the Eskimo Pie
1924 The Russian city of St. Petersburg was renamed Leningrad in honour of the late revolutionary leader. The name has since been changed back to St. Petersburg
1935 A brewery in Richmond, Virginia sold the first canned beer
1972 After twenty-eight years of hiding in the jungles of Guam, local farmers
discovered Shoichi Yokoi, a Japanese sergeant who was unaware that World War II had ended. Guam, in the western Pacific, became a US possession in 1898. In 1941, it was attacked and captured by the Japanese, and retaken by US forces in 1944. It was at this time that Yokoi, left behind by the retreating Japanese forces, went into hiding rather than surrender. In the jungles of Guam, he handcrafted survival tools and for the next three decades waited for the return of the Japanese and his next orders. After he was discovered in 1972, he was finally discharged and sent home to Japan where he was hailed as a national hero. He subsequently married and returned to Guam for his honeymoon. In 1997, he died at the age of eighty-two. His handcrafted survival tools and threadbare uniform are on display in the Guam Museum in Agana
1978 A nuclear-powered Soviet satellite plunged through Earth's atmosphere and disintegrated over the Northwest Territories, scattering radioactive debris over parts of northern Canada . A widespread search to locate and remove debris was launched
1979 After a 30-year absence, Coca Cola went on sale in China under the name Ke Kou Ke Lo
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